Perry Marshall: The ONE Thing There Is NOT An Abundant Supply Of

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From Richard Koch’s new book The 80/20 Manager:

“What is scarce is rewarded.

Everything except individual inspiration and innovation.”

To that I add:

A basic education in direct marketing is not all that scarce either. Yes, it will land you in the upper ranks of business people, but most of them are barely squeaking by anyway.

Yes, you should do everything you can do to become a marketing master… but here’s what this really means:

You ALWAYS are honing your USP, your Unique Selling Proposition. ALWAYS. Not only your product, but your company and most of all YOURSELF. This never stops. Not even for a single day.

This is why I created the Marketing DNA Test. It’s why in all my high end coaching programs I ask people so many questions about their giftedness and history. It’s why we have the Breakthrough USP course (which candidly is the most thorough training on USP I’ve ever seen) and it’s why I constantly prod and provoke my students: KNOW THYSELF.

Unless you went to Montessori and/or special schools or were privately mentored, you were NOT taught to think this way growing up. School taught you to be exactly the same as everyone else – just hopefully a little bit better, a little more perfect.

That mentality is suicide in the 21st century. Here’s why:

There has never been a time when it was more possible for ONE business to serve MILLIONS of consumers at the same time. In 1963 that was true of maybe a thousand companies. In 2013 it’s true of a million companies.

This means: The world doesn’t want 100 good search engines. It wants one great one and Google is it. The world doesn’t want 100 really decent auction sites. It wants one great one and eBay is it. The world doesn’t want 100 perfectly respectable companies sort of like yours. It wants one great one.

Are YOU it?

The only way YOU are going to be THE one is focusing on the 1% of tasks that you are better at than almost anyone else, and building a team where the same thing can be said of every single one of them.

Which means you need to do less, not more.

It means one of your prime missions is discovering what gifts have been implanted inside you, what you were meant to do. So that you bounce out of bed every morning with purpose.

Life is going to either polish you up or grind you down. You alone decide which it’s going to be. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to polish yourself, to chisel that piece of granite until the fine statue inside emerges.

There is one thing there is not an abundant supply of and that’s people who have fully developed and expressed their God-given USP. And the great news, there can never be too many.