The beautiful thing about the work we do is teaching people to be meaningful, relevant, and valuable to others. Doing this delivers a powerful experience because people feel cared for and appreciated, and it unleashes the emotion of having a great day. It’s also the reason I founded Mindmaven and why I enjoy working so hard on our vision. Being valuable is a challenging thing to do. Although we’ve developed many processes and best practices that make it easy, I want to recommend a few simple habits almost anyone can do, starting today.
If you think about it, we are constantly exposed to information we perceive as valuable. Because of this, the Inbox has become what I call a “treasure trove of value.” The best piece of advice I have is to start becoming aware of what’s valuable when you come across it. So whenever you think, “This is really valuable,” try to think of five people you know who would appreciate this information just as much as you. If you can come up with these people, do yourself a favor and send it to them. The beauty is all you have to do is click ‘Forward’ in your email app and add an email address with a two-line commentary about why you think your friend would appreciate this item. Let me give you an example.
Whenever you think, “This is really valuable!” forward it to at least five people you know. Tweet this
On a regular basis, I look at spreadsheets which have a rundown of the latest compensation levels people of various seniority are getting. This well researched data is exceptionally intriguing to anybody managing a startup. Whenever I receive this kind of information I think, “This is valuable,” and then I think of five people I could forward it to. I often end up sending it to a lot more people, and it’s very easy to do. A CEO of a startup appreciates receiving something of value like this, so the first habit to establish is: Whenever you find something valuable, forward it to at least five people. You’ll touch more people in a meaningful way and increase the value of your network!
Let’s take it a notch further. We call this valuable item a “value payload,” and when you’re sending this off at the end of the day, you should also put it into what we name a “value payload repository.” This is a database of all the items of value you’ve ever sent to anybody. Just as Elon Musk and SpaceX are trying to reuse their rockets, we recommend you start reusing those value payloads! We have a program we call Value Payload Management which focuses on setting up this system so you can provide value at scale. If you’re interested, feel free to contact us, and we’ll talk about how we can help you. However, it’s easy to do on your own. You can create value payloads in the subfolders of your email client. You can also use a tool like Evernote, or you can store value payloads in folders on your Google Drive. Despite my Elon Musk reference, there’s no rocket science here!
Just like Elon Musk reusing his rockets, start reusing items of value to help your network! Tweet this
The key idea is to have this system in place and then be disciplined about storing the information when you use it. This builds a system of trust where you know everything of value you’ve ever come across is in the system, and all you have to do is go in and copy and paste it over. What would usually take 9-10 minutes of writing can be reduced to 30 seconds. Not only will you achieve a tremendous improvement in efficiency, you’ll deliver incredible value to people around you, and they will thank you.
