Seneca's Barbell

Seneca was a well-known, some would say notorious, businessman, political advisor, and writer who lived during Nero's rule of the Roman Empire. He even served as an advisor to Nero before the emperor sentenced him to die by slitting his own wrist. But that's a story for another time. What's pertinent about Seneca's life for our purposes is his approach to considering business ideas that have potential and and efficiently crafting them into proven assets that create prosperity. In his book, The Black Swan, and at Antifragile, Nassim Taleb repurposed Seneca's approach and called it Seneca's Barbell. I'm sharing an interpretation I developed based on a presentation by Nick Peterson. Seneca's Barbell is an approach to developing business ideas, navigating risk, and improving system reliability. More on that soon. Here's how it looks. The first iteration of my coaching business existed as an idea with potential. I turned it into a proven business asset, earning a return on my investment of time and effort by simply 1, creating an offer, 2, defining an audience, and 3, executing a direct sales strategy. I moved my coaching business idea across the barbell efficiently and effectively by focusing only on what was essential and doing it as effortlessly as possible. So how do I muck this up? I listened to and emulated all the gurus, influencers, and experts and added unnecessary marketing components. Here's a list of all the things I began spending my time, attention, energy, and money on. First, a logo. Second, a website. Third, an email list. Fourth, a lead magnet. Fifth, content creation. Sixth, posting on social media platforms. Seventh, a video channel. Eighth, mini-workshops, 9th webinars, and 10th books. In short order, my barbell became to look like this. Developing new business and marketing ideas is fine, but suppose you don't develop each one into a proven asset delivering a return on investment, saving time, or earning money. In that case, you create what programmers call cruft—unnecessary or outdated code that slows down and even breaks the system. Put another way, by adding a bunch of marketing tactics to my sales strategy, I reduced the efficiency and effectiveness of achieving my goal: making a bigger difference while making a better living as a coach. Bluntly stated, I went from spending most of my time doing the work I love—coaching—to spending most of the time doing the work I hate—marketing. Does any of this resonate? Does it make sense? Why do promising and talented coaches do this to themselves? Turns out, it's not our fault.