Why Doing Your Own Thing Leads To Success

If you follow me on Facebook, you know already that someone going by Papa Hood Sorcery, put my strategic sorcery course (a few paragraphs altered here and there, but the bulk of the lessons are word for word) on his website – right down to the “Strategic Sorcery Mini Grimoire”. To his credit he admitted this, apologized, and took it down without haste. So no lawyers, no cursing, no doxxing, or anything else. Time is our primary non-renewable resource, so no more time to this. It did however spark some thoughts about something else. The Power of Doing Your Own thing and how that leads to success.

I do consultations for a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs, writers, and such. They break up into two main camps. People that are driven by their idea and creativity and jazzed about putting something new into the world, and those looking to jump on something that has been done and capitalize on it. The prior group succeed way more often than the people in the latter group, precisely because they:
1. Are first on the scene with their idea, or are at least adding something new to it that hasn’t been done.
2. The genius of this idea, whether figuratively or in the sense of the literal meaning of genius – a spirit that inspires, drives the project forward.

The second group of people that want to capitalize on what has been done, doesn’t get either of these benefits. I am not really talking about illegal actions like Papa Hoods plagiarism above, but people that want to mix up and regurgitate stuff that has been done without adding anything to it. This also extends to those commercials for franchises your hear. Chances are by the time they are advertising on the radio, the market is already saturated, if you live in a place like I do, there are a lot of closed down frozen yogurt places and Quiznos – thats why. By the time you think “I should do X because its SUPER popular right now”, you are buying in at the height of the market and the bubble is ready to burst. The goal is to be one of the first three people doing something, not one of the masses.

This is also one of the reasons that I don’t authorize people to teach my stuff, and why I did not frame my teachings as a magical order. I am not interested in having people climb up a ladder of my own creation and repeating my teachings in perpetuity. I am interested in helping people unlock their own lives and potential.

Anyway, my point is that creativity is magic. We all get inspired by others works, and we all want success – but being someone else is not going to yield as much success as being yourself. Even if you do succeed it’s not going to give you the satisfaction that you put something into the world that people like and love. By far the biggest thing I took away last night was not that someone had ripped me off, but the tremendous outpouring of support from my students, fellow authors, and peers. People that have been touched by or at least respect my work. That is magic.