[Issue 4] Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game
Navigating through the 3 rocks guaranteed to shipwreck your brand
[Photo by Humberto Chávez on Unsplash]
The Odysseus Files, Issue 4
Build a Castle, Not a Village, Part 1
Playing Achilles’ Game
[Note: this is Part 1 of a miniseries within the broader Odysseus Files called “Build a Castle, Not a Village.” These miniseries will group broad topics thematically, helping you connect the dots between them more easily.]
Homer’s Iliad ends with the funeral of Hector, prince of Troy, King Priam’s favorite son, and the commander of all Trojan forces.
His death was a massive blow to the Trojan morale. And was entirely avoidable.
To the mythical heroes of Homer’s world, the chief aim of battle was personal glory. So they would seek each other out on the battlefield, challenge each other to personal duels, and boast when they managed to kill an enemy of equal or greater status than themselves.
This was an impulsive, reactive way of fighting, based on quick wins and tactical plays. (Instead of strategic moves aligned with core objectives and carried out with discipline.)
And yet that’s precisely what Hector chose to do when Achilles challenged him to fight.
He agreed to play Achilles’ game - and he lost, badly.
Achilles was the master of the battlefield. He thrived at the point of the spear: toe-to-toe and helm to helm with his foes. His hand-to-hand combat skills were greater than anyone else’s in the Aegean. Facing him on the battlefield was a death sentence.
Hector knew this when he abandoned the safety of the walls of Troy.
He didn’t have to fight this battle - so why did he?
Hector’s unnecessary death is a word of caution to new entrepreneurs today. It’s a warning against three of the biggest rocks most entrepreneurial ships crash upon. Hitting these rocks will sink your ship before you even get started.
Navigating safely through them, on the other hand, is how an intellectual entrepreneur crafts a sustainable brand built for decades, not just quarters.
Let’s jump in.
Mistake #1: Building from the Roof Down
Hector made the same mistake many entrepreneurs make: he agreed to abide by a set of unspoken rules established by someone else.
Think about it: how often have you felt the pressure to do something in your business or marketing because everyone says you “have to”? Or believed you needed to study the top achievers in your category to reverse engineer how they got there? (A trend that’s super common in the creator economy, especially.)
It’s only natural. Whether you’re just starting your business or you’ve been working “in” it for a while (but are too swamped to step back and catch a breather), it’s hard to resist the pressure to just look at what everyone else is doing and repeat it.
The problem is, this is like building your business from the roof down: you chase tactics, without any way of determining whether those tactics actually make sense for your business.
Tactics-first thinking is why so many new businesses struggle to get off the ground.
Even if they do, they run into another problem.
Mistake #2: Chasing the Wrong Business Model
Most consumer-facing businesses operate off of a “churn & burn” business model.
It’s all about getting the sale - churning through customers, then burning those relationships in the pursuit of new customers. From e-commerce brands to direct response-style D2C (direct-to-consumer) businesses to traditional brick-and-mortars, the emphasis is on dragging a “lead” through a marketing “funnel” as quickly as possible, making whatever money the business can off of them before spitting them back out on the other side.
This is unsustainable, because the business has to constantly keep chasing new leads.
Stop hustling, and the money stops coming in.
While content creators, artists, and other makers are more focused on the act of “creation” rather than pushing a sales funnel, you can see some of the common threads:
The content “hamster wheel” - stop creating, and your business dies (makes those couple weeks of PTO at your corporate job suddenly sound great)
The focus is on audience growth - chasing more new eyeballs, in the hopes that a small number will support your work so you can feed your family and keep making more *stuff*
When someone does finally give you money, the relationship pretty much stops - you’re too busy chasing new eyeballs to give much special attention to the ones you already have
Most early monetization of creator brands comes through advertising, affiliate marketing, or brand sponsorships - in other words, you’re building an audience to sell to someone else to profit off of (and once again, if your audience stops growing, those deals start drying up and business gets - you guessed it - unsustainable)
Building on a “churn & burn” model means settling for a “hustle & grind” experience. And once you’ve hustled long enough, eventually you risk burning yourself out - and you lose everything you wanted from your business.
If, per the last point above, you’re trying to mimic someone else who achieved success in your industry, chances are, you’re settling for building a “churn & burn” model as well.
Is this really what you want from your business?
