How To Overcome The Biggest Obstacle to Growth And Innovation

As an entrepreneur, your biggest personal motivation in all areas of your life is to expand your freedom of thinking, action, and results. You are always growing, and you continually measure yourself in terms of growth.

You notice that your greatest growth of freedom comes from seeing yourself—and everyone else around you—as uniquely different. The more you think this way, the more you grow, and the freer you become.

You’ll also notice that when you think about other people as uniquely different, they grow in their relationships with you. Everyone’s freedom to be themselves grows.

Escaping the sameness trap.

Everyone and everything in the world is unique and incomparable. Seeing things this way enables you to continually bypass all individuals in the world who are permanently trapped in envy because of their chronic self-comparison.

These are the people who are always complaining about unfairness, because not everyone is the same.

Circumstances have changed a lot over the past 25 years due to technology connecting us with one another. It’s given individuals the possibility of greatly expanding their capabilities and their futures.

It doesn’t matter as much anymore how you grew up or what possibilities you have locally because we can use technology to get outside of our immediate environment and establish opportunities, teamwork, and capabilities.

It’s no longer necessary to be trapped in the situation you’re born into, to be the same as everyone in your immediate community. You can escape from it.

Free to grow.

Everything in your life is and always has been unique. This means that you’re completely free to grow yourself, and your life, into anything and everything you want to be. You and your life are not comparable to anyone else’s.

One’s value used to be determined by how much one reinforced the sameness of the community, but that’s shifted. Now, instead of getting rewarded for sameness, our networked world and economy rewards uniqueness and innovation.

We value individualism—that individuals can come to grips with themselves and plot out a plan of their own—which requires commitment and courage, and gaining capabilities and confidence.

Every individual has the freedom to grow. And only you, as an individual, can determine that nothing is going to stop you from growing as long as you’re willing to distinguish yourself and envision your own goals.

Then, you grow your life, your mindsets, and your capabilities in order to reach a destination that’s outside of the circumstances in which you began. These circumstances are neither fair nor unfair. Someone who believes that they were born into a situation unfairly is trapped by the sameness of their beginning circumstances.

This is the fork in the road—how every individual responds to how they were born into the world. You can either suspend judgment, and see yourself, everyone, and everything as uniquely different, or you can be confined by your circumstances.

Fascinatingly alert.

I spend a lot of time on the internet, and what I’m looking for are things that I didn’t know I was looking for. Every day, I seek and discover new facts and new ways to think about things. This is how I’ve been since I was six years old—it’s a daily experience for me to learn new things and make new connections between things that I know.

This is how I, and the high-level entrepreneurs I know, create. The innovation comes from combining two or more concepts we’ve gathered by being endlessly alert and fascinated.

Everyone and everything is uniquely valuable and useful to your personal growth and progress, and as a successful entrepreneur, you’re alert to how everything around you is changing in many different ways. All of this is increasingly fascinating to you, so much so that your vision of your future is that it will always be bigger and better.

Endlessly more curious.

You’re always growing your appreciation of how different things around you relate to one another. And as your understanding of these unique relationships develops and expands, your growing knowledge, ambitions, capabilities, and results make you even more curious about discovering still further surprising relationships.

I discovered for myself when I was very young that there’s no end to what you can learn just by asking people questions. This is how I found out what life was like for older people when they were my age, and this capability of learning by asking questions has continued to this day in how I coach entrepreneurs.

By asking people questions, you not only learn facts about their lives, but also how they’ve experienced and are experiencing the circumstances they’ve been in.

Enjoyable responsiveness.

The more you understand these endlessly unique differences and relationships, your responsiveness to the world outside of you becomes increasingly enjoyable and rewarding.

You don’t find new information, new experiences, or new circumstances scary. All of these allow you to try new things. No situation is ever 100 percent new. So you make use of your past, figuring out what resonates with everything new in the situation.

Even when something new is shocking, the shock doesn’t last long, and then you figure out what you can do with this new thing. You determine if there’s any knowledge you’ve gained from a previous situation that you can now apply to the new situation that might give you an advantage. With everything new, you develop a new approach. 

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I hope this article triggered some new ideas, projects, initiatives, and thinking for you and your business. Let me know that you liked it by clicking the thumbs up icon above.

Thanks for reading,

Dan

Check out my newest free quarterly book Innovation Over Envy to learn more about why envy leads to a lifetime of unhappiness while uniqueness leads to endlessly enjoyable innovation.

Make sure to check out more of my latest articles because little things keep becoming bigger and better when you think about them in new and different ways.

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