Why It's So Hard To Stand Out These Days?

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1:19It's incredibly frustrating. I know. I still experience this till this day. And I ask myself, what's going on? And what I've realized and what I've researched and what I want to share with you today is that you're playing a game where the difficulty level has got turned up on everybody. And most people don't realize the rules actually have changed because we're not competing in a marketplace anymore. We're competing in an attention war. And as Herbert Simon has said way back in 1971, when information becomes abundant, attention becomes scarce. That's the world you're building in. Today, I'm going to break down exactly why it's so hard to stand out.

1:58And then I'm going to give you a simple practical blueprint to become the obvious choice in your market without selling your soul or dancing on TikTok if you don't want to. So let's dive in.

2:14Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. The first thing we need to identify is what is the problem really?

2:53The biggest reason you can't stand out isn't the algorithm. It's sameness. Most people are creating content that looks like content, looks like everything else. Same title, same hook, same thumbnail, same Canva template, same five tips, same three mistakes you want to avoid. You know exactly what I'm talking about. And when everything looks the same, your audience brain just shuts off. It doesn't actually pay attention anymore. It ignores all the sameness. And you have to understand the way your brain works. It's a survival machine. It's built to filter, to be efficient. It doesn't want more inputs.

3:31It wants meaningful inputs, inputs that actually can help it. There's even a well-known memory effect around this. When something is categorically distinct, it is remembered more than anything around it, anything that is familiar even. So this is the reason Mr. Beast is the biggest YouTuber. I know this kind of seems left-wing, but if you look at Mr. Beast, he's constantly trying to create the most outlandish concepts, outlandish videos, the most crazy ideas. Why? Because he knows that novelty gets people's attention. When something new, something interesting, something weird, something even absurd will get people to click and watch his videos.

4:13Now, love him or hate him. He has spent a tremendous amount of time studying what goes viral. And this is one of the things that he spends a lot of time in before he creates a video, figuring out the idea of a concept that is going to shock and make people say, what in the world is this? And they feel compelled to watch that video. I'm not telling you that you You should be Mr. Beast. In fact, I'm telling you the opposite. You should be yourself. But being different gets you remembered. Good doesn't automatically get you remembered. Being novel, being distinct really sticks in people's minds. And this is something that has existed since the beginning of time.

4:53It's existed with the artists that you love. Like I love Michael Jackson, right? I'm a big fan of his. Who wears one glove? Michael Jackson does. Who wears glittery socks? Michael Jackson. It's distinct. It's strange. It's weird, and it gets people's attention. Here's a problem that nobody is saying out loud. There is more content than ever in human history, and the supply keeps expanding every single second of the day. And the average person is already spending a huge chunk of their day online. For example, one of the most recent studies I saw that was out of the UK from Ofcom, it's a company called Ofcom, and they said the average UK resident spends about four hours and 20 minutes online per day.

5:38And that's just in one country. Why am I sharing this with you? Because you need to understand that when you post something, you're not competing with other business owners. You are competing with group chats and Netflix and sports highlights and celebrity dramas and movie trailers and doom scrolling and billion dollar creators, people that have lots of money, and a phone designed by teams of psychologists to keep you hooked. So there's a lot to compete with. And yes, this is why people feel more distracted and fragmented and unfocused than ever. The brutal truth is that standing out is hard because trust is built through repetition.

6:20But repetition is hard nowadays because people don't consistently see you, and yet repetition still works. There's classic research behind this, and it's often called the mere exposure effect. The effect that repeated exposure can increase likeness and familiarity, like you're going to like something, and you're going to feel like it's familiar. So if people don't see you repeatedly, you don't become familiar. And if they don't become familiar with you, they don't trust you. And if they don't trust you, you don't get chosen. You don't get chosen to either be the person they consume, like in terms of your content or buy your products and services, whatever it might be.

6:57This is why going viral is really overrated. You know, just going viral once is not really going to help you. You want consistent viewership. You want consistent branding. You want consistent audience members watching and observing what you're doing. You need the right people to see you again and again until you become the default choice for them when it comes to whatever you offer. Now, even if you do get their attention, you still need people to act because people are overwhelmed with options these days. There's famous research commonly referred to as choice overload. You've probably heard the jam study example where people are given all these choices of different kinds of jams showing that too many choices can really reduce action and get people to really not act at all because of analysis paralysis.

