The Borrowed Strategy Problem
Why You Can't Just Copy What Works for Someone Else
A few years ago, I came across someone teaching the VIP Day model — charge premium pricing for one concentrated day of work, deliver the whole thing, and move on to the next client.
The pitch was compelling: more money, more efficiency, a clean beginning and end. I liked the theory of it. The person teaching it made it sound like a no-brainer, so I added it to my offers.
I did a few of them. And the work itself was fine — I could get through the day.
What I couldn't get through was the aftermath.
I was so depleted afterward that I needed multiple days just to feel like myself again. Not burned out in a dramatic way. Just completely empty in a way that didn't match what I'd signed up for.
I eventually broke the format into two half-days, which helped some. But it still never quite fit. And when I did a full offers audit not long ago, I took it off the list entirely — not with grief, but with relief.
What I kept was the thing underneath it: the one-page website offer, the same price, the same scope of work, just spread across a week instead of crammed into a day.
Same value. Completely different experience of delivering it.
The VIP Day model works beautifully for certain people. It's probably a natural fit for a Type 3 who runs on visible momentum, or a Type 7 who loves an intense contained sprint, or a Type 8 who wants full control over a focused output.
For me — a Nine whose energy replenishes slowly and who does her best work by routine rather than against a ticking clock — it was never going to stick. Not because I didn't implement it correctly.
Because it wasn't built for the way I'm wired.
That's the borrowed strategy problem in its most ordinary form. Not a dramatic failure. Just a quiet, persistent mismatch between someone else's model and the person trying to run it.
Why Borrowed Strategies Fail
A strategy built around someone else's personality, instinctual drives, and unconscious patterns will fail you not because you're implementing it wrong, but because it was never designed to account for the specific ways you work — or resist working.
This isn't about willpower. It isn't about discipline.
It isn't about whether you want it enough.
It's a structural mismatch: the strategy assumes a set of conditions that don't exist in you.
When a high-energy Type 3 tells you to post on social media every day, they're giving you advice that lives naturally in their operating system. Visibility is where they thrive. Self-promotion doesn't conflict with anything deeper. But if you're a 5 who experiences visibility as a genuine drain on your resources, that same advice is asking you to override something that runs much deeper than strategy.
The advice isn't bad. It was just designed for someone who isn't being run by the same patterns you are.
The Illusion of "Just Implementing"
There's a seductive idea in the online business space that strategy failure is always an implementation problem. If you just followed through. If you just stayed consistent. If you just pushed past the resistance.
Sometimes that's true. Resistance is real, and pushing through it matters.
But there's a meaningful difference between resistance that's pointing to fear or avoidance, and resistance that's pointing to genuine misalignment.
When you're pushing against genuine misalignment — trying to sustain a marketing strategy that requires a kind of energy or visibility you don't have — it doesn't get easier in the end. It stays hard in the same specific way every time you try to do it.
And the insidious part is that most people conclude from this experience that the problem is them. They needed more discipline. They weren't cut out for this.
None of that is true. They were just using a tool that wasn't built for their hands.
What Each Enneagram Type Needs to Know About Strategy Fit
Your Enneagram type doesn't tell you which specific strategies to use. What it does is tell you the specific ways your patterns will interact with any strategy you try to implement — and where the mismatch is most likely to show up.
Type 8
Type 8 doesn't borrow strategies so much as co-opt them. They take the framework, throw out the parts that feel like someone else's rules, rebuild it around their own logic, and then run it their way.
This can actually work — 8s are good at this — but the failure point is when the rebuilt strategy still contains assumptions about collaboration, help-seeking, or vulnerability that the 8's patterns won't accommodate.
Strategy fit for an 8 means building a model that works with their directness, their need for control over their own ship, and their resistance to anything that feels imposed.
Type 9
Type 9 is perhaps the most at risk for borrowed strategies, because the Nine's ability to adapt and accommodate makes a borrowed strategy feel workable for much longer than it actually is.
The 9 can implement almost anything for a while — they're flexible enough. The failure shows up later, when the business has taken the shape of other people's recommendations and the 9 realizes the direction they're heading isn't really theirs.
Strategy fit for a 9 means starting with the question of what they actually want to build — not what makes sense, not what someone they trust recommended — before any implementation decisions get made.
Type 1
Type 1 needs a strategy they can execute with integrity.
The borrowed strategy usually fails for a 1 because it involves compromises the 1 can't quite get behind — corners that feel like they're being cut, standards that feel too low, a pace that doesn't allow for the level of care they believe is necessary.
The 1 will slow down or stop before they'll do it wrong, which means strategy fit for a 1 requires building in the quality standards that let them move without that internal friction.
Type 2
Type 2 needs a strategy that doesn't require them to lead with their own value.
Borrowed strategies built around confident self-promotion, premium positioning, and owning authority tend to fail for the 2 because underneath the implementation is a belief that their worth depends on being needed — not on being excellent.
