BHS #3: When Your Ambitions Outweigh Your Capacity
⚡️ Today’s level up ⚡️
Today’s edition is designed to give you tools when you feel you’re capable of more, but you don’t quite have the capacity to bring it to life.
Let’s go!
Read time: <5 minutes
This is edition #3 of the Behind-the-Scenes Breakdown of The Purposeful Performer, my productized service offering for 2025.
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You think big, but feel small
I have a recurring fantasy, which I’ve had for many years.
It involves the ability to hit a “stop time” button so that the world stops and I can “catch up” on all of the ideas in my head. It’s kind of a weird thought when I know I have enough right in front of me, but still, I dream of a scenario where I can finally catch up to my ambitions.
Perhaps you feel this way too sometimes?
As I laid out last week, we’re in the midst of a major transition to a new era. Some are optimistic and bullish on this future, while others are a bit more cautious. But what is certain is we’re going to be witness to changes that will move faster than we’ve ever experienced in our lifetime.
While this is thrilling, it can also be intimidating (or outright frightening) without the right personal operating system in place to:
- Make sense of it all
- Gain control
- Build leverage
As I also pointed out, the same resources that existed before, will be the same ones we’ll have to contend with in the new era. These are:
- Time
- Energy
- Attention
- Money
As you can see, this creates a nice little acronym, TEAM, and that’s certainly the way you want to think about these resources (as your team to support you) as you commit to operating the best you can in elevating your craft and designing the life you want for yourself and those you care about.
I’ll come back to these resources and a helpful framework in a bit, but first, I want to share what’s possible when you get this right.
The time is now for the strategic seller
This week, I’ve read posts on LinkedIn from sellers turned entrepreneurs who are now giving back to the industry that made them who they are.
This is something I call The Purposeful Economy, and those in sales, particularly those exposed to transformative tech and understanding how big businesses work are leading it.
Here’s Scott Leese talking about it.
Here’s Marcus Chan talking about it.
Here’s Dale Dupree talking about it.
All of them run a 7-figure annual business they own. All of them come from a background in sales. All of them are living their lives based on rules they have determined most important to them, not the rules ingrained in them as they were coming up through their sales career. And most importantly, all of them are benefiting from this new way of life now…not at the typical retirement age (when it would be too late).
This is the future I want for you.
It’s hard to build a life of autonomy around “hacks”
This week, I was also fortunate to have Luke Floyd as a special guest on Make More Hustle Less Club to talk to us about the four truths around his personal operating system called IGST.
Luke is actively on this path to freedom using his current role as an Enterprise AE and being guided by IGST. The key to his success to make his plan a reality is the order in which he operates:
- Embodies his intentions.
- Clarifies his goals.
- Selects his strategies.
- Defines his tactics.
If you want a breakdown of how all of this works, I recommend you pick up his book.
The point of all of this is that I see a worrisome trend amongst some sellers as we collide up against this new Intelligence Era with rising expectations inside businesses and a barrage of things competing for your time, energy, attention, and money.
Without being purposeful with your performance, it’s easy to get swept up by it all and simply give up your control to people or things that don’t have your best interests in mind. I encourage you to push back on this urge.
As Scott, Marcus, Dale, Luke, and I have all discovered, it’s not going to be the tactics or “hacks” peddled on LinkedIn that get you ahead. It won’t be blindly following the blueprint your Sales Ops hands you during onboarding at your new role. It won’t be Open AI, or your government, or society that will save you.
It’s up to you my friend.
But luckily, you aren’t alone on this journey.
Think like a designer
Back to thinking big, but feeling small.
Instead of getting frustrated that you don’t have enough, I encourage you to think differently. Think like a designer. Everyone I mention here, and the many more faces that occupy your LinkedIn feed who have leveraged their sales career to create a life on their terms, they too were designers.
Because having ideas and ambitions is easy. But acting on them and bringing them to life is the hard part. When you feel the weight of your ambitions increasing but your capacity to deal with them shrinking (either in time, energy, attention, or money), use this as a cue to act…even if it’s tiny.
The goal is not to get lost in your thoughts driven by your ambitions, but to take small actions towards them. I think of this action as therapy against “the burden of my ideas.” It’s why I have strategic blocks on my calendar to keep me on track and make this easier.
I came across this visual this week thanks to visual.link, and it reminds me of the daily challenge before us. To gain true balance, we need to think more in terms of work/life/play integration. Embrace cycles. Use systems. Hopefully this visual helps keep things in perspective as you encounter this mental tug-of-war.
It allows you to “deflate” some of your ambitions by taking action on them while empowering you to grow your capacity by applying your time, energy, attention, or money toward a better version of you.
See you next week!
P.S. How I will help you in 2025
For the past four years, I have poured my heart into elevating my craft as a writer. Specifically, writing that inspires, helps, and develops others. This weekly newsletter has been the manifestation of that writing where I can deliver long-term ideas, breakdowns, and guides that compliment the daily posts I share on LinkedIn.
I have doubled down on writing as the medium in which I will transfer knowledge with the goal of coaching you up to a new standard so that you can join us on this prestigious list of individuals who have transformed their sales career into a vehicle that enables full autonomy in your life.
This newsletter, in its current incarnation, will be going away. It will be replaced by a foundational product called The Purposeful Performer. For the remainder of this year, I’ll share more details on what it is, who it’s for, why I built it, how it will help you, and what you need to do to join the movement.
Can’t wait!