All that you have is your experiences, your employees, your training, your resources and your own stories. The good news is that is all you need to succeed.
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Last October, the Kansas City Royals did something that we had not seen since 1990: they reached the World Series after being carried on the strength of their bullpen. Not since the “Nasty Boys” of the 1990 World Champion Cincinnati Reds had a bullpen led a team that far in the playoffs. The Royals, led by the “HDH” trio of relievers (apparently elite bullpens get cool nicknames), came up an agonizing 90 feet short of a World Series title.
After the 2014 World Series, and the success that the Royals bullpen had in carrying the team to the brink of a championship, we have seen multiple teams attempt to create their own 3-man super bullpens just like the Royals. The Yankees spent almost $40 million and traded one of their top prospects to get two relievers in attempt to build their own elite bullpen that is designed to function exactly like the Royals. Utilizing their three best arms to get the last nine outs of any game they have a lead in.
It’s almost like a team trying to build their roster around a mid-round QB draft pick simply because Russell Wilson and Tom Brady were mid-round draft picks. Those types of successes can be separated by over a decade.
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We will see in the upcoming years whether teams like the Yankees and Astros will have success attempting to copy this model. One reason that the success of the method used by the Reds and Royals is so rare is that relief pitchers are far more volatile than your traditional starting pitcher (due to a smaller body of work and sample size) and thus fluctuate from year to year. It’s almost like a team trying to build their roster around a mid-round QB draft pick simply because Russell Wilson (3rd round in 2012) and Tom Brady (6th round in 2000) were mid-round draft picks. Those types of successes can be separated by over a decade.
Speaking of football…
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Famous Super Bowl Hero Flops
Let’s not forget the Super Bowl heroes who get huge contracts for being associated with those winners. Teams signed those players to big dollars expecting them to have a similar impact for the new team as their previous employer.
The most famous of these types was Cowboys’ cornerback Larry Brown who got a five-year, $12 million contract with the Raiders just weeks after he was the first cornerback ever to win Super Bowl MVP (in Super Bowl XXX).
The Raiders saw Brown’s 10 interceptions in his last two seasons in Dallas, they saw him win three Super Bowls as a key member of the defense, including starting that last championship season, the MVP of the Super Bowl and thought he was a perfect fit to come in and build their next championship winning defense.
But it’s more complicated than that…
Teams have different players, different coaches, and different schemes. Their roles may not even be the same on their new team as it was on their old team. For Brown, he was on a loaded Cowboys’ defense that also included Hall of Fame defensive back Deion Sanders, taking away half the field and allowing Brown to avoid covering the opposing team’s top receiver. The Raiders making him their top cornerback exposed his weaknesses and he struggled.
Brown lasted all of two seasons and a total of twelve games (with ONE interception) for the Raiders before being released and spending one more season with the Cowboys before retiring from football.
There are other examples similar to Brown, including Dexter Jackson who was the MVP of Super Bowl XXXVII for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But Jackson, like Brown, was on a loaded defense and surrounded by great defensive talent including Hall of Famers Warren Sapp and Derrick Brooks. He signed a five-year $14 million contract with Arizona (note the way player salaries have escalated in recent years as this made Jackson one of the highest paid defensive backs at the time of the contract). Jackson played only one season of his deal, then got hurt, and was released less than two years after signing.
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How This Applies to Your Business
Sports can teach us so much about life, we simply need to open ourselves up and learn how to apply the lessons to our own lives (such as in this article). No matter what area of life you are in, you will see others have immense success and then you see the imitators attempt to reverse engineer their plans (I’m saying that far too nicely) and duplicate their success. In the sports world (both college and professional), it’s how the bad teams try to copy the most successful teams in order to emulate their on-field results. However, this practice has not necessarily brought teams the best success when compared to things like mastering the basic fundamentals of team building and roster construction. These same principals can be applied to your business and you will see why you should not be making the same mistake that professional sports teams make when trying to imitate winning teams.
Trying to copy someone’s identical plan, especially without identical pieces, is only setting you up for failure. The reason that players like Jackson and Brown succeeded was because they were in a specific system that fit their skills AND had players around them that complimented their skills…something that other teams may not necessarily have had (in this case neither the Raiders nor the Cardinals did).
This can be applied to your business as well. You can see how some of the top people in your industry operate, but you cannot copy them. It simply will not work. You do not have their experiences, their employees, their training or their stories. Attempting to copy them in this situation would be a Raider-like act.
All that you have is your experiences, your employees, your training, your resources and your own stories. The good news is that is all you need to succeed.
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All that you have is your experiences, your employees, your training, your resources and your own stories.
The good news is that is all you need to succeed.
I discovered an example of how this fails from one of my favorite bloggers, Ramit Sethi from IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. Ramit invited one of his students taking his course into his studio to interview and during this interview he broke down the student’s sales copy live. The student was grateful for Ramit’s assistance and seemed excited to get to send this out to his followers.
Except that wasn’t what ended up happening.
Rather than sending out his now optimized copy that Ramit helped with, this student just took Ramit’s email that he sent out to his list a few days prior (and whom this student was a follower of) and sent that out to HIS list.
Needless to say this did not go over very well. He was flooded with unsubscribe requests because the email felt “off” to his readers (even though they did not realize this was from another list).
When Ramit found out he was furious, and banned the student from buying any of his products again. But he also asked the person why they did it.
The student responded that they could never write their copy as well as Ramit could, and they felt that stealing his email was the only way for them to have success.
Ramit turned this into a teaching point for the rest of his students, about how this was someone seeing the results and surface tactics above the foundation that had been set. He saw it as ‘getting a certain email equals get a certain result’, and it failed.
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Here is how you can use your own resources and stories to create your own style rather than doing what Ramit’s student did. These steps will allow you to easily create your own emails/blog posts/articles that are 100% your own, no copying necessary. And the best part is that it will take only a few minutes to create these ideas. Click here to your FREE worksheet for these steps.
Step 1: Create a list of three subjects within your niche that you want to write about.
If you’re in the personal finance space, write down the aspects of personal finance that you are going to blog about; for the business niche, what business topics you will cover, etc.
Step 2: Create a list of three stories or other personal anecdotes that you can weave in to engage your audience and make your point.
These stories are what help you create your own style. But they do not all have to be your personal stories, as just in this article I used stories from different sports leagues as well as from Ramit Sethi. I also have written an email to my list that is about one of my favorite movies: The Karate Kid (and yes, the original one). All of these are examples of the options you have to tie into the topic you want to write about.
Step 3: Combine one option from step one with one option from step two.
You personal stories are a great way to get the reader to not only be engaged with your content, but also to relate to you on a personal level. You cannot teach the reader anything in your content until you have them engaged with your content. That is why I recommend starting your posts/articles off with some kind of story that will grab the reader’s attention and get them reading into the main part of the article where you are providing them with valuable, actionable content.
If you need an example, look above at how I used the Royals and former Super Bowl championship teams/players to start off this article. If you are still reading down here, you can see how that style can be successful.
You do not need to try and be someone else, what you can already share with them is valuable enough and will engage the right audience.
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And once you do that, you will find you have plenty of fans that enjoy your personal style. You do not need to try and be someone else, what you can already share with them is valuable enough and will engage the right audience. Because if you try to copy someone else’s work, you won’t hear the sound of cheering fans, you’ll only hear the sound of your followers clicking the “unsubscribe” button.
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Photo: Flickr/woodleywonderworks