This week’s Top 5 with Chance Brown is all about imitation, or stealing other people’s ideas and using them for your business. Trust me, there are a lot (at least 5 for the purposes of this show) of reasons that you don’t need or want to be all that original.
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Welcome back to another episode of Top 5. My name is Chance Brown, and I get to be your host for today. Grateful for you listening in to another episode. If this is your first time joining us, thank you for being here, number one. And number two, this show was designed to give you five actionable takeaways that you could go apply to your business that's going to help you grow and prosper and build that profitable business for the long term. Today's episode is all about thievery. You heard me right. We are going to steal other people's shit and take advantage of what they've done to help us build our business. We're going to take credit for it when it succeeds. We're definitely blaming somebody else when it fails, right? Just kidding on the last one. Hey, so I have for a long time been a proponent of stealing other people's ideas and using them in your business. I think that it's really important to be able to borrow off the good that others have created without just flat out stealing, stealing, right? But making it your own so that it fits what you're trying to do. And you're not going to steal everything that you see or here. But you're going to see things as you go through business that other people are doing. And you're going to take those ideas and expand on them and build your business, right? So I will tell you when I first started in the real estate industry, not really knowing a whole lot, having very limited resources. When I say very, that was a capital V on very limited resources. There wasn't a ton of technology, but there were a few guys out there that were kind of sharing ideas in a digital format. Guys like Chris Smith, Jimmy Mackin, the team from Thousand Watts, some of the stuff I read on Inman back in the day, Jay Thompson, many others that really played an important role in my development in this industry.
And I've had the good fortune to either have met most of them now, or actually had them on this show as guests. And so I took those things that they were writing and started to use them in my business. I borrowed things from watching my dad run his company. I borrowed things from places that I had worked at before that did things really well. And still today in my business, we use a lot of those things as part of how we operate our business. Why reinvent the wheel? Why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to? And so we'll get to that in a minute. Let's start with item number one, because I want to be really, really upfront about item number one. And it's not a tip to take away. It's just a cautionary tip, I guess. Item number one is don't break the law. Like if somebody's copywritten something, if somebody's patented something, if somebody's trademarked it, whatever that looks like, don't go outright steal it. The idea here is to take the concept and build it around your business to make it work, right? Two weeks ago, sitting in a conference, Jimmy Mackin is up on stage.
Mark Davison's up on stage from Thousand Watt, and they are literally doing a live workshop on how to brand. And Jimmy says something that is really, I thought, very forward thinking and kind of in your face. And I was like, shit, I'm going to steal the hell out of that. And I literally, while I'm sitting there in this conference, go on Canva, create what Jimmy was talking about on stage, and post it out to my social media. I'm pretty sure that was the point of what they were trying to do up on stage. But I certainly wasn't going to let that opportunity pass, because I thought it was really, really clever and good. And it's probably not something, no matter how long I sat there and thought about it, that I would have done myself, that I would have thought of myself. And there, boom, in a five-minute span, Jimmy and Mark and the team up on stage from Thousand Watt and Curator really were instrumental in helping me come up with a really good marketing piece. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. We're not going to be talking about straight up stealing, right? Item number two, don't overthink this. Don't try to get self-righteous or anything else. You have been stealing all your life.
You stole from your parents as you learned to walk and talk by emulating them walking and talking. You stole your fashion sense from other kids at school or from pop culture references and videos on MTV or whatever that looked like. You styled how you played baseball or football or whatever sport that you played around the stars that you saw. We have a long, proud history of stealing from other people. We just don't call it that. But you're a thief. Just get over it. Let's just move forward. You'll probably be better than you'll probably be better than you'll probably be better than the original if you steal from it. You'll likely be more successful through imitation than being an original.
Being an original is hard. It's really, really difficult. Listen, at that same conference that I was just telling you about, where Jimmy and Mark were doing the marketing workshop and I took that piece of creative, there was a woman there who spoke who was the first African-American female general in the United States Army. And one of the obstacles that she talked about was not having somebody to look up to to emulate. That's a real thing when we look at being an original versus being an imitator or an adapter. You will likely be more successful when you have others to look up to. And this isn't new.
