142: 🍉 Pick the Low-Hanging Watermelon

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If you can see your low hanging watermelon from a different angle and get excited about it, that walking down that hallway would open interesting doors for you in your business, then it's a watermelon. But if it's going to distract you, if it's going to drain important resources, then it's a pumpkin and not the big good one that you want to nurture. A distracting undersized pumpkin.

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Figuring out what to work on next in your business is not always easy. We have such limited time and attention as business owners. You all probably know that Corpse Peak Term Low Hanging Fruit where can we pick the low hanging fruit of our business? Well, sometimes low hanging fruit is a good thing. We what opportunities are easy to grab. They're right there hanging just over your head, within reach. You don't have to stretch too far. Pick those Sometimes low hanging fruit can be a distraction, a lure away from bigger, meatier things. So maybe sometimes you want to avert your eyes. Don't look at the low hanging fruit. Don't just go for what's close and what's easy and what's obvious. You want to create something new and big and original, something that's really gonna make a big splash. Every now and then though, you might be missing out on something massive that's right in front of your face that I like to call a low hanging watermelon. This term came to me randomly in the moment when I was voxering with a friend. Or is it voxing? Might be voxing with my friend Leanne who you hear me talk about a lot on this show. She was thinking about what her first book should be about. What? What's the right topic? What's the right angle, what's going to bring her the most interesting business for the next phase of running her business. And I said to her, call me crazy, this might not resonate at all, but I feel like you've got a low hanging watermelon in front of you, like a low hanging fruit that is so big and so juicy, but it's so close to you that you're not even seeing it. And that was leveraging her original body of work that I feature in free time. First Time Facilitator that's a podcast that she started by throwing her hat into the ring when she was at a podcasting conference, didn't yet have a show. She just wrote what could be a show on a piece of paper and lo and behold, the organizer of the conference picked her name. So Leanne got to go onto the stage, share her podcast that we know didn't exist, but the audience didn't know that. And that gave her the impetus to start her show. First time facilitator. She grew it to 200 episodes and then hit that inevitable plateau of feeling like, okay, I have really squeezed the juice to stick with our fruit metaphor. I have really juiced this topic. She had created many a delicious smoothie, she had shared tons of solo episodes. She had so many guests on there. One of those interviews was with Matthew Dix, who wrote the book Storyworthy that has still makes such an impact on my life. And then of course, Leanne was ready to pivot and explore new and different topics because she herself was no longer a first time facilitator. But she had already created a whole treasure trove of material as she was wondering what next book to do. This is when I came in and I just said again, I might be totally off base here, but I'm sensing a low hanging watermelon, a fruit that's so big, so ripe, so ready for the picking. That would also help put a capstone on this really important part of her career and her body of work. What I meant in saying that was that maybe even though energetically, she does feel ready for the next thing, maybe it's worth putting some effort into creating the First Time Facilitator book because she has the topic, she has the trove of material and micro assets and she has product market fit. She knows exactly who it's for, she and what they would find most helpful. And she has developed her own expertise over the course of conducting 200 plus interviews, doing her own trainings, experimenting with all these topics I shared with her that I have firsthand experience with this because when I got the book deal for Life after college in 2010, I had already been sitting on a half done word file for two years. I started that website in 2005. I myself left college in 2004. Then I later went back to finish one semester with my class in 2005, my graduating class. So I was starting to get further and further away from this topic of Life After College. However, I had all these blog posts, all this content. That's what I was known for online and that is what a publisher gave me a book deal for because that was the proposal that I wrote. We got 27 rejections, but one, this tiny publishing house called Running Press said yes. So I worked on the book and it was a really a rollercoaster of a process because it was my first book, I didn't know any authors hardly. I didn't know what I was doing. I had all these gremlins by the time the book came out in 2011. You all know my story by now. That's when I started a sabbatical from Google. So I was even already a little bit burnt out from juggling a full time job and this side hustle the emotional ups and downs of writing my first book. And although I was super excited to launch Life After College, I could feel myself at the ripe old age of 27 being ready to move on to some different topics. So it's no surprise that a year after the book came out, I really hit a wall where I thought I do not want to be the Life After College girl for the rest of my career. I've got to figure something else out. And that existential searching of trying to figure out what's next, but planted the seeds for Pivot. The point that I'm sharing about Life After College is that in that case I was a little bit over it in terms of the topic even by the time the book was coming out. But I'm still so glad that I put a capstone on that part of my body of work that I picked that low hanging watermelon because it opened so many doors. That book brought in the next five years of speaking gigs and opportunities. I developed a keynote that wasn't called Life After College. It was called Career in the Age of the App that I gave a really embarrassing TEDx talk at TEDx CMU in 2012. I did one on one coaching. I created courses. I'm just really proud and grateful that Life After College. That book enabled me to close out a chapter of my body of work and also create this artifact, a resource that accumulated and consolidated all my best thinking on how to help 20 somethings navigate adulting. Adulting was not a term at that time. As I've said before, I'm really proud of that book and it is still an evergreen topic, just like first time facilitator. So with life after college, I knew that grads would be graduating every single year and that even if my audience had aged out of that topic, maybe parents and grandparents still wanted to buy it as gifts for loved ones in their life who are graduating. Just the other day I got a royalty check for almost $500. It's not much, but it's 11 years later. The book has probably sold 40,000 copies, which is significant. Less than 3% of books ever sell more than 5,000 copies. That stat just continues to blow my mind even though I don't talk about life after college as much. I even take it out of my bio because I don't want people to write me off as an after college person. I am happy doubling down on Pivot and free time now. Pivot for navigating what's next, free time for optimizing what's now. And because pivot is about navigating change, life after college does fit under that umbrella in terms of my body of work.

