The secret to beating overwhelm
Build leveraged assets or burn out not trying. Why most creators are exhausted, What you’ve been taught wrong, and how to finally build a business that gets easier over time.
Hi
What you can do as a single human to overcome what seems like overwhelming odds stacked against them when building a business? It really comes down to three words.
Build leveraged assets.
Yes, I know the words “building leveraged assets” is peak business speak, and your eyes are glazing over, but bear with me because those three words can change your life, reduce your overwhelm, and help you recover from (or prevent) burnout.
What is a leveraged asset? It’s something that becomes more valuable with every new bit that goes into it without it making you do more work or expend significantly more effort.
An email list (should) be a leveraged asset. You should make more (or at least the same amount of) money with every person that enters your list.
A community can be a leveraged asset if you do it right. The main way to tell if your community works is whether your effort increases or stays the same with every person that enters. You can build a leveraged asset if you find ways to connect people with each other instead of having to be in there every day. If it becomes harder to control, you are doing it wrong.
A subscription should be a leveraged asset. If it gets harder to manage with each person, then it isn’t a leveraged asset. However, if you charge enough to hire people who can manage it for you, then yes, it is a leveraged asset. It should build higher with each person who enters it.
Advertising can be a leveraged asset. If you get your ads humming, they can generate a ton of money without taking a lot of work. They usually aren’t leveraged because something is broken, but they can be leveraged.
There are all sorts of leveraged assets that exist all around us. The more leveraged assets you have in your business, the better your business works.
There are hundreds of ways to build leveraged assets, and we are taught how to build exactly 1, maybe 2 of them.
Do you know why you probably hate your community, your products, your publication, and/or your email list?
Because they are not leveraged assets…yet.
If every time you wrote a post or sent an email you made more and more money without costing you more time, then you would love your email list, and love sending and posting in your community.
It’s obviously possible to build an email list of the wrong humans that don’t care about you, but it’s equally, or maybe even more, possible to build a list of the right people who perform the wrong actions.
For instance, people often try to equate list size with list health, but that is false equivalence.
It doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 10,000 people on your list if they don’t actually perform the action you want them to take.
Of course, that can mean a lot of things. Do you want them to engage, to click, to buy, to join something, or what? If you’re selling your own products, you probably want them to buy, but if you are trying to sell advertising, you probably want them to click and/or engage on the ads.
Those are two different metrics. My email list has a very healthy open rate and sales conversion rate for my own products, but it has a terrible ad click-through rate, which is killing us with advertisers right now.
Leveraged assets are not about more. They are about less. We’re looking for less time investment to get greater returns.
Unfortunately, up until now we’ve almost exclusively been taught the “pump method” of building a business, which is when you exert some amount of force and a predictable outcome happens every time forever.
These kinds of actions are easy to start doing, so entrepreneurs latch onto them.
The problem with a pump is that it takes the same effort on the first pump and the thousandth pump. Yeah, it’s easy to get excited to do it at the beginning, but it takes equal energy to do it the thousandth time. Eventually, that wears on you.
Thus, burnout, especially if your money situation isn’t improving.
Instead, we should be thinking about the “flywheel method” wherein things are almost impossible at first, then get progressively easier and easier over time.
The first push of a flywheel is so, so hard it seems like nothing is happening for a long time, so people abandon it before it starts working.
I don’t blame them, either. If they don’t know what they’re building, how could they possibly know to stick with something? A flywheel doesn’t get easier until you’ve done a couple rotations, and it’s difficult to get there. So, of course everyone stops before they find success with it.
That said, over time a flywheel gets much, much easier. The main reason I can keep doing this work, even with several chronic illnesses that zap my energy, is that it’s easier to keep going than to stop because I’ve built so much momentum.
I am the king of leveraged actions. It’s so natural to me at this point that, until recently, I thought this was common knowledge, but what I’ve learned recently is nobody is doing this…or even knows it exists.
The first thing I think about when taking on a project is how I can use it again in multiple places and formats.
What does this look like in practice?
We now have language to help us fight against the headwinds pushing against us, but how can we actually put this into practice?
It starts by prioritizing one asset first and building it to sustainability. Then, once it’s humming along, we build a second one and a third once the first two are stable. Basically, we build systematically and with intention. As we build new assets, the ones we already built are getting easier and easier to manage and integrating with each other to make you more powerful every day.
We don’t try to build 10 assets at once, which is what everyone is doing right now.
We don’t abandon things after a week, which is what a lot of people are doing right now.
We don’t keep doing things for years that never work, which is what the rest of the people are doing right now.
Instead, we prioritize one thing at a time and give it at least three months to catch. If it does, then we keep working on it. If it doesn’t, we jettison it.
Then, regardless of what we choose to focus on, we follow the best practices to succeed doing it. We don’t lone wolf it.
Instead, we follow best practices from people who know what they are doing and have built the exact thing we’re trying to build so we can tell if the most likely success path works for us.
Why?
Because our goal is to isolate and control, to the greatest extent possible, whether something works for us or not, in as short a timeframe as possible.
If you go out on your own, and you fail, it’s impossible to know whether your process failed or the methodology failed. If you find a good teacher and follow their advice, and it still doesn’t work, it’s probably not right for you.
Additionally, if you follow the methodology, have success, but hate it, you can at least find somebody to outsource the work to, and they have a guide to the process already.
Or you can abandon it.
In fact, you should abandon anything that either doesn’t work at all or makes you feel bad doing it.
So, at the start of every quarter, either pick something new or double down on the thing you prioritized to make it work better.
If after three months your new process does work to help you create leverage and growth, then we double down on it. If it doesn’t, abandon it for something else.
How long do you keep prioritizing that one action? Until it operates on its own with very little effort or it breaks down. Then, either you keep working on it or you hand it off to somebody.
Most importantly, we pick one thing at a time. What we don’t do is drag along a hundred things that can’t or won’t be leveraged.
In fact, we don’t drag along anything. Everything we carry forward should help us build leverage in our business.
It’s too much to expect a new process to build leverage at the beginning, but if after six months it’s dragging you down, cut it loose.
(If you need help learning how to prioritize things, Sarra Cannon is the best human in the world to help you with that.)
Seriously, if y’all just abandoned the stuff that wasn’t working in your business, you would be so much happier and more successful, but instead you hold out hope that maybe it’s gonna be the secret weapon.
There is no secret weapon.
There are only leveraged and unleveraged assets.
How does that make you feel? Let us know in the comments.
