Back July 28, 2016

Why You Should Compete with Yourself Instead of Anyone Else

If ”comparison is the thief of joy” as Theodore Roosevelt used to say, then why most persons are constantly struggling with it most of their lives?

As a business owner, it is really important to have a clear vision and get people to believe in what you believe. People are constantly looking at their competitors and concentrate on how to be better than them. Meanwhile, they fall apart from their main purpose — whatever that is.

Running a business requires skill, focus, and passion. If you add intuition and market insight, it looks like the perfect recipe for business success. More than that, it is said that competition is the lifeblood of the business world. Yes, we agree on that one, but we feel that this culture, focused on competing against one another, is just not right.

Change mindsets

While businesses that are competing with each other continue to fail, do something well enough so you deserve a trophy: compete with yourself.

If we take a close look at all those people who have made a difference in this world, any business which has been successful and it still is, we will easily notice that they owe their achievements to the fact that they primarily competed with themselves, not with others. They wanted to be better than their previous best. They wanted a better performance. This is what a business should be driven by staying focused on what is important in order to have a better tomorrow.

Even if it may be uncomfortable to live in a constant state of unease, a business owner has to live and build in the future, actively working towards disrupting his own affairs. Starting with this thought in mind is important because it will lead the way; still, it is never too late to adopt this kind of mindset.

Setting clear goals and continuing to evaluate your business is critical to staying on the right path. Persuade the others to trust your beliefs. Craft a better story. Make everything for your business adventure to be worth living.

Instead of viewing competition as an obstacle, think of it as an opportunity

We’re our own competitor: the biggest and hardest battle happens inside of the four walls of our startup’s office. Sometimes we feel like we’re our own biggest threat, but at the same time, we are not losing our will to fight. This is the way to prioritise the life span of our company, especially when innovation is constantly on the go and we are always in early stages of technological history. Relocate resources and adapt to changing markets, develop self-awareness and assess our strengths and weaknesses — that’s how we try to understand our shortcomings and find ways to overcome them. We always keep a clear mind about where we are heading to; we make sure that every element, no matter how simple, gets better than our previous one. Competing with ourselves is a strong incentive, no matter what it is about: developing faster, designing better, communicating friendlier or just prioritising more often.

ThinkOut believes in mutual learning. We carefully watch our competition and actively learn from how they manage and grow their operations, but at the same time, we focus our efforts on making a smaller segment of the overall market happy. We challenge ourselves to accomplish more. Our goal is to invest in finding a better answer for our audience, to fill in the blanks, to find better solutions than our own previous ones.

Here, at ThinkOut, we don’t ignore our competitors, but learn from their ideas, techniques, procedures, in order to move forward in the best possible way because “business means more when it’s made for good”.

Author: ThinkOut