The Desert of Arizona
Clear 64 Degrees – 6:39 a.m.
Not long ago, I was chatting with an expert helping him plan the “strategery” to support his growing business. He is a high-performance athlete who is already very well known across the country.
He ran into a wall and we were talking about how to proceed.
What happened was that he took a good look at what everyone else was doing in terms of packaging their similar product and said, “I can’t compete with that.”
And so he did nothing.
Granted, he was right. There was no way to compete with the exact thing he saw. There was no way to compete with how it was produced or distributed.
This is the position many people are in right now. “Am I good enough to compete with X, Y or Z? Those folks have slicker marketing, a lot more money, and [insert your excuse here].”
How can you compete?
As with so many business questions that seem NOT to have easy answers, the most genius solutions often bubble up only AFTER you realize this is the wrong question to be asking.
“How can I compete with THAT?” is not a helpful question. And it’s not a necessary question at the existential level of things.
This is not how your world has to operate.
The path of the Incomparable Expert is not about “competing” on the terms of others. This is what school taught you to do. Do you realize this?
You were given a fixed set of terms, pre-written measures of success that were not your own, and you were made to compete. And you were offered arbitrary and meaningless accolades (or punishments) depending on how well you performed. What a nice thing to do to a child.
Unfortunately, this is the way to lose on every level.
The way you win is to demonstrate the value you provide in a way where there IS no competition.
People don’t come to you because you’re the cheapest or fastest or most accomplished. They come to you because you’re YOU.
There is actually a formula for doing this. It’s not something I created, but it is something I discovered. You can have it. Listen or watch it and then put it to the test.
And if you need MORE and deeper help, there’s plenty to choose from.
No matter what, my suggestion is to give up the “competing with the other guy” frame of mind. It’s old, tired, worn out, wrong and it leads you to focus energy on non-productive areas.
If you are truly an Incomparable Expert, then there still is competition, but it’s a different kind.
What are you REALLY competing against?
You are competing with yourself to solve serious problems for others, in better ways, more easily, for more people.