Champion racehorses can win up to a few million dollars in purse money if they’re the first to cross the finish lines.
Not bad for two minutes of work.
However, the real payday, horse owners say, comes from breeding. Stud fees, to borrow a term from the animal kingdom. Derby winners, for example, can often expect to double, triple and sometimes even quadruple their value as breeding stallions. Thanks to the positioning, publicity and prestige of crossing that coveted finish line first, they’ve now earned the right to command higher prices.
And so, winning the race is only the beginning. It’s the skeleton key that unlocks the door to future income opportunities.
But you’re not a horse, of course. The question is, what race do you need to win to boost your stud fees? What public, prestigious achievement will afford you the ability to raise your rates?
Because talent is talent. Value is value. Whether you’re human or equine, the goal is always to do things in the marketplace that earn you the right to charge more for your next appearance.
I was reading an article about stud fee stabilization in the thoroughbred market, and the author explained that stud fees were determined by a variety of factors, including racetrack performance, breeder demand, global economic conditions and level of competition level in the market.
And yet, the one commonality among all breeders was the same.
No breeder wants to own an unproven horse.
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What opportunity will allow you to command higher stud fees than before?
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Transform ambition into activity
The recent onslaught of research on how ambition is an important character trait and predictor of positive life outcomes bothers me.
I don’t doubt that having ambition makes you happier. I don’t deny that it’s a prerequisite for success. And I don’t dismiss research that shows people with ambitious goals tend to be more satisfied than those with lower expectations.
But we do ourselves a disservice when we believe that ambition alone is enough to achieve success. It’s not. Ambition is merely the fuel.
Whyte writes in his book of consolations that ambition is frozen desire. That it takes us toward the horizon, but not over it. And if we are to emancipate ourselves into the next great pattern of existence, ambition alone won’t cut it. We must direct the beam of ambition, putting real ground under our feet, and step out into a larger gravitational field of experience.
Consider this. The word ambition literally means, eager or inordinate desire. Perhaps the real challenge is transforming ambition into activity. Hell, I’ve wanted to make a movie since I was a kid. That ambition, that fuel, was always inside of me.
But it wasn’t real until I finally sat down and started storyboarding the different scenes. I didn’t quite know what I was creating at the time, but that wasn’t the point. All that mattered was that ambition was becoming activity. Idea was becoming execution. I even took a picture to make it public, so as to reinforce my commitment through the power of social pressure.
And sure enough, six months later, the movie was release. Wilde was right when he said that ambition was the last refuge of failure. If it’s not channeled into activity, it’s just a pipe dream.
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Is your work as good as your ambition to do it?
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Trust nobody who tells how your story goes
Here’s a list of things I believe.
Feedback is useless, failure is overrated, authenticity is pretentious, teamwork is wasteful, balance is bullshit, ambition is insufficient, competition is stupid, effectiveness is relative, quality is unnecessary and planning is pointless.
These aren’t exactly popular opinions, but I still believe them, and I have zero feelings of guilt or fear or shame around them. Because I give myself permission not to buy into mainstream thinking. I allow myself not to march in lockstep with pop culture.
Besides, there’s no such thing as a thought police or a believing committee or some other sanctioning body whose job it is to assign me a demerit for holding contrarian beliefs. And so, every time I share them, I feel profoundly liberated.
I challenge you to try this thought experiment. Search inside yourself for an opinion that you’ve found to be true, one that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, one that challenges the widely accepted worldview of the masses, but one that you’ve always too apprehensive to share. Set aside whatever polite and politically correct inhibitions you might have, and just start sharing it.
Watch people’s eyes twitch and sphincters tighten when that opinion lands. Begin riding the sweet waves of that rocking boat, and see how you feel. Odds are, you’ll become addicted to this drug known as radical honesty. And you’ll start sharing those opinions more often.
Remember, opinions are the only thing people pay for. Have them.
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Are you brave enough to turn the prevailing point of view on its head and announce to the world that there’s more than one way to view reality? LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
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Let the good things linger while they can
Success bubbles to the surface several emotions.
Initially, you feel elated and confident and proud of your abilities. You smile to yourself and think, good for me.Way to go. Because you get this vision of all the hard work you put in, knowing that it finally paid off. Hell yes.
But shortly thereafter, you also start to feel powerful and vindicated and satisfied. You smile to the world and think, everyone can kiss my ass.Take that. Because you get another vision of all the dissenters who stood in your way, knowing that you succeeded despite people’s doubts and rejections and oppositions and misunderstandings about the work you do. Another hell yes.
It’s a delicious emotional cocktail, and there’s no shame in drinking every last drop. After all, you’ve earned it. And it won’t last forever. So for now, relish it. Reward yourself. Let the good things linger while they can. And when it’s time to get back to work, go out there and earn it again.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…What different emotions arise when you achieve success?
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Wherever it hurts, send your breath there
Our emotions are actually something that want to move through you. They don’t want to stay, they don’t want to be controlled, they don’t want to be part of your body, they actually want to move out.
