Back in 2007, my alma mater’s football team (American-style) did something that garnered them national attention, quite rare for a 2,000 person university: they won a game with 2 seconds on the clock by having seven players run a ball 60 yards for the score.
Why should you care? Because you need to do the same thing that they did: you need to change the game. Trinity’s players made 15 laterals in that single play, a record for college football that’s not rugby. You can see the confusion on their opponents as they get bewildered and finally exhausted trying to keep up with a ball that they thought was downed by tackle again and again.
You’re going to succeed in this market by doing the same thing. You need to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. You need to change the game by changing the level of work it’s done at.
You can do this in a couple of ways. Both are possible to Hidden High Potentials but not everyone else, which is why you will succeed.
The first way is to raise the level of work. For example, you might start selling to corporate offices rather than individual factories. The existing companies have all staffed their sales people to work at Level 2 and you will be selling at Level 3 (to the Level 4 corporate officer).
You can also change the game by doing the reverse. If the industry is complex and sold at Level 4, change the game by using technology to simplify the process and sell it closer to the customer. This is harder to do these days, now that most of the low-hanging fruit of automation have been completed.
Anyway, here’s your football madness from Trinity University v. Millsaps College.