GarthBox

There’s a preconceived notion that leverage is something you find.

Look hard enough. Talk to enough people. Dig far enough and you’ll find leverage.

But what if you thought of leverage as something you create.

All it takes is to add some more wood to the end of the existing pole and you can lift the world.

Seems a bit easier than searching for a different tool to leverage, doesn’t it?

Stay Positive & What Can You Build For Others To Leverage?

When you buy an editor’s time, you’re actually buying assurance.

When you pay for the chatGPT subscription, you’re buying a shortcut. (Said positively this time.)

When you’re buying a ticket for an international trip, you’re buying a story to tell your neighbors when you get back.

I recently evaluated a SaaS company and after a lot of digging found one deck with a few slides that actually answered what their target customer was buying: a career booster.

I don’t think the answer to the question of what you’re really buying requires as much vulnerability as the desire to answer it because once you know how the magic trick is done; the trick sort of loses it’s magic.

Or does it?

Stay Positive & Get To The Why (The Real Why)

You can drop off a platter of tacos at a table.

You can hand over the creative brief to the department.

You can send an email to your team.

The content itself is important to get right, but you’re evaluated by so much more.

You have a chance to hand over energy and emotion with every interaction.

You can drop off an experience that makes the table feel like they are being treated like royalty.

You can hand over a brief and ensure your excitement of the work that’s upcoming is inspiring and invigorating – so much so that it’s contagious to the team in that moment; your energy actually makes them want to read the brief.

And that email? Well, Claude can help you come up with a hundred ways to sign off in a way that delivers both emotion and vulnerability.

Stay Positive & You’re Actually Giving More Than You Think Your Giving (But You Can Make It Intentional)

If the boss was here, how would you act?

What about your kid? Or your neighbor? or your idol?

I like to sum them all up: If future you were here, would they be proud?

Sometimes to look beyond is to look within.

Stay Positive & Future You Thanks You

If you could invite a collaborator with you on your upcoming project, who would you invite?

If you could get an extra revenue bump to make an investment next quarter, what would you invest in?

If you could hire an exceptional team member, what would they do differently than the team today?

Now that you have answers, it’s a pretty short jump to…

Why not invite them?

Why not take a loan to make that investment?

Why not retrain/inspire your current team to do that?

We don’t have to wait for good things in life to happen; we can produce them ourselves… If we could just imagine first.

Stay Positive & If You Could Come Up With More Examples…

I couldn’t begin to tell you the number of projects I’ve worked with CMOs or CEOs on that died because either they moved on or I moved on.

They were really impactful ideas. Meaningful creations. Community building efforts.

They were concepts built for the long-haul. And quite frankly, they were ideas that you can truly wake up giving a damn about.

(Sorry if it spoils it for you, but I don’t wake up with insane passion about a Google Adword.)

And it’s these very ideas that I’ve felt have held me back in my career because I ignored a reality of applying time constraints.

I knew the average time span of an executive at an organization is 3 years. Thus, it would have behooved me (as it does now) to have worked those ideas under the scope of what’s achievable in that time frame.

And believe it or not, since doing that, I feel I’ve actually made greater impact with those ideas that if I had designed them to be longer-term executions.

If you want to write a book, it might be worth defining what “in your time” looks like for it. Is your deadline before having kids? Before money runs out? Before?

If you want to take on a new client for your consulting business, it might be worth defining what “in your time” looks like for it. Will you work with them only until you hit 400k in revenue for the year? Will you do it until one of your clients asks you to become an FTE?

An exercise in time restraints is an exercise worth doing, especially if the idea you have to execute is also worth doing.

Stay Positive & Don’t Let Good Ideas Die Because Of Time (You Can Control That)

It doesn’t pay to invest in someone to help you develop a budget. The main reason? A budget is meant to be done again and again and again. Revisited. Edited. Updated with life and goals. It actually pays more to get good at it yourself.

Doing the flower arrangement for your wedding yourself? It’s simply not worth it. (Okay exception being if you actually LOVE flower arrangements and can already tell me you know the difference between buttercups, spearworts and water crowfoots in the Ranuculus family…)

I had to go through this analysis recently regarding editing a novel. I’ll probably write another one or two in my lifetime but it will be awhile before I would even get to editing it again. Editing a novel, specifically, is an incredible skill. It’s one – after trying to do it myself, and doing meh – that fits in the “only once” category for me… meaning, I’ve hired a professional.

Visiting Thessaloniki once? Hire a guide. Crafting a newsletter for your business? Do it yourself.

Where to draw the line is pretty clear. It’s the drawing it part that takes guts.

Stay Positive & Know When To Invest