3 Strategies to Escape Economic Competition
Tl;dr: if you can bend your desires, the access conditions of goods for which people compete, and their subsequent volume, you can escape competition entirely.
If you understand what competition is, you can draft a strategy to get out of it.
Understanding Competition
Competition appears in a situation when a minimum of two living organisms (1) seek an end-goal (2) that is finite in quantity (3).
Trees are competing for access to food because food is scarce. However, they are not (and no one is) competing for air because air is infinite and free.
On the other way around, competition is fierce to get into Harvard because…there is only one Harvard.
Seamlessly, everyone is competing for money because (it is said that) money is not abundant (ironically, it is those that compete for money the most that have the less of it).
Competitions such as these are established when three conditions are observed.
The Three Conditions That Establish Competition
The three conditions that establish a situation in which competition appears are:
1. You want something you don’t have (most often, people compete for love, money, and/or power).
2. Someone else wants it too.
3. That for which you compete is finite in quantity.
If you manage to tweak or bend one of these three conditions, you’ll escape competition.
Let’s see how we can bend the first one.
1. Bend Your Desire Condition
The best way to avoid competition is not to compete in the first place.
You can’t lose the race if you don’t participate in it!
And the reason you don’t participate is because you don’t want the medal. Pure and simple.
Should you run a marathon with the perspective to win it, you’re competing. Should you run it to benefit the charity that organizes it, you are not competing at all.
The first rule to avoid competition is therefore not desiring that which people compete for.
If you’re not in the game, you can’t lose it.
While this is great when one wishes to avoid the job market to focus on entrepreneurship, for example, there are eventually things for which you’ll have to compete, unless you manage to be 100% independent in energy, housing, and food production, which leads to the second condition to bend.
2. Bend the Volume Condition
The opposite of competition is not participation or communism. It is independence.
The definition of independence is “which does not depend on anyone nor anything”. He who is entirely independent, de facto not competes.
When it comes to competing in the economy, we can divide the competition into two parts: competition to produce, which we will be dealing with here, and competition to consume, which we will be dealing with within the next section.
Competition to produce is really in fact competition to access customers.
You have four ways to decrease competition in customer access. The first is to be independent and to provide something nobody else provides, such as Apple with its iPhones.
The second is to access customers no one has access to, in small towns, small villages, such as what Amazon did by establishing its online shop (without knowing so).
The third one is to isolate your customers which creates a condition of scarcity in which your product or service is the only one available, such as Costco with its members-only shops.
This is also the case of my friend that organizes parties and invites 20 girls and 2 guys.
When you bend control access conditions, you control the competition.
The fourth way is to simply buy your competitors and establish a monopoly.
3. Bend the Quantity Condition
The best way not to compete that for which you desire, besides not desiring it, is to produce it yourself.
Let’s imagine you desire a McLaren supercar for which there are only 10 units produced. When McLaren decides to sell only 10 supercars, they are creating artificial scarcity to increase value, which increases competition.
If the people against who you compete have more money than you or better relations, you won’t be able to get the car you desire.
Your only choice is to therefore make the car yourself.
This is what happened to Lamborghini.
Lamborghini was a modest engineer selling agricultural machines, and when he complained to Ferrari that his car wasn’t working properly, Ferrari told him he was too stupid to drive it correctly. That response annoyed him so much that he built his own luxury car.
A similar story happened to Dave Christensen. A home builder and real estate developer, Christensen retired at 50 and ordered a yacht to celebrate. After the initial trip, he was unhappy with the quality of the vessel and decided he could build a better one.
And so he did.
The Bottom Line
Every area of your life you control is an area you won’t have to compete in.
You compete for food until you grow it in your garden.
You compete for housing until you get your own.
You compete for jobs until you hire people.
You compete in the economy until you invent a new product/service.
You compete for market shares until you create the market.