I stood with a rancher at around midnight one summer evening in a remote, West Texas field. Sadly, he had just found out that he had lost his entire peanut crop to a massive sounder (herd) of feral hogs. At the very corner of his fifty-acre square crop, I stood looking through my night vision scope, scanning the area. “What are all these cows doing out here,” I asked him. Hundreds of these large beasts were slowly stumbling around on the sandy soil. “Those aren’t cows,” was his only response. The reality hit me. Holy pork party, Batman! I had just purchased my new night scope, but hadn’t mounted it or sighted it in yet; still, I told the farmer I would come back the next night and help him with his hog problem.
Fast forward to me sitting in my platform, high in the only tree in a field after spending the day sighting in my scope. It was around two a.m. and extremely cold with the sun gone. Coyotes cried out in the distance. The occasional skunk or raccoon now and then would pass by, but no hogs. Finally around four-a.m. I’d had it. I had not seem a single hog, unlike the night before when I had seen hundreds. I climbed down from my stand and walked to the corner of the field where a road led to my car. In one last effort, I scanned the crop with my scope. There! On the opposite end, a group of hogs were walking into the field. I worked my way closer towards them realizing the wind was at my back. It was only going to be a matter of time until they picked up my scent. I watched their every move and then, as I put my finger on my trigger, a strange thought hit me. “Wow: this seems so unfair. I can see everything they are doing and they have no idea I’m even here!” Then a larger dose of reality hit me. After I fired the first few shots, the group scattered in 360 degrees! I was hoping they’d stay together and dash to the tree line, but suddenly my “unfair” advantage flipped into my HUGE disadvantage. I could ONLY see them with my scope, so I was now wildly swinging my gun from one side to the other, trying to keep up with where the hogs were…but it was futile. I heard a loud squeal. A sow had found me and clearly, she was NOT happy about me messing with her family. I swung my gun around at the last second to see a 250 pound pissed off momma making a B-Line for me.
The point of this story is not about shooting hogs. It is how in one moment, I felt I had a considerable upper hand only to discover that the very thing I was using for my advantage was also my biggest handicap.
Another time, I was playing an online game with my son in which we were snipers looking for each other. In an effort to gain a much better view of the area, I crawled up a mountainside to the summit where I could see with more ease. I wasn’t there five seconds when I heard a shot and was down. Victim. See, the other players KNEW that snipers climbed to the hill crests, trees and the highest building. So the FIRST place they look is where a sniper may have the best view. All the “sniper’s perch” ends up doing is exposing them to their enemies. So again, the unfair advantage had become a weakness.
Several years ago, I was trying new ideas for video series I could produce. I had an idea for the lottery. So I approached the Lottery Commission and presented my idea: Follow the lives of lottery winners and document how their lives were changed by their winnings. “NO!” they emphatically replied. “We are not interested.” That didn’t take long…
But what I eventually learned was that the winners of millions of dollars SELDOM have a positive experience. Their lives are usually ripped apart by greed, abuse and unbelievable amounts of legal claims against them. Nobody was suing them for slander or parking on their neighbors side of a walkway and nobody had family members strung out on drugs and distant uncles suing for any number of petty reasons… BEFORE they were rich. To most of us, it seems that money can solve our problems. The reality is that great advantage can quickly control your life in ways you never had to deal with before.
In business, there are plenty of opportunities to flex your unfair advantages, but you often have to be careful to not be simultaneously creating a weakness. By exposing your advantage, you become more vulnerable. Patents are great ways to protect your ideas and intellectual property, but it also means that anyone can now research your patent and read step-by-step what your process is and maybe even find a way to do your process differently that ends up giving THEM the upper hand. Maybe you find a way to handle certain accounts or certain clients or come up with a marketing idea. We can’t go around keeping these things secret, or they would never help us. But don’t be naive in thinking YOU are the only one who has good ideas or ideas as good as yours.
Use this to push yourself to constantly be looking for new strategies, or tools or methods. We often grow the most when we are pushed the hardest. I have a saying “Welcome to the comfort zone; where dreams die, ambition suffocates and goals vanish.” If indeed you are feeling like you are “coasting,” then think about cranking it up a notch. As Mark Cuban says “Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it away from you.” It’s okay that someone else my share, or embellish or even steal your ideas…just keep working on them and be known for doing original work.
Having an advantage is not the single solution to whatever you are doing. As you are finishing one idea, start coming up with the next.