We'll be right back just after this.

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An example of a low hanging watermelon in my business would be creating the licensing program for free time. Not that I have companies knocking down my door or lining up around the block yet, but I'd love to be ready. And I'd love to be able to pitch and share licensing as an option for companies that start hiring me to do keynotes. So if you remember last week's solo riff on the basics of licensing, I kind of shared more in episode 140 and and the episode with K he on $10,000 tasks and his 10K tasks framework. Well, licensing is a hundred thousand dollar task plus if not more that if I were to create that program and land one client. Now we're in the six figure contract range most likely. So that's a low hanging watermelon in my business that I can identify as a big juicy ripe opportunity, ripe for the picking that I could tackle next. So the pros of this mindset, this framework would be creating a capstone on a part of your body of work once you have product market fit established. Actually knowing that this thing you're going to create, whether it's a course or a book or something, that does take a little more time and energy and resources that you already know who it's for and you've already tested with smaller bits of content like podcasts or a series of articles. And third, you get to leverage a trove of content that you've already created.

The big cons of picking a low hanging watermelon is not to confuse them with an undersized pumpkin. So that harkens back to Mike Michalis book the Pumpkin Plan. Pumpkins, sure they don't grow on trees, they're not hanging, they're on the vine. But in his book the Pumpkin Plan, he says you don't need to do more, you need to do different. You have to pretend you're a pumpkin farmer. Yep, you read that right. A pumpkin farmer. But not just any farmer. A freaky, geeky, overall wearing, straw chewing pumpkin farmer. Those country fair folks who dedicate their lives to growing the half ton pumpkins you see on the evening news. Turns out that they of all people hold the secret formula for big time entrepreneurial success. Plant hearty seeds, identify the most promising pumpkins, kill off the rest of the vine and and nurture only the pumpkins with the biggest potential. So when I'm comparing a watermelon to a undersized pumpkin, what I mean is don't get distracted by something that's just mediocre or okay or you would really create a lot of friction for you to pursue it. That would be an undersized pumpkin that actually less is more. And you would want to cut those undersized pumpkins off the vine so that the big juicy ones, the big ones have a chance to grow. So the risk with a low hanging watermelon is that It's a distraction, it's a shiny should, it's a lure. But it is going to drain, even if it's right there, right in front of your face. But it would drain your energy. And as I say in free time, how we bake is as important as what we make. So I would not recommend picking a low hanging watermelon if you're going to be miserable when you're making whatever that next thing is, I don't want you to be miserable. So let's say Leanne's example. If she would just be so friggin miserable. Creating the book for first time facilitator. Don't do it. That's not doing anybody any favors. You've got to kind of shift your view on it. Look at the watermelon from a different angle and see can I get excited about this? If I think about who it could impact, how far it could spread, what it could do for my business. You know I love that saying, you can't see the open doors until you start walking down the hallway. Shout out Catherine Carruthers, who first said that to me, if you can see your low hanging watermelon from a different angle and get excited about it, that walking down that hallway would open interesting doors for you in your business, then it's a watermelon. But if it's going to distract you, if it's going to drain important resources, then it's a pumpkin and not the big good one that you want to nurture. A distracting undersized pumpkin. So as Mike would say, what he recommends, what a mentor told him to do, is make a list of all your clients or even your projects. And you want to actually look at what else you can kill in your business so that your best clients, your highest paying or the most joyful sources of revenue can grow in pumpkin plan, he says. And he maps this to the pumpkin growing process. Step 1 Identify and leverage your biggest natural strengths. Step 2 Sell, sell sell aka gather data. Step 3 as your business grows, fire all of your small time rotten clients. And I, Jenny will add, fire your shiny should projects that no longer resonate. Step 4 Mike says never ever let distractions, often labeled as new opportunities take hold. Weed em out fast. Step 5 Identify your top clients and remove the rest of your less promising clients. Step 6 Focus all your attention on your top performers. I'll leave you with that today. Where are the low hanging? There's probably just one or two, but they're so big you're not even seeing them. The low hanging watermelon in your business? And what are the pumpkins that are taking up resources on the vine that you actually need to make the hard choice of saying no and closing off any further resources that you would send in that direction? As always, I would love to hear from you. Send me a note@itsfreetime.com ask or or you can email hi time.com thanks so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day everybody.

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