8. Don't Focus On Competition - Business Bits - 30 Days Challenge

But don’t ignore it either.

Today, the market is so crowded that, no matter what you’re doing, you’re surely "enjoying" a lot of competition. Focusing too much on it will most likely drain a lot of your time, without a relevant benefit.

Try to see it like this: the only real creative energy that you have is focus. Just don’t think at skills, or information. At the most basic level, the only creative energy is focus: wherever your focus is, that thing comes into reality.

I would go even further and say that every time you don’t focus on something, you let that thing fading away. Like, literally you let that thing to die, to disappear from your life.

Philosophical discussion aside, what I want to say is that when and if you’re focusing too much on competition, you create two big issues:

first, you spend creative energy in something that’s not under your control - you simply waste it
second, since your resources are limited, by taking away focus from your reserves, you deprive your business from the creating energy you can invest in it

Many aspiring entrepreneurs are thinking in very polarizing terms, like “crushing the competition”, “being the best of all” and so on, without even thinking at the amount of energy needed just to observe each and every move of the competition.

You Can’ Go Forward If You Look Backwards

But even beyond the need for cleverly using your resources, there’s something even more subtle than that: the leadership thing.

The biggest pizza slice is always taken by the first to get to the pizza. The followers will take only leftovers. By incessantly focusing on what competition does and what doesn’t, you risk to end up in that big followers crowd. You may get something, eventually, if you’re close enough to the first guy, but your lot will be just leftovers.

Try to imagine Apple focusing on Samsung. It doesn’t really make any sense, right? Samsung represents competition for Apple, that’s true and you can see Apple is keeping an eye on them, but it’s obvious that Apple’s focus is on their own clients, products and processes. You can clearly identify an iPhone (or an “iPhone style”) from afar.

Now, if you picture Samsung focusing on Apple, it’s like almost seeing them trying to copy every shape and design of the iPhone, right? Even their naming convention is copied. And it becomes understandabe why they only get the “leftovers”.

I’m not saying there’s no business at all in copying the leaders. Of course it is, and, to some extent, it may be safer to implement something that’s already verified. I’m just saying the reward is bigger and cleaner if you’re the one that gets copied.

So, instead of following what others are doing, try to focus as much as you can on your own resources, on your own projects and on your own clients.

Work to establish your own identity rather than engaging in competition wars.
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This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.