Financial Tip of the Day #11 - Find Your Differentiator!

Some people say success is hard. Some people say success is easy. At the end of the day however success is generally determinant upon one thing - the value you bring others. It doesn't have to be a sexy skill like being a professional athlete, but rather could be a whole slew of skills. It turns out that consultancy is one of the highest paying professions. That's because people will pay a lot of money to get advice from people who are more knowledgeable about their product and can help them make more money. Business owners understand that in order to make money you have to invest money.

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value." - Albert Einstein

How do you find something that you can use to bring value?

The first step in finding some way that you can bring value is to find something that you truly enjoy. The reason you want to find something that you enjoy is because of one word - PASSION. Passion is electric, it invigorates a person and when that person talks about whatever they're passionate about they speak with excitement. Happiness and excitement are contagious. 

Imagine if a salesman came up to you and started reading off facts from a sheet about why you should replace your car with this new car. You probably wouldn't be too interested, and it might even deter you. What about if the salesman came up to you and asked you to imagine yourself driving in this car on a breezy saturday afternoon, driving down the highway with the convertible roof down and feeling the cool air. You still might not buy a car, but you'll probably have a lot better image about it! 

So when you're thinking about something you can use to bring value to people, think about something that you could see yourself talking to someone about for hours. Then take that topic and write out five ways that you could use that topic to help other people, or to bring them value. 

My passion

Personally, what I'm passionate about is efficiency, and helping people to maximize efficiency. I get incredibly excited when I can take a task that should take 10 hours, and find a way to make it take 5. I also get annoyed when I'm wasting time, because to me, time is our most valuable resource. 

Today for example, I was in the grocery store with my girlfriend. We got in line to check out at a register of someone who was new to the job. To no fault of his own, he was serving at about half the pace of the register next to him. I noticed this and told my girlfriend that we should move over. She said no and that the woman in front of her was kind enough to make room on the machine that slides your groceries to the attendant. I could physically and mentally feel myself becoming pensive as I knew as I wasting time, solely so that we could be behind the nice woman.

How could your passion bring value?

Once you find your passion, you need to find ways that it can bring value to others. My five ways that I could bring value to others are as follows:

1. I could strategically plan an efficient way to complete a task.

2. I could personally complete a task as efficiently as possible.

3. I could come up with ways to save time and money.

4. I could evaluate how a person/company is using their resources and advise them on processes that can be improved.

5. I could create automation initiatives that can remove repetitive work and complete tasks faster.

How I used my passion

It turns out that I found my differentiator through automating tasks to enhance efficiency. In my every day work life I use excel nearly all the time. Excel is a powerful resource that helps us “number people” crunch out and analyze big sets of data. 

One day I had a task to basically take 500 transactions and make sure that what was reflected in one report was the same as it showed in another report. Sounds like the most invigorating task possible, right? I went home that weekend with the assignment of completing all 500 transactions. I sat there for about 20 minutes and thought to myself, there has to be a better way. I then remembered a class that I took in college - Introduction to VBA. 

VBA is short for Visual Basic for Applications, and is used in programming macros in excel. Macros allow you to basically tell the computer to complete a set of tasks that you write with a click of a button. I began to realize that if I could find a way to tell the computer to take four variables from the one document, and take four variables from the other document, and make sure that they're the same for each report, it should work! So, for around 17 hours that weekend this is pretty much what I looked like -

Well, there might have been a slight difference. Instead of coffee, I might have had a few bottles of beer. After those 17 hours however, I had finally finished. I clicked the button and BOOM my computer started spazzing out and flashing blue colors across my screen. This is because I highlighted the transactions that worked, so my screen kind of looked like the stripes of an american flag sliding up and down. When it was complete however, the macro had completed nearly every transaction.

In terms of efficiency, this might not have been the most efficient way possible. To be honest, it probably would have taken less than 17 hours to complete that process manually, probably around 9-10. However, this is a task that we perform quite often, and in the future the next 9-10 hours can be saved with the click of a button, then the next, and then the next. 

Figuring out what this could do led me to think about other ways I could use VBA and macros to enhance the efficiency of our work. Over the past year, I have created more than a dozen macros for my jobs and other jobs in my company. These macros are now getting more attention and being dispersed throughout the firm.

FIND YOUR DIFFERENTIATOR!

My passion allowed me to find a way to create a niche in my workplace. Now I hope that you can use my example to think about how you can find a way to bring value to others. 

Step 1: Find what you're truly passionate about. It's often not easy to figure out, I'm not going to lie to you. Think about what you could see yourself talking about and working with on an every day basis, and what gets you excited when you think about that.

Step 2: Figure out how you can make that valuable to someone. There is a niche for nearly everything out there. What you need to do is become proficient at your niche, and bring value to others. Think through the ways in which you can make your skills useful and how you can work towards them.

Step 3: Learn and LEARN! Do research, read books, and PRACTICE! If you feel yourself getting tired, take a break. You don't need to hammer this every hour of every day, but definitely take some time each day.

"A jack all of all trades is a master of none" - Unknown

Step 4: Bring value to others. Once you have figured out your niche, studied/researched it, and thought through how to bring value to others, just do it. Get out there and build something that surprises people. Perhaps join groups with other people interested in your topic and discuss it. Find a way to get involved and get your name out there.

Step 5: Never stop growing. Warren Buffet is one of the most prolific investors of all time. His net worth is well into the billions, and he has revitalized many companies that you hear of all the time, like Geico. Every day though he sharpens his mind by reading for two hours. He is a forever learner.

"Sharpen the saw" - Stephen Covey

This is by no means an easy task. It will take a lot of time, and a lot of effort. I myself am just at the beginning and have so much to learn. I can tell you though that working every day with your passion is an invigorating experience. Your work stops feeling so much like work and is incredibly rewarding when you see the impact it has on others. 

"Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better." - Pat Riley

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