dasickis blog

Philosophy of My Mind.

Intimidate through awesomeness!

Continuing my informal series (or unseries...) of competition and pursuit of overall greatness, I present: intimidation via awesomeness.

Recently, I've been thinking about totally annihilating competitors. Rather than just mitigate their potential, I want to totally destroy their ability to directly compete. It turns out there's very little you can do to them physically that would greatly impact their performance. 

“Of course you can destroy your competitors just look through history and that's how Company X won!” -- You

But you're wrong & stupid. 

So let's go through some common methods of brawn devastation:
  • Drown the competition with money - This fails with hyper-resourceful competition that can market with significantly less and produce with extreme efficiency. However, this method works with competitors who also use tons of money to overcome their weaknesses. Case in point – Linux vs. Microsoft. 
  • Use your market-position to leverage FUD and partners to inhibit competitors' chances. However, you risk your reputation competing with similarly networked enemies who ignore hype and continue development. Case in point – Apple App Store vs. Adobe Flash.

Of course, there are many more knee-jerk methods than the above methods that may have adverse effects on competition, but nothing beats being awesome.

Let's take a look at defeat and victory: Defeat is a state of mind whereas victory is a state of the world.  Hence why it's easy to lose but crazy hard to win. When you win you have to actually produce something or find another way to impact the world positively. Now the difference between just changing the world and winning is when you win your competitors are convinced they lost. 

Here's how being awesome incapacitates combatants beyond any other method: When you launch an attack, your competitors have a direction to defend and counter attack. On the other hand, when you have a product and work to better it as much as possible by improving your customers' lives then you build awesome cred. As you develop and iterate with no intention to harm, your goal becomes making your customers love working with you. Eventually all other competitors will give up as their (actually, they were always yours) customers start to care less about their offering because yours is so awesome. That's when your competitors can eat the dirt. Now they're already down, they'll try to excuse themselves out of it. You attain victory when your bane-of-existence is grasping for excuses to justify their own awesome retardation. Any mistakes you make will be highlighted and all kinds of crazy  accusations will come out of the wood work. This happens when your competitors have lost direction and have nowhere to go but down.

Also when you're awesome, everyone knows and cherishes working with you. No one turns down awesome people/company calls. 

 

Compete ferociously!

After reading this article: http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2010/columns/story?columnist=broussard..., I was inspired to write about how the greatest people compete.

Competition is an event where two or more parties are fighting one another to achieve the same goal. The point of having a singular goal among all parties is key to why competitions occur. This fact is obvious, but some people misunderstand competition for ego-driven hatred and vice-versa. To illustrate this principle, recently 'analysts' have begun to report that Facebook is looking to take over the Internet (thus the world!) by pursuing all kinds of anti-competitive and proprietary solutions. Instead, I think that Facebook no longer competes with other social networks that battle ended a long time ago. They are now focused on how are their uses going to engage with the site longer i.e. how can they be a larger part of the day for all their users. Yet, all the other players they look to Facebook as a source of ideas to execute or excuse themselves for incompetence. 

All great people stop competing against others. They mostly know the battle is over. However, they do compete to make sure that their supporters get what they want. The mentality shifts from reactive market plays to responding to customers' emotions. Sometimes that means making sure others in the marketplace are hurt by their actions, but those are side effects to making sure their customers, teammates, etc. are well-served. In the example of Lebron James, he dominates the beginning of the game to ensure his teammates can succeed the rest of the game. If his teammates succeed he will win the game. Similarly, Facebook is making sure their customers find so much value with their network they spend more time with them. In both cases, their decisions may require certain actions that will detriment their opponents.

You become detrimental to your competitors when you inhibit their ability to attain their goals (which are similar/identical to yours). Sometimes this can happen by acquiring more customers in the target market or it can happen conciously by blocking your competitors from acquiring your customers. It's the latter case that most people are concerned because it limits the market's ability to produce the best products. Yet, only very few companies can directly block their competitors through brawn. Most companies need to be intelligent and create a better experience for their customers than any of their competitors. 

Basically, the point here is that when you compete never focus on how you'll kill your competitor. Only focus on why your customers need to love you more.