Creativity Kills Competition

We live in a very competitive society. The mindset ‘anything you can do I can do better’ has drifted us off the track of what it means to be truly competitive.

You see when you compete against someone else, what are you really accomplishing? It’s like another form of an argument, where you focus on being ‘right’ and proving the other person/business ‘wrong’. You get 100 points for the pride, but nothing else is often accomplished.

I’ll be completely honest, I often struggle with this especially being new in the leadership world. I look at others with more experience and try to compete with what they’ve accomplished. What’s funny about the way we see competition today is that it really doesn’t make sense because it’s all relative. If I compare myself with someone who’s been doing something for 10 years. I measure myself less successful, but if I find someone who’s only been doing it for 2 weeks, I measure myself more successful.  It doesn’t really add up, because comparing to others is all to where that person is and how they do it (‘There’s more than one way to slice a pizza’).

So how do we truly be competitive?
In my opinion, compete with yourself and no one else. The only person you can truly compare yourself with accurately, is the person you were at any moment in the given past. Your progression is the best sign of how competitive you are.

The best way to measure this true competitiveness is through creativity and relatedness. To illustrate this let’s look at the framework we talked about a few days ago and expand it to incorporate this concept.

Notice how I’ve narrowed the focus to the top part of the framework that talks about creativity. To recap, we have personal creativity capacity meaning we can only think of a creative idea so far on our own before we need other perspectives to evolve it. Hence the box being on the line that separates our perspective from everyone else’s.

Moral of the paragraph above: When you have a creative idea and commit to it, share it with others to continuously evolve it. 

Now you’ll notice circles outside of your perspective that I’ve called tribes. Think of these tribes as groups/communities of various sizes that have a common interest/struggle. Notice how some tribes may already exist, or there may be others that have the potential to be created.

Now your goal with your creativity is finding out how you want to cater your idea to a tribe that you believe it will be of interest to, or solve a struggle. This is the relatedness part.

So now I know this may be confusing so let’s apply it…

For #GameOn Leadership, all I’ve done is developed a creative way to express leadership development insights in order to relate to students and young professionals who are looking for an entertaining and engaging way to understand it. I feel based on the uniqueness of the concept, this tribe doesn’t exist yet and I am looking to build it. There are other creative ideas that are impacting this tribe and that’s when partnerships take place.

You can even apply this to looking for a job. You have the creative idea for a company and want to get their attention so they hire you. So you cater your idea to something that their company ‘tribe’ might be interested in and pitch it. (More coming on this soon when I introduce you to ‘The Idea Sheet’)

Other entrepreneurs can do this for really anything and everything else. They just need to get creative with the way they express their idea and find relatedness to showcase it to a tribe. Pretty cool eh!

So what’s to be learned from all this?

1) You can always get more creative and expand ideas to different tribes so really you can spend your whole life competing with yourself.

2) Just because someone is vying for the same job or in the same industry, your goal shouldn’t to be to compete against them (which again is relative) but rather to compete against yourself and get more creative and relate more to the audience you’ll be sharing that creativity with.

3) Creativity isn’t an island, so get off it and start sharing your ideas with others. See what they think. See which tribe is most interested. Learn about that tribe. Talk to people. Develop your idea so it impacts them in a positive way.

4) Just because the tribe (or in business terms, market) doesn’t exist doesn’t mean you can’t create one. It all comes down to how creative you are.

 “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Albert Einstein