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Please Stop Worshiping Originality

Posted Under: Jay Today TV
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Welcome to Jay Today, 3-minute lessons and commentary on business, social media, and digital marketing from New York Times best-selling author and venture capitalist Jay Baer. Join Jay daily for insights on trends, quick tips, observations, and inspiration. Jay Today is the show for you.

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From the Jay Today video podcast: We massively overvalue originality and we massively undervalue execution. Being first doesn’t mean that you’re the best. Here’s what to do instead:

Screenshot_7_17_14,_3_19_PM badge-jay-says Jay Today is my near-daily 3-minute video where I talk about social media, content marketing, business and life. JayToday is available on Youtube, iTunes (as a video podcast), and at JayToday.tv. The show is sponsored by Sprout Social (which I use for my social media), and Candidio (a great video editing service).
Here’s a Jay Today video where I talk about why it’s time to stop worshiping originality.

I’m still in New York City. I’m in another Breather space. If you’re in New York or San Francisco or Montreal and you need some peace and quiet, a place to do a meeting, get the Breather app, and you can hook that up. It’s basically uber for peace and quiet, a fantastic company founded by my friend Julien Smith. Yesterday I was in a different Breather space, and I had a phone conversation with a friend of mine who’s a corporate content marketer. He was talking about the fact that people in his company are really enamored with the concept of doing something new, of looking at what the competitors are doing, looking at what’s going on out there, and saying, “Hey, we need a fresh idea. We need a new idea. We need an idea that transcends people’s expectations about what content can be.”
I understand that thinking. I really do. I understand why people read case studies. I understand why people look at blogs and say, “We want to do something that will get people talking. We want to do something that our peers will say, ‘Wow isn’t that cool.'”
Copy of  Copy of Add text (2)  (3) (9)But from a business standpoint and from a results standpoint, we massively overvalue originality and we massively undervalue execution. Being first doesn’t mean that you’re the best. Being first doesn’t mean that it’s even effective. Being first just means that you tried something that somebody else talked about.
We talk about Steve Jobs all the time as this fantastic inventor and innovator, and he was certainly that. But you know what? He was also an incredible executor. Yeah, he invented the iPhone and the iPad. But they weren’t the first to even have a smartphone or a tablet. Apple was really much more of an execution plan: supply chain, manufacturing, retail, service. I think the most interesting thing about the Apple story in the last decade or decade and a half was the exclusive deal with AT&T. That had never been done before. That’s an execution play, not an originality play.

Quit worrying so much about being first, because first doesn’t mean best. (click to tweet)

All the time people ask me, “Hey Jay, what’s the hot new thing in social media? What’s the hot new thing in digital marketing?” You know what the hot new thing is?

The hot new thing should always be doing today’s things better. (click to tweet)

That’s the way you build a business. Quit overvaluing originality and undervaluing execution.

Sprout Social Shout-out

Today’s Sprout Social shoutout is for my friend Chris Moody. Chris works for Oracle Marketing Cloud (a Convince & Convert business partner). He’s a fantastic guy. I’ve had a chance to work with Chris for a long time. If you’re not following him in social media, you absolutely should do so. If you are somewhere in the North Carolina Triangle Region, you probably know Chris, because he is a man about town, a fantastic guy. Hello to Chris and a shoutout to him. The Jay Today show is brought to you by the good people at Sprout Social, a fantastic social media marketing platform. It’s what I use for my own social media. And the show is brought to you by Candidio. Candidio helps me make these videos every day, super easy, fast, and inexpensive. I just shoot these on my iPhone, I upload them to candidio.com, and they do the rest. They do the edits and the nice stuff at the front and the back and give it back to me. They can help you as well, Candidio.com.

Get More Jay Today

JayToday is available on YoutubeiTunes (as a video podcast), and at JayToday.tv. Here is another show from last week about WHY the ALS ice bucket challenge works…

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