7:45So when your positioning is vague, when your offer is, I help people with business and mindset and making them confident, your audience doesn't think, oh my God, you're perfect for me. They think that you're just generic, that you're vanilla. I've heard of this before. Maybe they'll say, oh, cool. I'll save this for later. And later never comes. Because when something's unclear, it feels like work to figure it out. There's a classic saying in sales and marketing, and that is a confused mind never buys. And that applies to buying into your brand, buying into your content. Now, when something is effort, something requires them to even think for a moment and to contemplate, it usually means scroll.

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9:52Learn more, get started for$60 a month for 12 months when you add an advanced solution to a qualifying internet package. Limited time offer restrictions apply. New customers only requires 300 Mbps internet, security edge, and additional qualifying service. one-year agreement, paperless billing, and auto pay with bank account required, taxes and fees extra. So what do we do about this, right? How do we fix this problem? Well, I have a five-part standout blueprint I want to share with you. This blueprint is simple, it's practical, and it works with whatever you do right now. So the first thing is you want to choose one market pain point you're willing to own that you want to be known for.

10:33I'm not talking about entrepreneurship or fitness or AI, right? I'm not talking about these broad ideas. I'm talking about one pain point, one obsession, one enemy. For example, I help coaches sell without being salesy. You're helping people sell their coaching programs. Not all of coaching is being covered here. One more example. I help service businesses productize so they can stop trading time for money. So as you can see, I'm getting really specific about who I serve and what I do for them, what problem I solve for them. Specific problem. Here's a rule. If your audience can't repeat what you do in one sentence, you're going to be invisible.

11:09It's just that simple. It's going to be very hard for them to remember you, to tell other people about you if they can't easily describe what you do. Step two is pick a point of view that risks disagreement. You need to do this. It's very uncomfortable, but if nobody disagrees with you, you're probably saying safe generic stuff. You know how I know I'm saying the right things? You know how I know I'm really actually creating good content is when I get a backlash, when I ruffle some feathers. You know, recently I sent out an email to my newsletter and it was about money and family and it was a personal story about my own upbringing and how I view money nowadays as an adult.

11:50The replies I got from this email, I got people saying, thanks for the email, wonderful topic, but mostly I got emails of people saying, go to hell. Literally, I got somebody to say, go to hell to me. But the boy here is that if you're not ruffling feathers, you're not really making any waves. You're not actually hitting any nerves. You're not really resonating with anybody. I feel personally when I get no engagement, it means that I really didn't stand for something. And if you want to stand out, it requires you to have a spine. I'm not saying you need to be rude. Please don't do that. I'm not asking you to be extreme.

12:25But you need to stand for something. You need to believe in something. and you need to be okay with being disliked because of this opinion. Step three, create a signature framework. Frameworks create a mental real estate in somebody's head, okay? Because now you're not just another person with tips, you're a person with a strategy, with the way they can move forward. Some of the frameworks I've talked about on the show is like 131, value ladder, jobs to be done. And these are concepts that describe how to handle a certain situation. Like, for example, what is 131? Well, 131 is a framework to help you deal with questions from your team members.

13:06I learned this from Dan Martell, who was my coach for years. And basically, you have a rule in your company that says, we always do 131. So when somebody comes to anybody in the company, you should always come with one problem, three possible solutions, and one suggestion to how to solve this problem. more? Which one of those solutions do you want to move forward with? And 131 is a framework that you can share with other people, like I'm doing right now, that makes it clear for people on how to handle a certain situation, a strategy to handle, you know, what I call helpless hand raisers, people that come to you and say, hey, I don't know what to do.

13:41How do we deal with this situation? And they don't actually come up with solutions for themselves. You want to empower your team members. This is the point here. And so in that moment, you just tell your team member, hey, what's your 131? Except for you want to build in public. You want to show receipts. And you want to do this tastefully because people like doers. People like seeing things for themselves. They want to see how this works in the real world. So you want to share either your own case studies of your own life or case studies of your students or case studies that you found online or studies that are published.

14:13You want to show before and after. You want to show tutorials or video screenshots so that you can show people how you're doing something in real time. You want to share stories, of course, and lessons learned along the way. You want to talk about what you tried, what you failed at, what worked. I do this all the time on social media. If you don't follow me on Instagram, this is where I'm most active. I do this all the time. I share, you know, when I fell flat on my face and when things actually did go well and why it went well. And I kind of share the kind of behind the scenes of building my business.

