On What You Plan to Do Next
2025-01-25 Invite Champions Weekly
A couple of tools for making better decisions.
Resources are finite.
Can I get an amen?
As we enter a new year, perhaps you’re weighing between possible new directions. Consider this reflection from Seth Godin1, long one of my favorite thinkers:
“The phone rings, and a lot of people want a thing. If it doesn’t align with the thing that is your mission, and you say “yes,” now your mission has become their mission.”
- Seth Godin
Each thing that you spend your precious resources on shapes your mission.
Do you see the dynamic relationship there? It is not as if you have an immutable mission and your projects either match it or don’t match it. Your mission and your “things” (your next project, your daily driver, your new start ups, your book ideas) have a symbiotic relationship.
Seth goes on to say:
“There’s nothing wrong with being a wandering generality instead of a meaningful specific, but don’t expect to make the change you hope to make if that’s what you do.”
The worst sorts of things, then, are the ones for which you are unsure if they match your mission. Which begs the question that you need to be able to articulate your mission, which in itself is based on what you think about said things (see my recent note about improving how you think).
As publisher of Invite Press, and the responsible party for how we spend our resources, I need to make sure that every book we say yes to is a “meaningful specific”: it is part of the Invite Press library for a specific, meaningful reason.
Part of my answer to the things about which I am unsure is simple:
When in Doubt, Leave it Out
This is harder than it sounds. Especially since things move so fast nowadays. A book contract is minimum seven months from contract to pub date, and sometimes years. What if something that made sense on signing no longer makes sense at publication? That’s a real danger.
Uncertainty about new things is offset by clarity about first things.
The more I understand our mission at Invite (to share the promise of Christ’s new creation) and our set of values (high on Jesus, low on politics, biased toward innovation), the easier it is to decide.
What new things are you considering this year? How will you decide?
Championing Invite
We now have roughly 80 contracts: 40 titles on the street and 40 more coming, most of them in the year 2024. The more we grow, the bigger the inquires, and the tighter I want to guard the things to which we say yes.
Tim Ferriss, Tools for Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: Harper Business, 2016), p. 238.