You curse a child when you de-risk their lives’. This seems to be the popular notion held by the economic elite. Aka rich folks locally, regionally and internationally by saying they wont leave much to their kids. You say, rich people already get a lot of advice, so why dedicate content to them?

I say, whilst they may be getting a lot of advice, if we look around us, the 2nd and 3rd generation of family wealth/businesses has not done well, or as well that it should have. In turn, impacting national economic outcomes for people like you and me.

People stay away from(de-risking) out of a desire to not “curse” their children by taking away their need to work hard and find their own career success. There are two sides to this coin. By not leaving generational wealth they could also dampen their spring board that could have used the financial leverage to build things and in turn benefiting the nations outcomes.

Knowing you aren't getting much or most of what your parents worked hard for may be deflating, in on it self to result in poorer outcomes for those kids.For any long term goal, the simple formula is to make the most of your time and money. Starting early will help you to start small. A step at a time and you are set to achieve your bigger goals. It would be better to teach your kids to do two things, preserve and grow what you have achieved as their parents and teach them how to build/scale new ideas and show them how to make more money by way of training and sharing your own secret sauce, as a parent who has been successful.

Instead of telling them they wont get much, best to give them most of your skill and some of your capital & all of your affection so they can test, experiment and be ahead of the curve from day 1 and find their entrepreneurial calling.

Also be cognizant of the fact, that not every one wants to be an entrepreneur, we wouldn't have had Mozart and Picasso if we didn't have dreamers and creators. Nurture any skill not just one skill or dream. Affection is the biggest gift, second only to empathy. Make sure you transfer both, beyond generational wealth to have offspring that can have even better outcomes than you and enable tribes around them that enable nations vs not.

Outcomes

You can never know your outcomes till you do something. Simple enough but not practiced as often enough as one would like to think. Patch Adams is a medical doctor whose belief that joy and laughter are integral to the healing process was made popular by Robin Williams in the movie Patch Adams. Patch Adams is best known for his work as a medical doctor and a clown(your read that right), but he is also a social activist who has devoted over 40 years of his life to changing America’s healthcare system. He believes that laughter, joy and creativity are an integral part of the healing process.

He was famously asked about procrastination. He replied, "Did you try to put on your pants this morning or did you put on your pants?”

What Patch was identifying is the notion of trying to put our pants on, versus simply doing – carrying out the action, because it’s the “right action.” It’s the thing we “ought” to do whether that be because it’s socially required or because it’s simply a necessary part of staying warm. It’s time to get dressed.

To overcome the inertia of “not doing,” we need to emphasize the focus on the next action. What is the next ACTION we need to take? Once we identify the action, it’s not about trying to do that, it’s about doing it. Outcomes are all about doing vs trying.

To be successful at this, we need to keep the action as concrete as possible. Our minds seem to tag tasks that are framed concretely (as opposed to abstractly) as something that needs to be done today, urgent even in the now, vs in the "ok at some point i'll get to it".

Our outcomes are how we frame our end state, our tasks and add a timeline to them. All else is noise that gets prioritized if we do not frame this correctly in our brain. What do you think happens when all you deal with is noise?

To be successful in any thing we need to be excellent in concrete definition of tasks vs leaving them in the abstract, help your brain/mind to help you with your outcomes.

Looked slightly differently, It’s not time to make a list of resolutions for 2022. It’s time to make a list of actions or execution mandates. What are you going to be “doing” in 2022 that will make it the year you hope it will be? As hope alone wont cut it the same way it didn't every year prior when you had resolutions.

One New Thing (that I didn't know about)

Waterbeds were a 2bn$ industry. They were all the rage in the 70s and 80s even popular in the 90s.

Charlie Hall invented the waterbed in 1968, just after the "Summer of Love," and started what became a $2 billion industry. But Hall intended for waterbeds to help people get better sleep. The waterbed was part of Charlie's thesis project at San Francisco State University. His idea was to create furniture that could form to the contours of a person's body without creating pressure points, although research on the health benefits have been inconclusive. The key concept of the waterbed is displacement. So as you move, water fills the gaps, and every curve of your body gets equal support. Now, before settling on water, Charlie tried to make a chair filled with Jelly and another with liquid corn starch.

He didn't check in with any body nor did he plan on disrupting an industry he just wanted better sleep outcomes so he went and did what he thought was the best possible thing to do. Invent a new product. That takes a lot of conviction.

In the 1990s, new mattresses like the Tempur-Pedic introduced memory foam mattresses to the US, and Sleep Number offered adjustable beds with inflatable air pockets. Waterbeds developed a stigma as being bulky, difficult and pricy.

Fast forward to today, waterbeds account for less than 5% of the mattress market. Interestingly enough 50 years after Hall's invention, he's back fighting the stigma. His company, Hall Flotation, makes luxury waterbeds called Afloat mattresses, and they're all about helping you get a good night's sleep. He's committed to fixing sleep outcomes for all, this is what a defined task helps you achieve.

Boring stuff that Scales

Note taking. Note taking is as ancient an art as any. There are hefty tomes on the subject of how to best capture and organize information in a swift and legible manner and courses devoted to the subject in colleges. There are billion dollar companies that help us take better notes. But there is no app for managing your outcomes, designing an offline system that your brain has they key to unlock as you re-read some thing. Investing time and effort in to designing or using a note taking system is as key as doing the business it self. If done right it serves as your time line and change management tool and also gives you a starting position "the next day" for as long as you live. Some thing carried over(the next day, week or year) is always better than nothing remembered or remembered incorrectly.

