FREE EXERCISE FROM THE BOOK
Your Insider Trading Guide (9 Questions to Spot Your Hidden Genius)
Business advice is full of guys telling you to build leverage. Build a business, build systems, build something that earns while you sleep, bro.
Cool. What the hell do you build?
That one stumped me for years, and the answer I eventually landed on is now the first thing I teach every client: you figure out what leverage to build by finding the leverage you already have. The thing that's easy for you and hard for other people.
The market pays for what's rare, and there's a simple map for where the rare stuff lives. If something is easy for you and easy for others, it gets outsourced to someone cheaper. If it's hard for you and hard for others, welcome to the most crowded room on earth, and I suspect you already know that room well because high achievers tend to own a timeshare there. The money lives in the third corner: easy for you, hard for others. You get to do the thing all day while other people pay you good money to never have to do it themselves.
You can't see your own easy
Here's the problem. When clients sit down with me, most of them have been sitting on their easy for years without knowing it, because the stuff that comes easiest to us is the stuff we do subconsciously. We file it under "nothing special." And the more extraordinary your ease is, the more ordinary it feels to you. A fish probably has no idea it can breathe underwater until it watches you struggling to.
So the only way to see your easy is to look at your own life from a perspective that isn't yours. When someone works with me, they tell me their story and I connect the dots and hand them their easy on a plate. Spotting it is one of my gifts. (My other gifts are being able to tell if it’s going to rain and being freakishly good at word puzzles. I contain multitudes.)
A screen is a terrible room for that kind of conversation, so this is the next best thing.
The questions I wish someone had asked me
These are the questions I equip my clients with when I can't work directly with the people in their lives, like their loved ones or their teams. They are the very questions I wish someone had asked me when I was trying to figure out my own easy. (I spent nearly two decades starting businesses in completely different industries before I found mine. Turns out my easy is seeing what people are good at before they can see it themselves, which is a ridiculous thing to discover after twenty years, but here we are.)
They might not reveal exactly what your easy is, but they'll give you valuable clues about what it might be, and clues are how this works. Your easy never arrives with a label on it.
Take your time. Sit down and answer them properly, then carry them around for a week or two while you go about your life. You'll start hearing things you've been brushing off for years: little comments, offhand remarks, all of them little clues pointing at your easy.
Want me to tell you what your easy is?
If you're moving from one phase of your life into the next and you want to build the next one on your easy, I have a program for exactly this situation. It's called The Sequel, and it starts with you, me, and some time.