Business
The company you fear is not your competition. In the worst case it is a chance to learn, and in the best case it is a partner. Stop slicing the pizza and start growing it.
When we started the marketing agency, our biggest competitor could not really be called a competitor, because there was no world in which we were their competition. We had no money, no people, and honestly no ideas yet. If we had told ourselves that they were the enemy, they would not have been a rival at all. They would have been the monster in the closet we were scared of.
So I decided something that changed how I have run every business since. Nobody in the industry is our competition. In the worst case, they are an opportunity to learn. In the best case, they are a partner. Once you hold that view, the fear drains out of the room and something more useful takes its place: curiosity.
Elon Musk was asked once, in an interview about SpaceX, what he was going to do about NASA, given that NASA was a massive competitor with a budget of billions and SpaceX was barely funded. He said NASA is not our competition, NASA is our partner. That is exactly the posture every company in your space deserves. Treat them as your partner. Because the moment you open up and realize that the worst case is only a chance to learn from them, and the best case is a chance to build something together, you step onto a road of abundance for everyone.
Contrast that with the closed version of the story. We should not work with these people, because they are the competition, and they might steal our ideas. That instinct feels like protection, but it is a cage. Everyone is good at something and less good at something else. If you find the synergy between what you do well and what they do well, you can collaborate so that both sides come out ahead. The closed posture assumes a fixed amount of value in the world, and that any value they capture is value taken from you. That assumption is the root of almost every bad strategic decision I have watched founders make.
So instead of hiding from our so-called competitors, we studied them. We looked at exactly what they were doing and asked how we could improve on it. Doing that produced two kinds of value at once. It produced financial value, because studying their marketing tactics gave us ideas for how to build our own things, and those ideas eventually made us money. And when we started making more money, we generated more value in that market, which led to a different kind of relationship with the very companies we had been afraid of. It turned into cross-selling. The monster in the closet became a channel.
Sit with that sequence for a second, because it is the whole argument in miniature. We started by studying people we were afraid of. The studying made us better, which made us money. The money made us a bigger presence in the market, which made us useful to the same people we had feared. And useful is the word that unlocks partnership. Once you are useful to a rival, the relationship stops being a zero-sum standoff and becomes a place where value can flow both ways. None of that happens if you spend your first year treating them as a threat to be defended against.
Here is the mental error underneath the fear. If you say a company is better than you, or might become better than you, you have already trapped yourself in the wrong question. The question is not who is better. The question is how much can everyone win. It is not a fixed box of pizza that you cut into ever thinner slices so more people can have a piece. It is about baking, about creating, about making the pizza bigger, so that everyone at the table eats well.
Once you internalize that, competition stops being a threat and starts being information. A rival running a clever campaign is not a wound to your ego, it is a free lesson delivered by someone who paid for the experiment. A rival winning a segment you ignored is not proof you are losing, it is proof the market is bigger than you assumed. The people who treat every other player as a mortal enemy end up spending their energy on defense. The people who treat them as partners spend their energy on growth. And over a few years, the gap between those two ways of spending energy becomes the gap between the companies themselves.
The clearest proof I know of comes from Tesla, and it is worth sitting with because it looks insane through the scarcity lens. Tesla made a large part of its electric-vehicle patents public. Not all of them, but a meaningful portion. To a lot of people that looked like a giant mistake. Why would you hand your hardest-won inventions to anyone who wants to build competing products?
Look at what actually happened. By opening those patents, Tesla pulled far more attention onto itself. Companies and individuals showed up wanting to use those patents to build their own products. Yes, that created a kind of competition. But Tesla was already ahead, and what it gained was far more valuable than what it gave away: market awareness. Every potential competitor went out and built its own market. Each one had its own ideas about targeting, about which customers to reach, sometimes customers Tesla was not even aiming at. And who benefited most from all of that new demand? Tesla, because they were already in front. They had studied the innovation behind version one of the very patents they released, and they understood they could keep extending in directions no one else could yet see.
