Stop Focusing On Your Competitors

As we are living in a competitive world, it is not possible to take your competitors off the table. However, you should stop focusing on your competitors and instead focus on your own business.

Competition is a natural part of the business. In order to survive, companies need to be able to compete with other companies in their industry and market.

But competition should not be the focus of your strategy. Instead, you should focus on what you do best and build a strong foundation for the future.

Balancing the Benefits and Pitfalls of Assessing Your Competitors

Is business really a competition? If so, what do you get from participating and how exactly do you win? You need to ask yourself if you are putting too much energy into your competitors.

This takes time away from getting real work done. Pondering on the what-ifs that hound you after you embark on the slippery slope of campaigning yourself to others.

Don’t be fooled. Measuring yourself against your competitors will allow you to see where you are in your industry, but this can hold you back from your own progression. The first thing you do is compare your current situation to theirs and begin to start counting the achievements.

You have no direct knowledge of what work went into these accomplishments, but an unconfident mind will find a way to delegitimize the success of others.

More importantly, it will set the precedent that everyone has success because they have something you do not possess or cannot possess.

Social Media and Your Competitors: The Perils of Incomplete Information and Losing Focus on Your Own Path

It also allows you to superficially judge the progress they have made. Social media is our main tool for communicating right now. Even passive participation, like scrolling through an Instagram feed, can affect our view of ourselves.

Social media is a marketing tool for businesses and people to show the best of themselves, not the worst. If you are using this as the basis of your comparison, then you are using partial information. You won’t have access to everything you need to make a fair comparison.

This also distracts from your own path. Any business can learn from the success of others, but this should not be the whole basis of observation. Positive behavior results from recurring action.

Recurring actions result from recurring thoughts. Recurring thoughts result from recurring observations. Observation is crucial to the learning process, but it is also limited. We can only see what others let us. Every business has different goals.

Your Competitors and Moving Goalposts: Focusing on Your Unique Objectives and Embracing the Level Playing Field of the Internet

If you have a goalpost that moves based on what you think others are doing, then your actions and behaviors will seem erratic and illogical. Ideally, progressive behavior for your business should be based on what you intend to achieve.

Do you need to hit a quota of income per quarter or do you need to spend more on an upscale office? Do you feel a business is more productive than yours because its social media is more polished or that an artist is objectively better because their art style is well-liked? There is a space for everyone in the business.

While business is inherently competitive because each organization is competing for attention and sales from its target, the Internet had allowed us to level the playing field. It gives more businesses the power to do more.

It gives everyone access to more niche targets. Your business may not appeal to the masses, but it will have appeal. You can’t scale what you don’t have.

Putting your energies into understanding your goals and your place in your ecosystem will help you to stay grounded. The effort wasted thinking about what others are doing could be better invested in your own projects.