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What Makes You Different? The Nathalia Beauty Case, Schopenhauer, and the Mistake That Undermines Even Competent Professionals
The Question That Seems Too Simple
Have you ever noticed that some of the most important questions in professional life seem almost too simple?
“What makes you different?”
Most people believe answering that should be easy. After all, if you know your own business, the answer should come naturally. In practice, something else happens. Competent professionals freeze. Experienced founders stumble. Consultants become defensive.
Not because they do not know what they do.
The problem is assuming that clarity is born through improvisation. The recent case involving Nathalia Beauty brought this phenomenon to the center of public debate and exposed an uncomfortable truth: many highly competent people still improvise precisely when answering the questions that matter most.
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“What Makes You Different?” A Test of Preparation and Argumentative Tactics
Facing a direct question in public can freeze even experienced speakers. Science confirms that anxiety can make the brain temporarily “freeze”: when fear of judgment activates the fight-or-flight response, the prefrontal cortex responsible for organizing speech and accessing memories becomes less connected to the rest of the brain.
In other words, under pressure, your brain makes it harder to retrieve what you know in the moment. That is why seemingly simple questions such as “What sets you apart?” can derail competent professionals if they have not prepared in advance.
A recent situation involving entrepreneur Nathalia Beauty illustrates this well. At an event, she was asked onstage what differentiated her mentoring program. Her immediate answer, focused on revenue figures, surprised the audience and went viral.
The strategic mistake was confusing scale metrics with a value proposition. As marketing experts explain, a unique value proposition is the primary reason a customer should choose your service. It should highlight the specific benefits and differentiators of your product, the company’s “why” and what makes it different. A revenue figure may demonstrate market success, but it does not explain how your offer creates unique results for the customer.
That is why, when answering “What sets you apart?”, you need to speak in terms of the value you deliver, not merely ego or business size. If you cite only generic numbers, the message becomes “look at our results,” without identifying the unique benefit only you provide. Instead, clearly explain the transformation your service creates and, preferably, support it with concrete evidence such as cases, testimonials, and metrics.
Research indicates that an effective value proposition is objective and demonstrates specific customer outcomes while clearly differentiating the offer from competitors. Without that, you do not create a perception of genuine differentiation; you simply repeat facts that are irrelevant to the person asking.
Pressure, improvisation, and memory
The real danger is assuming that improvisation will be enough. Under pressure, the brain actually looks for something already structured in memory. If no prepared response is stored there, automatic instincts take over: defensiveness, status signaling, irritation, or vague justifications.
As sources on social anxiety describe, a “mental freeze” can make a previously rehearsed phrase or concept as difficult to access as something unknown. Defensive reflexes appear instead, for example, “that’s just how it is” or “look at our revenue,” neither of which explains value.
To counter this, practice answers to crucial questions in advance.
Public-speaking experts specifically recommend preparing what you will say if your mind goes blank. That means anticipating key questions, such as “Why should we hire you?”, and formulating a clear response beforehand.
If “brain freeze” happens, you already have a recovery plan: acknowledge the question, such as “Good question, thank you,” state your main differentiator in the customer’s language, and then support it with evidence. Practicing this sequence increases confidence and prevents improvisation from replacing a solid argument.
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From “Revenue” to Unique Value
Returning to the Nathalia Beauty case, she tried to present authority credentials, high revenue and large-scale events, to answer the investor’s or customer’s “Why you?” question.
This resembles some of the rhetorical stratagems that Schopenhauer describes. Stratagem 30, for example, suggests appealing to authority, such as a metric or influential figure, when a solid argument is lacking.
But that move fails when it does not explain the substantive differentiator. In a debate, saying “buy from me because my revenue is high” amounts to sidestepping the question.
The problem was “status”: showing numbers proved no unique value at all.
As the concept of a value proposition makes clear, you need to state what the customer gains from you that they could not get elsewhere.
Instead of talking about “revenue at scale,” Nathalia Beauty could have said: what sets my mentoring program apart is the transformation it creates, for example, helping a professional move from selling isolated procedures to building a complete, profitable brand. Then she could have supported that claim with real cases and indicators.
That shifts the message away from ego, or technical self-promotion, and toward the customer: “What do we deliver? Unique brand-building outcomes.” That is what actually constitutes differentiation.
Example of a structured response:
Good question. I know the size of our program alone is not what sets us apart. What truly differentiates us is the kind of transformation our mentoring creates. Most courses teach isolated tactics, but our method reorganizes positioning, offer, and operations so that a professional stops selling only individual procedures and starts building a profitable brand of her own. I can prove that with [case X] and [metric Y] from other clients. If that is what you are looking for, it makes complete sense; if you need something different, this may not be the right program, and that is okay.
Notice that this example response follows three strategic moves:
Acknowledge the question (“Good question”), showing openness instead of defensiveness;
Focus on added value (“the transformation we create”), clearly explaining what you uniquely deliver;
Support the claim with concrete evidence, such as a real case and a metric.
This is a prepared “response architecture” rather than improvisation.
As Schopenhauer observes, in public debates the person who enters with a prepared response has an advantage. He frames this as a stratagem: a response structured with clarity and purpose.
Without that framework, the tendency is to get lost in vague justifications, personal status, or attacks on the questioner, all moves Schopenhauer lists as common rhetorical diversions, such as provoking an opponent until they lose composure or changing the subject when defeat is near.
In short, the true differentiator is being able to communicate the unique value you deliver with precision and relevance.
Schopenhauer’s stratagems remind us that public debates favor those who have something prepared to present.
The next time someone asks what sets you apart, consider this:
do you have a well-constructed answer? Or will you rely on improvisation in the moment, risking a freeze and losing a major opportunity to demonstrate your value?
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