Are You The First or The Best?

Dear lovely people,

Only a few number of people take time to ask themselves this question. Some of those who ask never get to the answers. The hard fact is that if you want to be the best in whatever you do, you need to first get better and to get better, you need to do what the best do – continually invest in improving your knowledge, skills and performance rather than just what the first do. You get the huge difference?

In the quest for success, if your objective is to remind the world that you did something first, you failed. This may mean that you failed either with the product itself (end result) or with the strategy in deploying it. But it doesn’t matter. A failure is a failure. If something was that great and revolutionary, people would recognize it as an all-time best.

It’s unbelievable how many people want to have first-mover advantage. You want to be known as the first person who did this or that. Even companies do this too, you feel compelled to get your breakthrough product into the marketplace ahead of the competition. You want the bragging rights of being the first and, of course, you know that because you’re ahead of the rest you will easily establish a dominant position. Sounds great to the ear except for the bitter fact that, it’s not always that easy.

Being a pioneer is good, draws some attention to you but guess what? Pioneers often are the ones who end up with arrows in their backs from all directions. Remember Netscape internet browser of yesteryear, it was thought to be the best before Microsoft Internet Explorer achieved it as recently as March 1, 2008.  Just some few years back, people carried around a cumbersome Walkman often tied to the belt of your slacks and loaded with some clumsy heavy batteries and cassettes and later, CDs. Then, it was first of its kind and thought to be the best until the MP3 player - a funky little device came along. People though had not finished saying wow! When Steve Jobs landed the revolutionary iPod that is still unbeatable. Even if you are doing something that a larger competitor is likely going to do, just make sure you do it better and strive to be the best.

Your success comes when you are able to get your clients shouting wow at the top of their voices because that is their nature – they prefer to be wowed. Being the best means you understand clearly that many people may be wowed seeing something for the first time especially that percentage of the population that are early adopters. But a larger percentage is going to be wowed by new and improved versions. This is exactly the trick that first-movers often don’t know and the outcome is that they are knocked off tracks even before they have time to develop stamina.

The bottom line: Being first in whatever you do is no guarantee of success. Being first does offer an opportunity to enjoy an advantage, as long as you’re smart enough not to rest on your laurels and you can position yourself to speedily embrace change. Walter Chrysler was thought mad when he bought a new car, dismantled and reassembled it several times over in order to master its faults and before the world knew what he was up to, Chrysler cars where on the market grossing billions.

Giving up on your path to success is easy, if you’re not careful. Dreaming, transforming the dream into reality, creating the demand to make you succeed is one thing; sustaining it is completely something else. If you’re the first you need to keep outplaying the competition by innovating, which is a tough challenge.

In the game of success whether at individual or corporate level, I have seen kings that have become peasants. I have seen apparently thriving companies disappear. You only have one life to live, so make yours count. Take the risk. Keep innovation at the center of your strategy and, fight like it’s the last thing you will ever do. It’s not about who made it first, it’s about who made it right.