We can't help you until we know what you want. Be clear, upfront and direct about it.
If we can't help you, we might know who can.
But we can't do anything, unless we know how to help.
(And, yes, you know what you want... even if its only the next baby step.)
There are times when the most powerful thing that you can do is subtract. Take away the feature, cancel the meeting, delete 30% of the words. Simplify, shorten, focus.
Subtraction is hard and rare, which is exactly what makes it powerful.
But other times, we need the exact opposite. We need to expand, connect and luxuriate.
Add the anecdote, offer the nice-to-have, inject it with beauty. Be more.
Addition is the default American strategy. When in doubt, its better to subtract.
If you had suggested this to me even two years ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. My ambitions had short time horizons. I tried (often in vain) to push myself through some sort of self-constructed urgency.
But the thing is, the best stuff takes time. By definition it has to. We aren't proud of things that come easily to us, we're proud of the things that were hard, the things that we fought for.
Fighting takes time.
Simple, but not easy, takes time. (Here's proof.)
Don't minimize the value of today, but recognize that while we often overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, or even a year... we severely underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.
Before your launch your new thing, step back and identify its biggest weaknesses.
Launching a new career? Evaluate your experience, your network, your resume, etc.
Launching a new business? Evaluate your plan, your market, your offer, your network, etc.
Next, take that weakness and find a way to make it a strength. All it takes is a mindset shift.
Is your product too short for the price point? No -- it's laster focused and a time saver.
Is it too long? It's the definative be-all-end-all resource.
Is your career in the wrong industry? No -- it gives you a unique perspective that helps you identify opportunities. (Come up with a couple right now)
New to town with no network? No -- you've got a huge opportunity to network with other transplants (they all remember being the new guy).
Reimagining your weaknesses as strengths isn't about putting lipstick on a pig. Not at all. Your work must be excellent.
Take a look at the example of the product that is too short or too long: two very different markets would be interested in each of them. Neither one is inherently better, just different.
This exercise is also NOT a way to lie to yourself (or to your customers). Everyone loses in that equation.
Transforming your weaknesses into strengths helps you see power you already have by identifying strengths in yourself and your projects that you didn't know existed.
Top athletes plan for recovery. They work their ass off, build their endurance. Then they taper. They slow down. They recover. They let their bodies recover. Then, and only then, they are poised for the win.
They can't perform at their best until they have rested and recovered.
Neither can you. Plan on it. Plan for it.
Here's the thing, reading this blog is abnormal. Top performer's are abnormal. CEO's are abnormal. Entrepreneurs are abnormal. Olympians are abnormal. Trying to be better is, sadly, abnormal.
You can make the truth less apparent by changing your group of peers, and I highly suggest that you do, but the truth remains.
The fact that you want to do more, to do better and to be excellent is extra-ordinary.
It may sound odd, but accepting the fact that I am different helps me make the inevitable compromises in pursuit of excellence.
You're different. You get to make different choices. This makes you abnormal. And, yes, this is what makes you extra-ordinary.
When I sat down to write this post, my site was down.
It was an easy excuse to slack.
I can’t post — my site is down! There was a chorus in my head — Hey, you don’t have to write! You’re off scot-free!
But the crazy thing is that I wanted to write. I was looking forward to it.
Yet, at the slightest opportunity, the resistance in my mind started singing and doing a tap dance at the opportunity to get out of it. Even if it is an easy, lame excuse.
The way I think about it, easy excuses are big opportunities in disguise. It’s a chance to overcome your resistance when the odds and logic are in your favor. In other words, its a pretty easy battle, a confidence builder.
Don’t succumb to the easy excuse. Just do it.
Psst - If you do give in, don’t despair, we’ve all done it. You’re in good company.
Reading is one of the most important things that I do. I read 100+ books a year. I read 30+ smart articles a day.
That's about 12 million words a year of learning focused reading.