Mistake #3: Adrift in a Sea of Sameness
Ultimately, focusing on tactics first or trying to build what someone else has already built fails because it means you look and sound just like everyone else. You get lost in the Sea of Sameness. (To borrow a phrase from Robert Rose, content marketing consultant, author, and speaker.)
If someone else has already built something, do you honestly think you’ll be able to use the exact same process to get comparable results? More likely, you’ll create something that is not aligned with what you want out of your business and that is constantly jumping from tactic to tactic looking for the next “hot thing.”
This doesn’t mean there’s no value in looking at successful people to identify how they go there, of course. Especially if you’re identifying principles and strategies that shape your thinking.
But it does mean that if you try to be like the “celebrities” in your space, you’ll end up as a “me-too” brand that no one pays attention to.
Let’s take a popular example from LinkedIn, Justin Welsh.
As practically the king of the platform, everything Justin says attracts thousands of engagements and hundreds of thousands of impressions. On the backend, he sells two courses to his 472,274 LinkedIn followers (and nearly that many on Twitter) and his 175,000 newsletter subscribers. This simple system is moving him quickly towards his goal of hitting $5 million in annual revenue.
Sounds pretty great, right?
He fits right in with a group of fellow creators, all boasting hundreds of thousands of followers/subscribers and millions of impressions.
But here’s the problem with trying to copy them:
They’re optimized for big numbers.
They’ve structured their businesses to get in front of huge crowds so they can sell advertising spots in their newsletters, videos, and podcasts. Copying them would only make sense if you want the exact same business model. (Which is fine, but you’d better have other ways of differentiating yourself.)Now that they’ve done it, they already have a bunch of copycats.
Why add to the noise - and end up desperately begging for attention in the process - if you can simply sidestep it?They’re model is dependent on showing up every day and staying on top of the algorithms.
Justin’s audience is big enough to handle a few weeks of not posting new content. But beyond that? He only has two courses to sell; there’s nothing else for previous customers to buy. He has to keep funneling new followers into his funnel to keep his sponsors happy and his course sales up. “Churn & burn,” anyone?
Top creators keep their positions because they manage to keep adapting to new algorithm updates. Kind of like how the top SEO experts can still create content that comes up first in the search engines, but for everyone else, it’s getting harder.
When you’re at the top and that’s all you do, you get rewarded for that expertise. But the more people that join you near the top, the harder it is for others to get there.
Want to build this way? Go for it. But there’s a better way.
Takeaways
Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about the Trojan War as a snapshot of the broader Bronze Age collapse that occurred at the beginning of the 12th century B.C. We covered some of the lessons of the chaos and collapse that occurred across the ancient Aegean and Near East:
The fragility within a deeply interconnected, globalized system contributed to the collapse of one of history’s greatest golden ages - with many similarities to today’s world.
Cycles of chaos and collapse are a normal part of human history - and that it’s possible to not only survive but thrive in the midst of change.
Change and chaos also brings opportunities for those prepared to take advantage of them.
Doing so requires resilience and awareness of what’s happening around you, as well as optimizing for sustainability in your life and business.
We ended with the argument that stepping back and getting intentional about building a sustainable life and business begins with vision.
This is also how true innovators - from iconic brands to impactful inventors - start: they don’t ask people what they want, seek approval, or copy anyone else. Instead, they build based on vision.
Creating your own vision means playing your own game, by your own rules, not someone else’s.
It means sidestepping the competition and noise, not optimizing to anyone else’s objectives, and putting your brand first before tactics.
This is how the intellectual entrepreneur approaches business: proactively, intentionally, and with alignment, rather than reactively and impulsively.
Hector failed to think this way, but his brother, Paris (the one who abducted Helen) learned from his example.
After the Iliad ends, the story picks up in a series of poems known as the Epic Cycle. Here, we see how Paris handles a fight with Achilles. Rather than go toe-to-toe, he shot Achilles from a distance, with a bow. It went against the “rules” of what counted as an “honorable” way to fight, but it was playing his own game - one that he could win.
Like Paris, choose to play your own game. The result is so much more exciting.
P.S. - What’s one tactic or piece of advice you’ve felt pressured to follow or use that just didn’t feel aligned with you and the brand you want to build? Hit reply and let me know.
P.P.S. - Next week, we’re going to start exploring a model for how exactly you can play your own game, stand out in the Sea of Sameness, and build a sustainable brand. Hint: you need to build a castle, not a village. Tune in next week to find out what that means.