Ep 449 | Escaping the Competition

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. I have a question I would like to ask the No Days Off Nation. That question is, would you rather compete against amazing people or non-amazing people? And it's, believe it or not, it's not a trick question. Would you rather compete against amazing people or non-amazing people? Now, I say it's not a trick question because I know that oftentimes we may default to, well, yeah, I wanna compete against the best and I wanna prove myself, and I get that. But from a purely logical perspective, kinda goes without saying that if your competition was not as strong, you would naturally flourish because you are amazing. And therefore, it probably makes sense that we would say, you know, I'd rather compete against non-amazing people. Amazing people make things difficult. They make things difficult because they're already incredibly skilled. They have the work ethic or the vision, all the things that you have as an entrepreneur, or at least what you're developing. Here and listening to the No Days Off podcast. I think we have to find an edge. We have to find an edge because we don't really get to determine whether we're competing against amazing or non-amazing in our respective industries. I mean, yes, maybe we may go a certain direction because we think we can outperform the competition, but the reality is people get better, companies get better, companies improve and maybe become amazing. So I think we've got to find an edge, and we find an edge by thinking differently about some things. What I want to talk about today is how we can think a little differently about time horizons. Competing against smart, talented people, people, it sometimes can lead to failure. Again, we talked about amazing people being skilled and resourceful and just talented. The odds of outsmarting amazing people in short-term competition, always outsmarting them, it's relatively slim. So the reality is here that avoiding competition with these people isn't always entirely possible, as we just talked about. So we've got to find an edge. And I think that there's a glitch. I think there's a glitch in the system, and that, that glitch in the system is in fact time horizons. Most people, including amazing ones, work on rather short timelines. When you talk to somebody about their vision or where they intend to go, it's usually on like a 1 to at best 3-year time, time horizon. People just work on short timelines. Short-term goals tend to dominate their focus. In investment, people think in terms of 1 to 3 at best. In career plans, I rarely meet somebody that thinks beyond 1 year, 2 year, 3 year. Even in life milestones, like family milestones or, or health accomplishments, people think in terms of next year, maybe 2 years from now, and that's usually it. Again, these things tend to revolve around this shorter-term time horizon. So I think that there's a massive opportunity, and I think the massive opportunity lies in competing on what I would say are longer timelines. Few people think beyond the 3-year horizon, so we should start thinking beyond a 3-year horizon because it creates less competition. Instead of competing with the amazing, how do I compete with the non-amazing? My proposal, again, is to think beyond the 3-year horizon. I think there's what I would call a 10-year advantage. I think if you adopt a 10-year timeline, you have an edge. Why? Because most of your competition has that short-term impatience. This short-term impatience limits most competitors. Their inability to think longer term creates an opportunity for you. Because long-term patience actually allows for compound growth. For example, uh, you plant an apple seed, and sure, you can watch it become an apple tree over the course of time, but longer-term patience allows for that compounding growth. That apple seed doesn't just become a tree, could become an orchard. Make sense? So I want to highlight this opportunity for what I would say could be a stubborn commitment to a clear vision that is much longer term. Patience is a very, very rare and a very powerful advantage if leveraged properly. We have this world that's obsessed with instant gratification. So play the long-term game and it creates unique opportunities. Naval Ravikant says, play long-term games with long-term people. So, I want to encourage you today to think beyond the immediate. Think beyond 1 year, 2 year, or 3 year. And I want you to consider a 10-year vision. And I want you to ask yourself, what seeds can I plant today that will yield an orchard in the future? Now, living this is not easy, right? Conceptually, we could draw out a 10-year plan. But because of instant gratification, because we're hard charging, because, you know, it's tough to, to be married to a vision for the long term, it's difficult to go, uh, and play this 10-year game. But if you really truly think about it, look across all industries, what you find is the best of the best had a much bigger vision for where they were going to go and not simply just the next 1 or 2 or 3 years. You could look at Amazon, you could look at Apple, you can look at Microsoft, you can look at Tesla. Look at those companies. I would bet you, not knowing, not having worked there, but just in studying those companies— Google comes to mind— it was well beyond Google search, it was well beyond the Tesla car, right? It's well beyond the iPod. Or even the iPhone. Those are short-term objectives, but the 10-year-plus vision is what they're building for. You know, we love to talk about Elon here. Elon doesn't necessarily build, you know, uh, Tesla cars as the, as the sole product. No, it's the income generator in the short term. What's his long-term vision? Colonize Mars. Everything he does today is with the mindset of, I'm going to do something at Mars and on the planet of Mars and call it a decade or two decades or whenever it may be. That is what I mean about long-term thinking. Think about your business right now. What's a one-year or two-year plan look like? Odds are many of you have that. What's a 10-year plan look like though? See how you have an extra 8 years of compounding and when you play that long-term game, with patience and you ride the kind of ebbs and flows and you, you iterate, you, you pick up such an advantage because most people are incapable of thinking that way. So escaping the competition, in my opinion, isn't about being smarter. It's not necessarily about being better. Yes, sometimes we default to those things, but it's not about being smarter or better. It's maybe about choosing a playing field with less competition. I'm just a big fan of finding areas where there is less competition, not because I'm afraid of competition by any means, but why compete? How can I manufacture a world in which there's lesser competition and more opportunity for me? My question for you, what's one area of your life or one area of your business where you can start thinking in 10-year horizons? Instead of 3? I want you to reflect on that, and I'd love for you to apply this strategy today. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.