Out of Context: You’re Biggest Competitor is Your Own View of Your Future

"You have to compete in the future dimension without destabilizing competition in the present and without subverting the core values that have sustained your business in the past. That’s part of doing business in the three dimensions of time.

The only way to succeed in the marketplace today—the marketplace of individuals or products or services or ideas—is to know your own story and to follow it into the future. Define yourself by someone else’s benchmarks, immerse yourself in someone else’s possibilities, and you become the thing you define yourself by and immerse yourself in. Measure yourself against your own rate of change and you stay inside your own story. That way, when the other side ceases to exist, you still have a reason to go on.

External and lateral competition is the distraction. Internal and vertical competition is the game. The real battle is against yourself.

Look at competition as external and lateral, and you also can never stop defining yourself by the present moment. Do that and you can never escape from the present into the future. Fail to make that leap, and the changes you are required to make will always be reactive and degrading."

Posted by Michael McKinney at 08:49 AM
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