Changing the world by trying. Living passionately. And a bit on student life.

The best way to produce something good is to do everything the competition does, but better. If they’re big, fast, cheap, you should be bigger, faster and cheaper. If they have five features, you should have ten. At least. If Chad studies 10 hours for chemistry, you should study 20.

Of course, all this does is produce mediocrity. It’s an endlessly arms race that leads to nowhere.

Quit dreaming. Someone else is going to be better than you at producing commodities. They can outsource overseas, cut corners, be more efficient and buy more machines.

You can’t out-Amazon Amazon.

Picture Sony and Microsoft. The Playstation and the Xbox. Each invests billions of dollars at making bigger, better, faster, more expensive machines than the other. And it leads to nowhere. Both make a loss on every new machine sold.

And then there’s the few that set out to make exceptional products, not just good. Those that ignore the arms race and strive at doing a few things extraordinarly. The market always wants more. They don’t cave in.

No one has yet to beat the iPod, because throwing in more features, more battery life or making it cheaper doesn’t cut it­. Apple has developed the best interface ever imagined. They’ve took decades to become exceptional at one thing. They don’t compare themselves to others, Apple has no competition. Years of insight and true dedication can’t be copied.

Picture the Wii instead of the Xbox or Playstation. No bells and whistles. Crappy graphics. But Nintendo is exceptional at making fun and entertaining games. The Wii didn’t set out to dominate the market, Nintendo ignored the competition. By focusing on its core competence, Nintendo has revolutizioned the way we think of video games.

Don’t try to sand out of the crowd, ignore the crowd altogether.