Better Than

As many of you may be aware, this year I’ve committed to producing a single piece of content (Seth Godin calls it “making art”) every single day in the form of a hand-lettered yellow sticky note. If you’re interested, you can follow these efforts on my Instagram account. Last week I posted the Big Yellow Sticky you see embedded in this post.

This week saw a video uploaded by Anthony Iannarino. that kind of debunks the literal text of my sticky note.

Anthony is buddy of mine whose content and commitment I use as a gauge to personally push my own efforts to a higher level, so I pay close attention when he writes an article or posts a video. There is a section right at the beginning of this recent video that hit right on the message I posted last week, and it stung for a second (but only for a second).

I’m a firm believer in the “global conscious” and some ideas and themes are just destined to emerge at certain times, so Anthony may not even be aware of my original sticky note on this topic (or maybe it was just his way of pushing me to dig a little deeper.)

Challenge accepted.

I don’t disagree at all with what Anthony says in his 3-minute video, I just think that perhaps the spirit of my message may not have been fully represented on the 3-inch square surface.

The invisible secret behind my statement is that you should be holding yourself to a higher standard than your competition every day and in every way. You should be aware of your competition, but not so obsessed with them that you’re playing the role of Follower instead of Leader. If your competition reduces their price, you shouldn’t feel compelled to lower yours in order to “beat” them. You should be better than that.

If you hold yourself to higher standard, you should already be better than your competition — which means every day you should be trying to be a little bit better than you were on the previous day (because you were already better than them). This is a message I takeaway from Anthony in his video when he stresses the importance of personal development and improving your performance.

I don’t really think that Anthony and I are in disagreement on this point, but I still wanted to elaborate on what my personal thoughts were behind the creation of this particular sticky note. Anthony’s video provided an opportunity to continue the discussion.

What do you think?

Would you be interested in hearing more details about the quotes on the big yellow sticky notes I post? I’ve been thinking about creating a blog post with more ideas behind the pithy post-its. Let me know on Twitter or in the comments below if you’d like to read more about how to activate the big ideas on those little yellow pieces of paper.