#3 Ways for Staying Focused on Your Business As much as you should keep a tab on your competitors, it should not take the focus from the core essentials of your business.

Imagine this scenario. You have found a niche in the market that nobody else has and you have successfully come up with a business idea to exploit it. You soon form a team of your own and start finding ways to address the business needs. All is going well for you until you on one fine day you find out that there is another company that is doing the same as you. You start fixating on the other company, keeping track of all their new ventures, trying to guess their next moves instead of focusing on yours. Slowly and steadily your company starts to lose the edge it once had and business gets difficult. As a remedy, you analyze what the other company is doing that you are not, further down spiraling our own.

The information revolution is not always a good thing. Thirty years earlier, you might have even not known if someone was working on the same idea as you. But today, you may find dozens of companies doing the same thing, perhaps seem to be doing it better than you are. As much as you should keep a tab on your competitors, it should not take the focus from the core essentials of your business. You should avoid this comparison trap to lure you in.

So how do you stop yourself from that insecure feeling of not knowing how your competition is doing and focus on your business instead? Let us look at three ways in which you can focus on your business and not worry about the competition

Get motivated by your success, not demotivated by others'

We tend to focus more on our competitor's success and failure than ours. Someone else's success tantamount to our failure and other's failure becomes our success. It is too enticing to compare your success and failures with others.

Due to social media, we generally see the good things happening to people. More often than not, you will see your competitors posting all the good things happening to them and their company. You naturally will feel that they are going at it without any hiccup which is far from true.

So in order to escape the trap, ignore the posts they make. If you can't ignore, remember that for one good thing they post, there are 10 bad things that may have happened. So focus on your triumphs and celebrate them.

Learn from your competitors

If your competitor is doing well, then find out how they are doing so. How do they reach their customers? What kind of feedback are they getting? How could you do better? What could you do differently?

Instead of getting anxious about what your competitors are cooking, study them. Learn from their failures as well as from their success. Having competition is a good thing. Learning from other people in similar businesses will give you an edge which you can apply in your own business.

The market can always absorb another player in the same segment

Before starting a business, many think that there is no room for another player in that market. They think if there are other similar businesses already operating in that segment, it is difficult for a newcomer to gain ground. But that's hardly true.

There are plenty of opportunities for everyone. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have thought there is no market for another search engine, we would not have Google today. There is always a possibility to do something better and cater to a different audience. You just need to focus on how you can create value and come up with something better than others.