There’s can only be one best in the world, and it had better be you.

Whether it’s your business, your podcast, your book, or anything else, if you’re not competing to be the single best in the world at what you do, why are you trying?

Of course, that’s a lot of pressure.

If there can only be one best in the world, to become that singular talent will no-doubt require you to forsake everything else in your life in pursuit of attaining that status, if you can even muster the motivation to start down the road against such odds in the first place.

But maybe Best in the World isn’t an absolute, objective title.

Maybe you can choose to redefine what you want to be best in the world at, and drill down until it becomes not only attainable but inevitable if you choose to focus single-mindedly on the niche you choose to carve out for yourself.

Think about the best swimmer in the world.

Chances are your brain immediately jumped to Michael Phelps, and for good reason. He’s not only the most decorated international swimmer of all time but the most decorated Olympian of any kind.

But if you look at his finishing results, you’ll see that while he was flat out dominant in some categories of races, he failed to medal in some, and didn’t even compete in others.

While Phelps might be the hands-down best in the world at the 200m butterfly, he’s not even in the conversation for the 400m freestyle, in which his best international placement was 18th.

And this is all in the pool. What about open water, endurance swimming?

Depending on your worldview and the boundaries and criteria you use to judge a given pursuit, there are many potential Bests in the World.

This is an exciting proposition.

Instead of competing against everyone else in the world who does the same thing you do, you can choose to narrow your focus on who you serve, and thus thin out your competition.

Narrow your focus far enough and you may find yourself as the only one choosing to compete to be the Best in the World for those people.

Narrowing Your Focus

Of course, being the Best in the World at something for which people are unwilling to pay for, or which lacks an audience big enough to support you, Seth Godin’s Minimum Viable Audience, doesn’t do you any good if you’re hoping to support yourself based on your work.

But narrowing down your focus to the point at which you have the ability to conceivably become the Best in the World at a certain pursuit, to a certain group of people is the starting point for creating something worth talking about.

As you drill down you might find a point at which you are already the Best in the World. If this audience meets the Minimum Viable Audience, your job is to double down on them and get the word out that you exist specifically to serve them.

If they don’t meet the Minimum Viable Audience, you’ll need to expand your focus outward, degree by degree until you find an audience that does meet that threshold.

You may no longer be a Best in the World front runner at this point, but if you’re willing to put in the work, you probably can be.

Incumbent Bests in the World in many niches are often generic, mass-market providers only claiming the top spot in that niche because no one has yet come along and spoken to that specific group of people directly and intimately.

This is your opportunity.

You Get to Choose Your Competition

Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you not only to which audience, but also to which worldviews and for what criteria you choose to compete to be the Best in the World on. The easier a given criterion is to do well, the more competition there will be to become the best.

Better to compete on criteria that are truly difficult to excel at. They’ll take more work from you to develop, but you’ll have less competition once you make it to the top.

In the podcast production business, the world we at Counterweight Creative operate in, there are dozens of companies and hundreds if not thousands of freelancers for us to compete against.

We certainly can’t compete on price with freelance audio editors from India or the Philipines.

We could potentially build a team to attempt to compete with the likes of Gimlet Media, producers of big-budget shows for brands like Microsoft, Adobe, WeWork, and more. But the stress, effort, and uncertainty of that shift in focus aren’t of interest to me or our team.

We choose to compete in the broad market of entrepreneurs and businesses using podcasts to grow their authority and fill their pipelines, but this is still a massive market (and getting bigger), one in which it would be difficult to be the best in the world.

Within that market, we choose to work specifically with up and coming health and wellness entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their exposure. Even within this shrinking niche, there are multiple criteria we could choose to compete on.

The obvious choice is to compete to deliver the best finished audio quality, but we’re not interested in that.

What Criteria Will You Compete On?

For production teams like ours which are made up of trained sound engineers, more than acceptable audio quality is easy to achieve. Thus, it’s hard to be the best, with so many competitors eager to focus the entirety of their efforts on achieving top spot (whatever that is…).

We’re happy to settle on delivering podcasts that are better quality than 95% of other shows, but past that the added effort only results in diminishing returns.

We would rather choose to compete in areas that are harder to deliver on, and thus draw fewer competitors, but also bring more value to our clients.

We choose to compete on crafting a strategy for our clients that doesn’t just produce quality podcasts, but uses podcasting as a driver for their entire marketing strategy, and brings in a steady stream of leads while growing their visibility and authority in the areas they’re choosing to compete in.

We choose to compete on providing the best customer experience to the people we work with. By being the easiest and most streamlined to work with, and providing a client experience that leaves them changed, and raises the bar for what they expect from every other service provider they interact with.

We choose to compete on building the best team culture, one that leaves our team members better when they leave than they were when they joined. We want to develop, empower and equip our team members to be better in every area of their life for having been a part of our team.

We choose to compete on caring more for our people, team, clients and partners alike than anyone else.

None of these are easy, we don’t always deliver on them consistently, but they’re doable, and when combined, I think they provide a focal area that we can be the Best in the World at.

What about you? What is the focal area in which you can compete to Best in the World?

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