There are two phenomena in business and life that are both enormous potential traps.

The first is following the crowd — doing what everyone else is doing and counting likes and retweets.

Then again, purposefully doing things wrong because it just seems cool — because you want to break all the rules and be a contrarian — is its own trap. It was cool when Sriracha put a rooster on a bottle of hot sauce. It was not cool when the 23rd copycat did the same thing.

Both of these strategies are traps because the people who use them are usually looking at a map somebody else drew, and then basing their next move on that.

What if you simply did what you wanted to do with your next big idea, regardless of what anyone else thought about it?