Let’s make some mistakes!
Twenty years ago, on October 28th, 1998, I incorporated my first company. Twenty years later, I’m still going strong, so I thought it might be a nice way to give back by dedicating the next several emails to the worst mistakes I’ve made along my journey, with the hope that you’ll get value out of knowing what NOT to do, thanks to my having done those things already.
Today’s Mistake: Caring too much about what others are doing
How I WISH I’d known this one years ago. When HARO started blowing up, it seemed like everyone wanted to build their own version of HARO. Some people went so far as to blatantly steal my website code and call it their own. Others created mailing lists and claimed to be “just like HARO!” Every single time I found a new one, I worried for days, even weeks – Are they going to beat me? Am I going to lose everything I’ve built?
In the end, all that worry was a WASTE OF TIME. Instead, I should have put my energy into continuing to build what I was building – Because in the end, HARO survived (and got acquired for millions) and the others? Well, they’re pretty much all dead.
Even today – Just last week I found someone who’d copied ShankMinds: Breakthrough, my award-winning digital networking group, made a few changes, and called it her own. As soon as she launched, a handful of people brought her to my attention. My response to each of them? “Good for her. In the end, networking groups aren’t new things, and the ones that survive do so because of the members in them, and the person leading them. I’m not concerned.” And then I went right back to building new and better features for MY members.
Let me put it another way: Be so busy working on improving your OWN grass, that you don’t have time to notice if your neighbor’s is greener.
I hope you’re enjoying my mistakes! More coming soon! Any thoughts? Reach out! I want to hear from you! Just reply!
Happy Monday,
-Peter
PS: If you want to learn better ways to focus on your own stuff, from brilliant minds who have already done it, come to ShankMinds: Vegas in January!
It’s rule number one! Never care what anyone else does. But it’s always better to know at least what they do so much not to be caught unprepared when what others do can put in crisis what we do.