TIL: windows, problems & snakes - Growth of Influence

I had the window of my office slightly open today.

A bee came inside. Actually, it was a wasp.

I didn’t notice it until it regretted its decision and tried to get out.

I heard it tirelessly pushing towards the invisible glass we call a window until I decided to help it.

As I got up to go to the window, I was thinking

“How dumb could the wasp be for not seeing the way out?”

It wants to go from point A to point B and over the last couple of minutes, all it does is push against an invisible wall and stay at the same place.

Then I paused for a moment.

I was reminded of those countless times in life when I was the wasp.

I wanted to go towards the light (or fitness, or wealth, or have fun) but I was hitting this invisible wall that wouldn’t allow me to move forward.

All those times when regardless of how much I tried, I kept hitting again and again this invisible wall.

And even though I tried different paths, I ended up at the same window.

This made me realise that more often than not

when you feel stuck all it takes is

taking a couple of steps back,

seeing the big picture,

(or the big window that’s blocking you)

and taking the longer way out.

Sometimes, being obsessed with making progress and moving forward doesn’t allow you to realize that the way to get unstuck is by taking a couple of steps back.

THINGS I’VE LEARNED

1.
We all face pretty much the same problems

Regardless of your age, ethnicity, or gender, you can either solve a problem for good, or you are going to find it later down the road.

All problems can be categorized into 3 big buckets.

Health

Wealth

Social

Remember three weeks ago when I told you a quick story about my 4th meeting with an interesting businessman who runs a 180-person agency?

Well, three days ago we spent a whole hour discussing longevity.

He didn’t solve the “how do I optimize my longevity” problem earlier in his life.

Now a good chunk of his time goes to getting the answers to some of those questions.

Regardless of where you are in your life, you might want to identify the weak link in your life – health, wealth, social – and maybe try to solve the problems related to this area.

Constant progress snowballs over time.

Unsolved problems snowball over time as well.

2.
You don’t run out of problems. You just change them with better ones.

Let’s say you have a wealth problem.

In other words, you don’t make as much money as you want.

When you fix this problem, you get a new one.

You now have a wealth management problem.

When you fix your wealth management problem, you know get a new one.

You now have a tax optimization problem.

And so on and so forth.

This is true for all 3 areas. Wealth, Health, and Social.

Keep trading your way to the top and before you know it you will be a version of yourself that you are insanely proud of.

3.
Imagine getting bitten by a snake.

This is a good one.

So imagine for a moment that you get bitten by a snake.

Instead of helping yourself recover from the poison, you chase the snake.

You try to find out why

You try to prove to the snake that you don’t deserve to be bitten.

This has nothing to do with snakes.

GROW YOUR INFLUENCE

Regardless of the path you want to take, there are a million different things that you can do.

There are probably a million different things that you can do that will not help a single bit toward your goals.

Identifying the 20% of things that create 80% of the results is one of the best hacks in the world of business.

In some cases, there is a 5% that creates 95% of the results.

The goal is to find this 20 or 5% and do as much of it as possible.

If you second-guess yourself, this might help you.

to your growth and influence,
>> Chris Fountoulis
Founder – GrowthOfInfluence.com & Elcune.com
chris@growthofinfluence.com

Interested in our ventures? Find them here:
– Women’s clothing brand: Elcune.com
– Agency for creators: GrowthOfInfluence.com
– Personal Website: ChrisFountoulis.com