EVERYTHING IS JUST SOMEONE ELSE’S OPINION

 

 

In the film Casino Royale, James Bond knows the secret of winning at poker is reading the other person’s ‘tell’.

The ‘tell’ is when they give away their hand by an involuntary reaction, it might be a twitch, or a blink. This gives him an unfair advantage because he can tell what sort of hand they think they’ve got.

I heard a professional poker player on the radio discussing this.

She was one of highest-rated poker players in the world, over the course of her career she’d won many millions of dollars.

She was asked the secret of her success, was it learning to spot her opponent’s ‘tell’?

She laughed and said “No, that’s just for amateurs, all a ‘tell’ can reveal is what the other player thinks about their hand, not the truth.

For instance, early in my career I was playing against an opponent for $250,000.

I learned to read his ‘tell’ and I could see he thought he had a great hand, so I folded.

When the cards were revealed, he didn’t have a great hand at all, my cards could easily have beaten his.

But he thought he had a great hand and that made the difference, I had folded to his opinion not the facts.

That was the last time I bothered reading anyone’s ‘tell’ because it’s just someone else’s opinion.”

Learning that lesson cost her $250,000 but she never forgot it. From then on, she ignored the ‘tell’ and always relied on facts.

She knew what cards had been played, and what cards were left, so she knew exactly what the odds were. She played the odds, the facts, not the other person’s opinion.

That’s why we shouldn’t worry about other people’s opinions.

And yet we live our lives according to other people’s opinions. We’re always trying to be better according to their judgement.

But ‘better’ is just a ranking that someone else has made up, better only exists in their opinion and if you play according to their opinion you must be playing their game.

And if you’re playing their game you can’t ever be as good at it as they are at it.

In fact by trying to be ‘better’ you are almost guaranteed to be second best.

This works in any competitive sport, and advertising is a competitive sport.

You’re competing for the consumer’s attention, and you won’t get that by being just like everyone else.

Most strategy departments will lead you in the direction of trying to be better.

They’ll do this by giving you a similar brief to what everyone else in the category is doing.

This is dumb.

I recently saw a much more empowering strategy:

DIFFERENT IS BETTER THAN BETTER.

Put simply: if you don’t play the same game as everyone else, you must stand out by being different, and that repositions everyone else.

Because everything else now looks the same, and you’re the one that looks different.

So by not listening to other people’s opinion you’ve achieved the most important objective: impact.

But it’s not enough just to be different, how are you different?

I find Dolly Parton expressed it more pithily than anyone I’ve heard:

FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE AND DO IT ON PURPOSE

By staying true to what makes you (or whatever you’re selling) different, you will have carved a niche for yourself in everyone’s  mind.

You will have done it by not worrying about other people’s opinions.

Like a poker player, you have learned to play the cards NOT the other person’s opinion.

Just remember what Steve Jobs said about letting other peoples’ opinions limit you:

 “Everything you see around you was made by people who are no smarter than you.  So you can change it.”