Life, by its very nature, is competition. Like it or not, you’re always competing with other human beings.

You compete for a prospective spouse, you compete for a place on an athletic team, you compete for attention from others, you compete every day of your life in numerous ways that you don’t even think about.

Above all, you have to compete in the marketplace, whether you’re selling a product, a service, or yourself as an employee or prospective

 employee.

All other things being equal, the surest way to beat the competition is to think value instead of rights. You have no right to someone’s love. You have no right to someone’s friendship. You have no right to someone’s respect.

All these, and more, must be earned, and to the extent you create value for others, you will have them in abundance.

Wealth is perhaps the perfect example of this, because it is quantifiable. It is an aspect of life that makes it easy for you to gauge how successful you have been at creating value for others.

If you concentrate on creating value, money tends to follow as a natural consequence. And to create value, it’s wise to keep in mind that people are programmed to act in their own best interests. If you doubt this, try asking someone to buy your product just because you need the money.

The reality is that consumers have no interest in a company’s needs or problems. Their sole interest is in what the company’s products or services can do to make their lives more pleasurable or less burdensome.

The late B.F. Skinner, collectivist psychologist and social theorist, spent his life on failed efforts to find a scientific way to repress the human instinct to better one's existence. By trying to modify human behavior to suit himself, all he really accomplished was to underscore the reality that self-interest is a natural and normal human characteristic. Only force can prevent human beings from acting in their own best interests.

It’s also crucial to recognize that you will never be successful trying to sell people what you think they should want; consumers buy only what they think they want. If your objective is to sell someone on yourself or your product, tell him everything that you or it will do for him, and don’t waste his time with your opinions.

Getting what you want is a result of giving other people what they want, a philosophy commonly referred to as value-for-value.

When the Product Is You

Creating value is especially important when it comes to increasing your worth to an employer, or to individuals or companies in cases where you’re selling your personal services.

In this regard, always think of yourself as a product, and recognize that a product with an enthusiastic, cooperative attitude has great value in the marketplace. Likewise, a product that turns out neat work has great value; a product that completes projects on time has great value; and, above all, a product that can solve problems has great value.

In fact, the surest way to get a promotion and pay raise is to be a problem solver. All employers need problem solvers, because all employers have problems. The greater the employer’s problems, the greater the opportunities for problem solvers.

Nourishing Value Creation

Attitude is to value creation as water is to a garden, because value tends to grow in direct proportion to attitude.

Volumes have been written about the importance of attitude as it relates to success and happiness. In fact, the subject has been so dissected by so many thousands of writers and speakers that the term positive attitude has become something of a cliché.

Nonetheless, it’s a subject that doesn’t fade away like last year’s fad. On the contrary, it transcends the ages.

Attitude is no longer the exclusive domain of self-help speakers and writers. Increasingly, it is being studied by serious researchers and discussed at universities worldwide.

The idea of changing your life by changing your thoughts is a stunning notion that has become pretty well accepted, and the fact that it is within your power to change your thoughts makes the concept that much more remarkable. Best of all, no one can force you to abandon your mental state.

I believe that the reason thoughts have the capacity to transform themselves into physical realities is that all atoms throughout the universe are connected (as evidenced by such phenomena as radio “waves”).

If so, it logically follows that what happens to the atoms in your brain has an affect on atoms outside your body. We know that atoms vibrate at tremendous speeds, so whether they give off positive or negative energy is of monumental importance.

Alexander Graham Bell, with somewhat stronger credentials than I, shared his thoughts on this subject when he stated, “What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.”

Part and parcel to a positive attitude is the emotion of passion. If you came home one day and found your house in flames and your family trapped inside, you would probably develop an instant passion so strong that you would try to make your way through the flames in an effort to save your family.

What would cause such an instant passion is purpose. Your purpose — i.e., your objective — would be instantly clear. It also would be clear to you that time was a limiting factor, thus you would spring into action without feeling the necessity to do a lot of research or enter into a prolonged discussion about the matter with anyone else.

If I saw you working with that kind of passion in a business setting, I’d probably offer you just about anything in an effort to convince you to join my team. Of course, it’s unlikely that you could ever be as passionate about business as you would be when trying to save the lives of your family, but it’s certainly a good goal to shoot for.

Why? Because the closer you can come to duplicating that kind of passion in other aspects of your life, the more likely you are to create value.

Creating legitimate value is the straightest line between where you are now and where you want to be in life. It doesn’t matter how fast or how hard you work if your efforts don’t create value for others.

Creating value, then, stems from passion; passion stems from a belief in what you’re doing; and belief in what you’re doing (i.e., a purpose) stems from being involved in work that you not only are good at, but that you enjoy.

Once you have all these factors moving in the right direction, competition becomes less and less of an obstacle to your success. When you focus on setting the standard for creating value, the competition has its hands full just trying to keep up with you.