And if you welcome them instead of resist them, they move out. They go away. But if you suppress negative emotions, rather than accepting and appreciating them, they can paradoxically backfire and increase feelings of distress.
It’s like getting a foot cramp in the middle of yoga class. One option is to jerk out of the posture and collapse to the ground and grab your foot and start rubbing the cramp until it goes away. But that reaction often creates more stress than it’s worth and takes twice as long.
The other option, one that you learn after a few years of practicing, is to simply notice the cramp, name it for what it is, send your breath to where it hurts and ride it out. Doing so is surprisingly relaxing, satisfying and takes a fraction of the time.
And so it with our emotions. Once we start practicing healthy affect labeling, which is attaching words to feelings, we domesticate our emotions, instead of pretend they don’t exist.
One strategy I find helpful is to keep a handy cheat sheet on my desk that lists about a hundred different emotions, ranging from defensive to shocked to trapped. That way, any time I need to feel my feelings, I simply grab the list, find the label that best describes my current state, accept it, and then get back to work.
It’s done wonders for the sharpening and deepening of my emotional competencies. And it reminds me that emotions come and go like guests who come to visit. Some are welcome and we’re delighted to see them, others, not so much.
But either way, it’s this process emotional development offers the greatest degree of leverage in attaining my full potential.
Wherever it hurts send your breath there.
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How are you mindfully ridding the ebbing and flowing tides of your rich emotional life?LET ME SUGGEST THIS…
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When talent dissipates into a daily task
Most skills are sellable, but only if you want to sell them.
That’s the challenge of diversifying your career portfolio. It’s mainly a matter of permission. Allowing yourself to capitalize on something undernurtured. Letting yourself bring a quiet talent to the forefront of your career and truly owning it as a critical piece of your professional value.
It’s a scary proposition. Because you’re worried that the thrill of performing that talent might dissipate once it becomes a daily task. You’re concerned that you’ll become vulnerable to the bastardization of ambition, violating the purity of something that you hold dear in the name of business growth.
And so, it’s not much an enterprise decision as it is an existential dilemma.
Are you sure you’re ready for the world to see you as you really are? Are you truly equipped to handle the risk of taking your talents on the ride they deserve?
If the answer is yes, go for it. Express each of your talents to make a difference in all parts of your life. Find a home for every gift.
If the answer is no, that’s okay. Hold tight. Figure out what kind of inner work you need to do to become ready. And when you’re finally equipped to capitalize on that which is most precious and core to your identity, let her rip.
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Which of your gifts, that you never get the opportunity to employ, are just screaming to be sold?
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Expanding a business beyond its original roots
Innovation isn’t about how big something grows, it’s about how small it starts. That’s how creative people become legends. Because they possess the miraculous ability to expand something beyond its original roots.
The question is, how do they do it? How does a person turn a seed into a forest?
One of my clients is a leading provider of marketing, rating and management software and services to the insurance industry, both for independent agents and insurance carriers. But when they started the business, all they had were a few programmers and crude piece of software installed on clunky desktop computer.
Thirty years later, they’ve grown the company from one product to multiple automation products and services for the entire insurance industry. After I finished speaking at their recent user conference, I asked the president how he did it. What his strategy was for turning his seed into the forest, as it were.
Upfield explained that his company specialized early. They focused on an underserved vertical. And once they had built enough trust and connection and permission with their small but loyal user base, they capitalized on those assets by asking their users what else they needed. What other problems needed solving. What additional products and services they’d love to see next.
After all, customers love to put their fingerprints on the things they love. They’ll tell you how to sell to them. You just have to listen and let them lay track down in front of your train.
As my mentor loves to remind me, don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers. Focus on that, and you’ll expand beyond your original roots.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…If you were your own customer, what would you just love to have from you next?
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Moments of Conception 202: The Energy Scene from The Celestine Prophecy
All creativity begins with the moment of conception.
That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.
Based on my books in The Prolific Series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.
Today’s clip comes from the energy scene in The Celestine Prophecy:
Nobody wants to be friends with a taker. Some people are exhausting to be around. To them,
everything is an emergency, every experience is a trigger for outrage, and
every piece of information is a crisis. They’re poor victims of the passive
injustice around them. And their incessant drama baits you into a life of
worry, and their vortex of chaos devours and swallows your energy every time
you interact with them. They’re like an emotional black hole whose
gravitational pull is futile to resist. Blech.
And yet, there’s no hope trying to scrub our lives clean of energy drainers.
Instead, we ought to focus on improving our own ability to do the opposite. To be someone
who lifts others up. To become known as the one who contributes meaningfully to everyone they encounter.
