Your Highest Work

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The 3-Stage Model — or Why You Should Be TOCO

„Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.“ writes Bertolt Brecht in his Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) which translates roughly to “First the grub, then the morals”.
I have a 3-stage model with which I would like to show you where there is the place for morality in business:

Imagine yourself on a sunny day on the beach holding an ice cream.
The sun is up, the sky is blue (It’s beautiful and so are you…)
Now imagine yourself INSIDE that cone of ice cream. Trust me on this one, nothing bad will be happening.

At the very bottom of the cone, it is very dark, dense, and solid, actually, you are not even sure if that IS chocolate – at least it does not feel that way…
This stage, the bottom stage, is the stage of apathy. A place where you are hiding your value and your self-worth is the lowest.
Let’s call it the bottom of the cone (BOCO).

If you go up from there, and there is a natural movement up, you get to the second stage, the stage of grabbing value, the stage where you are mainly interested in yourself.

It is the world of me first, getting rich quickly, a world of egoism. Still, there is no sunlight there and your self-worth is still quite low but you try to compensate for this by trying to grab as much value as you can.
Most of what you see in business and on the internet today is in this stage.
I call it the middle of the cone – MOCO.

From there, the highest stage, is further up – up into the sunlight and the bright day. Of course, you are afraid to go up there, you are becoming vulnerable and, you know, the seagulls, or you could just be dropped onto the floor.

But this stage is where you should be, I call it YOUR HIGHEST WORK.
You are mainly giving value, you are a Value Giver.
You are feeling the freest.
This stage is called the top of the cone (TOCO).

Personal Branding is not proclaiming how great you are

Personal Branding is all about finding your Valuetives.
What’s a Valuetive, you ask?—Glad, you’ve asked:

Valuetive (noun)—A person related to you by shared values.

And as all your relatives make your family, all your Valuetives make your Value family.
You may call it your tribe if you are inclined to a more ethnological point of view.
If you have a POV more influenced by social media you could call it your think-alike audience.

This is Personal Branding,
anything else is a tale
told by an idiot
(uhh, that could have been you),
full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.

You’re a Viking now, Oh-oo-oh…

Let’s assume you have found your Valuetives—your tribe and let for the sake of this visualization say they resemble something like a Viking tribe.

So congrats: You are a Viking now!

But it is not enough to just enjoy the Viking life; talking about Mead here.
You also have to be a contributing part of your tribe for your acceptance (and survival) and not just like Mead.

You could be a navigator—but there is already a very competent one. He has even discovered America—so you would be a lame duck…

But how about being the guy not only enjoying Mead but also knowing how to brew it?

That’s your “Role of Acute Relevancy” (ROAR) in your Value-Family: You are the Mead guy now!

ROAR Like a Lion

Finding your ROAR can be most difficult: it is probably easy to find any ROAR but finding YOUR ROAR is different.
To stand out is actually bad advice.
Standing out means pretending to be something other than yourself.

But this won’t work because to find your ROAR you have to be you.
So tricks won’t do—just be you.

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Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.

– Oliver Wendall Holmes –