You aren't growing 📉 because you aren't weaponizing "value" 🚀
You aren't growing 📉 because you aren't weaponizing "value" 🚀
“Value” is your best move toward growth. How it works, and how you can use it for growth.
Hey! 👋🏽 This is Tanzim. My mission is to make uncommon knowledge for engineering leaders common. The knowledge I wish I had before is available to you now.
You are stuck in a career, pay grade/hourly rate, customer pricing, and user growth. The primary reason is that nobody taught growth by weaponizing the concept of "value."
Growth is a by-product of your ability to create value efficiently. Value unlocks growth. 📈
You become valuable when you bring value to them: customers, employers, colleagues, partners, or friends. Value makes your worth undeniable and opens up all sorts of growth possibilities.
Proactively taking additional responsibilities
Contributing to open-source projects in your free time
Proactively going the extra mile in your freelance project
Offering above and beyond customer support than the competitors
...are all good examples of providing value.
Value is transferrable, just like food
Value consumption: 🍔🍔 when you consume others' work to get value out in exchange for a payment
Value creation: 🍳🍳 when you become the producer generating value for someone's payment
The payment for value can be made with money, time, attention, etc., whatever assets someone has. You can gain negative value, too. For example, it wastes your time, corrupts you morally, and makes you lose money and health.
For this reason, watching entertainment content is risky. If it does not offer value, you will waste money buying it, waste time and attention you could be utilizing elsewhere to derive realizable value, which you will miss out on now. It may be morally/spiritually corrupting you, too.
Should you spend your scarce resources (i.e., money, time, attention) to consume a risky work of value?
Even the major venture capitalists no longer want to watch a full-length startup movie only to find out it was a waste and/or damage to the portfolio. They are now more into value generated by the startups early than user acquisition at all costs. (News: Sequoia to founders: focus on profitability)
Value's monetary worth 💵
Value is often exchangeable. We create value for those who have money. That is how we get paid at work in exchange for creating value.
Your target is to optimize for more value created with less effort. However, the irony is that if you can create value more efficiently, your customers/employers may also start to undervalue your work because they see your decreased efforts.
The good news is that sensible organizations/teams/customers would not undervalue your work. They would value you so that you could continue to produce value (News: Amazon doubles salary, Microsoft doubles salary).
You are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve -- said by a car and rocket billionaire who should remain nameless (to not risk bad influence).
Prefer employers and customers who do not see you as a cost/expense instead of focusing on the value you offer.
Are you creating value for others?
A simple way to recognize you are bringing value to others is by observing whether your work is:
Upgrading their state (spiritual, mental, health, competency, etc.) 🏋🏽 -- saving your boss's headache is included.
Saving their lives, money, sanity or time, etc. 🫁
Making them happy, productive or money, etc. 💰
Loss accelerates when you accelerate effort on the wrong thing
Beware of going all-in with the wrong project for your value creation journey. The more you increase in action, the greater the loss in value you will experience if it is not the right project. How could you avoid doing the wrong thing? There are generally two approaches.
Waterfall: When you are a domain expert in an area, it pays off to plan and execute accordingly to consistently and predictably generate value. The downside is that you cannot effectively respond to the market changes (e.g., people's opinions about your work).
Agile: Even if you are a semi-pro at your work, you can start to generate value, see how the market/colleagues respond and change how/what value you develop with a higher conviction
Communications of created value
We often fail to communicate value because we fail to communicate the pain it solves. While communicating value, we often confuse the promotion of work with self-promotion.
The 3-step strategy for your next promotion
Observe/ask your manager what pains them
Learn to solve that problem
Relive their pain for them to focus on what matters more
You can keep it as simple as that and it should, in principle, work in most cases.
The biggest leverage: are you a time billionaire?
You can be a billionaire. You probably are. Maybe (not) a dollar billionaire.
A time billionaire is someone who is going to have a healthy 31.7 years of life, which is 1B seconds. This concept was introduced by an investor, Graham Duncan. ⏰
To have a sense of time and how to utilize it is to be human. Others in the animal kingdom do not have such leverage. Time practically runs out, for sure. It is the rarest commodity.
Time > Money. The biggest currency and leverage you can have to create value is already with you and that is time (and you could very well be a billionaire of it).
This will give you the ultimate clarity:
🧠 Use angular brackets <, > as the comparators of value.
🤑 Not as comparators of money, size or strength.
Do not compare two entities, two people, two organizations, etc., in terms of who has more money, strength, customer base, headcount, lines of code written and the campus size.
Compare them in terms of who gives you and the society more value. This forces you to take a position and reduce the comparables into a much simpler form. Easy to work with and communicate with.
Value has a different meaning to different people
Last but not least, value is not an exact science. The perception of value is in the eyes of the perceiver.
Not everyone will value you. You will not value everyone despite everyone's best effort. Also, you may value spiritual success more than worldly success, but the same principles may apply.
Now that you know what "value" is and how it works. It is waiting to be creatively weaponized by you to fuel your growth in business and work. 📈📈
This is it for this one.