Category: Mindset

My sister sets themes rather than New Years resolutions. For example, “Be Open to Change.” She carriers her theme through the year and uses it to guider her choices. This year, I decided to follow her example and pick a theme along with my goals. My theme is: “Excelsior!”

Part of the reason I chose “Excelsior!” was because I realized that there was an abundance of good things in my life. And that’s a problem.

You’ve probably heard these bits of advice:

• “Good is the enemy of great.”
• “What got you here, won’t get you there.”
• “You become successful by saying, ‘Yes.’ You stay successful by saying, ‘No.'”

These oracular maxims all highlight the importance of selection.

Our time, energy, resources, and attention are finite. A key lever in creating an exponential return on these is to be selective and don’t settle for good options.

Last Tuesday, I had a standing meeting in an empty hotel event space. The hotel was an old Elks Lodge that was restored and repurposed, but the walls and ceiling still had their earlier 19th century decorative flourishes and patterns.

I spoke with a consultant and his partner who had built a business providing training to enterprise level clients. The consultant had landed a whale through his public speaking many years prior, and he wanted to figure out how to gain new clients without having to speak at a thousand events? He thought that maybe the solution was search engine optimization.

We had an interesting conversation, but one thing that stood out was a model that I shared with them that I’ve been developing and playing with over the last couple of years:

In a business, there are two vectors of growth:

1. Optimization
2. Innovation

These are like horns on a bull.

How do you discover growth opportunities?

If you intended to look for a change outside of your business to capitalize on and drive growth, how would you approach it?

Innovation has a way of rapidly defusing across the market. There’s a temporal arc from a high value opportunity to a solution that is standardized, commoditized, and filled with competitors.

If you were building websites in 2000, there was a sea of opportunity filled with big fish to catch. If you’re building websites in 2023, there’s a sea of competitors that you’ll have to navigate your boat through to find an empty spot.

There are external growth opportunities beyond innovation or trends, but something that all growth opportunities share is that they require risk taking.

One of the questions rolling around in my head is, “what is enough effort?”

Any given task, objective, goal requires an energy expenditure to realize. That amount of energy is nearly always unknown.

For example, imagine that you want to build leads with a new channel. You saw a video on YouTube that has you all fired up about social media advertising.

How much effort should you put into that?

“I could call the mayor in the middle of the night and he would answer his phone,” a Rotarian friend of mine told me. Then she amended, “…Well, it wouldn’t be me, it would be one of my pastor friends, but they would do it, and the mayor would answer!”

My friend wasn’t boasting, she was just explaining the depth of her network that she’d built over six years volunteering in service to non-violence causes in Portland.

A working theory that I’m playing with is business as service.

The theory goes something like this:

When you create products in service to a market’s needs, it’s easier to grow and especially through word of mouth.

I designed an early year mini-workshop for my Toastmasters Club on achieving goals that we’re providing this Saturday (Your Breakout Year.)

In thinking about possible avenues to promote it, the best tactic would be if we had a large local network on Facebook.

We don’t have that and it would probably take a couple years of low-level sustained effort to build that network.

If someone had started that effort in 2021, the only promotion we would need to do for the workshop would be a post on social media. The cost to replicate the impact of something like that today is high. I.e. it would take a tremendous amount of work to have the same impact.

There are many situations like this in business.

I worked with a coach who told me a story about a researcher he worked with at a technology lab in the 90’s. The Internet was still nascent and file size was critical because of all the 28k modems consumers were dialing in with. There were several new image formats being promoted and the researcher had been awarded a grant to figure out which image compression algorithm was the most efficient.

My coach was an intern at the lab and was surprised to see the researcher wasting his work days playing video games instead of doing research. When he asked the researcher about it, they responded, “I’m letting time do the work.”

Six months later the results were due. By then though, a variety of people across the Internet had publicized tests and data on the available formats and the researcher simply summarized them and did some spot work to fill in the gaps. The researcher recognized that lots of other people cared about the problem and were actively engaged with it. They used that as leverage to avoid doing the work themselves.

A few days ago, I wrote about alternatives to effort to get objectives accomplished. One of the proposed alternatives was time.

Not all effort is equal. Some activities you’ll engage in will create a massive impact with little work on your part. Other activities will require massive investments to achieve little.

As a simple example, when we start a new project we create a project brief that addresses a wide variety of needs. It’s a simple template that takes a holistic view of the work and takes around thirty minutes to complete. But it increases the efficiency of the entire project by getting everyone on the same page for delegating while preventing downstream mistakes. Compare this to the effort involved in micro managing tasks and directing effort.

A couple of years ago I took a self-study course on Jungian psychology through the Jung Society of Washington.  James Hollis was the teacher and in one module he used the metaphor of the brain as an air traffic control center and thoughts as planes circling in the sky.  Reflection was the mechanism that enabled the brain to make sense of all the traffic above the airport and land the planes.

Similarly, I’ve noticed that when an objective isn’t fully understood, it’s hard to make progress and it can stay circling up in the sky indefinitely.

For example, you may need to hire someone to do outbound sales, but you don’t know where to find them, if you can afford them, or what they would do day-to-day.  This plane stays in the sky because “you don’t know where to start.”

Wednesday and Thursday I ran retrospectives on the year for small groups of entrepreneurs. We looked back over 2022 and answered questions about our life and how it’s progressing. I’m someone who is deeply reflective with a pile of journals that stretch back to when I was sixteen. I’ve found though, that reflecting through conversation with others brings different insights forward. I’m going to use today’s blog post to synthesize a couple of insights that emerged for me.

1) Strengths aren’t recognized as valuable or as strengths.

A group of questions that we reviewed was around identifying strengths and weaknesses. In both retrospectives, it was interesting to me to observe that people didn’t fully understand how powerful or positive their differences from others were.

They relied on them, but they would discount or overlook the benefits.

This in turn made me consider that I don’t fully utilize some of my own strengths. E.g. I’m a competent writer and unique idea generation is easy for me. I practice that strength here, in my blog, but I haven’t leveraged it in my business on a consistent basis.