Evan Carmichael uses Civilization to explain that there are many ways to win in business. Instead of forcing yourself into strategies that don't fit, play to your strengths: build an online community, make videos, write newsletters, or speak. Skip the networking events if that's not you.
Chapters
So growing up, my favorite computer game was Sid Meier's Civilization, and this is a game where you have to kind of take over the world and build a civilization from one city into global domination. And what I loved about it was there were multiple ways to win. You could win by destroying every other civilization in the world. You could win by building a spaceship and being the first to get to space. You could have a cultural victory and be the first to build the United Nations in your civilization. And there may be a few other ways to win, and most Most people, I think, try to win by trying to destroy all the other civilizations, but that wasn't me. I rarely won that way. Maybe that's some time for good self-reflection on that as to why. But you may be thinking, well, what's relevance in business? You have to find the strategies that work for you. There's a lot of different ways to win in business. There's a lot of different ways to win with your company and achieve your goals, but not all of them are going to work for you. You've got to find the strategies that work for your personality. So I was recently on a call yesterday with a friend of mine who has a consulting in business and is trying to take it off the ground, how to get new clients. And we gave him a whole bunch of different strategies, you know, talking about networking with other people and forming alliances and going to conferences and having a YouTube channel and having e-products. And those are all strategies that can work. They all can work, but they all can't work for him. And I think a problem that a lot of entrepreneurs face is they try to do everything. You see that something's working for somebody, so you try to apply it to your business, but you're fighting to do it because it's not natural for you. It's not part of who you you are. And where your business will take off is when you feel like you're really comfortable doing something because it feels right. It's who you are and you have a lot more success with it. So I'll give you an example in my own case. I hate networking. You know, I'm not the guy who sees somebody on an airplane who's sitting next to me and strike up a conversation and give them my business card. I'm not that guy. I'm genuinely pretty introverted. You may not believe it by watching these videos, but in general I'm not the life of the party. I'm not the guy talking to everybody. I prefer to kind of stay to myself. And that could hurt me in business, right? If my business depended on me being a great networker, then my business would fail. I wouldn't be an entrepreneur. I'd be stuck in some corporate job that I probably hate. And so I've managed to work around that. And while networking can work for other people, I find things that work for me. So my preference, my strength, is on building up a lot of noise and building up a community, right? So I kick up a lot of dust in the entrepreneur community. I make these videos, I'm active on Twitter and Facebook, I have a great newsletter, and And that's what brings a lot of people to me and gets me speaking at those events. So instead of going to an event and being a networker, I'm off speaking, and then people come up to me afterwards and want to talk to me. And so I found another way to do it, right? And that's what you need to do for your business too. People give you tons of ideas and strategies, and every day I share different strategies on this channel. Some of them are going to work for you, some of them aren't. It's not that those are bad strategies, they just work for other people and other personality types. And so I really encourage you to Give everything a try, but if you don't enjoy it, you're not finding you get in your flow with it, then, then stop it. Don't try to force yourself to do things that you're not good at, because if you don't have an interest in learning it and you hate what you're doing, you're never going to build anything great. You're never going to have huge success. And instead, if you find a few things that you are really good at and you enjoy doing and you want to learn more about it and you go all in on it, and you maximize those strengths, you have a lot more fun, you'll have a lot more success, and you'll be a lot happier. Believe. Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know from you what you've tried before that you've seen work for other people, but you just can't get it working for you for whatever reasons. Leave it in the comments below. I'm curious to find out. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.
