[3-1-3] This is not the cake

Hey 🙂

I saw something on Instagram today. An author talking about his mantra — he’s got a neon sign in his office that says “This is not the cake.”

The idea: it’s dangerous for him, and for all of us, to compare our ingredients to someone else’s cake. Don’t compare your flour and eggs — the mess you’re still mixing — to someone’s already fully baked cake.

I love it because I see it constantly in the people I work with. There’s this undercurrent of comparing where we are to people who’ve been doing this 15 years. We compare the early-stage problems we’re trying to solve right now to something someone else solved a decade ago.

My intuition is that looking at the competition has almost no value. The only real use is inspiration — maybe it helps you see what you want to achieve, your vision. Even then, there’s so much downside. When you look at competitors from the outside, what you see is a finished product. It doesn’t show you the mess behind it, and it doesn’t help you with your mess.

Honestly, the competition hasn’t helped me at all. If anything it’s done more harm than good.

So this week: come inward. There’s more to learn by looking at ourselves — our behaviours, how we work, what we’re working on as a team — than by worrying about what other companies are doing. There’s almost nothing helpful about watching the competition, and quite a lot that’s actively bad. Almost no upside, mostly downside.

Take your 10-15 minutes at the end of the week. Do your 3-1-3. Start with wins — what does progress actually look and feel like this week? Then get honest about what we need to focus on — not what the competition is doing, but what we need to work on to move forward. If you’re looking outward for strategy and tactics, that’s usually a sign you don’t understand your own business.

Then get into the detail: where do you spend 20% of your time next week to get 80% of the result? What are the three jobs that move the needle on the one thing that matters most?

Ignore the competition. Get into yourself, your team, your work. There’s far more to discover there.

Do the report. Email me — chris@chrismarr.co.uk. I’d love to read what you’re working on and what feels important to you.

Have a great weekend!

The 3-1-3

3 — Wins & achievements What does progress look and feel like this week? What are the three biggest wins that moved us along?

1 — The one thing What’s the single biggest challenge or focus for us right now? What’s the one thing that, if we did it, would make everything else easier or unnecessary?

3 — Next week’s moves Where will you spend your 20% of time next week to get 80% of the result? What are the three tasks that move the needle on that one thing?

Send it to chris@chrismarr.co.uk

🗣️ 👀

Chris.