Let’s Get This Money
I’m re-reading “The Go-Giver” by Bob Burg and John David Mann, and I’m enjoying it even more than the first time, because now I can really relax and let the words sink in (as opposed to having my inner go-getter reactively interrupt my focus) because I know where the story is going, and I like where it’s headed.
One excerpt that glimmered when I re-read it, and I immediately knew I was going to write a post about it:
“You can’t go in two directions at once. Trying to be successful with making money as your goal is like trying to travel a super highway at 70 mph with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror”
I think this lesson works even if you replace “making money” with “getting [reward]” where the reward is accolades/recognition/status/attention/praise/etc.
I think any reward (e.g. winning a championship) is a by-product of the underlying process (e.g. focusing on details in practice, finishing your reps, helping your teammates with their technique, etc.). Reward is at best a proxy. Focusing on improving it without focusing on improving the underlying process and structure is a bit like trying to increase R^2 on the validation/test split when the underlying process is causal or trying to minimize real-world variance because it looks like model uncertainty.
The Go-Giver’s Law of Compensation states that your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. As I’ve learned in Rob Snyder’s “The Power of PULL”, understanding demand and designing your supply to fit it happens one real person at a time. This is how you balance scale (how many people you serve) and quality (how well you serve them). Talking to that real person and unblocking their project while hyperfocusing on scaling enough to make a lot of money is the operational expression of the Go-Giver’s superhighway analogy.
A final note on service: financial responsibilities continue to burden us as the cost of living increases every year, so I’m justified in worrying about prioritizing income. One lesson I learned many years ago was that when I’m consumed by my problems and it’s all I can think about and I start feeling sorry about myself, I should go spend some time helping someone else. That gets my mind off of my stress and gives me the experience of service. Ultimately that gently gets me back on track towards the “stratospheric success” that Burg and Mann speak of.