The way I see it, my #1 priority is to go to bed smarter than when I woke up. This is a gem of a phrase that I stole from Charlie Munger and think about everyday.
Learning is a system that I trust. I've seen it pay off in spades -- in my career, in my relationships and in my self-awareness. Big, huge wins.
I know it's my priority. But, just because its clear, doesn't mean it's effortless.
I make the time to read with these five key strategies:
These may or may not be the right strategies for you. But, I assure you, there are strategies that will help you make time.
The best strategies are simple, but they're probably not easy.
Sit down and identify what you need to do to make time. Then do it.
It's my birthday today, so it's only natural that I am thinking about wishes. Take a minute, close your eyes, imagine a birthday candle.
Make a wish.
But, let's be clear, NOW, it's time for the wish-making. Take 10 minutes and write down 10 ideas that could get you a step closer to your wish. Commit to taking one of those steps tomorrow. I have.
Action is what makes the wish. Not the flicker of an idea.
The truth about shortcuts is a lot like the fallacy of effortlessness. They don't exist -- at least, not in the way that they are advertised.
Short cuts absolutely exist, in terms that there are shorter & longer ways to get from point A to point B, but the fast lane to beat all of your competition easily & quickly, there's no such thing.
Shortcuts come from people who have discipline to zoom out and evaluate their market strategically and execute their vision exquisitely. Most people skip this vague and challenging task.
"Overnight successes" are almost always people who have valuable adjacent skills that they developed over the long term. These advantages are often invisible from the outside, but are the basis of quick success.
The seeming unbeatable leadership position came not from any single shortcut or action, but rather through hundreds or thousands of consistent decisions.
All in all, shortcuts come down to three skills
Rather then search for the shortcut, hone these three skills, and you'll come out ahead -- in the short & long term.
Short term changes and long term changes require different things from you. Short term changes do great with pushes: will power, carrots & sticks and even deliberate setups (like removing all junk food from your house).
Pushing is how we see 99% of resolutions and diets setup.
We will it. We push it. We hope that once we get momentum, it'll keep going.
And it works. For the minute.
Pushing is exhausting. Even if you manage to push yourself for a month or a year or even a decade, you aren't going to feel good about your progress and you'll constantly be on guard, fearful of not pushing enough.
If you want long term change that feels good (reflecting over years or decades), it requires something totally different.
Long term change requires a reframe. A totally new way of thinking about the situation and the choices. A way doesn't require you to push.
Perhaps you look at writing as a cathartic expression of your ideas rather than a necessary marketing evil... or you look at exercise as your opportunity to have some alone time with yourself, rather than a daily dose of self-hatred. You get the idea.
Reframes don't make it easy everyday. You may still get resistance, but its a friendlier conversation with yourself, focused on your core wants rather than your fears or hatred.
But perhaps the funniest thing about reframes is that, although they don't seem to move you towards your destination as quickly (because they're less goal centric and more holistic), it's most certainly a case of the tortoise beating the hare.
Most things just aren't that complicated. In fact, most things, get worse when they get complicated.
Running a successful company is much less about doing 5,000 different things, and much, much more about doing 10 key things 5,000 times (0ver & over & over again). It's all about optimizing the system.
The thing is that doing 10 key things 5,000 times takes a totally different skill set than coming up with the 5,000 ideas.
It requires action and determination and consistency. It requires grit and willpower. Honestly, it's less fun than brainstorming!
But that work ethic is where success comes from 99% of the time. It comes from the action, consistently optimized, not the idea.
After all, any action at all -- even stupid action -- trumps any idea, any day.
I fall into the trap just as much as everyone else...I want to think my way out of confusion and uncertainty.
But, by the time you get to the point that you realize that you are confused, thinking isn't going to cut it. It's time for action.
All you need to do to figure it out is the MINIMUM required to move forward (or sideways, or heck, even backwards!)
It might be a good time to ask my question for making hard decisions.
