Here's What Makes a Job MEANINGFUL | The Value Matrix

You have people at work, they're not present and they're not asking how they can add value. It's the fundamentals of business. How can I add new value to my co workers or my peers? How can I add new value to the people even above that strategy at work? I want you to think beyond what you're capable of and what your skill set is and ask a different question. Not what the American education system, which is, what am I good at? The question is, how can I drive value? I'll tell you a secret for entrepreneurs, most of your peers in your industry expect nothing from you. And that's why you're gonna win today. Who's ready? All success in work is based on value. Everything we know, we do, we give. We serve in work, no matter what work is, is a function of value. But very few people think strategically about value. So I'm going to go a little geeky business with you. You want to play? Yep. Okay. We're just going to think about, like a simple value matrix and I'm going to teach you a simple idea. And you might just draw these out with me. This says E V N V. Don't worry, I'll teach you what it means every given context you're in. Let's start with. Assume you have a team, right? And your team might be your family, it might be your friends in your living room. It might be more organizational or corporate. But let's just imagine you got some people working with you. And EV ENV is how we're going to get to a value matrix. And here's what I mean by that. In every given job, there's roles below you, above you, and to your left and your right. And so there's often a hierarchy that's happening around you. There's a context happening around you. Most people, when they get a job, the reason they're stuck in the job is because they're stuck in the value frame of that job. What they do is they go to work and they do the job. But if you don't go beyond the job, you don't get promoted beyond the job. Now, we all know that the problem is in an entrepreneurial world where half of this audience is who's dictating that for us. You know, you're just kind of, you're just trying to get the posts done during the day. You're like, I can't do anything else. I'm already busy. Brendan, here's a strategic way to think about it. Evnv. Let's go through EV Means expected value. I want you to think of, okay, in this role, what would be the expected value? So if you're somebody on salary, you're going, okay, what's the expected value in my job? Then you start working a simple matrix. You go, okay, the folks below my role in the organization, what's the expected value that they expect from me to them? What do they expect? Like, what's that interaction look like? What am I supposed to give them? What's the deliverables? What's the working relationships? What's the meetings, what's the rhythm, all of that? What about my peers, my co workers? What do they expect from me? I'll tell you a secret. For entrepreneurs, most of your peers in your industry expect nothing from you. And that's why you're gonna win today. Who's read? I'll teach you about the breakthrough in my career and how I got to have all these amazing people in my masterminds was a simple value matrix. I'll walk you through. So your peers, what do they expect from you at work, in your company? Like, literally, this is not a conceptual thing. Write it down. What do they expect? And if you don't know which, by the way, I did a survey on this. Sorry, it was pre pandemic, but it was fascinating. About 65% of the US workforce does not know the expected value that their peers want from them at work. Well, you know, I go to work sometimes and my coworker's there and we have a meeting. Yeah, but in your career, what's the expected value between you and your coworkers? I don't know. Well, then how can you deliver the value? If business success is based on value and you don't know the expected value of everybody around you, how can you deliver it? Is this resonating with anybody? Same thing. If you got a boss, you got a higher up. What's the expected value that they think you should be driving? We all know in our personal lives, when there's not clear expectations, the relationship struggle, right? It's so weird. Everybody around the world knows that, which is what started my survey years ago. Because I asked, I said, okay, if we all know the shared expectations are critical to relationships, how is it people in jobs don't know the expected value of everybody around them? So why is this relevant? Leaders, go home and teach your team this. Everybody. What are we supposed to do here? What's the expected value of this role, of this job, of this person? When we don't have clarity around that, it's just like, how does the organization flow together? And it's not always your job to dictate that. It's your job to put that in the minds of your people so they start asking the questions. And if you have a bunch of people who, who never ask these questions, you have an underperforming organization. If you have a bunch of people who don't ask this question, you hired wrong too much for the morning. If you have someone in your life who doesn't ask this question about how they can bring value into your day or your week, you might have chose wrong. It might be time for a conversation I shared last month. How even just in my household on Sunday, we get together and we say, what's the week like? And we'll. What do you need this week? How can I help this week? It's this constant question of like, okay, you have all this going on. Can I help with food? Can I help with transportation? Can I arrange this thing? And we're doing that together all the time. Absent from that, you feel at home, like you're both fighting different battles. Anyone ever been there? It's like, how come we're not adding value to each other? And that's where marriages end. Someone in that relationship is in the wrong time zone. They're still fighting, you know, high school demons about relationships. So they're not even present. Could you imagine dating someone who's not present and who doesn't want a value to you? Who's ever done that? I dated her too, okay? She ain't around no more. So now think about it at work. You have people at work. They're not present and they're not asking how they can add value. It's the fundamentals of business. So this is the first part of the Matrix, right? Now the second piece is Nvidia and envy stands for guess what? New value. Because your job is to go, okay, I know this is what's expected, but I'm going to do more. And you start plussing purposefully and consciously in each direction. Okay? How can I add new value to those who are coming up? How can I add new value to my co workers or my peers? How can I add new value to the people even above me? That's the game changer. That is the. Everyone's like, what's strategy at work? That strategy at work. Because if you don't know that everything else is fighting fires and everything else is a sense of urgency, everything else is uncoordinated. It's just not thoughtful. The way to be thoughtful is always Thinking through value. Now think about your customers and your community. And now this starts really building, right? Because this I gave as a