Web Wisdom #1 – Lao Tzu

February 20th, 2010

When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.

–Lao Tzu

Sure, we’ve all checked out the work of our “competitors” at one point or another – hoping to find a “chink in the armor” so that we can feel better about what it is we do. Or perhaps we look at our so-called competitors’ amazing website and think, “man, there’s no way I could come up with something that great…”

And when you’re first starting to take your business or your passion online, it’s natural to see things in the context of competition and scarce rewards for a select few (don’t worry, I’m not going to go into a “Law of Attraction” tangent here). However, I do have to say that the term “competitor” is becoming so outmoded for me that I can’t even type it into a blog post without surrounding it in quotes, or prefacing it with “so-called.” Have I ever allowed myself to be intimidated by someone else’s level of skill or success before? Umm….YEAH! Anyone who tells you they’ve never compared themselves with anyone else is almost certainly simply engaging in a not-so-subtle form of egoic competition with you.

All of this leads me to another quote by another great thinker, the prolific Seth Godin, whom I had the pleasure of listening to in person at a keynote he delivered recently. Seth says “the only thing that successful people have in common is that they’re successful.”

In other words, there is no replicable recipe for success, but rather, success comes from throwing away the rule book, forging your own rules, and thereby becoming utterly indispensable.

So when it comes time to forge our own path to success online, we see that simply copying the “competition” is a pretty solid recipe for failure. In fact, looking at life as one big competition rather than a massive collaboration is also a pretty dependable pathway to failure – if not in a professional sense, then almost certainly in a personal sense.

Here are some questions that we might be wise to ask ourselves as we utilize the power of the web to forge our own paths to success:

When creating your website, did you use your “competitor’s” website as a template and barely deviate from that sacred model?
Are you copying some aspect of a “competitor’s” website without really asking yourself how that thing that you’re copying might actually benefit the people you’re trying to reach?
Are you shying away from valuable tools such as blogging and social media because other people in your field have not yet adapted those tools?
Are you afraid to let your website express your authentic personality and goals as a result of that personality and those goals getting buried in the murk of what’s considered “standard industry practices?”
If your website represents a “watered-down” version of you or your business, is it because your website is seeking to bend or exaggerate the truth of what you truly have to offer?
Have you neglected to consider the positive benefits of focusing on what it is that YOU (or your company) has to offer and then building your entire online presence around that very uniqueness?

Until the next time…

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