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The Long View
It’s Saturday night, around 11pm, and you’re fully down the rabbit hole, researching your competition, hopping from website to website, social channel to social channel, the pit in your stomach sinking lower and lower.
Sure, you know comparison is the thief of joy or whatever that saying you heard once is, but you NEED TO KNOW.
You justify it by reasoning that surely by keeping tabs on what the competition is up to it will only help you run your own business better.
You sure as hell don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and by the looks of things, they certainly do. Maybe you could learn a thing or two.
They have the types of high-end feature clients you dream of, their blog posts are shared regularly, they post engaging content on every conceivable social channel, of course they put out a highly ranked podcast as well, and what’s that? They’re getting into YouTube now too??
Your first reaction, of course, is to immediately map out a plan for how you can do everything the competition is doing, BUT BETTER.
“Maybe you’ll even get on TikTok,” you muse to yourself, “I need to one-up them somewhere.”
You sign up for TikTok out of curiosity only to find they’re already there.
“Damn It.”
You add TikTok to your now multi-page list of required content and social channels on which you’ll out-produce everyone else in your industry and shut your computer.
You resolve that Monday morning is the day you’re finally going to step up and get into the arena with the heavyweights whose shadows you’ve been living in up to this point.
You don’t know how you’re going to do it, being a small shop without the team or resources of some of your larger competitors, but that shouldn’t matter should it? With the power of the internet at your disposal, you can accomplish anything right?
Sure you’ll need to hustle. Stay up late. Maybe work weekends.
But it’ll all be worth it when you grow to the point where you’re the one with the big clients, the fancy website, mountains of content.
Right?
