October 7, 2026

🤖 COPYING. JUST. ACCELERATED.

             

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

COPYING. JUST. ACCELERATED.

Artificial intelligence is making businesses faster and more productive—but if everyone uses AI to produce similar ideas, strategies and customer experiences, differentiation becomes even more important.

🤖 AI Makes Copying Ridiculously Easy

AI is everywhere.

Organizations are using it to write.

Analyze.

Research.

Design.

Plan.

Serve customers.

Develop products.

And make decisions.

The promise is enormous.

Do things faster.

Do things cheaper.

Do more with fewer resources.

Great.

But there’s a strategic problem nobody seems to be talking enough about.

AI also makes it ridiculously easy to copy.

Ask the same questions.

Use the same data.

Study the same competitors.

Apply the same best practices.

And pretty soon everyone starts producing variations of the same thing.

Faster.

🐑 Welcome to the Accelerated Herd

I’ve argued for years that benchmarking is dangerous.

You study the best.

You copy what they do.

They study someone else.

They copy what they do.

Eventually everybody starts looking alike.

Welcome to the Herd of Sameness™.

AI pours gasoline on it.

Because now you can discover what everyone else is doing almost instantly.

And replicate much of it just as quickly.

That might improve your efficiency.

It will NEVER improve your competitive position.

Being faster at becoming the same is not a growth strategy.

🔥 CREATE NEW. DON’T COPY YESTERDAY.

This is why the first Move in the BE DiFFERENT Growth Playbook™ is CREATE IT.

You declare HOW BIG?

You choose WHO to SERVE.

You discover WHAT those specific customers CRAVE.

Then you determine HOW you intend to COMPETE & WIN.

Not by asking:

“What are our competitors doing?”

But by asking:

“What can we do to satisfy what the WHO craves in a way that no one else?”

That question changes everything.

Because the objective isn’t to become incrementally better than everyone else.

It’s to become The ONLY One™ who does what you do.

AI can help you get there.

But only if you use it to stimulate creation rather than accelerate imitation.

🎯 Turn AI Around

Here’s an Audacious Move.

Stop asking AI:

“What are the best companies in my industry doing?”

That question sends you straight toward the herd.

Instead ask:

“What is everybody in my industry doing—and what could I do that is completely different?”

Now AI has a different job.

Not showing you what to copy.

Showing you what to avoid.

Use technology to expose sameness.

Then use human imagination to escape it.

Because as AI makes copying easier, the strategic premium on being DiFFERENT goes UP.

Not down.

AI can accelerate your business.

Just make damn sure it isn’t accelerating you toward everyone else.

CREATE. DON’T COPY.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 10.7.26 at 06:26 am by Roy Osing
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October 5, 2026

SCARS. BEAT. PROMPTS.

               

🚀 Audacious Move™ of the Week

SCARS. BEAT. PROMPTS.

AI can give you career advice in seconds.

But the mentor who can change your career brings something no prompt can manufacture: lived experience.

We are drowning in advice.

Ask AI.

Watch a video.

Follow a guru.

Download somebody’s 10-point formula for success.

You can get an answer to almost anything before you’ve finished your morning coffee.

But answers aren’t the scarce commodity anymore. Judgment is.

And judgment is earned.

It comes from making decisions when the data was incomplete.

Screwing things up.

Getting blindsided.

Dealing with impossible people.

Making a call when there was no obvious right call.

And living with what happened next.

That’s why, when you’re choosing a mentor, I wouldn’t start with credentials.

I’d look for the scars.

Here’s what to look for.

🚀 #1. They’ve Got Stuff Done

Forget impressive theories.

Look for a track record of achievement.

The best mentors have built things, changed things, fixed things and delivered results.

They’ve faced obstacles and found a way through them.

They haven’t just studied success.

They’ve produced it.

AI can synthesize thousands of theories about what successful people do.

Your mentor should be able to tell you what happened when the theory didn’t work.

That’s the experience you want sitting across the table from you.

🌪️ #2. They’re a Graduate in Messiness

Business isn’t neat.

Careers aren’t linear.

And no algorithm gets to make all your difficult decisions for you.

Organizations are full of politics, uncertainty, competitive pressure and human beings who don’t always behave rationally.

Find someone who has succeeded in that messiness.

Someone who has walked into a situation where the playbook didn’t fit and figured out what to do next.

You want practical wisdom earned in the real world—not textbook perfection.

🔥 #3. They’re an Operator First

Find a doer.

Someone with what I call a Masters in Business Achievement.

They execute.

They make decisions.

They produce results.

They understand something increasingly important in an AI world:

Knowing more isn’t the advantage it once was. Doing something useful with what you know is.

Execution Is Your Strategic Learning System.

You execute.

You learn.

You adjust.

Sound familiar?

Be Imperfect FAST™.

👟 #4. They’ve Been Close to the Front Line

Don’t assume the best mentor occupies the biggest office.

Some of the most valuable teachers are people close to customers and operations.

They know where strategies collide with reality.

Where the beautiful PowerPoint hits an angry customer.

Where the clever idea smashes into a process that doesn’t work.

Where somebody actually has to deliver what leadership promised.

That’s where judgment gets built.

Find someone who has been there.

🏪 #5. They Understand Small Business

Never underestimate a successful small business leader.

They don’t have massive staffs, deep pockets or endless resources to hide behind.

They improvise.

They solve problems.

They make decisions with imperfect information.

And they live with the consequences.

They survive because they execute every day.

That experience is mentoring gold.

💥 #6. They’ve Failed

This one matters more than ever.

Be suspicious of anyone whose career story sounds perfect.

Failure teaches things success never will.

The mentor you want has made mistakes.

Backed the wrong idea.

Trusted the wrong person.

Missed something they should have seen.

Taken a hit.

Learned.

And come back smarter.

Success gives you credentials. Failure gives you wisdom.

You need both.

⚡ #7. They Live in a Culture of Execution

Finally, look at the environment your potential mentor comes from.

Do people spend their time discussing things?

Or doing things?

Because we’re moving into a world where creating another idea, another analysis or another recommendation is becoming ridiculously easy.

Execution remains bloody hard.

Ideas have zero value until somebody turns them into a result.

Find a mentor who understands that.

🎯 Advice Is Cheap. Judgment Isn’t.

That’s the shift.

Your mentor doesn’t need to be famous.

They don’t need thousands of followers.

They don’t need to dominate LinkedIn.

And they certainly don’t need to be a self-proclaimed guru.

They need scars.

They need evidence.

They need stories that didn’t end the way they expected.

They need a history of getting stuff done when circumstances were ugly and the answer wasn’t obvious.

Use AI.

Use every tool available to you.

But when you’re looking for someone to help shape the decisions that could change your career, look for something technology can’t download for you.

Lived experience.

Choose someone who has lived the lessons you need to learn.

SCARS. BEAT. PROMPTS.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 10.5.26 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink