We’re all asked to “pitch” things every day.

Ourselves – to make new friends, find partners, or to get a job.

Our products to customers.

Our company – to establish relationships, partnerships, or opportunities.

Despite their importance to all aspects of our lives, weak pitches are the most common.

Weak pitches focus on others being the wrong choice, hoping that this will lead to us, our product, or our company looking better.

“Tell us about your burger” should not be answered with “I’ll tell you one thing, we don’t use that pet-grade beef that Company X is using…”

(Even if it’s true)

The pitches I love, the pitches that catch my ear, and the pitches that I have had the most success with – they emphasize how I/we/it are different, without the association or arrogance of “being right.”

“We prioritize grass-fed beef because top-quality ingredients are important to the customers that love our product and to us.”

Additionally, I think confidently stating what you are not, emphasizing difference, not rightness, further strengthens the pitch.

“If you love the Company X burger, ours may come off as less juicy. They make a good burger, but we were willing to trade some of the extra flavor for the characteristics that value.”

I’m not right.

They aren’t wrong.

We’re just different.

By not needing to downplay others, it shows a level of confidence and identity that few possess.

It becomes a strong pitch in a world filled with weak ones.

Not right or wrong, just different.

Three chefs following the same recipe.

Three chefs using the same ingredients.

Three chefs using the same implements and appliances.

The master chef, creator of the recipe.

The home chef that has cooked the dish weekly for a year.

The first-timer who just downloaded the recipe. 

Do the dishes taste the same?

Are they worth the same amount?

Why?

It is estimated that 360.4 billion emails are sent every day.

It is estimated that 18% of them are opened.

55,152,000,000 emails opened each day.

If 1% of them include the phrase “I hope you are well,” then it is one of 551,520,000.

Five hundred fifty-one million “I hope you are wells” each day.

If it takes the average person 1 second to process those words, then:

Nine million one hundred ninety-two thousand minutes are spent each day doing so.

(That’s 153,200 hours.)

The average U.S. worker is paid approximately $28 at the time of this post.

OECD data gives a developed world rate of around $20 an hour.

At the U.S. rate, it costs $2,177,738.00 each day for everyone to process, “I hope you are well.”

At the developed world rate, over 1.5 million dollars a day.

Even at a rate of $5, it costs us $383,000 a day.

I hope it’s worth it.

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm

https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm

Poor leaders focus on compliance when they should focus on inspiration.

Leading with a focus on compliance is a recipe for mediocre performance.

And headaches.

Have any champions raised the trophy and sung the praises of the compliance of the organization?

No. We hear about vision, passion, compassion, focus, intensity.

Trophies are not raised by the compliance focused. 

Yet, compliance tempts leaders with the immediacy of the result and the clarity of the definition.

The feeling of power.

Control, albeit temporarily.

At what cost?

Diminishing returns on action/reaction cycles. 

Short-term focus emerging as the norm.

Compliance can emerge as a byproduct of inspiration.

But inspiration will never emerge as a byproduct of compliance.

It was fascinating to watch my wife and her friends study for (and pass!) their Certified Sommelier exam.

It also highlighted to me just how wrong I was about how wine experts go about identifying wine.

We see the wine snobs in movies take one sniff of wine and rattle off the vintage, producer, and varietal.

To an outsider, they appear to be some magical wine savant.

They aren’t.

They figure out what a glass of wine is by figuring out what it is not.

It’s a framework, similar to the game of 20 questions, where they take identifiable characteristics and check them against knowledge, leveraging experience and deduction to increase their chances of a successful outcome.

Visual clues help to eliminate certain regions.

Aromas eliminate others, tightening the geographic focus.

Tasting notes eliminate particular grapes while signaling the presence of others.

The list of options for what the wine is becomes more limited.

The hunter can now search for specific characteristics that narrow the search.

The sweetness. The acidity.

Each note, each observation being used to narrow down the options, increasing the odds of success by eliminating others.

They didn’t know it was a Merlot blend from the Bordeaux region at the first sip.

They figured all the things it likely wasn’t to figure out what it was.

If we are struggling to figure out what something is, sometimes the best route is to figure out what it is not.

Prior experiences and lessons serve as waypoints, each one increasing the odds that when we make that final declaration, we will be right.

Easy sale

The customer can articulate a problem that they do not have a solution for

“I wish I could just hire someone to mow my lawn.”

Easy sale

The customer has a solution in place, but they are unhappy with how it performs.

“I pay this guy to mow my lawn, but he doesn’t do that good of a job.”

Easy sale

The customer has a solution in place but needs a lower-cost solution.

“I pay this guy to mow my lawn, and he does a great job, but I need to save money for my vacation. I wish I could find someone as good for less money.”

Hard sale

The customer does not even know that the problem your product or service solves exists. 

In this scenario, as the salesperson, you have to do two things.

First, convince them the problem exists.

