Why following the crowd will get you nowhere

Sigma School

18th August 2023

The rule is simple: If you want to be average, do average things. If you want to be above average, don't do average things. If you want to do something special, you must be willing to do something extra.

a person is learning and improving his skills at home, on his desktop

But why do people follow the crowd? Because the average is easy, and the crowd is easy to follow. Suppose you have a million customers and you want to satisfy them all. You can't try to satisfy everyone equally, because then you would have to make a million different products. So you have to make a thousand different products, each tailored to a single customer's needs. And each one of those products must be exactly perfect for that customer.

But who gets to decide what a customer's needs really are? There is a natural tendency for people to think, "If everyone else is doing it, it must be right."

The psychology behind the crowd's behavior is simple: once people start doing something, they stop thinking about why. They stop thinking outside the box. For them, the box is their only point of reference.

Of course, if you haven't been paying attention to the world around you, it's almost impossible to know what's going on. The need to follow instructions is so strong that most people never think to ask, "Is it true that everyone else is doing it?"

So maybe it's better not to follow the crowd. It may turn out to be best to do what's out of the ordinary.

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Be a rebel

Many people in business seem to be trying to clone a successful model. They want to be the next Google or the next Apple. Is that a good strategy?

It can be, but only if the business model is novel. If it's just a copy of another model, then you might be copying something that already exists and is not novel. (If it were, it would already have been copied.)

Nowadays, ordinary people can get rich by copying successful models. It's easy. You just go to Bootstrap.com and pick out a business model that other people have successfully used. It's even easy to start a business mimicking a successful model. Bootstrap.com will list hundreds of them. Many entrepreneurs choose the one that sounds most like their own business idea.

But if your business idea is novel, it won't work unless you do something no one else has done. Because it's new, it has nothing to copy. That might seem like a disadvantage. But in fact it is an advantage. Because it's new, it's more risky. That's why it's so valuable.

The risk is compounded by ignorance. The successful model probably works because a lot of people have already tried it and figured out how it works. If you try it, you'll probably end up trying something that doesn't work.