Most businesses are built by looking at the person next to them.
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“They are using this tech stack, so we should too.”
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“They charge $150/hour, so we will charge $140.”
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“They have a ‘Case Studies’ page, so we need one.”
This is the path to Commodity Hell. When you copy the structure of another business, you inherit their constraints without inheriting their soul. You become a “comparable,” and comparables are chosen based on price, not value.
The Myth of “Best Practices”
“Best Practices” are simply the average of what worked for other people in the past. If you follow them perfectly, you will achieve an Average Result.
The Sovereign knows that the only way to earn outsized returns is to be Non-Fungible. You must build a Personal Monopoly—a combination of skills, traits, and context that is unique to you and your organization.
The Three Pillars of Distinction
1. Specific Knowledge This is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If the 2026 version of an AI can do it, it is not specific knowledge. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and obsessions. It feels like play to you but looks like work to others.
2. Contextual Sovereignty Standardized advice assumes a standardized environment. Your market, your team, and your personal “Risk Delta” are unique. A strategy that works for a VC-backed startup in San Francisco will kill a bootstrapped agency in Dubai. Your distinction is found in the “Unstructured” and “Unpredictable” parts of your specific reality.
3. The Founder’s Fingerprint Your business should be an externalization of your internal “Source Code.” If you are obsessed with minimalism, your software should be brutalist. If you value deep relationships, your service should be high-touch. When you bake your personality into the product, you create a moat that no competitor can cross because they can’t be you.
The Protocol: The Plagiarism Audit
Perform this audit every 90 days:
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The “Why” Test: Look at your top 3 business processes. Why do you do them that way? If the answer is “Because that’s how [Competitor] does it,” it is a point of fragility.
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The “Uncopyable” Test: If a competitor had 10x your budget and 10x your team, could they replicate your “Distinction” in 6 months? If yes, you don’t have a distinction; you have a temporary lead.
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The Obsession Check: What do you do that makes no “business sense” to an accountant but makes total sense to your soul? Double down on that. That is your monopoly.
#DhandheKaFunda: Don’t try to be the best. Try to be the only. If you are the only one who does what you do, for the people you do it for, competition becomes irrelevant.