Your Skills Are Problem Solving Tools. You Are The Angle.
It’s important to think of your skill set and your knowledge as problem solving tools. If you do this, you’ll have a better life obviously. You’ll make everyone else’s life better too.
You’ll also never run out of content for your website, which let’s face it is more important than both of those things.
It all starts with why you’re unique. It ends with you applying your unique skills to the world’s problems.
You need a single thing, and only you have it.
If You Don’t Have This ONE Ingredient, You’ll Probably Fail
One of the most irritating aspects of the internet is that everyone is trying to be the same thing and do the same thing.
They see some guru like Tai Lopez shilling a guru blueprint course, and suddenly they’re all on YouTube giving their thoughts of the day on how to achieve success.
They see a travel blogger doing yoga poses against a mountainous sunset and suddenly they’ve all got the same profile picture and Instagram. #bagelsinNewYork #entrepreneurlife
Or they see that FB Ads and Ecommerce is the current thing so they sell exactly the same streetwear and use exactly the same Shopify template and run exactly the same ads.
More than a handful of people have asked me what I have against dropshipping or Instagram or whatever. The answer is always nothing.
But here’s a Universal truth that absolutely nobody but me will tell you: You need one simple ingredient if you want success in anything.
Don’t worry, I’ll tell you what the secret thing is. For free in a few short sentences.
If you don’t have this ingredient, then you’re doomed to have to compete on the same platform as everyone else under the same ruleset.
If you do have this thing, then competition doesn’t really matter and it doesn’t matter if you screw up pretty much everything else.
So what is the thing?
It’s the angle.
People come to me a lot about stuff. New clients and returning clients come to me alike for business stuff. People check out the blog or even the not so serious Twitter account. People even ask me for advice on personal stuff, which considering I don’t have a life is a serious achievement.
The reason a lot of those people come to me is because of the angle.
When you get a problem, there’s a tendency to try and use a subpar solution – mostly out of desperation or not seeing the forest for the trees. You put a ton of effort into fixing the problem, forcing a square nail into a round hole, because you want the problem to be fixed.
Yet people ask me, and I’ll give them an answer they aren’t expecting. The simple reason is that I don’t have their problem. There’s not an emotional decision there for me, and no time or effort invested. I just look at the issue, find the easiest, quickest and hackiest way to solve it and there we go.
Where this applies to business clients: Often, they’ll think, “I have to sell X. Other people in my niche are running this type of ad or have this type of website or whatever. How do I do what they do but better?”
In most cases, that’s the answer to the wrong question.
You don’t have to do what they do better.
You should probably just do something else entirely.
Everyone Has A Skill Or Two, And Knowledge Of A Few Things
New guys starting in business look at established companies or overexposed methods and think, “How do I do better than everyone else?”
Competing with people who have more knowledge, experience and funding than you is never te best way to start.
Instead, you should flip it on its head. Look for an angle.
Everyone can approach a billion problems from the angle of their expertise.
Let’s take a stupid, stupid example. If you were marooned on a desert island, what would you do to survive, and where would your life’s experience and skills come in handy?
You might think, “I’d be dead within hours.”
That’s unlikely.
You might think, “I’m a f***ing Rambo, mate. I’d gut a tiger, eat its heart and then swim to the nearest beach resort, then have sex with all of the beautiful women there.”
… Sorry, but that’s probably unlikely too.
But very few people have no skills, knowledge or experience.
What do your knowledge and skills help you with?
Case in point… I watched a video about a barber shop today.
Now, cutting hair isn’t the most glorified thing in the world. Especially for guys; you go and get a haircut, you have a chat with the barber and then you pay and go home.
So what does a barber know about life?
Probably a lot. They talk to people from all walks of life. A lot of them are self-employed and rent the space. Many of them know a ton about their towns which all have histories and unique cultural heritage.
Throw in the fact that every barber has his own hobbies, and you’ve got a unique perspective that can extend to a ton of different topics.
Could You Save The Environment With A Circular Saw?
…I don’t know, but I bet a carpenter could come up with some cool ways to save the world. That’s the point.
Stop trying to out-compete people who have more advantages than you. Instead, find angles which allow you to skip the competition and deliver stuff to people without the fat in the middle.