That is the part people miss. Sometimes it is good to invite competitors into a market, especially a market that is still forming, precisely because it helps you. The more people there are in a market, the more everyone can win. If you are open, the pizza is never the same size twice. It can get bigger and bigger and bigger, for everyone. A young market with one player is a curiosity. A young market with a dozen players fighting to educate customers is an industry, and the founder who understood that early rides the whole wave instead of guarding a puddle.
None of this means you become naive or passive. Being open to partnership is not the same as being easy to take advantage of. You still keep your edge, you still move fast, you still protect the things that genuinely are your advantage. What changes is the emotion you operate from. Scarcity runs on fear, and fear makes you hoard, copy defensively, and shrink. Abundance runs on curiosity, and curiosity makes you study, collaborate, and expand. Tesla did not stop being competitive when it opened those patents. It kept its lead and its speed. It simply refused to let fear make its strategic decisions.
I understand why the scarcity story is so sticky. We were taught it. You see a pizza, you want your slice, because if someone else takes a bigger slice there is less for you. That is the default script for most of the business world, and it produces a very specific kind of question: why should it go well for my competitors, because if it goes well for them, that means I make less money. That reasoning is simply false. There are countless examples in the world where a rising tide lifted everyone, Tesla being only the most recent famous one.
So here is what I would actually do with a competitor. First, remove the word competitor from your vocabulary and replace it with the word partner, even before you have any relationship, because the word shapes the way your mind approaches them. Second, study them without shame. Reverse-engineer what works, understand why it works, and let that understanding upgrade your own thinking. Third, look for the synergy, the place where their strengths and your strengths could produce something neither of you could build alone. And fourth, if a market is young, do not resent the newcomers. Their arrival is often the thing that turns your niche into an industry.
Watch what happened to us as a small case study in the whole idea. We began by treating a company we feared as something to study rather than fight. Studying them taught us, which made our work better, which made us money, which made us a real presence in the market. And once we were a presence, the relationship inverted: the companies we had feared became partners we could cross-sell with, because we now brought something to the table. Not one step of that sequence is available to the founder who spends year one in a defensive crouch. Fear locks you out of the entire chain, because fear never studies, it only guards, and guarding produces nothing you can later trade on.
There is one more benefit that only shows up over the long run, and it is reputation. The founders who treated the whole field as enemies tend to be known that way, and it costs them, because nobody wants to partner with the person who spent a decade at war with the room. The founders who treated rivals as future partners built a web of relationships they could draw on when they needed suppliers, distribution, talent, or simply information. Openness compounds, the same way fear compounds, and one of them builds you a network while the other builds you a fortress with no doors.
It helps to remember that studying a competitor is the cheapest research and development you will ever run. Someone else spent real money and real time discovering what works and what does not, and then they published the result in the form of a product you can examine. When we reverse-engineered our competitors' campaigns, we were letting them fund our education. A closed, fearful founder looks at that same published result and sees only a threat. An open one sees a paid experiment they got to read for free. The information is identical. The only difference is whether fear or curiosity is holding the lens.
And your energy is finite, which is the practical reason fear is so expensive. You have a fixed amount of attention and drive to spend each day, and every unit you spend guarding against imaginary theft is a unit you did not spend building. Scarcity does not just make you unpleasant to deal with, it taxes your output directly, because the hours you burn on defense produce nothing. The abundance posture is not only kinder, it is more efficient, because it frees the energy fear was quietly consuming and points it at growth. That is the unglamorous, practical case for treating rivals as partners: it is where your energy actually goes furthest.
The founders who win long-term are not the ones who defended the smallest slice most fiercely. They are the ones who understood that they were in the business of making the pizza bigger. Your fiercest rival is a teacher you did not have to pay for and a partner you have not met yet. Treat them like the monster in the closet and you will spend your career afraid of an empty room. Open the door, turn on the light, and get to work growing the thing you are all standing around.