Defying Industry Norms

Earl Nightingale once said, “Watch what everyone else does—do the opposite. The majority is always wrong.”

Dan Kennedy once said, "Everybody who makes a lot of money defies industry norms. Everybody who makes average money conforms to them."

Someone, somewhere, once said, “In a world of beauty, the ugly stands out”.

At least two out of three quotes are made by highly successful people. Many of the most successful people I’ve come across frequently repeat all three.

More.

They’ve all personally made me a lot of money as well.

And above all, they share an important theme—that of doing things differently.

There’s a lot of value in being a contrarian.

All of this, however, needs an important disclaimer—there’s a lot of danger involved in blindly being a contrarian.

See, becoming a contrarian just for the sake of it won’t bring you much success. In fact, it’ll make you look stupid, and dumb, and quite ironically, you’ll become no more than a conformist chasing whatever is popular at the current time.

No, you’ve got to have some reasoning behind the madness.

You have to be deliberate about how and why you’re doing things differently. You first have to understand the basics. You’ve got to learn and master the foundations and principles some of the brightest minds who came before you bled for to discover and share with future generations.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, you need to know the rules before you can break them.

Everything has an order, everything has a reason.

Yet not every reason is as sound as they often appear to be.

That’s where the contrarian approach comes in—to put everything you’ve been taught so far to the test, and see how far you can push the boundaries established in your industry.

The difference between a true contrarian successfully thriving where no man has gone before and a dunce nobody even pays attention to is that of experience and mastery of the foundational principles his domain is built upon.

Rules are made to be broken, but only after you understand why they existed in the first place.

Don’t rush to the finish goal, skipping your fundamentals in the process.

Speaking of fundamentals.

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Here’s a golden piece of advice from the great Dan Kennedy that everyone in business, no exceptions, should read, print out, tape to their wall, remind themselves of every day, and seek to apply to their business as much as possible:

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"Everybody who makes a lot of money defies industry norms. Everybody who makes average money conforms to them."

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Now think about this:

What do most people do?

They all follow in some random gurus’ footsteps, almost blindly copying whatever he and the rest of the market do. Always doing the thing that seems right and playing the game as most would expect. They follow the rules without knowing why the rules are there in the first place, let alone questioning whether those rules are actual rules you should be following.

They’ll say stuff such as:

"Oh everyone attaches a random picture of themself to their LinkedIn post (one that has nothing to do with the post whatsoever). Let's do the same!"

"Oh everyone is praising "value" (even though most don't know what it means) and giving everything away for free (i.e. not getting paid). Let's do the same!"

"Oh everyone is using ChatGPT to come up with topics to talk about and writing awful hooks that ooze 'emotionless and templates writing'. Let's do the same!"

I hope you can see how that’s a problem.

It’s a problem that’s easily solved if you simply think for yourself one second.

Think about what (and why) you’re doing something. Then stop merely copying other people just because they're doing it. They might be successful with it, even because of it, but that still doesn't mean anything. You won't become successful merely by being a copycat of someone else.

And yes this includes the above piece of advice by Dan Kennedy himself as well as every other thing he said or wrote.

Do your due diligence. Defy the norms (or don’t if defying the norm is the norm—there’s a paradox for you). And see what happens.

To give you something more practical to work with.

Here's the exercise Dan Kennedy recommended:

Take out a piece of paper (or whatever you use to write on) and make a list of everything that's an industry norm in your business — how things are prices, how things are sold, how they are deliverd, how they are advertised, how they are marketed, what kind of content gets created, how contracts are made up.

Idenfity and isolate every single thing you can think about that's an industry norm people in your business conform to. (This should be a list of over 100 different items).

Then try and figure out how you can defy as many of them as humanly possible.

"You will transform your income in direct proportion to the number you manage to violate," Dan Kennedy adds.

I've been doing this slowly but surely from the start with how I approach social media, how I write my emails, and how I create and sell my courses. And I call tell you that my income increased in direct proportion with the norms I defied.

I urge you to try it yourself.

Don't delay.

Pick up a piece of paper today and do the exercise.

Then send me a message in a few days sharing how much results you're already seeing that quickly.

On another note.

The best and easiest way to define the norms is to build an email list of your own so you can define the rules of what you do, how you work, who gets to join, and everything else within your very own corner of the internet.

This truly allows you to defy the norms—and even define your own.

To learn more about how to grow and monetize your email list, check out Email Valhalla here: https://alexvandromme.com/valhalla