Stop competing and start creating your own game
Why it is lethal to follow trends and crowds
There are many high-quality restaurants in Lake Como, Italy. The great majority of these restaurants are close to the lake and they serve great food. They compete with each other on every aspect including decor, best views, and signature dishes. Then there’s another restaurant called Tremesso ran by a husband and wife. It is not close to the lake, but it is one mile away from the lake. It has no scenery and luxurious decoration. Instead, it has plastic chairs, old furniture, and cheaply laminated menus. The menu only has one item: the best-tasting pizza ever. This restaurant is always full. The husband is in the kitchen, and the wife serves the tables. They grow their own tomatoes, onions, herbs and spices. They make their own dough, grow their fresh ingredients, and crush their own garlic. Their pizza is amazingly delicious. They open up their home and garden to their guests. After you eat their delicious pizza, you feel compelled to tell others about your experience. This couple has established their own game. They play a different game from all others.
This example is narrated by Daniel Priestley in the wonderful book titled “Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining up to do Business with You”.
The overall lesson here: You need to establish your own game in this life. This means you need to be remarkable and outstanding in what you do. You will resist the temptation to copy others or follow the crowds. You will continue to do your own unique thing. Embrace what makes you crazy and weird.
If your competitors are all trying to be modern, you will be stubbornly old-fashioned. If other organizations are all competing based on price, you need to charge a premium and offer an exceptional experience for your customers to delight them. Never fit in and believe in your own game. Raise up your own game instead of focusing on your competitors.
Exercise: Ask yourself:
- What is everyone else doing?
- What is it that only you believe in?
- How can you leverage and amplify this into something that you are proud of?
A great example of creating a unique game is journalist Rob Orchard. In an era of instant and hyper-speedy digital news, Rob calls for a Slow Journalism revolution. His magazine, Delayed Gratification, proudly announces that it represents the last and the slowest journalism out there. This gives him leverage, depth, and quality:
Jack Ma is operating on a similar philosophy and he calls it Tai Chi. He says:
“Tai Chi is like ‘you fight there and I’ll go over here. You’re at the top, and I’ll go down’. It’s a balance. You are heavy and I’m small. When I’m small, I can jump. You’re heavy. You cannot jump. Taiji is about a philosophy. I use Tai Chi philosophy in the business. Calm down. There’s always a way out and keep yourself balanced.”
Look at Lady Gaga. She is operating in an alternative universe. She is the hero of her own world and she sets the rules of that world.
Elon Musk is another fascinating example. He is the only crazy one out there obsessed with colonizing Mars and creating a multi-planetary human civilization:
Exercise: Ask yourself
- What are you obsessed with?
- Why? Why do you care?
- What is your calling?
- Where do you see your unique mission and contribution?
- How will you make it happen?
Take a long term view and do different
We know that the best entrepreneurs, artists, and professionals do things very differently. There are tons of articles on the habits and mental models of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. These are geniuses and pioneers who have taken the long term view and who have been wildly successful. They each followed the paths that were less travelled. They each carved their own paths step by step. They solved significant problems and thus created value for millions of other people. They followed their dreams like a marathon runner.
Exercise: Ask yourself
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years? 15 years?
- Visualize and write down your dreams in HD resolution.
- How do your ideal day and life look like?
- Where are you?
- What are you excited about?
- What makes you tick?
- Come up with 3 scenarios (5, 10, and 15 years).
- Make each scenario very detailed and specific.
Follow your heart’s desires and find your own voice
Exceptional top performers have a different mindset: They have all established their own games in life. They are outliers not just in their accomplishments, but also in their personal systems and routines. They are willing to be different and daring. They fully follow their own hearts, desires, and voices.
Pleasing other people or following trends guarantee that you will be mediocre. As Oscar Wilde remarks: “Everything popular is wrong”. If you follow the crowds, you will never fully develop the best of yourself. You will not maximize your innate talents and strengths.
You need to aspire to be 100% of yourself and the best version of yourself. This means upgrading and hacking yourself until you have absolutely reached the best version of you.
Exercise: Ask yourself
- How would the best version of you look like?
- Describe that ideal version of you in detail.
- How would this person spend his or her day?
- Who are ideal friends and collaborators?
- How would he/she make a remarkable contribution to the world?
Chris Guillebeau is the author of the book titled “The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World”. He visited 193 countries in the world before he was 35. In his manifesto, titled “A Brief Guide to World Domination”, Guillebeau says we live in an ocean of mediocrity, yet we need to avoid mediocrity at all costs:
“If there is any good news to the normalization of mediocrity, it’s that when you do something excellent, it will be so uncommon that you will instantly stand out. People will be amazed, because they’re so used to the good enough that the excellent is truly rare. This can work to your advantage when you decide to take things up a level and exceed the low expectations around you.”
Exercise: Ask yourself
- What are the three small actions that you can do today to avoid mediocrity and find your own thing?
- Write them in your diary and take the 3 smallest possible actions to differentiate yourself in the market.
