How To Grow Creativity And Opportunity
Dan Sullivan
The following is an excerpt from the book Free Zone Frontier by Dan Sullivan.
In ordinary situations, an enormous amount of the profit you make has to be put toward competition. Because of this, competition is incredibly non-profitable.
Engaging in competition is a waste of your personal energies, personal capabilities, and the capabilities of your organization. You spend so much of your time shuffling for position in circumstances of scarcity and use up resources that you could instead be devoting to creativity.
When you create a new Free Zone, it’s completely devoid of competition at first, and so it’s incredibly profitable.
Abundant Free Zones.
These situations become suddenly abundant because you have an idea and then you and your collaborators define and create new Free Zones. It’s all gain when it starts because the price is whatever you’re charging. No one else is charging for it yet, so there’s no comparison. The pricing mechanism of the marketplace isn’t working there yet.
The price you set will be dictated by how quickly you want to grow the market, so you’ll likely make it very reasonable so that as many people as possible can enjoy this new product or service you’re offering.
But your emphasis is entirely on the new customers, not who’s competing for your new customers, because there is no competition for them.
You can be more focused on your clientele, your creativity, and your innovations because there is room freed up in your brain now that you’re no longer distracted financially or creatively by what other people are doing or worried about competition.
Seeing is creating.
From now on, all of your progress and growth can come from identifying Free Zones where entirely new value can be created using and multiplying the capabilities you already have. This maximizes the value of your experiences so far.
I think of things I did when I was around twelve years old, and I realize that I was preparing for what I do now as an adult without even knowing that that’s what I was doing. An existing capability I had was asking questions, and I used that as the basis for creating The Strategy Circle, a fundamental tool of The Strategic Coach Program.
Suddenly freed up.
Simply by changing your mindset to a new way of creating value for others, you free yourself up from the scarcity caused by conventional restrictions that hold everyone else back.
Most people are held back because they measure their success in comparison to others. That’s a restriction because it doesn’t have anything to do with your capabilities or with creating value for other people.
Abandoning thoughts of where you are in relation to other people frees you up to focus your energies and capabilities on the ideas you have that can be the most useful to others, and to measure how well you’re doing in terms of your real, significant value to others.
For more on achieving a competition-free business, get your copy of Free Zone Frontier.
Best possible game for you.
You’ll clearly and confidently see new possibilities for value creation that will be the direct result of everything you’ve uniquely envisioned, attempted, and achieved in your life so far.
Your uniqueness comes from everything you’ve done. Everything that’s been powerful, painful, frustrating, freeing, and so many more things all count. Your uniqueness, and what constitutes a Free Zone Frontier, are totally determined by how you’ve transformed yourself in the past.
Who you are is who you’ve evolved and transformed into. Since the game you’re playing now is one that only you can play, with your unique capabilities and experiences, it’s strictly your game. There can be no competition in it.
You can combine the summing up of your unique past with the summing up of someone else’s unique past, using both of your capabilities to create something bigger, and there still won’t be any competition whatsoever in that because each of you needs the other’s capability that you yourself don’t have.
Endlessly abundant.
As soon as you shift your thinking from the existing arena of isolated competition to the new Free Zone of ever-expanding collaboration with like-minded achievers, you won’t believe how abundant the creative possibilities become.
Everything you’ve done in your past has made it possible for the next big, creative thing you’re going to do. And this will always be true.
No matter how far you go, and how enormous your achievements are, you can always go beyond that because your experiences and achievements are now new or expanded capabilities that can be used for new, even bigger opportunities.
Opportunity, not status.
By increasingly developing and expanding new Free Zone Frontiers for the rest of your life, you’ll bypass all considerations and concerns about your status in conventional circumstances.
This is a big deal, because the thing that we compete most for is status within what already exists. But competing for limited positions or resources is a scarcity mindset. And you’re taking yourself out of these conventional circumstances.
You still have status—it’s a collaborative status and a new value creation status. But you’re not doing it for the status. Because if status is your goal, you’ll eventually get all of the status you want and run out of opportunity.
There are systems that need to be maintained, and status is a good way to maintain certain systems—just not for you if you want to expand, transform, and use your capabilities in the best possible way to create new value for other people.
