Second takes

Have you ever tried recording a video message for someone? Perhaps you’ve used Loom to record a message for a colleague or for a sales lead. Do you always send your first take? If you’re like many people you have an occasional false start and try a couple of takes, or even more. Why? Because you can.

The option to easily start over is fertilizer for seeds of doubt. “Was that good enough?” “Could I have said that differently?”

Yet, in daily conversations with those same people, how many times do you stop the conversation to give it a second take? Many decisions are best treated like daily conversation, but we can easily end up treating them like a prerecorded video riddled with false starts, second takes, and second guesses.

Procure purpose with a mission

There are essential tasks in every business that are, in and of themselves, mundane. Yet, mundane tasks, when understood to be part of a larger mission or goal, can become purposeful, even profound.

What is your mission or big-picture goal? How does your business, project, or work impact others? If these questions leave you stumped, start by defining your mission and its impact. By understanding the bigger goal, one can find meaning and purpose in seemingly mundane tasks.

An inspiring (though possibly apocryphal) story about John F. Kennedy illustrates this. The story goes something like this: while visiting NASA in the early days of the Apollo program, the President encountered a janitor and asked what he did at NASA. The janitor responded, "I'm helping put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”

A version of a similar allegory goes this way: Three men, all laying bricks, are each asked what they’re doing. The first man says “I’m laying bricks”. The second man says “I’m helping build a hospital”. The third man says “I’m helping save lives”.

Procure purpose for your work by defining the vision and focusing on the mission.

Untapped utility

What are your exceptional abilities? Even if you think you’re only exceptionally good at one thing, does that one thing have additional utilities that you have yet to realize?

In 1953 the creators of WD-40 “set out to create a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for use in the aerospace industry.” Today, the resulting product WD-40 is found in 4 out of 5 American homes and has a list of 2,000 uses generated by users of the product. It turns out that a water displacement solution has an incredibly broad utility beyond what the original creators apparently imagined.

Do your products, services, and talents have a broader utility than you realize?