Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
There are a few times the magic disappears.
It often disappears when a robot can do it.
It disappears when it’s too manufactured.
It disappears when you use a human without humanity.
It disappears when it’s shared with the wrong person.
And, most of all, it disappears when your heart wasn’t in it.
Stay Positive & It’s Never Too Late For A Gut Check
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It doesn’t get owned in a day.
Nor does it get owned when you put your name on it.
It’s not owned when someone else signs off on it or when the certificate comes in the mail.
You own it when you’ve “owned it” again and again and again.
You’ve owned it when no one can say that someone else might own it.
When you think about it, it’s quiet rare for someone to truly own something.
But when they do, you remember them.
Stay Positive & Usain, Elon, Michael, Sam, Stephen, Banksy, Seth, Tim
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You’re doing important work even if you don’t see it. Because what’s important is the doing part.
Yet, regardless of the work we’re doing, we’re going to run into sunk costs. Those pesky things we called investments at the time that we can no longer get back.
It’s those nonrefundable purchases or those items we bought but never used or the things that we got but then ignored for something else.
Thinking back to what can be a sunk cost doesn’t help us make educated decisions about the future, though.
If you were to get tickets for a concert that you couldn’t refund or trade then your friends invited you over for game night, either decision costs you what the tickets cost.
In that scenario, thinking about monetizing each experience doesn’t help you because they both cost the same, but you can think forward to which you will have more fun doing.
Consider the business decision of signing a contract for a social listening tool that tracks media coverage of your business and sends you a daily digest, but instead of reading the digest you spend 20 minutes per day training your team on building relationships with the media.
Both actions cost the same as what you paid for the contract, but what matters is the future outcome of where you spend your time.
We call them sunk costs for a reason. They’re sunk. Let someone else waste their time in exploring the things left behind, and if they don’t realize that you left them because you had a better investment, so be it.
What’s more is the emotional equivalent of sunk costs: emotional waste.
Too often we wrestle quantifying all the time, energy and emotion we’ve put into something. We have identified with it and made it part of the story we tell others about ourselves.
It’s tough to leave behind, but, like sunk costs, what’s important is that we make the choice to pivot toward something that puts us in a direction of happier or greater impact.
Regardless of the decision we make, the emotional waste is the same. What matters is what we do going forward.
Stay Positive & Onward To Better
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It’s likely there are people who are advocating for a change that will impact your industry.
Those who wanted to save trees, advocated for the death of the newspaper. At the time, outlets thought it would do them over if they had to use less paper or if the price for it increased.
Or consider child-labor laws.
Businesses thought they would have to close their doors if they could no longer have children working in their factory. Certainly they couldn’t survive without the cheap labor.
During those pivotal shifts, there were companies that fought the impact, spent millions (billions?) to prove why sticking to what they were doing was the best way forward.
Then there were other companies who embraced the impact to their industry. Who pivoted. Who acknowledged the need to change and improve.
The challenge is to remain in a long-term thinking position.
Turns out, the companies who threw a fit were the ones that wanted the shortcut, short-term profit and who were short-wired to ignore ethics.
Change might be a threat for every sort of business, but the long-term thinking ones tend to handle it better.
Knowing you might not be a business owner yourself, it’s worth spending a few minutes reading about brands that you’re supporting. It might change things for you.
And, again, change might be a threat, but if you can focus on the long-term impact of your purchasing decisions, you’re sure to handle it better.
This post was inspired by KOHANA cold brew coffee. A coffee worth sharing as much as their story.
Stay Positive & Ready For The Long Haul?
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The key to letting things go is to bring them to the surface.
That’s why every recovery process begins with awareness.
When we keep things deep or when we layer distractions in front of them, they’ll stay with us.
Bringing them to the surface might be rough, it might draw a few tears, but it’s the only way you can either begin to embrace or let go (truly let go).
Stay Positive & Whenever You’re Ready
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The problem with racing to have the lowest price is that you might win.
Same with speed.
There is a limit to how low you can go and a wall with how fast.
Quality, however, still has a say in things, and quality can shine in a variety of ways.
It can be the quality of the product or the space or the community or the interactions or the online ordering system or all of these combined that make your brand remarkable.
If you’re starting a new business or taking a leadership role in an ongoing one, please don’t be distracted by lowering prices or increasing speed.
No customer or potential customer actually wants you to win at either.
And if they do, it’s because they don’t know about the sacrifices you will have to make to get there.
Stay Positive & More Quality Please
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You’ll learn more about your student’s parents by meeting them for a quick lunch than you will at a parent teacher conference.
You’ll learn more about running a business by going to lunch with someone who has run a few than by listening to a podcast.
Information alone is sort of helpful, but doesn’t often inspire enough action.
Information paired with connection and emotion and community and trust and a personal bond built with another is much more likely to lead to action.
And action is what we need.
Stay Positive & Lunch Can Be Actual Fuel If We Choose
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