Certainty is a Myth, Sameness is a Trap: How to Turn the Tables and Win in a Game You Weren’t Meant to Play.

“Forget ‘best practices. The most profitable move you can make is to find out what everyone else is doing and run in the opposite direction.”

The Deafening Hum of Sameness

Take a moment and listen. No, really. Block out the noise of your own business for a second—the emails, the phone calls, the quiet panic about next month’s payroll—and listen to your industry. What you’ll hear is a low, persistent hum. It’s the sound of everyone saying the same thing, attending the same webinars, chasing the same trends, and regurgitating the same tired “best practices.” It’s the sound of sameness. A comfortable, reassuring, and utterly lethal lullaby that sings businesses into a state of competitive irrelevance.

This hum is the siren song of conventional wisdom. It promises safety in numbers, a proven path to a predictable outcome. Follow the map, do what the gurus say, and you’ll be fine. But this promise is a magnificent lie. The map everyone else is using leads to a place that’s already overcrowded, a bloody battlefield where you and all your competitors are furiously undercutting each other on price, fighting over the same shrinking scraps of margin. It’s a place where you’re perpetually competing, not creating. A place where your brand becomes little more than background noise.

“Your industry’s ‘best practices’ are the comfortable furniture in the waiting room of irrelevance. The real work happens outside, where the rules haven’t been written yet.”

The truth is, the moment a piece of advice becomes “conventional wisdom,” it has lost its power. The moment a strategy becomes a “best practice,” it is, by definition, an average practice. Following the herd feels safe, it feels logical, it feels like you’re mitigating risk. In reality, you are taking the biggest risk of all: the risk of becoming invisible. You’re voluntarily entering a game where the rules are set by others, and the odds are stacked against you having a breakthrough. The only way to win is to refuse to play.

The Gilded Cage of ‘Conventional Wisdom’

So why do so many sharp, driven entrepreneurs—people like you—willingly lock themselves in this cage? Because conventional wisdom is a brilliant salesman. It sells a product more addictive than any narcotic: the illusion of certainty. In the chaotic, unpredictable world of business, certainty feels like a warm blanket. It’s the comforting whisper that if you just colour inside the lines, you won’t fail. It’s the checklist, the five-step plan, the guaranteed framework that absolves you of the terrifying responsibility of thinking for yourself.

This desire for a pre-approved path is human. We’re wired to seek patterns and follow the tribe. Rocking the boat is scary. What if you’re wrong? What if you look like a fool? The social and financial cost of sticking your neck out and failing seems immense. So, we outsource our thinking to industry reports, keynote speakers, and LinkedIn influencers. We adopt acronyms and methodologies without ever questioning their premise, creating a business that is a perfect replica of a thousand others—a ship that is “built to code” but has no rudder, no engine, and no unique destination.

The problem is that this gilded cage, while comfortable, is shrinking every single day. The bars are closing in. While you’re busy implementing yesterday’s best practices, someone else is out there breaking the rules and creating tomorrow’s market. They are not just rocking the boat; they’re building a submarine and exploring a world you can’t even see. They understand that the very act of conforming to industry norms is what makes you vulnerable. Your compliance becomes your competitor’s greatest weapon.

Who Guarantees What, Exactly? The Myth of Certainty in Business

Let’s be brutally honest for a moment. Who, precisely, is offering this guarantee that comes with following the conventional path? Who is underwriting this promise of safety? The answer is nobody. Certainty is a myth. The business plan you slaved over is a work of fiction the moment it leaves the printer. The market forecasts are sophisticated guesses, and the five-year strategy is a prayer whispered into a hurricane. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. I have witnessed on multiple occasions how smart people invest in this “mythology”, ending up with nothing but empty promises and broken expectations.

Clinging to conventional wisdom as a source of certainty is like clinging to a life raft with a slow leak. It feels secure for a while, but eventually, you’re going down with it. The real risk isn’t in trying a bold new idea. The real risk is in the relentless, day-by-day execution of an average idea. That’s where margins erode, passion dies, and the business slowly suffocates under the weight of its own mediocrity. It’s a slow-motion failure that is far more common and far more painful than any spectacular flameout.

The pursuit of certainty through convention leads directly to the soul-crushing cycle of perpetual competing. Because you’re using the same tactics as everyone else, your only differentiators become price and effort. You work harder and harder for smaller and smaller returns. You’re stuck on a hamster wheel, running furiously just to stay in the same place. 

The alternative? To embrace the uncertainty of being different. To accept that there are no guarantees, and therefore, the only logical path is the one you carve yourself. It’s the only path where you get to set the rules.

The Slow Bleed: The Real Cost of Playing Not to Lose

When you build a business based on conventional wisdom, you aren’t playing to win. You are, at best, playing not to lose. And this defensive crouch comes with a price tag that doesn’t show up on any balance sheet until it’s far too late. It’s a slow bleed. A thousand tiny cuts that drain your business of its vitality, its profitability, and its very soul. It’s the constant, gnawing anxiety about cash flow because your margins are tissue-paper thin. It’s the revolving door of talented staff who leave for more exciting opportunities because they’re bored of executing the same tired playbook.

