Why We Get Worked Up About Competition
I have this hypothesis that we get more worried about the competition when we’re not actually focused on being something.
What I mean by that is that, when our business or product doesn’t have a defined mission or overarching goal, when we’re not focused on moving towards becoming, then we tend to become fixated on what others in our space are doing.
Less time on what we’re trying to do, more time focused on (getting worked up by) others.
And to be clear, the mission or goals I’m referring to cannot be “growing our revenues” or “becoming more profitable”. Those are by-products not end states in and of themselves.
Missions focus on the grand and the ambitious in whatever realm we’re operating within, from “curing cancer” to “organizing the world’s information and making it accessible” to “accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy”. It could also be more narrowly focused on your end customer e.g. transforming them from a state of X to a state of Y.
(If any of that makes you feel uncomfortable, or if your reaction is that organizations that do that are simply trying to “put one over on us”, I’d suggest the issue lies within you and what you’ve associated with the idea of commerce.)
The point is that there has to be a goal: something we can all get behind and move towards. Something that allows us to organize and dedicate and focus our resources to a specific end.
When we do this, we’re more focused on innovation, we’re more focused on finding ways to do what we do better, all in pursuit of that mission.
When we do this, we’re also less worried about the specific actions of others. We have less of a tendency to get worked up by tactics that can be short sighted (and short term) in nature (e.g. dropping prices).
The point, of course, isn’t to ignore the competition altogether. We need to learn from what others are doing. The point is to figure out which of their actions are worth learning from because they move us towards our mission versus which don’t.
Incidentally, this is as relevant in our personal lives as it is in our professional ones. When we have an overarching personal mission or set of goals, we essentially transcend to a different level of pursuit.
We’re moving towards something versus running from those things around us.