Second, convince them that you are the best solution to this problem. 

Hard sales are exponentially more difficult than easy sales. 

Assuming a 10% conversion rate, for every 100 people you talk to, you will get 10 to acknowledge the problem exists, then only 1 of those 10 to become a customer. 

Many tasks that previously required either a significant amount of expertise or experience can now be performed successfully by people with only two skills.

Resourcefulness and the ability to follow directions. 

Using nothing but Youtube, I’ve been able to do tasks that I would otherwise hire an expert to do.

Strange error message on my computer? Dealer overcharging me to change an air filter?

There’s a video for that. 

I’ll just do it myself!

Me, Youtube, and the ability to follow directions. 

But it’s crtical to understand the great divide between these level 0 tasks and others.

Level 0 tasks ONLY require these two things – resourcefulness and the ability to follow directions.

Level 1 tasks (and beyond) require resourcefulness and the ability to follow directions – and something else.

And that something else makes all the difference in the world. 

It may be expertise. It may be judgement. It may be preparation or training. 

But resourcefulness and the ability to follow directions are not enough to complete these tasks.

That feeling of completing a level 0 task is such a rush. 

An addicting rush that rewards you with false confidence.

And the line between level 0 and level 1 tasks becomes fuzzy.

Hubris tinted goggles leading you to believe that EVERY task is level 0

And then you find yourself in the ring with Mike Tyson as you Google “how do I box?”

This entire post was inspired by a passing comment made during this episode of “The Tim Ferris Show” w/ Josh Waitzkin

“Put two Advil and a Gatorade by the bed. It’s sober-you doing a favor for drunk-you.”

This quip was the cloud parting wisdom being bestowed upon me by an “elder” who was maybe three years older than me.

My early twenties. That fun, terrible combo of wanting to party like I was an undergrad but hold down a real job. 

Hangovers were both more painful and frequent than ever before.

While the obvious answer was not to go out drinking when I had to be up early for work, advice so sensical was not yet welcome.

The sagelike wisdom worked incredibly well.

Drunk-me would stumble in and have the Advil and Gatorade waiting for me by the bed. Even in a stupor, it was pretty easy to follow the directions I had laid out for myself.

It also worked wonders for my ability to crawl out of bed and function the next morning.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized that this same thinking could yield exponential returns in all aspects of my life.

Always do favors for your future self. 

I’ve written about the net present value of decisions and focusing on long-term value.

I’ve written about how much fulfillment and joy we get from the act of giving.

Doing favors for yourself simply combines the two.

You aren’t going to the gym today because you want to.

You are going to the gym so you can be a mobile grandparent. 

Doing favors for yourself is not only preventing future regret but also maximizing future happiness. It’s putting things in motion today that yield exponential returns in the future.

And you are the sole beneficiary. 

Suppose you continuously think about future-me and frequently do favors for future-me.

You are setting future-me up for levels of health, wealth, and happiness that may otherwise seem unattainable.

And you will have no one to thank – but yourself. 

Your inspiration album is useless without context. 

Homebuilders and interior designers know this.

Clients will send a picture or upload an album with comments like “we love this.”

This interaction does more harm than good.

Why?

It’s not specific enough.

The client may be “in love” with the color scheme in the photo they share. 

That’s what they see. Their distorted view fixated on a single element.

But others don’t see it.

Not without direction.

The builder may look at the picture and identify a style of window. 

The interior designer may think they adore the lighting. 

“We love this” is not enough detail. 

These assumptive flaws happen every single day in the business world as well.

Just yesterday, a potential client told me they were looking for someone who can provide “strategic value.” My kneejerk response was to say, “that’s us, we provide strategic value, there is a fit between us!”. 

But I was wrong.

Instead, ask “when you say strategic value, what do you mean?”

In this case, they meant a deep pocketbook to fund growth. To me, strategic value means operational improvements, strategic horsepower, and wisdom from a board of directors that has “been there, done that.”

We saw different things in the same photo.

When you share the photo, tell your team where to focus.

When you use the jargon, tell your team what it means to you.

Establishing the right norms as a leader delivers the greatest return on your time.

Norms are not training videos, policies, or signs hanging up around the workplace.

Norms are established by action. By real-world testing.

Inexperienced leaders think that they may be establishing norms by delivering a message in a team meeting. 

But that message is barely step number one in the establishment of norms.

You can announce an attendance policy.

You can print the policy and hang it on the wall for all to see.

But the norm is not established until the rule is tested.

When the best salesperson on the team violates the policy, even by the tiniest of margins, how do you react?

Do you establish a norm that being a little bit late is okay?

Do you establish a norm that top performers are allowed to be late?

Employees seek waypoints.

Actions, not words, define these waypoints.

The alignment of your words and your actions will be tested.

Constantly.

Inspired by some of the notes I took when reading Monday Morning Leadership