A strategy built on top of that belief without addressing it will keep producing prices that are too low, boundaries that are too loose, and a business that serves everyone except the 2.
Type 3
Type 3 can implement almost any strategy — for a while.
The borrowed strategy usually fails for a 3 not because it doesn't work, but because it stops being new. The 3's energy lives in the early stage of things: the launch, the pivot, the fresh start. When a strategy requires sustained consistency over time without novelty or visible results to show for it, the 3 starts looking for the next thing.
Strategy fit for a 3 means building in enough forward momentum and visible progress markers to sustain their engagement through the long middle.
Type 4
Type 4 resists strategies that feel generic, templated, or aesthetically incoherent with who they are.
If the framework isn't theirs — if it's borrowed wholesale from someone whose work they don't fully resonate with — the 4 often can't make themselves execute it with any real energy. The work of getting dressed in someone else's clothes.
Strategy fit for a 4 requires genuine customization: not just applying a framework but building from their actual perspective, voice, and way of working.
Type 5
Type 5 implements borrowed strategies slowly and partially. They'll study the strategy extensively, understand it better than most people who use it, and then implement only the pieces they feel sufficiently prepared to execute.
The borrowed strategy fails because the 5's threshold for "ready" is very high, and a strategy built for someone else's competence level and visibility comfort won't account for that.
Strategy fit for a 5 means building in time to get genuinely knowledgeable before showing up publicly, and not requiring a level of visibility that requires more energy than the 5 has available.
Type 6
Type 6 can implement borrowed strategies reasonably well when things are going fine — and catastrophically when they're not.
The 6 will follow the plan until something unexpected happens, at which point the doubt and second-guessing take over. Whose plan was this? Is this actually right for me? What if the person who built this strategy was wrong?
Strategy fit for a 6 means building in enough flexibility and contingency planning that the unexpected doesn't derail the whole system — and enough real understanding of why the strategy works that they can trust it even when it feels shaky.
Type 7
Type 7 borrows strategies with more enthusiasm than almost anyone else — and abandons them more consistently.
The borrowed strategy fails for the 7, not because it's wrong, but because the excitement wears off. By the time compounding would actually start happening, the 7 has found something more interesting to try.
Strategy fit for a 7 means building in novelty and variety within a container that's consistent enough to produce results — variety in the content, flexibility in the method, but clarity on the non-negotiables that don't change.
What Building From Your Own Wiring Looks Like
This doesn't mean you can't learn from other people, study what's working in your field, or borrow elements of approaches that resonate. It means those things stop being the primary input.
The primary input is you.
Before you decide on a marketing platform, the question is: where do you naturally express yourself, and what does visibility that doesn't drain you actually look like? Not where everyone says you should be. Where do you actually want to show up?
Before you structure your offer, the question is: how do you do your best work? Not how does the person you admire do theirs.
How does your specific mind engage with clients, what kind of depth are you naturally drawn to, what does a client relationship feel like when it's genuinely working?
Before you set your pricing, the question is: what is your relationship with your own worth, and what does your type predict about how that relationship will show up in pricing decisions? Because the number you land on will always be downstream of that.
Building from your wiring doesn't mean working only from what comes easily. Some things that are genuinely right for you will still require effort. But there's a different quality to the effort when it's moving you in a direction that actually fits — it has a solidity that borrowed-strategy effort almost never has.
How to Start Diagnosing Your Own Strategy Mismatches
A few questions that can help you locate where the borrowed strategy is showing up:
What strategies have you tried more than once, abandoned, and tried again?
The repetition is a signal. If a strategy keeps not working and you keep returning to it, that's worth looking at — not as a discipline failure but as a possible mismatch.
Where do you spend the most energy for the least result?
Not just time, but the specific kind of effortful pushing that doesn't feel like momentum. Where are you working hard in a way that isn't producing much?
Whose advice are you implementing, and how similar is their Enneagram type to yours?
This isn't a perfect filter. But if you've built your strategy entirely around advice from someone whose type is functionally the opposite of yours in terms of how they relate to visibility, structure, and self-promotion, you're probably in borrowed territory.
What would your strategy look like if you built it from scratch, today, around how you actually work?
Not what you think you're supposed to do. What would actually feel sustainable for more than six weeks?
Final Thoughts
The borrowed strategy problem isn't about bad advice. Most of the strategies circulating in the online business world are genuinely effective — for the people they were built for.
The question isn't whether a strategy is good. It's whether it's right for the specific person running it. And answering that question honestly requires knowing yourself at a level that goes below preferences and past comfort zones into the actual patterns that govern your decisions, your energy, and your resistance.
That's what the Enneagram is for, at its best. Not as a label, not as an excuse, but as a map to the specific place in you where a strategy either lands or quietly gets abandoned.
