Join 60,000+ seasoned professionals who are done with the corporate world. Epic Encore is an almost daily newsletter with inspirational stories from leading experts. Your Epic Encore is about turning your lifetime experiences into the cornerstone of the rest of your life. It represents your audacious leap into entrepreneurship, fueled by the wisdom and tenacity you've garnered in your successful career. This isn't about playing catch-up in business and building a 7-figure business. It's about forging a unique path, using your distinct perspective, seasoned judgment, and invaluable insights that can only come from years of life experience.
How one sentence changed everything I thought I knew about my career
|
The fog was already burning off San Francisco Bay when I sat down at my desk in San Anselmo, coffee going cold beside my keyboard. I had a problem. Not a new problem. The same one I'd been circling for decades. I've been on the internet since 1992, back when most people had no idea what it was. The browser wouldn't be invented for another five years. I'd managed networks, sold computer hardware, and watched the entire digital world get built from the inside out. Then I pivoted to LinkedIn coaching before LinkedIn was cool, wrote multiple editions of the book on it, and spent 25 years helping small business owners find their voice online. I knew things. A lot of things. But every time I tried to explain what connected it all, the tech career, the coaching, the Mastermind Book Club, the Epic Encore program I was building for men reinventing themselves after corporate life, people's eyes drifted. I picked up Neil Gordon's book, The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time, and by page thirty, I stopped reading. Because something was cracking open. The problem you solve isn't what you think it is. I grabbed a notepad. Not bullet points. One honest sentence. I crossed out twelve attempts, each too clever, too vague. Gordon kept echoing: Start with what they already believe. Then flip it. What did they believe? That reinvention was for younger people. That the expertise they'd spent a lifetime building had an expiration date. I tapped my pen twice and wrote: "The most important work of your life is the work you haven't done yet." Something settled. I started writing. On Thursday April 23rd, Tom Ruwitch and I will be discussing The Most Powerful Sentence of All Time with Neil Gordon. Join us live at 11:30 AM Pacific/2:30 PM Eastern. No need to register. >>> Click here to join the live discussion See you Thursday. Ted |
Ted Prodromou
Join 60,000+ seasoned professionals who are done with the corporate world. Epic Encore is an almost daily newsletter with inspirational stories from leading experts. Your Epic Encore is about turning your lifetime experiences into the cornerstone of the rest of your life. It represents your audacious leap into entrepreneurship, fueled by the wisdom and tenacity you've garnered in your successful career. This isn't about playing catch-up in business and building a 7-figure business. It's about forging a unique path, using your distinct perspective, seasoned judgment, and invaluable insights that can only come from years of life experience.
Mike White walked onto Survivor 50 with no immunity idol, no physical advantage, and no survival skills. What he had was a story. The creator of The White Lotus knew exactly what his weapon was. "Being a storyteller is pretty much my only skill set," he admitted. "Being able to see people in their narrative, articulate that, and get in people's heads." His strategy wasn't to outrun or outmuscle anyone. It was to make every player feel like he was a supporting character in their story. For...
In the 1920s, Chicago, a con man named Yellow Kid Weil, Joseph Weil, had a gift. He never lied to his marks. Not exactly. Instead, he told them a story. A vivid, irresistible story where they were the hero, the insider, the one who finally got the upper hand. By the time the story was over, his marks weren't being deceived. They were choosing to believe. There's a difference, and it matters more than you think. Weil understood something that the world's greatest persuaders all share: facts...
I fixed computers when they filled entire rooms. I was there when computer networking was invented, not learned about it, watched it being built. Employee number 40 at Cellular One. Fewer than 10,000 cell phone subscribers in all of the San Francisco Bay Area. By the time I left, they had over 1,500 employees and 500,000 subscribers. I was working on the internet in 1992. Before browsers. Before anyone had a name for it. I say all that not to impress you.I say it because I need you to...