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Don’t Bank on Being the Outlier
At some point in your journey as a creator, you’ve probably had the experience of watching a competitor with objectively lesser talent, quality, and utility gain more traction and garner more attention than your higher quality offering.
It’s easy to throw your hands up in defeat, complain of a rigged system, bemoan the fact that good marketers can get away with delivering lesser value products or blame it all on luck, either your competitor’s good or your own bad.
These are all fair and understandable reactions to the circumstances. There may be a rigged system, your competition may be better marketers than you, and it’s highly likely that they have been the beneficiaries of a stroke or two of luck along the way*.
* You almost certainly have as well, but we’ll talk about that another time
As much as we would like to believe that our society is a strict meritocracy, where the cream rises to the top, and hard work and initiative are rewarded with commensurate success, it’s not, and they’re not.
The system does not always work fairly, reward the most deserving, and occasionally even elevates the truly deplorable to the highest levels of a field.
Faced with this reality, there’s another reaction common to creators, one that almost ensures they will never get the big…
