Shift your problem-solving mindset from personal execution to delegation and leverage. By seeking out mentors, coaches, or employees who have already solved your problem, you can achieve your goals more efficiently and avoid common pitfalls.
Related Insights
The act of hiring help creates a psychological shift. It forces you to act like a business owner and focus on growth to justify the expense. This imposed accountability often leads to a surprising increase in revenue.
Success is often attributed not to a relentless personal grind, but to a superpower in attracting and retaining top talent. True scaling and outsized impact come from empowering a great team, embodying the idea that "greatness is in the agency of others."
To truly leverage AI, professionals must change their approach to tasks. Instead of automatically assuming personal responsibility, the first question should be whether an AI tool can perform it. This proactive mindset shift unlocks significant productivity gains by automating routine work.
The primary goal of hiring should be to reclaim the founder's time from low-value tasks. This frees up the business's most valuable asset—the founder—to focus on high-leverage activities that truly drive growth, rather than simply adding capacity.
Many leaders, particularly in technical fields, mistakenly believe their role is to provide all the answers. This approach disempowers teams and creates a bottleneck. Shifting from advising to coaching unlocks a team's problem-solving potential and allows leaders to scale their impact.
Don't wait for a large budget to learn delegation. Start with inexpensive tools like ChatGPT to practice offloading tasks and articulating needs. This 'ladder of leverage' allows you to build the core skill of delegating, making you far more effective when you eventually hire human assistants and chiefs of staff.
The young founder hired an experienced executive who became a mentor and effectively his boss. He learned more from observing this leader's actions—how he interacted with people and approached problems—than from direct instruction. This demonstrates the power of learning through osmosis from seasoned operators.
It's a misconception that ambitious people hire assistants. The reality is often reversed: gaining leverage by delegating small tasks frees up mental space, which in turn unlocks a higher level of ambition. As you offload the daily annoyances, you naturally start thinking bigger about what's possible.
The primary goal of delegating low-value tasks isn't just to work on more sales or marketing. It's to reinvest that time into becoming a leader who can attract A-players, high-level partners, and bigger opportunities. Scaling requires you to become a person capable of attracting that next level of success.
Founders often feel guilty delegating tasks they could do themselves. A powerful mental shift is to see delegation not as offloading work, but as providing a desirable, well-paying job to someone in the developing world who is eager for the opportunity.
