Last Saturday I woke early, put on my running shoes, and joined 5,400 other competitors for a 10K race in New York City’s Central Park. There’s nothing like jostling within a massive pack of Type-A health-nuts to push myself to the limit of my own speed-and-pain-threshold.

While I believe in joining large groups of competitors for a healthy body and sound mind, I don’t run crowded races expecting to finish in the top group.

I was reminded of the best business book I ever read, “The Millionaire Mind” by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley, since it recommends the exact opposite scenario from my Saturday race if you want to be rich and successful in business.

Stanley is better known as one half of the duo who wrote the best-seller “The Millionaire Next Door” (an excellent book in its own right).

Stanley surveyed about a thousand millionaires in 1998 to determine the common elements of their financial success, and came up with a profile of millionaires greatly at odds with how the popular press depicts America’s wealthy.

“The Millionaire Mind” speaks directly to every small business owner, since the lesson of the book can be summed up in four words: “Own Your Own Business.”

The key insight I took from his book for finding success as an entrepreneur can be summed up even more succinctly: “Avoid Competition.”

More specifically, Stanley writes, look for areas in which you do not have to compete with the best and the brightest minds of your generation, and the best and the biggest companies. Stanley found an inordinate number of millionaires who built businesses in non-competitive markets, or niches that others find difficult or unattractive to fill.

He highlights the guy who ran the junk/scrap yard in his small town who, by the way, retired with $5 million dollars. By his own admission, the junk yard owner didn’t have to be that good, he just owned the only junk yard in town.

Time and again Stanley interviewed millionaires who created businesses in areas where they had no competition, often because the industry lacked prestige.

The converse of the “Avoid Competition” rule is also important. If you enter highly-competitive, ultra-prestige fields such as medicine, law, banking, and consulting, filled with straight-A students from Ivy League colleges, it’s going to be extraordinarily difficult to stand out from the crowd.

Stanley found that a typical millionaire was an average B- student in school who went to a not-particularly-name-brand college. Finding careers in medicine, law, banking, and consulting too difficult to pursue, the average millionaire in his survey found employment in a less competitive field. The most successful of the survey participants worked in less competitive fields and they owned their own businesses.

My 10K Saturday was a “prize money” race which attracted world record holders and Olympic-class athletes, which may explain why the winning time at Saturday’s race was a blistering 4:34 per mile. Unsurprisingly, nobody was there to hold up the tape or a medal when I crossed the finish line.

In my road-racing career I accept mediocrity, and therefore welcome the competition from the world’s best. In my business career, however, I have higher expectations. Taking a page from Stanley’s “Millionaire Mind” at Cedarcrest I look to find the races where I’m the only one at the finish line, winning every time.