metaphor just internally, right? This was for you, your own psychology, your own team, how you're thinking. But now you're just going to go out to your customers, you're going to go out to the community, you might even go out to civilization, a bigger picture and start asking these bigger questions because leaders are asking the bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger questions. So how do we, what's the expected value of our customers? How do we go beyond it? What's the expected value of our community? How do we go beyond it? What's the expected value of everybody right now? Let's go beyond it. And when you go beyond it, people are like, what is happening? It will change everything. I'll give you another example from my career. In my world, as we all kind of get bigger in our industry, we start running masterminds and high end groups and we do ultra, you know, we start doing yeah, and it ended up being, it ends up being, you know, many of us charge, you know, 50,000, then 100,000, then a million dollars. Like we start charging way, way more. But what's interesting in my industry was like, oh, we're all siloed, even the big dogs, we don't really talk that much except, you know, when we speak at each other's events or something like that, or when we're at conferences, we're kind of all separate, building different groups and programs. We're not really learning from each other. And what I realized, there was no expectation. The only expectation was when I have a book out, can you promote it? That was the whole expectation of the influencer category. When I came in, there was no shared best practices in large across multiple things. Maybe if you're a book writer, you go to a book conference or a speaker, you go to a speaker conference or a seminar leader, you go to a seminar on how to do seminars. But it was like there wasn't much shared. And if there was, the peer group levels were extraordinarily expensive. I mean like really pricey. And I was like, there's not that much of an expectation. No one's adding new value. So I reached out to what were probably the 10 or 15 of us at the time who had more than a million fans. There weren't many people and all of them had to be earning 5 million or more above. So it was a million fans plus people and about a $5 million type business. And I said, let's just meet Up. And they're like, ah, you know how much you can charge, Brandon? I go, no, let's just meet up. Let me take you camping or something. And they're like, what? And we're going to sit around and we're going to share everything we know and maybe we'll go, kay or something. Well, how much are you gonna charge? No, just show up. I'll handle all of it. They're like, what do you mean you handle that? He said, just show up and be willing to share. Best practices. People couldn't even believe it. People didn't believe it so much. I invited I think 20 people to the first one and I think we had like six. Like six. But then we did it. And they're like, wait, oh, we're gonna start sharing this stuff? That's crazy. The next one, we had like 20. And by then we were like, you know, I was flying them in jet helicopters above the Grand Tetons, racing. I mean, we were doing crazy stuff. Crazy. No one had ever done that before. I bet you have peers and I bet you have even people who might be slightly above. They might not even know that you're doing what they're doing. They might never come together and share. Because a big belief to me is that so many people, we think we can only add value at work based on an old time zone in which our competencies were developed, our particular skill set. Right, so success at work for you means I'm highly skilled or not. This is from the 1920s all the way until the current day. Today we're still teaching kids. Your value is based on the skill and the certification. Right. You got this diploma and you have a skill, get a job on that. We're still en masse indoctrinating the world on this. But there's ways to add value that are way beyond that in a social community. My value in that particular group and in a couple other dozens of groups now that I run or work with, is just bringing people together. I don't even have to be the smart guy. Thank God. Doesn't it feel good when you can have a lot of success and you don't have to be the smartest person in the room? Yeah, maybe you brought the room together. Maybe you're not even there. You just recognize these two people don't even know each other and they're out there fighting silos by themselves. Do you know, when I started working with the Fortune 50 CEOs, it stunned me. They didn't know each other, like, at all. Not even A casual thing where then I'd go to some fancy conference in Aspen and there'd be world leaders who were all hanging out and talking. And I was like, how come they know each other? But over here, these people don't know each other. And so I'm just sending invites, sending links, connecting people. I want you to think beyond what you're capable of and what your skill set is, and ask a different question. Not what, the American education system. Which is, what am I good at? The question is, how can I drive new value? This is the way you break through. How can I drive new value to those around me, to my customer, to my community? And even. Yes, I know it sounds weird to say civilization at itself, but the civil rights movement was adding new value. As we go to other planets, that's civilization. As you start thinking bigger, you're thinking, the world, humanity. How can we do better? Some of you are solving health problems for the world. That's adding new value in areas that haven't been added before. If I talk with you and there's not a conversation about adding new value, I know you're in the wrong time zone, and I know you're probably going to grind it out five, 10 years longer than you need to. This is strategy. You all like it so far? Okay, there's two ways to learn. Today, you can take that and write it down philosophically, or tonight, tomorrow, you sit down with your team and you workshop it. Who's going to workshop it? Yeah, I'm fine if it's just you and your green tea, but if you sit down and you obsess about it, just to give you an idea, I do this every week of my life for 17 years. I'm always asking, what's the new value? It doesn't mean I have to go create everything. Because remember, it's not always just about me. My competency, my skill, my product, even. A lot of the new value in the world isn't even about new products. It's about new partnerships. You don't have to go create 17 more things. You gotta plug your 17 things into new streams of value that already exist. Now you're talking strategy, right? You already have products. You're just not plugging them into streams of value that already exist. So you're always creating new things for the same stream of value. If you're always creating new things for the same stream of value, the weird thing is that's called overwork. We have to ask, okay, how can we take what we do have already and plug it into new streams of value. It's a faster way to scale a business. Is this too dorky, or. You guys are with me. Okay. Too dorky. Okay. It is dark out there, so sometimes I don't know.