Your employees and your customers can tell when your voice isn't

Your employees and your customers can tell when your voice isn't really you.

Oscar Wilde captured it best:
"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

Most people are other people, he wrote. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Let's apply this to being an entrepreneur: you study the decks that raised the most money, the posts that went viral, the keynotes that launched the biggest products.

Then slowly your voice starts sounding like a highlight reel of other founders, when in reality your advantage in business is the part no competitor can download: what makes you, you.

Here's a challenge: Today, find one place you've been quoting someone else's playbook. Rewrite it in your own words starting with a blank page. The About page. The all-hands opener. The first three minutes of your next sales call.