Why Your Biggest Rival Is YOU

You don't have competitors in your industry that you need to beat, right? It's a false narrative. This is the magical thing about business. It's an infinite game. And multiple companies selling about the same product, about the same price, about the same quality can both be wildly successful at the same time. And to view the other players in your category, to view the other players in your industry as worthy rivals, that some of them do one or many things better than you and you can learn from them, but the only true competitor is yourself. How do you do better than yourselves? How do you make your leaders better this year than they were last year? How do you make your customer service better this year than you were than they were last year? How do you make your innovation and your online tools better this year than they were last year? And learn from everybody else, but compete against yourself first. And this is the single best long term strategy that you can ever deploy. And you will find yourself way more innovative because you're not trying to me too. Or catch up with whatever everybody else is doing. You're thinking for yourselves. And I'll give you one example to drive home the point, which is Microsoft versus Apple. Steve Ballmer, when he was the CEO of Microsoft, was hell bent on beating Apple and their ipod and he was going to come up with his own product and he was going to outperform and beat Apple, literally. He talked about it obsessively, right? Except Apple was ignoring Microsoft and they were trying to compete against themselves. So at some point it's true. Microsoft's product, Microsoft's MP3 player, the Zune, actually did get better than the ipod. Except about a year or two later, Apple introduced the iPhone. That rendered both the ipod and the Zune at completely obsolete. Microsoft was competing against Apple. Apple was competing against itself. Apple was the innovative company.