Energy, after all, is interactional currency. It’s a social gift. And giving it
to people is one of the highest forms of human generosity. But it’s not a
technique. There’s no seven step process for giving energy. It’s simply a
matter of intention and attention. Caring enough about people to observe how
they experience themselves in relation to you. And believing that the world is
ready for the energy you are here to deliver. A friend of mine who runs a
career counseling agency used to say her goal was to add wood to people’s internal fire, not sprinkle water on it. I always
thought that was a perfect way to look at the energy exchange. Allowing both people to reflect heat onto one another like logs
in a fireplace. Does interacting with you
add to people’s life force, or devour and swallow their energy?
Get the idea to
ground zero. Holacracy literature suggests that for an organization, any
tension sensed by anyone anywhere should have a place to go to get rapidly and
reliably processed into some kind of meaningful change. The theory is, if the
company can do something with people’s tension, it becomes energy, not
frustration. Interesting way to manage an organization. In fact, it’s also a
useful strategy for managing the creative process. Because the job of the
artist is to manage our tensions. To metabolize our thoughts and feelings and
emotions into meaningful expressions. That’s the stuff great art is made of.
And so, we need a process for moving those tensions downstream so they can
processed and entrusted into a concrete system. It all starts withground zero,which
is entry point into the creative processing
workflow. Think of it as the loading dock where raw materials enter the
idea factory. It could be a folder or a database or a document or a whiteboard
covered with sticky notes. Whichever tool we choose, the point is to master the
habit of getting our ideas to ground zero. Immediately. Without even thinking.
Because the mind is a terrible office. And we do our brains a disservice
anytime we fail to offload our feelings into the system. That would be like an
organization full of employees with unrealized, unprocessed tensions. The point
is, ideas were never meant to stay that way.It’s not about the seed,
it’s about the tree it grows into, the forest it becomes a part of, the
landscape it belongs to and the new life that flourishes within it. What are your ideas becoming?
Make paying attention to your intuition a priority.Synchronicity is a very real thing. The experience of
two or more events that are meaningfully related is an occurrence that happens
all day, every day, all around the world. But only to people who are looking
for it. Only to people who expect their intuition to be there for them. Because
the reality is, synchronicity it not magic. Mysterious coincidences are not the
work of relativity theory or quantum mechanics or extrasensory perception or
god’s way of being anonymous. Jung himself even said that synchronicity could
not be understood as anything except a phenomenon of energy. And so, what
people are likely experiencing in these glorious moments of rare and perfect
harmony is elevated awareness. Focused intention. Hyperactive listening. Cognitive
bias. Show me someone who makes paying attention to their intuition a priority,
and I’ll show you someone with multiple moments of synchronicity in their daily
life. But show me a person who’s afraid to use their intuition because they
don’t want to have to defend it without logical explanation, and I’ll show you
a person whose life is in disharmony. I experiences synchronous moments on a
daily basis. But only because I expect to. Do you notice
extraordinary beauty all around you?
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What did you learn from this movie clip?
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The freedom of not needing to be right
Stop making people wrong.
As satisfying as it is to firmly latch yourself onto people’s talking points and refuse to let go until you’ve sucked every ounce of energy from them, all it does it leave people feeling diminished, dismissed and discouraged.
Just let it go. Enough parading your own brilliance. Surrender your insatiable need to prove how misinformed other people are.
Because it rarely improves upon the situation. All it does is burn valuable calories and make you look like an asshole.
Think about the last time you walked all over somebody’s point, shot holes in their argument and reduced their opinion to a saggy slice of swiss cheese. Was your correction helpful, or did it simply make them more defensive? Did your interruption improve on the silence, or did it simply make you feel better about yourself?
The reality is, terminal certainty is not a positive character trait. That’s something I’m learning as I get older. The freedom of not needing to be right vastly outweighs the satisfaction of making people wrong.
Nietzsche famously said, you have your way, I have my way, but as for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Imagine how liberating it must feel to live that philosophy. Imagine how productive we could be if we stopped burning calories making people wrong.
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Are you trying to be right or trying to be happy?
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Good will, good practice and good business
We make our world smaller every time we say no.
Which isn’t to say we should agree to every request that comes our way. Certain opportunities simply aren’t worth the risk and effort we would need to put into them. But when it comes to the chance to act like a professional, to do what we do in the way that only we can do it, we should say yes. It’s good will, good practice and good business.
And so, if a client asks us to do something, even if it’s not really our job, but it would help them be more successful, we should do it. If a colleague asks us to volunteer, and we know that we will learn enough through the experience to consider it part of our education, we should do it. If a friend asks for our help, giving us an opportunity to solve a problem in a way that makes them glad they know us, we should do it. If a prospect invites us to showcase our talent, and there’s a high likelihood of converting that trust into income down the road, we should do it.
The key is creating a personal filter. A decision making framework that evaluates the asset value of a potential new opportunity. I recently launched a web based software application that does just that.
Opportunity Junkie allows you to consider the creative, existential, strategic and financial implications of saying yes to a new project, relationship or experience.It’s a reminder that opportunity never stops knocking, we just stop listening. And that feeling fully alive is always on the other side of yes.
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When was the last time you say no to the chance to act like a professional?
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