In my two decades of building & operating, note taking is a selling skill that so few sales people use or even possess. It takes practice in engaging in that conversation with a client, actively listening to their challenges, and taking the right type of notes to be prepared to move any deal forward. If done right it scales over time by training you to get better at your job.

Heres an exercise you should do next time, post a sales meeting. Compare your notes with the sales rep(s) present. Make a list of what you two wrote, qualify and frame the info into key areas and prioritize items by the insights they provide you. Like takeaways etc that will allow you to send a follow on email or have a secondary conversation. I know it sounds simple and easy, but it's not. 

You are in for a surprise, 6 times out of 10 the notes are not even worth saving the paper for, they have no conscious thought or classification system, as they had no end outcome, framed in your mind about you using them post meeting.

Your focus was the sale, but not enough conscious thought went into recording the process leading up to the sale. We need to typically have an end state in mind to be a good note taker so we queue up our thoughts in a way that we de-construct the sales process to re-construct the act of completing the sale(if that makes sense to you)

Taking good notes helps you listen, learn and understand information. Do it well and do it often. Heres a great article to understand the process and get good at it. Its boring but it scales so well, try it and compare your outcomes pre and post note taking.

What you should be listening to

Some thing that re-sets your brain to think small, do smaller but win big. We all talk about sexy, blitz scaling unicorns these days but my heart has always been in un-sexy businesses that provide cash-flow. Heres the story (podcast) of a Window Washing Business - Johnny Robinson Co-founder of Orange Window Cleaning talks about how he got started. The first person to build this domestically with some thoughtfulness will be earning a $M in a year, thats my read from the business and the validation provided by the podcast. Some thing for you to give a listen and try out. I will sign up as your first customer if you do it right and do it locally.

Monetize your time

Understanding that there is no such thing as time management. It’s not possible for any of us to “manage” time. Time is fixed. There are a fixed number of hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year and you have the same amount of time as everyone else, no less, no more.

So there is only one thing that can be managed in relation to time - yourself and what you do with the time that’s available to you. Busy does not mean productive. And productive does not mean profitable.

Let me explain. Most business people get locked up in doing necessary, but non revenue-generating tasks(energy draws). They’re working hard and they feel busy and productive - but they’re not making any money! If any money at all, really.

Some one framed it really well, "If you are busy, you will only generate revenue if you are busy generating revenue" all else is just effort without a medal.

Break it down for your self. It might sound simple, but think about exactly how you spend your time right now. I bet a lot of it is on activities that don’t actually generate revenue. So list what you do in a day, draw up a map, look at the top 10% things that generate value, then look at the meetings you took in a day and how many of them correspond to creating said value, you would be a rock star if there was 30/40 cross over. Typically there is way less. To monetize your time, you have to spend the bulk of that time on the right things.

Easier said than done. There is a trick to it.

The trick is deciding what not to spend your time on, or less time. Then you can say “yes” to the most important activities and people in your life. Again simple to read or understand yet, near impossible to act on.

The next stage is regaining your time via virtual multiplication. WTF? What it simply means is combining automation and outsourcing/delegation to get more done. This has the effect of multiplying your time, by freeing you up. For sure, it may feel like more work when you have to spend time to document a procedure and/or teach a team member to perform a certain task for you. Trust me its the secret sauce to better outcomes in life, you can not automate, reduce, or fix a process thats not documented. So document every thing. Especially if you take good notes it will help speeding up positive outcomes.

Do it once, enjoy it for ever.

As a business leader your real victory is, when tasks or set of tasks will be able to run without you. Nirvana!

Made in Pakistan

Today lets do an exercise. I always think of things we can make and export or even get distribution in Pakistan. One such thing has been Kashmiri chai, done right. Why cant I buy powdered Kashmiri chai, add hot water, milk and be on my merry way? Why aren't we de constructing the best things we consume and take them mass market?

We continue to import apricots from Turkey yet waste 30% of our domestic yield due to lack of transport, logistics, cold chains etc. Tragic at best, criminal at worse to be loosing FX in importing some thing, whose local abundance we use as compost in the end.

It boggles my mind. Yet in our quest to build unicorns we keep looking away from local ideas. Lets change that.

The whole world is going nuts overt nut butter. Yet no-one has made a Chilghoza nut butter. Granted it wouldn't sell locally due to the price premium, but why is it that when I go to Trader Joes I find every damn nut butter but no Chilghoza, why aren't Chilghozas the truffles of our country. Why is there no authority that certifies them, labels and authenticates them why is there no council on it like the manuka honey from New Zealand. We talk about exports and dollars yet we don't talk about sharing ideas that can take us there. If you can do this and I can help you, get in touch, happy to be first money into a project that takes on either of these projects to scale.

Sell more of made in Pakistan and grow your personal and the countries long term outcomes.

One Last thing

The history of products, companies, ideas is always super interesting to me. It also humanizes the great achievements of others as basic simple constructs that could happen to any one who tries to ship products, ideas or services. People are all the same, it's their execution ability thats different. Thats what makes some one start youtube vs not.

Here is one amazing internal email from years gone by.  This email is how YouTube started. They originally wanted to make it a video version of “Hot or Not” (that’s what 'H or N' stands for). You may be too young to know what it was, so click the link above to read about it.