Courage

Scale down.

Lower your targets.

Take a break.

Build a profitable business.

Hire one person less than what you had planned.

Stop working two hours earlier.

Do not reply to a thread unless you can really add some value.

Set sustainable and humane growth goals.

Tell your colleague to take the rest of the day off.

Focus on a niche, for real.

Reject the invite to an all-hands meeting.

Set some time a part in your calendar to develop relationships.

Keep your opinion for yourself and bring facts to the table.

Think about what is going on.

Look inside and write down how you are feeling.

Withdraw from a recruiting process that does not feel right.

All those things require a lot of courage, simply because almost nobody is doing them. That’s where you can start making your story different.

Connecting the dots

See the opportunities to connect the dots.

A colleague might be working on a project that is related to the work a person in a different department is doing.

Your campaign’s results might be an important learning for those who come after you.

The feature that is ready to be released might be a fantastic opportunity to create new content about your key differentiator.

The outcome of a workshop organised by the management team might be relevant to share with your external partners, so they can also see what your company is about.

The point is that most of the things that are achieved in a business do not end there. They open up new opportunities, they are linked to other initiatives, they can be repurposed in various circumstances. That’s why auditing what is happening at any given time is much more important than pursuing something new.

Not a single way

The world is full with people that define success in a single way.

Nothing bad with that, but the reminder is that success has different shapes, it comes at different times, and it is your responsibility (not theirs) to define how success looks like for you.

Getting far

If you’re a marketer and can only talk to marketers, you are not going to get far.

If you’re a salesman and can only talk to sales folks, you are not going to get far.

If you’re a developer and can only talk to developers, you will still have job security, but you are not going to get far.

If you’re a strategist and can only talk to business people, you are not going to get far.

Build networks instead, inside and outside of your turf. Learn to speak different languages and to talk to different people. Be a mediator and an initiator.

That’s when you are going to get far.

The greatest invention

Ask a historian, “What was mankind’s greatest invention?” Fire? The wheel? The sword? I would argue it’s history itself. History isn’t fact. It’s narrative, one carefully curated and shaped. Under the pen strokes of the right scribe, a villain becomes a hero. A lie becomes the truth.

Foundation, season 1 episode 9

You probably have no interest in writing or controlling history, but you should be invested in managing your own narrative. Who you are, what you stand for, what version of you is in your future, what goals will take you there, what people will you have closeby, what decisions you are making every day.

It’s easy to delegate all of this to others.

Be the right scribe to your very own history.