The Power of Accumulation: Why it's Better to Be Awesome than to Destroy

For years, I would watch The Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise and would notice the same trend play out every season.

There are two strategies I see being deployed on these shows to “win”.

1. Be awesome. Just be so amazing, kind, witty, accomplished, compassionate, good natured… (all the things that would make you the type of person someone would want to be with) so that the choice becomes obvious to keep you around week after week.

2. Destroy everyone around you. This comes from an insecurity that you may not be that awesome. Despite endless attempts season after season, this strategy never works out.

Today, I was watching a video from Gary Vaynerchuk where he said the exact same thing, but in business terms.

He said, there are two ways to build this biggest building in town (paraphrasing).

1. Be awesome – work hard, strive, and achieve enough success where you can actually build the tallest building.

2. Destroy every other building around you so that your building is that last remaining building, and therefore the tallest.

👉 Lesson is: be awesome, and if you’re not awesome, that’s okay, but strive everyday to be a little better than you were yesterday. It’s not easy to change, it doesn’t happen overnight, but there’s an accumulative effective of compounding incremental changes overtime.