Growing up as a kid, my dad always told me: “son, life is what you make of it. If you decide to go with the flow, you will end up like me but in all my years I have come to realize that people love and respect the guy that stands out.” Don’t get it twisted, my dad is a good man, very respectable and did well enough to care for his immediate and even extended family. All I wanted to do was be like the man, so when he tries to tell me he’s ordinary at best, I always felt sad. As I grew older I began to realize that he wasn’t trying to put himself down, he was only trying to tell me I could be better, trying to instill that “think out of the box” mentality! For this and many more things, I am deeply grateful and hope to buy him a Porsche someday 
It’s never easy to be the one guy who does things differently, is it? you constantly get looked down upon, written off, considered an outcast and often times left for dead (in this case failure). However nothing GOOD comes easy, so imagine how tough it must be if you are not shooting for GOOD but for GREAT. It’s not today we started hearing stories about the then class joke, who nobody wanted to be seen around because of how he/she looks or perhaps the fact he/she did things differently only to emerge as the most successful of his peers. “Show me a successful person and I will show you his struggles and the many things he has done abnormally” said Simon Webbe. I agree with him. Most people who have made a name for themselves chose a different route, a path society might have deemed against the norm…they carved their own niche.
When William Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in 1976 to pursue his dreams, do you think he recieved cheers and adulation in the hallway? do you think his mates smiled and gave him the thumbs up? I don’t think so. He once recounted how many people thought he was making the biggest mistake of his life… I reckon owning microsoft and sitting of the “richest man alive” throne for several years is a big mistake. If you are in school, don’t misunderstand me, I am not asking you to drop out of school and call that your way of carving a niche…I am only asking you to stand out, stand out from your class mates, stand out from your peers.
Whenever I find myself thinking of business ideas, I tend to stay far away from anything that has been done before, implement skills that have not been used and market/promote using tools that not so many people will consider helpful. I want to do my own thing in a different way so when people think of me they won’t be thinking of 2 dozen other people, that’s never good for business. If you are building a start-up, engage your users and customers in ways they haven’t been engaged before! If your competitors are giving one month free, how about you push the boundaries (even if it means stretching yourself financially) and give them 2 months free. If your service/product is good, they will pick you over the other service and trust me, they will stick.
Branding yourself and your start-up is highly important and a lot of new entrepreneurs take this for granted. A great book I read earlier this year is Me 2.0: Build a powerful Brand to achieve career success by a Dan Schawbel. The biggest lesson I learned through it is how easy it is to fail if you can’t set yourself apart and get lost in the sea of several other new start-ups. I encourage you to read. In your dealings as an entrepreneur, keep yourself on the ball all the time. You are an entrepreneur (which makes you a thinker), think of novel ways to offer your services, come up with unpopular marketing ideas, don’t worry about traffic as soon as you start out…when you have set yourself aside, they will come pouring in. If everyone is jogging why not run?
