January 13, 2005

NORMAL. NEVER. WINS.

                   

🔥 Audacious Move of the Week

NORMAL. NEVER. WINS.

Learning how to BE DiFFERENT and stand out in business and life starts with deliberately refusing to think, act and execute like everyone else.

Stop trying to fit in. Start practising how to stand out.

Most people don’t have a differentiation problem.

They have a conformity habit.

They’ve spent years learning what everyone else does.
- What the experts recommend.
- What the latest textbook advice says.
- What competitive colleagues are doing.
- What conventional wisdom says is “best practice”.

And then they wonder why nobody notices them.

You don’t BE DiFFERENT by declaring it.

You BE DiFFERENT by behaving differently.

And behaviour can be practised.

Here are 6 Moves I’ve used over my career to escape the gravitational pull of the herd.

😲 1. SURPRISE PEOPLE

Predictability is comfortable.

It’s also forgettable.

I’ve always looked for opportunities to give people something they didn’t expect.

Not necessarily something expensive.
Not necessarily something huge.

Something thoughtful.

Learn something about them. Remember it. Then use that knowledge to create a moment they never saw coming.

Most people deliver what’s expected.

BE DiFFERENT people create the unexpected.

That’s what gets remembered.

🔍 2. CHANGE THE QUESTION

When people encounter a problem, they typically ask:

“How do I solve this?”

I ask:

“How can I solve this DIFFERENTLY?”

That one word changes everything.

It forces you away from the obvious answer.

✔️ It challenges assumptions.
✔️ It opens possibilities.
✔️ It makes copying harder.

If you ask the same question everyone else asks, don’t be surprised when you get the same answer everyone else gets.

🔄 3. PULL A 180

When everyone is running east, I get curious about west.

I call it the 180 Move.

Take conventional wisdom and turn it upside down.

Ask:

“What would happen if I did exactly the opposite?”

You won’t always use the answer.

That’s not the point.

The point is to break your brain out of its normal pattern.

The herd has enormous gravitational pull.

Sometimes you need a violent change in direction to escape it.

📚 4. PUT THE TEXTBOOK DOWN

I’m not anti-learning.

I’m anti-worshipping theory.

Business and career textbooks are full of neat models created to explain a world that is anything but neat.

The real world is messy.

Customers are irrational.
Competitors are unpredictable.
Plans go sideways.
Shit happens.

So learn the theory.

Then get your ass into the real world and figure out what actually works.

Performance beats intellectual elegance every time.

🤮 5. STOP GARGLING GOOGLE

Want to know what everyone else is doing?

Google it.

Want to create something nobody else is doing?

Close the damn browser.

The more time you spend studying competitors, the greater the temptation to become a slightly modified version of them.

Different logo.
Different words.
Same stuff.

I’d rather create something imperfectly original than perfectly copy what somebody else has already done.

Create. Don’t copy.

Your weird idea might fail.

Good.

Learn from it and create another one.

👣 6. TAKE BABY STEPS

This might be the most important Move of all.

You don’t wake up tomorrow and suddenly become radically different.

You practise it.

One decision.
One experiment.
One contrarian question.
One surprise.
One 180 Move.

Then another.

And another.

That’s how differentiation becomes part of your DNA.

Not through one gigantic act of courage.

Through hundreds of small acts of defiance against the way things have always been done.

⚡ THE REAL MOVE

BE DiFFERENT isn’t a positioning statement.

It isn’t a marketing slogan.

And it sure as hell isn’t something you paste on the wall.

It’s a habit.

A way of looking at every problem, every opportunity and every decision and asking:

“What could I do here that nobody expects?”

Practise that question long enough and something interesting happens.

You stop trying to BE DiFFERENT.

Different becomes the way you operate.

🚀 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 1.13.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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