Mindvalley Insights recently emailed me an article entitled, How to Avoid Entrepreneurial ADD and Pick the Most Viable Ideas to Pursue, which I thoroughly enjoyed and prompted me to write this post. Below is that 7-minute talk where Vishen, CEO of Mindvalley Insights, shares how he uses the principal of leverage to pick business opportunities.
This video is about how to choose opportunities that you either come up with or are presented to you. Vishen does it by quantifying leverage of existing and possible future opportunities. He uses his own businesses as examples, so I’ll some of my own companies and their subsequent opportunities: Telablue > Watershawl > Costpub/Tenet Marketing > Webories > Content Motors > A/B Insights > Coconut Oil > Apps/Database/Tracking. Vishen says to draw relationship lines between the different businesses/opportunities to see if there are any ways that one leverages the other. The more leverage, the more likely you should do it.
This is similar to the advice Cal Newport gives, which I highlighted in How to Work a Life of Purpose: build up a body of work that you can leverage for future work. Become so good at what you do that you can do it anywhere any way you want. Whatever you have invested all of your adult working life and school on would be silly for you to not leverage going forward. Whatever you’ve been working on the most is unique. It’s rare and therefore valuable. You know what problems your industry has and are also able to create solutions for those problems. Maybe you’re not interested in solving them, but if not you, then who? There is no one with your perspective other than you.
If you truly possess a competitive advantage, let me recommend that you do not diversify but instead leverage that skill-set to the maximum. Whatever you do, do it better than anybody else (and if you are one of these unicorns, I applaud you – send me your business plan and let me invest in your venture). – Ching Ho, Restauranteur | Designer | Adventurer