14:43And this really resonates with people because it's real and proof turns interesting into credible. Step five, I want you to repeat like a professional. This is where most people fail. They get bored after two weeks. Your audience doesn't even see you yet if you just publish for two weeks on whatever platform, TikTok, Facebook, doesn't matter. You need to be incredibly consistent. Repetition is the fee you must pay to be remembered. I used to teach classroom management when I was in education. My first career, I was a teacher and teacher trainer. And one of the first questions I used to ask my teachers that I was training, and what I was training them is classroom management.

15:23I used to teach them how to deal with a crisis in the classroom, student acting up, bullies, whatever, right? So one of the first questions I used to ask them is, are you consistent or are you not consistent in the classroom? I'm talking about, Are you consistent with your classroom management? And the most common answer I get is, I'm consistent most of the time. And I say to them, that means you're inconsistent. There's no such thing as, I'm consistent sometimes. You're either consistent or inconsistent. Keep that in mind when it comes to publishing your content. Quick side note, if you want to see a real life example of what I was talking about before, about leading by example, by showing real case studies, by building in public, then And you're going to want to subscribe to the podcast because I have an upcoming episode that I've been working on.

16:08It's a really cool episode called, Can You Build a Software Business with AI in Just Seven Days? And this is a seven-day experiment that I did. I locked myself in an hotel room and I tried to build a fully-fledged software product using AI. You're going to find out if I actually pulled it off, what are the hardships I had, the pitfalls, the problems, as well as some of the wins. So if you're interested in learning about that, if that sounds interesting to you, so make sure you subscribe to the show so you don't miss that episode. It's coming up. I can't wait to share it with you. So I wanted to make sure that you know about that before it comes out.

16:40I want to share a confession about this topic of standing out. I thought I wanted to stand out, but I actually realized I didn't make that decision. I actually didn't make the decision of standing out. Most people want to stand out, but they also want to be liked by everyone. They don't want to be judged. They want to feel like everything is private and theirs. They want to covet their own life. They want to avoid being wrong. They don't want to fall on their face publicly. They want to avoid commitment, right? They want to keep their options open. What I found out is that you can't stand out and stay safe.

17:12You got to make a decision. You got to draw a line in the sand and you got to choose a lane, right? What you're going to be known for, a message, a method of delivering that message and the frequency. You want to stick to that frequency and repeat that until the market finally goes, oh, it's you. That's the person that does X, Y, Z. That's the person that's all about this. And here's some good news. The good news is most people won't do any of this. They will ignore my advice. They won't do any of the five steps I outlined, which is why if you do it, you're going to look like a genius. You're going to actually stand out, which is something that is incredible, right?

17:50This is great news because if you're willing to do the work, you can actually crack this code. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You want to stand out for the right reasons, the reasons that mean something to you. For example, the reason why I do everything I do with this podcast, with my business, is because I didn't grow up with money. My parents were immigrants. We struggled financially. Finances was a big problem in our house. It was a big source of stress. and I really believe in my heart of hearts, it's very hard to reach your full potential if you are not financially independent.

18:27If finances are holding you back, it's hard for you to be your best self and I believe the best way to be financially independent is to build and grow a business. This is why I do everything I do because I know the stress of money and I don't want anybody else to go through what I went through and my parents went through. I want to make sure that people are alleviated of this so they can actually live a fulfilled life. And I feel like that's the most fulfilling thing I can do in my life. So you gotta find your thing, your why, and what you wanna be known for, how you wanna stand out. If today's episode hit you in the gut and you're like, okay, Omar, I get it.

19:02Now I wanna actually move forward, use your five-step blueprint to actually make this happen and be consistent. What do I do? Then I recommend you listen to this episode called Three Ways to Force Yourself to Take Action. This is a previous episode that you can find here on the podcast,$100 MBA show, because standing out is about just great ideas. It's also about execution. It's about how to make sure that you show up regardless of how you feel or what your circumstances are, you actually make it happen. And that's what allows you to win in the long run. That episode was designed to help you have a dead easy system to stop procrastinating and start shipping work consistently.

19:44So go ahead. It's called three ways to force yourself to take action. So go ahead. I'll see you in that episode and I'll see you in the next one. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business.

20:18And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

20:30We'll see you next time.

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