The opportunity telescope

This week we closed out a month, a quarter, and officially crossed the half-way mark on the year.

How’s it going for you, {name}?

More importantly, how are you measuring things?

Since very few of us do this for our health (quite the opposite 🤣), I’m sure your first thought is to check your accounting software and your bank account.

Money is a scoreboard. It tells you how the game went. It doesn’t tell you what play to call next.

So this year, I’m focusing on measuring something a little different. Instead of just checking the accounting software, I’m measuring opportunities.

They fit into two buckets.

The first is the “more of what’s working” opportunities. The referral network, the offers that are converting, or the client that keeps renewing. These feel a little too obvious to get excited about, but the “keep doing the thing that’s working” strategy is underrated.

It’s easy to get distracted by chasing shiny new ideas before we finish squeezing every drop of value out of what’s already proven to work.

The second kind is “what could be different”. This is the opportunity to build something that doesn’t exist in your business… yet. A new service, a new audience, or repackaging things to make them more attractive.

These opportunities are riskier, slower, and way easier to talk yourself out of… But if you only focus on more-of-the-same, you can’t expect anything more than what you’ve already got.

Both opportunities are important, but you have to look beyond your accounting.

So, open on my desk all week is a little Field Notes book with two columns: “More of what’s working” and “what could be different”.

If you only looked up at the night sky with your naked eye, you’d count a few hundred stars and figure that’s all that’s out there.

But build a strong enough telescope and you realize there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on Earth.

Opportunities work the same way. If you’re just going about your week waiting for one to fall in your lap, you’ll spot a handful a year and assume that’s the going rate.

But the little notebook on my desk is my telescope. Not waiting for opportunities to find me, but looking for them… on purpose.

The harder you look, the more you see.