Doing something laborious and seemingly inconsequential

Wearing a nametag every day for 20+ years has taught the value of being proactive, disciplined and prepared for constant rejection.

What a blessing. Because regardless of what you’re trying to accomplish in life, there will always be long periods of time where the work you’re doing will feel laborious and inconsequential.

And if you can train yourself to push through that resistance, it increases the likelihood of success down the road.

My first book actually had two free nametags in the back of each copy. One for you, and one for a friend.

Kramer would have been proud of this one, just like his coffee table book that turned into an actual coffee table.

But I personally hand glued every one of those goddamn stickers in there for years. Scalded my fingers hundreds of times and spent hours on the floor before each speech preparing the materials.

Now, I’m sure a more experienced entrepreneur would have found an easier way to automate or even outsource that task, but to me, the labor was a necessary part of the gift. Because it’s not like anyone at my events were buying the damn books anyway, so there had to be something special inside that demonstrated real thoughtfulness. Something to get people excited about the product and then, most importantly, tell their friends about it.

Free nametags did exactly that. For years and years, people would come up to me and talk about what they did with theirs. Proving to me that doing something laborious and seemingly inconsequential really can produce value over time. Particularly when you’re launching a new venture and people have no reason to trust you yet. Somebody somewhere has to toil. For longer than they’d like.

Graham, the computer scientist, author, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, writes that startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, he reports, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going.

Paul says a good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was also separate and laborious process to get it going.

Ultimately, his experience working with hundreds of the top startups around the world found that the most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

What laborious activity are you committing to doing in the early stages of your project? How could you create leverage for your brand by doing something highly personal that nobody else could do but you?

Nametags as a metaphor are quite appropriate here. Because this growth strategy hinges on the power of thoughtful connection. Yes, it might be tedious and frustrating to write fifty personalized emails a day, every day, for six months, until you run out of people in your network to tell about your new business.

But hell, if that’s what it takes to evangelize your new thing and get the world aware and excited about it, then so be it.

Listen, with every output of emotional labor, you contribute to a fabric. And while each thread might not seem transformative or consequential in isolation, you have to trust that the magnitude of generous acts will accumulate to give you an unprecedented source of leverage down the road.

And if they don’t, which is also quite possible, then at least you will have honed an important skill.

Never underestimate the power of not going away.

You don’t need a nametag, it just has to stick.

What are you willing to spend an hour doing each day, even in the face of no immediate results?