These 3 traits are essential for business success
If this is the first time you’re reading The Anti-Generic Newsletter, welcome! Each week, I explore topics that can help you stand out in today’s modern economy, where we’re facing the erosion of the institution, the marginalization of the middle class, and the atrophy of attention.
We’re in the Age of Fragmentation, and it’s not an easy place to dwell as business owners.
But there IS a way to succeed.
It’s being Anti-Generic.
You’ve got to be so fully yourself that no one could ever confuse you with another brand or founder.
This doesn’t mean sharing controversial opinions simply to create memorable drama, crying on social media to capture attention, or putting down another business’ marketing techniques as a way of building up your own.
It DOES mean running every piece of your messaging through the Anti-Generic Filter™ I introduced last week (check it out here if you missed that issue).
And it also means cultivating the qualities that will keep you in full integrity as you grow and sustain your business in the age of AI.
Here are 3 traits that are absolutely essential for your success, with suggestions on how to nurture each:
Discernment
As you’re already aware, I’m in favor of learning how to integrate AI into your business and marketing. But this must be done with utmost caution and consideration for your clients and customers.
In a Washington State University article, of the 44% of Americans who believe they’ve seen AI-generated marketing content, a whopping 42% of them said the interaction had a negative effect on their perception of the brand. Source
And the fact that 42% of Americans reported that they aren’t sure if they’ve encountered AI-generated content lets us know that our clients and customers are on their guard, looking out for AI content, and they generally don’t like it when they see it.
The biggest reason for this seems to be what consumers deem “deceptive” marketing content, where there are obvious AI “tells” that alert customers and clients that an AI tool is generating the messages instead of a human.
If you’re going to use AI for your content (and I’m an advocate for responsible use of AI tools), you need to keep a human “in the loop” to ensure that your message accurately captures the thoughts you intend to convey.
And it goes a LONG way with your audience for you to disclose when you’re relying on AI to draft or support you in drafting your messages.
Beyond that, when you’re communicating with individual clients and customers in a more intimate type of working relationship, like 1:1 coaching, it will benefit your working relationship to keep those conversations fully human.
The bottom line? You must exercise discernment in when and how you use AI in your messaging, as well as in how you disclose that to your prospective clients and customers.
2. Adaptability.
Those who succeed in this current economic climate must be nimble and quick to adapt. You’ve probably already read about how I flubbed this up majorly and really set my business back, but you can check out that newsletter here if you missed it.
I’ve been encouraging you to learn how to implement AI into your workflow, and one major thing you need to be aware of is the fact that the tools you’re using today may not be the tools you need to use tomorrow.
There are a myriad of AI tools being created each day, so you’ve got to be careful not to get too attached to any of them. You need the skill of AI architecture more than you need to master any one specific tool.
The faster you can adapt, the better.
Get ahead of your expenses the MOMENT you see your cashflow decreasing.
Look for business funding before you need it.
Start having renewal conversations with your clients long before their actual renewal date is on the horizon.
Get quick with creating and marketing a new offer.
Some of this advice is not new (a banker friend of mine schooled me on the importance of obtaining a personal line of credit from the bank long before I even thought about opening a business) . . . but some of it is very different than what worked just 3 years ago.
In online business specifically, the old standard was to create ONE successful offer, and run it for as many years as you could suck money out of it.
If a launch went poorly, analyze it from top to bottom, fix the issue, and run it again.
Rinse and repeat, for a decade when possible.
That advice will sink you today.
Consumers have a multitude of choices.
If you see an offer isn’t working, be very careful about how much time you spend trying to revive it instead of simply creating a more aligned offer for your actual audience.
When something doesn’t work (and ALL businesses will have LOTS of things that don’t work), don’t spend too much time trying to force or fix it.
Move on to find the next thing that DOES work.
3. Focus
It’s a noisy marketplace. A 2025 article on ad exposures estimated that we see between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements per day. Source
When you’re running a business, you must put blinders on.
It probably seems counterintuitive, but you need to be turning OFF everyone else’s ads that are coming into your space, so that you can focus on maximum creativity and clarity in your own advertising messages.
When you’re bombarded by everyone else’s agenda, it’s nearly impossible to carry yours out.
One way I’ve personally done this is by creating automatic rules in my emails for certain marketing emails I still want to receive so they automatically go to a dedicated folder instead of to my inbox.
That way, I’m choosing when I’m consuming other people’s messages instead of having them trickle in whenever they send them throughout the day.
And beyond consuming other people’s advertising, you’ve got to focus on just 1 (or max 2)teachers and mentors you want to learn from.
One of the worst things you can do for yourself is to follow too many leaders in your space (ask me how I know). This is anecdotal evidence, not a scholarly study, but I can trace a rapid decline in profitability in my business to a year when I joined not one, but TWO high-ticket masterminds AND had a $4500/month 1:1 coach.
Why wouldn’t I have rapidly increased profit with all of that support?
Well, all three of those mentors were giving me information and guidance that contradicted the others. So instead of the groups being a support, they created a lot of confusion and, frankly, distraction that I had trouble sorting through.
And any one of those 3 mentors/groups would have been plenty of support and guidance for me on its own. I want to be clear that each group and mentor was gifted and had a lot of wisdom to share. There was no inherent problem in the kind of support offered, but I had too many inputs going into my business.
Focus is what you need now.
Find ONE main mentor to follow and soak up everything that person has to offer.
You already have all the BEST answers for you inside yourself. The benefit of a mentor is simply to guide you in doing something you haven’t done yet that they’ve already accomplished.
Because it’s a bit of a tough market right now, people are getting AGGRESSIVE with their marketing, and if they’re any good at sales, they can be very persuasive. Do everything you can to avoid over-committing to multiple coaches and mentors. Choose your top one and go all in.
Discernment, adaptability and focus are the 3 traits that will set you up to win, right now and for years to come.
And I’ve got one quick task to help you benefit from today’s newsletter that’ll take you less than 30 seconds to complete.
Send me an email and tell me which one of these 3 traits comes easiest to you, as well as which one you know you’d like to get stronger at.
Feel free to share more back story with me if you’d like. I read and respond to every message and I might have something to share that can help.
To your success,
Anna
P.S. If you feel like you’ve struggled to build all 3 of these traits, welcome to being human! If building a business were easy, everybody would do it. You’re in rare air, and the fact that you’re reading this message gives me confidence that you’re going to find your way as long as you keep moving forward.
It takes the time that it takes!