What is YOUR Competitive Advantage?

As I have briefly written about in the past, I never did very well in the corporate world because I lacked the killer instinct and competitiveness that is generally required to succeed.

I always felt singularly poorly equipped to deal with extreme competitiveness and somebody willing to succeed no matter what the cost... even when it means pushing others out of the way just to get ahead.

My personality has always leaned more towards a cooperative approach to things.

It can be difficult to get anywhere in the world — let alone ahead — if you're not a competitive person. Way back when — you know, when I was still trying to do it the conventional way with a regular job — I finally realized that my only ”success strategy” that I could sometimes make work was persistence.

I might not be more aggressive, or more talented, but I was very good at sticking to things. And I gradually figured out that if I could just stick to a particular task or project longer than anyone else the others might eventually give up and leave as a result of which I would gain relative ”market share” and that turned out to be my competitive advantage!

Of course there were only a limited number of applications where this could effectively be put to work, but at least I didn't feel like I was at a complete disadvantage anymore.

The other way I ended up proving myself and making a difference during my brief ”career” in corporate America was to be the one who was always willing to take up allegedly ”impossible tasks.”

I seemed to have a knack for taking things that were almost guaranteed to fail and then proving everyone wrong by keeping them from failing. Whereas I derived a fair amount of personal satisfaction from saving these projects, I didn't necessarily get a lot of recognition for my talent... although I did become the "go-to" person for a fair amount of drudge work!

It was not a strategy I continued working within the long term, and I invariably ended up with a philosophical question of whether these things I was working so hard at even deserved to live, or was I effectively just nursing a loser along that would have been better off not happening at all.

Ultimately, I was not really adding anything of great value. In most cases I was charged with saving somebody's pet project so they wouldn't look bad to upper level management, but I wasn't really building success. From a business perspective, what I was doing effectively amounted to working really hard at keeping ”the 65% solution” alive, when there were actually ”98% solutions” available. If you were a business manager would you choose the 98% solution or the 65% solution?

So why would I even do such a thing?

Bottom line was always that I felt like I was capable and "competitive" enough working on those 65% solutions nobody wanted to deal with, but not competitive in the cutthroat world of the 98% solution.

Of course I quit corporate America after very few years and became self-employed and I have not regretted that. Even so, I'm still not a very competitive person!

But I am very persistent…

How about you? Do you have a personal competitive strategy? And you good in competitive situations, or is your nature more cooperative? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

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Created at 2025.01.06 23:23 PST
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