15 shareable advantages
Austin L. Church
Fractional CMO, Author of Free Money, Founder of Freelance Cake and Business Redesign → Raise your rates, delegate confidently, and free up 10 hrs / wk so you can have a record year while working less
Though I’ve shared pieces of my thinking around freelancing and entrepreneurship, I don’t think I’ve ever explained my paradigm at a high level.
Here’s the thesis: Freelancers need better leverage.
Better leverage has become something of an obsession for me.
Back in high school, I wouldn’t have known what that meant even, yet I was always looking for the best output—an A- or better—with the least input.
Perhaps a 2-hour bonus project could compensate for studying less and slightly lower grades.
I wasn’t fully aware that I had been solving this input-output equation for each class until the end of my senior year. Our valedictorian, Craig, gave me a compliment: “You know, you could have been valedictorian if you had wanted it.”
Whether or not that was true, Craig’s observation gave me better perspective on myself: I?was?less interested in being #1 and winning awards and more interested in having more free time to do with as I pleased.
This quirk or aptitude twisted like a golden wire through college and grad school and on into my 6-month stint at a marketing agency and eventual entree into freelancing. As I gained experience as an entrepreneur, mostly through modest triumphs and painful stumbles, I came to understand its value.
Many fields and domains are a hackable puzzle in the same way that solving a Rubik’s Cube is.
The starting configuration may change, from one cube or business to the next, and the seemingly endless variables would seem to create dizzying complexity.
This complexity puts beginners at a disadvantage. However, as John Reed explains in his book?Succeeding , amateurs do have a way to progress faster:
"When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles – generally three to twelve of them – that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles.”
Tim Ferriss offers a good example of what happens when you understand core principles, or to use Tim’s language, when you deconstruct the habits of world-class performers.
Ferriss became a National Chinese kickboxing champion by getting each of his opponents disqualified through a technicality (stepping out of the fighting circle 3 times). He became the first American in history to hold a Guinness World Record in tango (most consecutive turns) not through many years of grueling practice and complete mastery of the dance form but by isolating a handful of the most important moves.
Whether you admire Ferriss or not, his exploits present an uncomfortable truth:
The people who work the hardest or longest at something don’t always get the best outcomes. No, the 80/20 rule is always at play.
And if 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results, why not double down on your most?effective?effort?
Think of it as strategic laziness.
Instead of relying on the brute force of muscle or time to lift a small boulder out of a hole, you go find a long crowbar (lever) and a small rock (fulcrum) to get better leverage and accomplish the same outcome in less time with less effort.
A lever gives you a mechanical advantage—it’s,?er, science—and every business has opportunities for better leverage hidden in plain view. Some leverage points are harder to understand and use. Others are shockingly easy.
Not to get too meta on you, but the concept of better leverage is itself better leverage. Once you know?to?look, you can eventually deduce?where? the best points of leverage are.
As I mentioned, a lever gives you a mechanical advantage, and in 2019 I began making a study of what I call “shareable advantages.”
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Some of my advantages I simply cannot transfer to you. I cannot package up the six years of education and experiences from B.A. and M.A. programs in Literature and drop them in your memory like a truckload of eggs.
Other advantages have the distinct benefit of being repeatable and transferable—that is, shareable.
Because they have their root in beliefs, principles, and habits, they tend to be evergreen, or non-expiring. They lack the hype of the cleverest, bleeding-edge tactics, but they have greater long-term value. These shareable advantages are like my Bean Boots from L.L. Bean. They don’t win fashion awards, but they have kept my feet dry for over 15 years with zero maintenance.
Those of you who know the difference between knowledge and wisdom, white mushrooms and white truffles, get-rich-quick schemes and cash-flowing assets, will find plenty to get excited about in this list of 15 durable, shareable advantages:
I could keep going, but I’ll stop there. Any of the advantages above will give you better leverage. Better results with less effort.
Levers change with your level. It makes sense, right? A small crowbar serves if you’re pulling nails from old barn wood, but lifting that boulder requires a different tool.
The leaders in every industry find the leverage and use it. For Warren Buffett, it was compound interest. For Sarah Blakely of Spanx, leverage came down to a?high tolerance for failure, rejection, and disappointment ?(in an industry dominated by men) and differentiation (better colors and packaging). Testing her prototypes with real women led to superior design as well.
What about freelancers?
Once I lay out the progression, the graduating nature of leverage may seem obvious, yet most freelancers don’t hunt for or strategically use better leverage.
I hope I’ve convinced you to start. ??
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About Austin L. Church
Hi, I'm Austin, a writer, brand consultant, and freelance coach.
I started freelancing after finishing my M.A. in Literature and getting laid off from a marketing agency. Freelancing led to mobile apps (Bright Newt), a tech startup (Closeup.fm), a children's book (Grabbling ), and a branding studio (Balernum ).?
I love teaching freelancers and consultants how to stack up specific advantages for more income, free time, and fun. My wife and I live with our wrecking balls and two cats in Knoxville, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains.
You can learn more at?FreelanceCake.com . You can also connect with me on?Twitter .
I help skilled experts and tech companies enhance their online brand.
1 年I think I've seen you share pieces of this as LinkedIn posts ;) Great repurposing!
Senior writer helping consumers make informed choices through detailed SEO buyer guides, reviews, and blog articles in leading media outlets | Find me on CBS News, CNN Underscored, ConsumerAffairs, and USA TODAY ??
1 年The habit of writing daily, even if only for 15 mins on the weekends when I don’t do client work, has been crucial to my growth as a solopreneur. Currently working on getting past limiting beliefs—I think this is just as essential for thriving as a business owner. As you briefly mentioned in your newsletter, the abundance mindset is ??