What’s worse than your baby keeping you from sleeping, crying incessantly? The neighbor’s baby keeping you up all night squealing like there is no tomorrow, in a tiny apartment with paper walls and virtually no sound isolation.
What are the options? Wait until the baby grows up? Move to a different place? Encourage the neighbors to move out? Build a sound isolated wall? Frankly, none of these options are valid from a practical point of view. Side note: the latter option isn’t valid per se because acoustics isn’t an exact science. The material is costly, and the results are often vastly underwhelming.
In business, incumbents and newcomers in your industry can be annoying, keeping you up all night, much like the neighbor’s crying baby. Sometimes, there just isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.
Radical change is what’s required to deal with those situations. Staying true to your personal beliefs and your business’ values, look past the problem and see if any solutions start with you. Without leaving everything you stand for behind, there might be features you can implement that are radically different, embracing the opportunity to set yourself apart.
In the end, you can’t control what you can’t control. Keep track of your competitors, but (laser) focus on you.