Simon Sinek explains why market dominance breeds complacency. When one player controls an industry, they stop noticing their own weaknesses until a competitor like Uber or Starbucks arrives and forces customers to choose, pushing incumbents to either improve or collapse.
Any participant in any industry can get lazy when there is little change in how that industry operates. And then when there's a sudden change to how the industry operates, everybody gets angry, panics, and points a finger.
I'll give you an example. Okay, I'll give you two examples. Example number one, taxi companies around the world hate Uber.
Right? Now. Here's the reality. The app that calls a car, not proprietary. You can call a taxi with it with an app, right? Paying with your phone, not proprietary. Any taxi can do that as well. The reason Uber is eating taxi companies for lunch is because it's a better product. And taxi companies around the world could have a shitty product because. Because you're the only game in town and we had no choice. And now you have a competitor and instead of competing, you're getting angry. I would gladly take more cabs than call services. If I got in the cab and he said hi and it was clean and I had a nice chat with him and he wasn't on the phone and he wasn't smoking and all of these things and I had some leg room.
Gladly has nothing to do with the app, the pay mechanism. It has to do with the fact that. That Juno and Lyft are just better. It's just a better experience, better product. That's why I take them. It costs a dollar more. Whatever, I'll pay for it. It's not even a price thing. I have no idea if it's cheaper or more expensive. I actually never compared.
The same goes for Starbucks, right? So there was a lot of people hate Starbucks because they put mom and Pops out of business.
Right? The reality is the complete opposite, that when Starbucks moves into a neighborhood, mom and Pop's coffee shops actually do better for two reasons. One, Starbucks attracts more customers, so there's just more people. And the second reason is there is a groundswell of giving back to the local. And so more people go to the mom and Pop, right? The ones that go out of business, the ones that refuse to compete. Give you a real life example. This goes back a few years.
Real life example, I'm lactose intolerant, right? So I don't have milk in my coffee. And there was a time where it wasn't a foregone conclusion that every coffee shop had soy milk or almond milk or something. So I would always go into the mom and Pop that was across the street from Starbucks, always go to the mom and Pop. And I'd say, do you guys have any soy milk? And they go, nope. I go like, thank you, and I would walk out.
Those went out of business.
Because I went to Starbucks. He's right. I went to Starbucks. Now had Starbucks moved in. And they went across the street and said, let's see what Starbucks has. We should offer soy milk. Maybe it's time for us to replace this ripped couch that we've had for 15 years, because it's really nice across there and it's really gross here. It's the ones who got angry and refused to compete that went out of business. I think retail is the same. Everybody's pointing fingers instead of saying, we've had it really good for a bunch of years. And the question is now, what is our competitor revealing about our own weaknesses that we can learn to improve? Because that's what competition does. Competition reveals your weaknesses to you. And when you had no competition, you didn't know where you were weak.
This is the problem with being the best at anything.
Because you don't know where you're. Your faults are. And then somebody undermines you because they can see your faults before you can.
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