You can go back to Romans before the time of Christ, teaching rhetoric through repetition and memorization. You can look at today in modern medical schools, how they will actually have their doctors pretend to be their patients so that they can imitate them and they learn and they're more empathetic because of it. Repetition, imitation has become a form of mastery. How many times, if you're a real estate agent and you're listening to this, how many times have you been given a script? Whether it's LP Mama, which has been around forever, or Tom Ferry's Four Buyers, or whatever those scripts look like, and you just hammer that script into your head over and over and over again until you can take it, put it in your own words, and it just rolls off your tongue. It becomes mastery.
You will likely be more successful by being an imitator than you will by being an original. Let me throw one more thing out at you before we move on to point number four. If you look at studies, and there have been plenty of them, nearly 50% of the originals that hit the marketplace fail, while the imitators succeed. They have a very minimal failure rate because they learn from the other people, and they tend to nearly triple market share. So look at this as copying is going to help you be more successful. This is copying is a tool in your toolbox. Number four, if you are a copycat, you get the distinct advantage of using other people as your filter, right? There's an old adage that a wise man learns from his mistakes, while a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others. Absolutely true.
Use what others have done. Look at the reaction. Look at the feedback. Look at how you want to add your personal twist to that, because you are a person that can filter through this. Filter it through your sphere, your leadership group, your peer group, and use that feedback to enhance the version that you create. There's a great book by Eric Ries. I had to read it when I was getting my MBA called The Lean Startup. And The Lean Startup looks at how outdated the business plan version of trying to go and get funding for a company. Where you're going to write a hundred page business plan that's looking five years in the future, when really you don't have any clue what's going to happen in five minutes in the future.
And so it has this cycle of putting something out there, testing it, revising, putting something out there, testing, it's called the minimum viable product. You can do that same thing. The minimum viable product is probably what you're stealing, but you then go and enhance it, put it out for feedback, and keep fixing it. And there's just this cycle, right? Where you're filtering the reactions of the people in your marketplace to what you're creating, and then using it to build a better version. Sometimes you will find, as you continue to filter, that you are copying from yourself, you're just taking that copied version from yourself and building it better, right? All right. Last but not least, number five. When you're when you're emulating somebody else, when you're copycatting, when you're stealing, when you're whatever you want to call it, right? Adapting, whatever. You don't get pigeonholed into one thing. You get to pull from various places, various solutions, instead of you just creating this one thing. So I'll give you an example. Look at how both Netflix and Amazon attacked the traditional retail versions of what they did. I love going to the bookstore, but I still buy most of my books online these days. Bookstores weren't a new idea. Video rental wasn't a new idea. The challenge to the existing model was. So instead of saying, hey, how do I open up a better bookstore? Amazon was like, how do I make this a more convenient experience using this new technology we call the internet?
Same thing with Netflix. It's not even challenging the whole model. It's still a bookstore. It's still a video rental. It's just challenging the part of it that changed the world for those two famous copycat. I'm recording this on my Mac. Amazon or Apple was not the first computer company to hit the market. But they took what others had done, simplified it, made it really, really intuitive and user-friendly, combined that with out-of-this-world marketing, and built themselves a really cool little cult. Oh, by the way, has made them one of the most valuable companies in the entire world. Did they have challenges? Sure. Every company did. Amazon did. One of the most valuable companies in the world. But they borrowed from other pieces of it. I cannot urge you more strongly to stop trying to be so original with what you do. Feel free to copy. Feel free to steal.
There's nothing new under the sun. You're not going to create something new under the sun, man. Just look at what's around you and take it and adapt. It doesn't mean that you can't be clever. It doesn't mean you can't be original in the way that you think and the taking of that and how you're going to deploy it. I think most people would say that Jeff Bezos is probably a pretty original thinker. I don't know anybody who doesn't think that Steve Jobs was. But Steve Jobs also knew that he could take, create great design and great marketing around it and build a better version, a more accessible version of something that already existed. So you're already copying in other parts of your life. Why not do it in your business? You have the opportunity, though, to do it better than everybody else. Thank you for listening in to this episode of the Top 5. We will see you next time. Have a great day.
