Creating Value & The Importance of Being Unique In Business

Dan Sullivan

You know you’re unique in business when you impact people and uniquely create value in their lives.

The link between value creation and your Unique Ability.

When you realize you have a Unique Ability, you must prove it by showing that your uniqueness is valuable and positively impacts the lives of others. In other words, people can move more quickly toward what they want because you’re in their life. Therefore, your presence is of utmost importance.

Many people are extraordinarily talented and intelligent and have a period of years—maybe a couple of decades—where they can prove it in the world. But unfortunately, they sometimes get caught up in the belief that others should recognize their importance and reward them for their uniqueness. Somehow, they believe that uniqueness without value is enough.

And that’s just not the way the world works.

The value of your Unique Ability.

Once you’ve developed your Unique Ability as an individual, what matters next is its importance and impact in other people’s lives. At Strategic Coach, we say that there are three ways to create value for other people:

  1. They have dangers, and you help eliminate them.
  2. They have opportunities, and you help capture them.
  3. They have strengths, and you help multiply their capabilities.

If you create value in these ways, you are of massive importance in your client’s life.

My Unique Ability is coaching. I’ve found that the greatest people out there who are most appreciated for their Unique Ability—whether in politics, business, culture, teaching, or science —are those whose uniqueness enables others to do things they couldn’t do before.

A simple example is the value creation provided by a retail sales representative for a client inside a store. The value they provide is being on time, recommending the right product, and offering expertise and guarantees. It’s in the way they anticipate the client’s needs and think ahead.

Value creation is happening all the time.

Everyone has a Unique Ability that can be useful to someone else. It’s how the world constantly levels up and improves.

So, step one is recognizing that you have a Unique Ability. Step two is recognizing its importance and developing your Unique Ability in relation to others. After all, you can only know your uniqueness as it relates to and impacts others. You can believe anything you want in a room by yourself; the test is when it’s out in the world.

Apple created an immense value creation model when they provided the ability to buy single songs to download instead of entire albums. This was with a competitive pricing model for both listeners and artists. Yet Steve Jobs never asked people to pre-buy on the promise of a breakthrough like many do. Instead, he did education-based marketing and kept new products secret until launch. You can bet he thought through the entire strategy and value creation model and knew the importance of how its uniqueness impacted the user experience.

We have our full thinking capacity at about 24 years old, but I believe our uniqueness shows around age six. It shows in how we play and what goes through our minds as we do so.

When I was a kid, I grew up alone on a farm. But my imaginative play was filled with partnerships. I always had lots of play partners. Now, I’m uniquely good at two things. The first is asking people questions that allow them to think about their thinking in a way they can’t do on their own. The second is Unique Ability Teamwork.

Unique Ability Teamwork.

To be unique in business, you have to focus on your Unique Ability and find others to do whatever falls outside of that, which should be within the realm of their own Unique Ability. Your team members should be like you in that they’ve determined and developed their Unique Ability, but are doing something totally different from what you’re doing.

Uniqueness will set you up for the most extraordinary teamwork in the world.

To unlock great teamwork, you must be serious about developing the thing that makes you unique that nobody else can bring to the game. And in terms of the dollar value of what you uniquely offer? Well, there’s only one person who can determine that, and it’s the person who would write you a check for it.

Want to learn more about creating value and the importance of being unique in business? Get your copy of The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Value Creation.

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