Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images Bestselling author Seth Godin says that his relative lack of competition is astonishing.
I interviewed more than 50 top thought leaders in fields ranging from business and technology to genomics and urban planning to find the answer.
Here are 10 of the best insights they shared in my new book Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It.
"When you start building your brand in a corporation, it's a confined space. You don't need to be the best in the world; you just need to be the best one there. You can be a big fish in a little pond, and if you're the biggest fish in that environment, you get bigger and can then start to do things outside the organization."
-Michael Leckie, regional vice president at Gartner
"The fact that I don't have a lot of competition in what I do is astonishing to me. We say to every salesperson, every marketing person, every engineer, every CEO: 'Here you go, here's this free platform. If you say somethingthat's worth writing, people will read it. Do you want to use it?' And they say no. What's that about? I literally don't understand why people are eager to put 140-character things out of Twitter, but aren't willing to actually share thoughtful, generous, useful insight in a more permanent platform."
-Seth Godin, bestselling author, entrepreneur, marketer, and public speaker
"If you want people to do their best [work], they have to feel really safe, take risks, be naked, bare all, and if you're in an environment where you could be mocked, it's not as helpful…we held tight to that philosophy. Rigorous but supportive: that concept really resonated for people." -Eve Bridburg, on the founding of GrubStreet
"When there's not a long and stable operating history from which to make accurate forecasts, beating the plan isn't cause for celebration. In fact, successfully executing it often leads to failure because you're fulfilling a bad plan." -Eric Ries, entrepreneur
"[Codifying a system] is important because it provides a set of touchstones that we can return to for every new situation we face. What's the system here I need to apply? What are the principles of influence that might be available to be more persuasive in this new situation?" -Robert Cialdini, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University
"If you understand women, whether you're selling lingerie or technology, that's critical to your success." -Paco Underhill, environmental psychologist and author
Courtesy of Dorie Clark
This story comes from "Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It" by Dorie Clark.
"It's not about arriving at a certain place. It's about keeping an open question as to how you're impacting the earth and looking for ways accessible to you, given where you are in your life, to make a positive difference." -Reverend John Gibb Millspaugh, food justice organizer and Adaptive Leadership expert
"Part of it is looking at where the audience is. You've got to figure out where they are. It's not about how to get them where you want them to go." -Robert Scoble, blogger and author
"I try to make my content shareable as much as possible. I might create a SlideShare about it. I think, how do I repurpose this information so it spreads far and wide?" -Mark Fidelman, entrepreneur and consultant
"You don't need time to have a good idea, you need space and you can't think appropriately if you don't have space in your head. It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don't have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they're suboptimal." -David Allen, productivity consultant and author
Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.