Competition Helps You

“If we can keep our competitors focused on us, while we focus on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.” Jeff Bezos,?Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Amazon.com

When I ran my international television design company, opportunities to acquire prestigious contracts worth a million-plus came up a few times a year. We were privileged to win some of these. The same handful of companies were always invited to pitch. There were two of us in London, one in New York, one in L.A. and a couple of others who aspired to step up to the design ‘premier league’.

One of my tasks as MD was to receive the inquiries and negotiate terms with the client. I’d persuade them to pay a pitch fee of several thousand pounds and to limit the rivals invited to a maximum of two or three if they really pushed it. Of course, we had to back this up by actually stepping away if they wouldn’t agree to our terms, which wasn’t that hard. Because if they weren’t prepared to invest in us seriously throughout the pitch period, it was because they didn’t value us and our time would be wasted.

Yachts in Cannes

At the international events we all gathered at, such as the Cannes Television Festival, we would see our competitors in person.?The meetings would be frosty,?to say the least. Instead of us getting together in these staggeringly gorgeous settings to discuss industry standards and how we could assist one other, we would glare at each other across the yachts and luxury hotel lobbies.

My CEO told me to check out who our rivals were talking to and slip into position after they’d left so we could find out whether there were any conversations worth having, too.

I found this stressful, painful and lonely. There we were in one of the most beautiful places in the world, representing teams of incredibly talented designers whose job it was to make?a?stunning and commercially impactful brand and creative work. You’d think it would be paradise, but instead of enjoying it, I was stuck in the mindset and behaviours of fear and scarcity. It isolated us from the valuable peer support and intelligence that could have helped us, both individually and collectively.

Our egos keep us stuck in fear

We were all operating at the highest levels in our businesses, but we were doing it without any mindset or leadership support, which was rare in our industry at the time. We fell back on what we thought was the safe way to behave, which was actually just our egos hijacking us. Our egos are our primitive inner beings. They have two missions: to defend us from certain harm and to validate our desire for approval. That’s where the phrase?pandering to someone’s ego?comes from.

We now know that enlightened and self-aware people need to challenge their egos.

Our egos haven’t evolved from our history as primates when the most common cause of death was being eaten, so they’re not able to distinguish between real and imagined fears or attribute a level of sophistication to assessing them.

The feelings we have towards our rivals are often super intense for this reason. Without the ability to think about it rationally, our egos decide we’re about to get eaten. This is a gale-force-ten threat, they tell us, that we need to react to in a gale-force-ten way.

Competition is opportunity

So it’s our egos that make us see competition as a massive threat rather than as a source of opportunity in our thriving business landscape. Giving in to our egos leads to a winner-takes-all mentality, whereby people either ignore competition in the belief they’re above it or try to eliminate it to become the dominant market player. This thinking is misguided because it takes us away from what should be our key focus: harvesting intelligence from our customers to make our businesses and lives the very best they can be.?

No business operates in a vacuum, so the winner-takes-all mentality makes us weak. It’s na?ve to think we can either succeed blindly or crush everyone who gets in our way. Our competitors are like the torchbearers of our journeys. They can show us where to go next and help us choose the best course of action at any given time. If your competitors are copying you, that’s a great sign. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. You must be doing something right, so keep blazing a trail in your sector and getting noticed for the amazing things you’re doing.

Our world thrives on competition

The world we live in thrives on competition and we all benefit as a result. Competition results in better products and services. It’s good for consumers and good for business. It drives economic growth and increases standards of living. Competition through free trade is the basis of successful economies worldwide. When businesses compete with each other, customers get the best prices and quality of goods and services. Competition boosts innovation and causes the invention of new and better products, as well as more efficient processes. Many products that are commonplace today were once innovative breakthroughs. Cars, planes, phones, televisions, computers and many drugs and medicines all demonstrate how competition has the capacity to improve lives and increase prosperity.

Of course, it’s inevitable that we’re going to lose out to our competitors sometimes. Because of our egos, most of us truly hate that experience, but losing is a part of everyone’s life and it’s never going to be the end of you. Pick yourself up and tell yourself a bigger and better opportunity awaits on the other side. Tell yourself that God or the Universe, for a reason you may not understand right now, just decided it wasn’t right for you to win at that time.

Negative thoughts don't lead to positive results.

There’s another purpose for loving your competition. Negative thoughts don’t lead to positive results. When your brain focusses on your rivals and you allow feelings of jealousy, bitterness or fear to dominate, you stop focussing on yourself and what you can do better in life. Ask yourself where do you want to sit: in a place of darkness and bad-feeling or a place of freedom and light? As Martin Luther King said, “Hatred paralyses life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonises it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

Our rivals are not your enemies.?Their?main goal in life is not to hurt you. They’re just trying to do something for themselves and their loved ones, like us, which is to make a great living and enjoy life along the way.

They’re solving the same problems as us. That means they’re always thinking, always experimenting and always learning about the same things, too. We learn from their mistakes as they learn from ours. They expand our horizons as we expand theirs.

They create a context within which our business exists. They help us identify trends and set benchmarks for comparing our performance.

Only we and they know what it takes to walk this path, so whenever those unpleasant feelings of envy, insecurity and dislike come up, which they will because your ego is so powerful, we should say no to them firmly and thank our rivals instead.

Ask for help appreciating the benefits they’re bringing to us. Trust that everything is unfolding in the right way, for the right reason, and at that the right time for us to experience our very best lives - with their help along the way.

Humanise your competitors

One of the best ways to feel better about your competition is to humanise them, which means honouring your connection to them through your universal oneness or human experience. We all struggle and have challenges in life, and often the challenges we’re experiencing are exactly the same as those of our rivals. “I don’t like that man,” said Abraham Lincoln once. “I must get to know him better.” “Be kind, for everyone you meet is having a hard battle,” said the ancient Egyptian philosopher Philo.

Remember, even the most annoying people or the ones you perceive to be a direct or immediate threat may have been the victims of the worst mistreatment and the most emotional pain or deprivation. They may be fighting a heroic struggle against the odds simply to function in daily life. Who are you to add to their pain?

Our insecurities can be like a form of poverty;?they make us mean and stop us from giving credit where credit is due. They also keep us from sensing the pain and fear our rivals sometimes experience and how much they might appreciate kind words or thoughts from us.

So, rather than wishing pain, suffering or hardship on our rivals, we should wish them the best and set ourselves free. Healthy competition is truly one of our greatest assets for growth. Its existence moves us towards excellence. It’s also ongoing validation that a market actually exists for our products or services. So, instead of wanting your rivals to fail, see competition as a catalyst that helps you become great at what you do. You can only know how strong you are when?faced with?resistance and challenge, so embrace competition rather than resenting it. Transform envy into healthy motivation by appreciating your rivals and the freedom to be the best and most empowered version of you will result.

This article is a chapter from my Amazon best selling book: The Smart Connector. If you've enjoyed it I invite you to head on over to Amazon and purchase it https://bit.ly/thesmartconnector.