Action looks like a lot of things. It might be calling a trusted advisor or finding a YouTube tutorial or doing a small test... or saying screw it, let's go big, now! What your action looks like isn't important.
Action begets clarity, all you need to do is start moving.
There are three ways for a business to make more money:
The most successful businesses have found two ways to win big. They can put all their resources in one of those three buckets and hit one out of the park... or they can make modest gains in all three, for exponential total growth.
Both work. One is a lot less risky.
Where are you going to focus?
The purpose of education is to spark and sate curiosity. On repeat. This is how we get self motivated and directed students.
This is how we develop humans who can pivot and succeed in our world, where the rate of change only increases.
It's not how we learned in school, but it's how we need to educate ourselves.
Note, that the sparking is just as important as the sating.
I'm all about focusing on big wins. I often get feedback that I am be so big win focused, that I let the little stuff slide. Yesterday, I got a stark reminder why that that doesn't always cut it.
I was touring a recently renovated house. When I opened up one of the cabinets, the door wouldn't close properly, it wasn't installed or aligned quite right.
That was the end of my tour, the house was vetoed. All because I lost trust in the builder.
Clearly, they only cared about making it look good from the outside, not quality, functionality or longevity. I assumed that there were lots of other issues like this, many of them much bigger and more ominous.
Even though the functioning cabinet would be a quick and easy fix that really didn't change the home's value, the fact that it advertised that they didn't care was enough for me to walk away without regret.
Your customers do this too.
Where are you losing people due to the little things?
Absorbing ideas is key to growth. Read. Talk. Expand. But, Idea absorption isn't enough!
Despite what schools tries to teach you, parroting and paraphrasing ideas doesn't cultivate excellence.
Absorbing the idea and then thinking about it: what you agree with, what you disagree with and what it connects to in your web of ideas.
Change the idea and make it your own.
This is why the margins of your books should be marked, the pages of your notebooks, full. Curiosity, not submission, cultivates learning.
Ideas aren't worth anything... until you make them your own.
There are many reasons why you might be bad at something. One of them is that the thing is a weakness. You're just destined to suck at it. But, we are way too quick to label something that didn't go well as a weakness.
There is a huge gulf between weakness and lack of skill development. Unless you've put in the hours, you have no idea if the thing is a weakness or simply a lack of practice.
Another gulf exists between the thing itself and all of the adjacent skills that complicate it. It's rare that we get to test any single skill on its own merit.
Maybe you're a great artist, but have a weakness in sales... leading you not to make sales (even though you really are good at art!)
Or maybe, you're a great artist, but haven't developed your sales skills yet... (also not making sales, also good at art... and with the potential to make lots of sales, with some hard work!)
Just because you don't knock the first ball out of the park hardly means that you have a weakness. Don't let a lack of skill development or the adjacent skills, which often invisible, cloud your judgement of yourself.
What you label yourself counts for a lot.
A manager's responsibilities can all be broken down into these categories:
As will all systems, your system is only as strong as your weakest link.
This doesn't mean that you need to turn your weakness into a strength, but rather that you need to make your weakness a solvable problem.
There is considerable debate over whether you should focus your energy on mitigating weaknesses or improving your strengths. Let's look at one example. You're an amazing designer who is horrible at writing and sales.
On one hand, you can mitigate your issues: take a class on writing effective emails and attend a sales training. Now, you are okay at writing & selling. Your ability to attract clients has probably doubled! This is a big win.
On the other hand, you can make your weakness a solvable problem. You can hire someone to do your sales and translate your words into effective communication. Your ability to attract clients has probably 10x'ed. This is a crazy huge win.
A third option (I am out of hands!), you could work for a agency where selling isn't part of your job and communication is largely handled by someone else. Another win!
Moral of the story: mitigating key weaknesses can lead to big wins, but the exponential wins come from framing your weakness as a solvable problem -- and then taking the steps to take it off your plate.