Which Storm Phase Are You In

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What if I told you that you personally and your company have three different types of competitors? The three different types of competition is, first and foremost, number one, entropic. Entropic is E-N-T-R-O-P-I-C. Entropic competition revolves around the law of entropy.

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And the law of entropy says that anything man-made or God-made is built to go from order to disorder. And we are going to go into the two different areas of entropic competition in some quick detail here. Physical competition is what the average business owner thinks when they hear competition.

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And that is, who are my competitors? Who are my competitors online? Who are my brick-and-mortar competitors? If I went to a trade show for, if you’re in the shoe business and you sell shoes, what other booths would be there selling shoes? Those are your physical competitors. And then the third form of competition is your present competition. So I want you to imagine and quote the word present.

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And present competition is the what or who is present to a potential customer or client during the sales process. Meaning, in your company, when there’s a client or a customer that you’re wooing, trying to get them to buy something off your website, or maybe they walk in the door and you have to sell them on a product, what is in the stream of the sale that could potentially block the sale? Meaning, if someone walks into your office, does your office admin have terrible B.O.? Where it just sets a terrible start to the situation? You get the idea. It’s what’s in the way.

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And again, the law of entropy says that anything man-made or God-made is built to go from order to disorder. I often say that if you leave a car in a desert and you come back 80 years later, is it a car? I say it’s not. Cars run.

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If you leave a car in the desert and come back 80 years later, you have a chunk of metal. I don’t even know if there’s going to be, although there probably won’t be air in the tires. I can pretty much assure that.

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The erosion on that vehicle, probably some kind of animals living in that chunk of rusted metal. But the reality is, I think we all agree, that’s not a car. That has changed.

Entropy has broken that down. Well, entropy breaks into two categories in business. One I call world, the world entropy, and one I call self, self entropy.

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So the world entropy, if you’re in business and you guys go through your own little checklist of whatever business or industry you’re in, the world that is pressing against you could be banks. I think we’ll agree on this call that 2006 to 2014, the banking industry wreaked havoc in the business world. The laws, the changes, the this, the that.

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I mean, it was crushing businesses from the outside. I think your clients, clients have attitudes, customers have attitudes. I think those attitudes press on businesses and cause change.

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How about your vendors? Your vendors press on you. How about your true competition? Remember your physical competitors? I think they’re very entropic. I think they force change.

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I think they force breakdowns all the time. And then general life. I love the phrase, welcome to life on planet Earth.

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So entrepreneurs, they go face first into entropy, right? I think we as humans realize you live life in three phases only. You’re either going into a storm or you’re currently in a storm. Or you just came out of a storm.

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So you’re either going into a storm, some challenges, big time, relational challenges, money challenges, health challenges. Or you’re in one or you just came out of one. But let’s get real.

That’s it. There’s no other options. That’s entropy.

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So this episode is dedicated to self-entropy. I call it self-entropy because it centers around self-sabotage. Self-sabotage became worldly famous in 1936.