A few weeks ago, I was trying to make choices about directions of my business and some decisions about dealing with a challenging issue – nothing new to most people in my position. In situations like this, I turn to trusted friends and mentors, and I always find this to be the most helpful action I can take. And during this period, I also happened to read one of Seth Godin’s blogposts called Your Competitive Advantage. It reminded me to also look at a few of the business books I most admire and refocus myself on what’s important and refocus on the vision I have for my parenting website. Seth’s post also reminded me that working faster, doing more and spending more and more time on ‘problems’ is not necessarily going to lead to success. An extract:
“When you increase your discernment, maximize your awareness of the available options and then go ahead and ship work that scares others… that’s when you succeed. More time on the problem isn’t the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won’t do.”
So if you are thinking about your own competitive advantage…
Ask yourself, are you spending enough time focusing on doing your very best work, work that is better than your competitors’, work that will differentiate you? Or are you obsessing about your challenges, your obstacles and your shortcomings? Seth Godin calls this our “Lizard Brain” – he says this is the kind of brain that does this:
“We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.”
The Lizard Brain creates resistance in us and that resistance gets in the way of our success:
“The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
As the year draws to a close, I challenge you to put your lizards out in the sunshine and leave them alone – use 2012 as the year that you put all your passion, energy, ideas and brilliance into being the best you can and doing the best you can – that will make your competitive advantage shine.
