Seth Godin’s Wisdom

Every entrepreneur needs to follow someone they admire. Why? To get inspired. To have someone to shadow, mentally. I have several people that I admire. One of them is Seth Godin, marketing genius, writer and entrepreneur. In today’s blog post he asks, “what is your competitive advantage?”

Are you going to succeed because you return emails a few minutes faster, tweet a bit more often and stay at work an hour longer than anyone else?

I think that’s unlikely. When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more showing up and more following instructions) you’re racing to the bottom.

It seems to me that you will succeed because you confronted and overcame anxiety and the lizard brain better than anyone else. Perhaps because you overcame inertia and actually got significantly better at your craft, even when it was uncomfortable because you were risking failure. 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.

Seth Godin: Your competitive advantage

It got me thinking, what IS my competitive advantage? I have built Bellacures, a chain of nail salons, from scratch and after six years of being in business I now engage in more administrative and maintenance tasks than ever before. I miss the days of creating and building. If I want Bellacures to stay on top, according to Seth Godin, it is unlikely that my company will improve from my efforts of answering my emails back quickly and performing flawless damage control. As 2011 starts to close out, I am going to compile a list of ways to re-create and create more for Bellacures. I urge you to do the same for your company! There is no better way to start off 2012 than with an inspiring strategy.