This is the reality of the firefighting mentality. You spend your days lurching from one predictable crisis to the next, never getting ahead, never building anything resilient. Your operational model is a patchwork of “best practices” that don’t quite fit together, creating friction, inefficiency, and endless frustration. You feel perpetually busy but not productive. You’re working harder than ever, but the needle isn’t moving. This isn’t a temporary phase of growth; it’s a permanent state of being for a business built on a foundation of sameness.

The most insidious cost, however, is the erosion of your own ambition. The daily grind of staying afloat in a sea of mediocrity dulls the sharp edge of your vision. The bold ideas get shelved. The risks seem too great. The contrarian impulse that made you an entrepreneur in the first place gets smothered under the wet blanket of industry norms. You start believing that this is just “how it is.” This slow surrender is the ultimate price you pay for the false security of the herd.

Welcome to the Red Ocean: Where Everyone Fights Over Scraps

There’s a term for the market you inadvertently create when you follow the crowd: the Red Ocean. It’s red because it’s stained with the blood of all the competitors fighting viciously over a finite and clearly defined market space. In this ocean, the game is zero-sum. For you to win a dollar, someone else must lose one. The rules of engagement are known to all, and the primary weapons are price wars and incremental feature improvements. It’s a brutal, exhausting, and ultimately unwinnable war of attrition.

Conventional wisdom is the architect of the Red Ocean. It tells everyone to fish in the same spot, with the same bait, at the same time. Is it any wonder the waters are choked with competition? When your strategy is to be a slightly better, slightly cheaper version of the incumbent, you are sentencing your business to a life of perpetual competing. You’ll be forever looking over your shoulder, reacting to what others are doing, trapped in a race to the bottom where the only prize is survival, not victory.

“Stop benchmarking your competitors. Start dissecting them. Their business model isn’t a roadmap to follow; it’s an autopsy report revealing the vulnerabilities you were born to exploit.”

Think about it. Your marketing sounds the same. Your service offering is fundamentally the same. Your business model is the same. How can you possibly expect to achieve a different result? The very act of benchmarking against your competitors and adopting their “best practices” ensures you will never, ever escape them. You are tethered to their fate. To escape the Red Ocean, you don’t need a bigger boat or better bait. You need to find a new ocean.

Flipping the Turntable: From Background Noise to Centre Stage

So here you are, stuck. The hum of sameness is deafening, the gilded cage feels secure, and the Red Ocean is the only reality you know. It feels hopeless. But what if the problem itself isn’t a problem? What if it’s an instruction manual? What if the suffocating pressure of conventional wisdom is the single greatest strategic asset you have, simply because it tells you exactly where your competition will be and what they will do next?

This is the moment of epiphany. The point where you stop seeing the industry norm as a rulebook and start seeing it as a weakness to be exploited. It’s the moment you decide to stop trying to be the best DJ playing the same tired song everyone else is playing and instead, you walk over to the turntable and start flipping the script. You take the record that’s been putting everyone to sleep, scratch it to a halt, and put on something so jarring, so different, that everyone in the room has no choice but to stop and look at you.

Start Flipping The Script

This isn’t about being different for the sake of being different. This is about being strategic for the sake of being dominant. It’s about recognising that in a world saturated with noise, the only way to be heard is to create a new sound. Flipping the script means you stop asking, “How can we do what they do, but better?” and you start asking, “What if we did the one thing they would never, ever expect? The one thing their business model makes it impossible for them to copy?” This shift in thinking is the first step out of the bloody water and onto dry land.

Your Unfair Advantage: Turning Convention on its Head

Welcome to the fun part. The part where we stop admiring the problem and start building the weapon. Your unfair advantage in the market is not a bigger budget, a fancier logo, or a more aggressive sales team. Your unfair advantage is the ability to think in a way your competitors literally cannot. They are so deeply embedded in the “way things are done” that they are structurally and psychologically blind to the opportunities that their own conformity creates.

The solution, then, is to become a professional script-flipper. An architect of strategic rebellion. This isn’t about reckless chaos; it’s a disciplined, creative process of deconstruction and reinvention. It’s about looking at the same landscape as everyone else but seeing a completely different set of possibilities. It requires you to be part-detective, part-artist, and part-insurgent. You’re not just creating a new product or service; you’re creating a new game where you are the only player.

“The most profitable question you can ask is not ‘How do we win the game?’ 

It’s ‘How do we invent a new game where we are the only players?'”

This process is your vehicle for change. It’s your way out of the drama of perpetual competing and into a place of clarity and market leadership. It requires work, yes, but the work is exhilarating because it’s creative, it’s impactful, and it’s yours. You’re no longer a follower, a footnote in someone else’s industry. You are the headline. Let’s break down how it’s done. Let’s get tactical. 

