Future-Proofing Your Business: Real-Life Strategies to Prepare Your Business for Tomorrow, Today

Chapter 7. The Information Age

"In order to take information onboard we need to let go of our ego. Absorbing information is all about humility."

When I first started in business, I thought that being competitive simply meant being better than the next guy in your chosen field. But the truth is that it's not so much about being better as it is about being smarter. And the only way to get smarter is with information.

I'd watch people who started their businesses around the same time that I did fly past me as they built their companies—and I'd wonder how they were doing it. What was I missing? I was good at what I did; I worked the hours, put in the hard yards. I figured that if I worked twice as hard, I'd cover twice as much ground in the same space of time. But all I seemed to be doing was spinning my wheels twice as fast at the start line.

The answer to my question was simple: These people had better information than I and their other competitors did. That helped them not only predict the future and develop enhanced strategies to match that vision to grow their businesses at an accelerated pace, it helped them bring the future to them!

It took me years of beating my head against a brick wall and fighting the good fight to learn that if I wanted to get ahead of my competitors, my real challenge was to look for information to which my competitors did not have access. If I was only getting the same amount and quality of information as my competitors, then I could only expect to come up ...