A speaker argues that taking on your hardest problems at work creates the most value and recognition. He shares how an unexpected pregnancy forced him to dramatically increase his income, then offers two concrete steps: have a coffee chat with a colleague or manager to find tough problems you could solve, and visit fromimpossible.com for free chapters of his book.
Alright, I have a question for you. On a scale of 0 to 10, who here wants to make more money and make a bigger impact? Right? 0 is you're good, and 10, which I already see, is I want more! I need it! Well, I'm here to share a bit— yeah, thank you— about how you can take these sometimes what feels like impossible goals and turn them into an inevitable success. Now, what manager ever in the world has said, "My people do too much. I can't keep up with them. They're taking too much initiative." None. The answer is none. Every manager, leader, owner thinks, "Why don't my people take the initiative more like myself? Why can't they do more?" Not necessarily hours, but just take more initiative. And that is really your path to making a bigger impact and making more money. Especially at work. If you think about, well, I don't— I'm struggling because of my boss, my market, my product, my time. Those all end up being excuses that stop you. They're actually true, but still, you can't wait for those to be solved by someone else. What can you do? What I like to think about is sometimes the biggest path— I'm sorry, the path to the biggest money and impact is through the hardest problems to solve. To solve. It's not the easy problems. So where can you find— where can you take the initiative, especially at work with yourself, your team, your customers, your managers, your executives? Where can you find problems to solve that might feel impossible, might give you a pit in your stomach, but ultimately create a lot of value? And that's where you get appreciated and you get that money and impact that you want. And sometimes it's the scariest ones that create the biggest breakthroughs. For me, I remember when my wife first said that she was pregnant years ago. She came out of the bathroom and she'd actually written on her stomach, "Hi, Dad." Yes, thank you, super cute. And I was so excited because I really wanted to have a baby with her. And but the next day I panicked. I was like, "Oh, well, shit." Really is what I— That's what I thought. We're gonna have to have a bigger place. My rent is gonna double. How am I gonna pay for this? I didn't have the luxury to be paralyzed or get stuck. I had to figure it out. 'Cause an option of staying where we were was not an option. I couldn't hide. So I ended up growing my income 10 times as we added another 10 kids plus. Yeah. So, again, when you feel like there's that impossible problem, see it as an opportunity. Don't let— you might feel paralyzed, but don't let yourself stay paralyzed. So I'm going to ask you to do two things. First thing is think about who on your team, as a customer, as a manager or executive, can you invite to coffee or phone chat just to find out what kinds of problems or tough problems they have that you might be interested in solving. And the other thing I'm going to ask you to do— so think of that one person— and the second thing is to take out your phones, take out your phones, go to a browser, and go to this site: fromimpossible.com. fromimpossible.com. If you scroll down to the orange section, you can see you can put your email in for some free chapters of my book, From Impossible to Inevitable. It'll have more details on how to make yourself an inevitable success. Especially here at work, when you do want to make a bigger impact and make more money. Thank you.