Step 1: Map the Dogma (and Identify Your Anti-Role Model)

First, become an anthropologist of your own industry. Map out the sacred cows—the “unbreakable rules” and foundational assumptions everyone takes for granted. But let’s add a twist: don’t look for a role model to emulate. Instead, identify your Anti-Role Model. This is likely the biggest, most successful, and slowest-moving incumbent in your space. The one everyone secretly wants to be.

Instead of copying them, put their business model under a microscope and find its inherent weaknesses. What are they structurally incapable of doing? Their size makes them slow. Their legacy systems make them inflexible. Their commitment to their existing cash cow makes them blind to new opportunities. Their conventional wisdom is your treasure map. For example, if your Anti-Role Model is a big-box retailer that wins on massive selection, you don’t try to have more selection. You win on radical curation, expert advice, and a personalised experience they can’t possibly replicate. Their strength dictates your point of attack.

Step 2: Find the Friction

Dogma always creates friction—pain points where the “rules” chafe against reality. This is where the Anti-Role Model is most vulnerable. Where does their dogma frustrate customers? Where does it create soul-crushing bureaucracy for their employees? Where does it silently destroy their profit margin?

Take the taxi industry before Uber. The dogma was a centrally dispatched, highly regulated fleet. The friction for customers was immense: no idea when your car would arrive, no idea who the driver was, inconvenient payment, and variable quality. The friction for drivers was also high: expensive medallions and being beholden to a dispatcher. These points of friction weren’t minor inconveniences; they were massive structural flaws waiting for someone to build a business model specifically designed to eliminate them.

Step 3: Flip the Script by Asking a Better Question

Once you’ve found the friction, the temptation is to ask a conventional question, like “How can we do this slightly better?” This leads to incremental, boring answers. The Maverick asks a better, more profound question. You don’t just change the answer; you change the entire equation.

Instead of asking, “How can we make taxis arrive 10% faster?” Uber’s founders effectively asked, “What if anyone with a safe car could be a driver, and what if the passenger could summon them directly with a device they already own?” Instead of asking, “How can we build a better hotel?” Airbnb’s founders asked, “What if anyone’s spare room could be a hotel?” Flipping the script is often an act of radical reframing.

Stop asking, “How do we get more market share?” Start asking, “How do we make market share irrelevant by creating a category only we occupy?” Stop asking, “How do we lower our prices?” Start asking, “How can we create so much value that price becomes a non-issue?” These questions lead to fundamentally different, and infinitely more powerful, solutions.

Your Roadmap from Follower to Maverick

1. Schedule a “Dogma Debrief” (This Week): Get your team in a room. Title the meeting “What are the stupidest things we do because our industry says we have to?” Make it a safe space to challenge everything. You’ll be shocked at what emerges.
2. Institute a “Kill a Stupid Rule” Ritual (This Quarter): Make rebellion a habit. Once a quarter, the entire company nominates and votes on one internal policy, industry “best practice,” or long-held assumption to ceremoniously kill. It could be ditching a useless weekly report or killing a customer service policy everyone hates. This builds the muscle of critical thinking and gives everyone permission to question the status quo.
3. Adopt the “Trojan Horse” Strategy (Next Project): A frontal assault on industry norms can sometimes be too jarring for customers. So, hide your revolution inside something familiar. Disguise your radical new offering as something they already understand. For example, you could sell a “management consulting package” (the Trojan Horse) which is, in reality, the implementation and training for your revolutionary, subscription-based workflow software (the hidden army). You use the familiar to introduce the radical.
4. Become a Student of Other Industries (Ongoing): Stop reading your own industry’s trade magazines; they are echo chambers of sameness. Instead, look at how completely different industries solved their problems. The most innovative ideas are almost always stolen from somewhere else. What can a local bakery learn from Netflix’s subscription model? What can a law firm learn from Amazon’s obsession with customer friction? Cross-pollinate ideas relentlessly.

From Industry Dogma to Maverick Leadership

The Certainty of Being Different

Let’s circle back to where we started. The business world sells the lie of certainty, and entrepreneurs, starved for stability, buy it. They trade their uniqueness for a set of pre-approved, ineffective “best practices.” The great irony is that this desperate grasp for certainty is what guarantees a mediocre and precarious future. The only true certainty in business, the only defensible position, comes from being different. It comes from being the only one who does what you do.

“Don’t build a better version of what already exists. Build the thing that makes what exists obsolete. The market doesn’t reward ‘better’; it crowns ‘different’.”

Flipping the script is not a tactic; it’s a philosophy. It’s an ongoing commitment to independent thought. It’s the understanding that your greatest asset isn’t what you have, but how you think. The herd is stampeding towards a cliff of commoditisation and irrelevance. The hum of sameness is the sound of their march to the grave. Your job is to stop, listen to that noise, and walk calmly in the other direction. That’s where the open field lies. That’s where you’ll find your future.

The herd is heading for a cliff. Are you going to follow them, or are you ready to flip the script and lead the charge in a new direction? The choice isn’t just strategic; it’s existential.