Stop being competitive: Find your blue oceans
Kim and Mauborgne have written a remarkable book titled “Blue Ocean Shift: Beyond Competing — Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth”.
In this book, they argue that you need to move beyond competing, inspire your people’s confidence, and take your organization from a red ocean crowded with competition to a blue ocean of uncontested market space.
Kim and Mauborgne focus on nondisruptive creation as the way forward. In contrast to Uber versus the taxi industry, non-disruptive innovation focuses on creating new areas and establishing new games outside the binaries of existing competition. Take the example of the non-disruptive moves of life-coaching, microfinance or online dating. These did not displace another industry or company. No jobs were lost. They created new industries and a wealth of new jobs. They identified and solved brand-new problems. They created brand-new opportunities and new markets beyond what is existing.
Here are some career lessons inspired by this book:
- If you want to make your career and your contribution remarkable, you need to navigate uncharted territories and find your own ‘blue oceans’.
- Red oceans are red because there are too much competition and blood — everyone is competing with each other there. Red oceans leave little room for growth. In red oceans, supply exceeds demand and there is intense competition. Each company fights to capture a share of existing, saturated, or shrinking industries. It is a bloody war and it is not worth fighting for. Many organizations are drowning and going bankrupt in these red oceans.
- Blue oceans are about the creation of new innovations and opportunities that did not exist before.
- You need to stop competing against your peers. A competitive mindset harms your psychology and creates unnecessary negative feelings and stress.
- Stop assuming that this is a zero-sum game. You can find and create your own path of value creation. If you do, you can create a much greater pie of value. You then have the potential to create innovation, new jobs, new frontiers, new hopes, and a better future.
- You need to go out of your comfort zone and traditional boundaries to explore and find your own blue oceans. This involves discovering your best strengths, building on your talents, developing your creative confidence, and finding your own voice.
- Remember that you need to have a long term perspective to achieve these. It is a long term game — do not expect short term results.
- You will also need to swim up against the currents and defend your own views and position.
- You are all far more creative and capable than you give yourself credit for. You need to tap into that unlimited imagination of yours.
- You can create opportunities that are far larger than what you think. Develop your confidence to explore new possibilities that others do not see.
- Create a roadmap for travelling the road that is less travelled. How will you create fresh ideas that will solve important problems? How will you create a new market?
- How can you think from a view of unlimited potential and abundance? How can you better recognize opportunities around you?
- How can you better work with machines and algorithms? Can you upgrade your existing skillset using new tools, skills, and knowledge unleashed by artificial intelligence? How will the AI revolution transform your industry and your job? How can you better prepare yourself for the upcoming technological changes and disruptions?
- How can you learn and develop a rare skillset about burning but overlooked issues in the world, in your industry, and in your vocation? Why are these issues or problems overlooked? What can you do about them? How can you contribute?
- How can you develop a rare combination of skills that you truly care about and that people or organizations are struggling with?
- How can you look for new technologies, platforms, or methods that allow you to solve the problem or seize the opportunities? How can you create outstanding value in areas that no one else is bothering with?
- How can you uncover and challenge the accepted conventions that hold us back? How can you use your imagination to build alternative better futures? How can you cultivate hope? How can you turn pain points into new opportunities?
- Don’t be afraid to be different. Dare to disappoint mainstream views. Embrace the things that make you different. Adopt different routines.
- If everyone around you is getting up early, try working between 22.00 and 2.00 am. Do things that are just crazy, but somehow works for you. Take very cold showers or do Bollywood/K-pop dances. Embrace what makes you weird.
Your Manifesto for Finding Your Own Path
Here is a manifesto on doing your own thing and following your own journey. Please read it below:
Exercise: Write your own manifesto now
- What are your own guiding principles?
- How will you put them into action?
- Create a not-to-do list now: What are the things that you will not do? What are the things that you will say no to?
“If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise–ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.”
“In your career, even more than for a brand, being safe is risky. The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable.”
― Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
“If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself, you won’t get noticed and that increasingly means you won’t get paid much, either.”
Michael Goldhaber, Wired
Take-aways:
- Stop being competitive and follow your own blue oceans where you can establish your own game. Establish a game where you can be the best in the world.
- Figure out practical ways to build on your unique passions and strengths. Think about strategies to differentiate your unique value proposition.
- Do not follow the crowds and trust your intuition to be different. Dare to be different and be ready to disappoint others.
- Spend 100 hours to acquire a rare skill in your industry. Repeat until you have a rare combination of skills.
- Keep learning, growing, and experimenting with new strategies.
- Escape from large crowds and popular trends — find your own unique thing. Develop your own secret sauce that works.
- Develop a thick skin for criticisms.
- Be remarkable and outstanding in what you do.
- Invest in your personal brand and build trust-based high-quality connections.
- Embrace what makes you weird and authentic.
- Follow your heart’s desires and find your own voice.
- Say no to all. It is a ‘Hell No’ if it is not a ‘Hell Yes’.
