Breaking out of prison and supercharging business management

6 min readNov 14, 2023

Today is packed with actionable steps to progress

Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter. It isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective — Prison of the Past
🔨 Tool — ChatGPT
🍿Consume — The CASTLE Method
📖Concept — Leadership Ladder

Perspective

“The Known Prison of the Past”

This is a concept that Deepak Chopra frequently speaks about.

He tweeted a longer version of the quote that read,

“The known is the prison of past conditioning. The unknown is the fresh field of infinite possibilities. Step into the unknown”

This resonated with me because I’ve had a few conversations recently that revolved around fear.

In personal growth and development, everyone has fears about different things.

We have all been fearful and hesitant to take the next step in some aspect of our lives. Looking back, we’re usually confused about why we were so scared to start in the first place.

People are asking me about content and putting yourself out there on social media. And I’m asking others about starting a business and getting people to buy from you.

We can learn tips and tricks ’til the cows come home, but we all know the answer.

Just start

Previous experience has proved that good things come when you step towards that fear of the unknown. We all know this.

By reflecting, we realise we got to where we are by taking a few uncomfortable steps. Why not take a few more?

There are infinite possibilities. Follow your gut and step into the unknown.

If you need an accountability partner, send me an email.

Tool

ChatGPT

Yes, yes, I know ChatGPT is old news. But I have to speak about their new internet and application connectivity.

So, previously all you could do was access the pre-2021 data that the model was trained on.

Now, it has access to the internet and to the apps in the image above.

What does this mean?

I could type into ChatGPT:

“I’m going on holiday to Istanbul, Turkey from London, for 5 days. Book me the cheapest direct flight, a 4-star hotel with a great city view and create an itinerary for the 5 days that I’m there. I enjoy visiting historic buildings, and museums and doing exhilarating activities.”

ChatGPT will then connect to either Expedia or Kayak to book my flights and hotels. Based on my interests, it will then plan an itinerary for me and use Kayak to book any tickets needed to do the activities.

The above example is just for travel, but think about how the other apps above are normally used.

You can create a full meal plan, shopping list and recipes with Wolfram Alpha perfectly tailored to your body composition and goals.

You could set up a customer support email chain using Zapier.

The possibilities are endless and more apps will be added as the days go by.

This feature is only accessible to paid users, but $20 for a month to play around and learn these tools or integrate them into your business is worth it to get ahead.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

How to start a business

In this video, Ali Abdaal shares the simple steps to starting a business.

He focuses on creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) where the sole purpose is to generate leads.

A lead is an indicator of interest.

The main idea behind an MVP is to create a bare-bones prototype just to gauge whether there’s enough demand in the market.

The two MVPs Ali suggests are either a scorecard or a webinar. Always give this kind of MVP away for free, just to gauge interest.

The sole purpose of the MVP is to accumulate as many email addresses as possible. That’s the currency you’re working with. Those are your leads.

If enough people are interested and parted with their email addresses, you might be on to something.

This changed my perception of an MVP, as I thought it had to be a slightly more established product. But it doesn’t have to be.

The scorecard or webinar simply needs to be around the niche that your business will be in.

For example, if you were starting a football coaching school, you could create a scorecard around “What type of coach are you?” Get them to answer a few questions and spit out one of the famous coaching archetypes.

Or, host a webinar about what makes a good coaching school, or what it takes to be a good certified coach.

You get the point.

If enough people sign up, take the quiz or attend the webinar, you might have some students to attend your coaching school.

You can create the quiz in Google Forms, Typeform or ScoreApp and host a webinar in Zoom or many other great platforms.

Ali also created a Notion template to help you validate your idea. You can grab it here.

Concept

Leadership Ladder

The leadership ladder is part of a leadership cheat sheet created by entrepreneur Jesse Pujji.

The ladders you see above were created by L. David Marquet and they’re pretty self-explanatory.

They depict the different stages of either an employee (Individual Contributor) or a founder/CEO (Manager.)

To progress up the leadership ladder, you need to master the rung you’re on.

The ladders show the language we use depending on which stage on our journey we’re at. This can be very helpful to either indicate where you are on your journey or help you progress to the next stage.

When starting out as a new employee, it’s obvious to everyone that you need to be told what to do. Even if it’s just onboarding, you need clarity on what’s expected of you.

The language used in the last rung of the employee ladder shows agency. It shows you know what the company expects of you and you started working on it without being told what to do.

On the manager’s side, the last rung shows trust in your team. You’ve selected the right people and because they have agency, the company can develop quicker.

I find the leadership ladders surprisingly useful for their simplicity. It helps me understand where I am on my journey and what needs to be worked on to climb a rung.

It’s not always experience that causes you to climb, but also people, relationships and trust.