And that’s what I love the most about the Christian Business Leader Podcast. You have first-person accounts of how Christians practice their faith even in difficult situations, which many Christians find hard to do or don’t bother with at all. The guests he’s had on the podcast have been working out what it means to honor God at work or in business, so they’re examples you and I can learn from if we want to do the same.

As Philippians 4:9 says, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.”

So, what would you do with over 200 of the most thoughtful Christian business voices of the last decade?

When I began thinking about a personal project I could challenge myself with this year, I wanted to do something that adds an educational value for you, who trust me with your time every week. So, finding a unique answer to this question has been top of mind since February.

I decided to start with transcriptions for three reasons.

First, and this is personal. If I told you I have a BA in Christian Studies, a Professional Diploma in Education, and I’m an MBA student, how would you merge these three domains?

Would you like more context? Okay. I’ve been a preacher’s kid for most of my life. I started teaching in a secondary school in 2011. Then, I started and ran a small business between 2012 and 2014, and a non-profit in 2022. I’ve been working professionally in the youth development and education space over the past five years. Last but not least, I’ve been a fan of The Chosen and other creative Christian productions. What stands out? Three words: Christian. Business. Education. This observation tells me that I am uniquely positioned to build something impactful for other believers.

Second, if you visit the Christian Business Leader Podcast website and click on any episodes, it plays the audio. It would have been nice to have each click open a new page with a podcast summary, useful links, and guest profile information. This is what you get when you click on other legacy podcasts, such as Tim Ferriss’ show. In fact, Tim Ferriss has a page dedicated to his podcast transcripts.

I could have written a fan email to Darren Shearer asking him to do the same. But I once emailed him asking to join his team, and got no response, which only strengthened my resolve to do something that adds value to his podcast instead. I hope starting with transcribing his published episodes is a step in the right direction.

Third, you cannot build a product without a knowledge base to start. In early 2022, I was working with Mrs. Ebele Chukwujama to start The Listening School, our starting point was a pioneer organization in listening intelligence worldwide, because they were leading in research and had created or curated seminal works on the subject matter. This is the very foundation of artificial general intelligence, which now empowers people to do things they otherwise cannot. Once you have gained a strong understanding of a domain, only then can you advance the field with your own contributions.

How I started

To create a knowledge base, you need inputs, basically good documents that contain the knowledge you need.

So, in principle, the plan was to transcribe all the guest episodes first so they would feed the knowledge base. Not all the episodes, but the guest episodes, because that’s what I want the knowledge base to contain. Moreover, Darren’s solo episodes mostly draw on his books and articles, so they’re already available in text format for anyone to read.

The mistake I made, which many people still make today, is assuming that once you tell AI something, you only need to back up and watch it bring everything to life as you imagine or maybe instruct.

But the reality is that even with a detailed prompt (even in Openclaw), you need to guide your AI tool all the way. It starts with a good plan you may have jointly developed, but it doesn’t end there, especially if you’re working with free accounts (the limitations could hurt your drive).

So, I wanted to take every guest interview episode Darren had ever published, all 280+ of them spanning 2015 to March 2026, and convert them into searchable, usable text.

I started by cataloging the entire episode archive. Using the podcast RSS feed, I built a master spreadsheet of all the guest episodes, recording each episode title, guest name, publication date, episode length, and direct MP3 download link.

Then I went through the list carefully to distinguish genuine guest interviews and episodes where Darren sat down with another person from his solo monologue episodes, because I noticed he used the same naming convention throughout, listing his name, Darren Shearer, as a guest on a few episodes.

The naming convention he uses for his episodes helped. The interviews consistently followed patterns such as “w/ Guest Name,” “Interview w/ Guest Name,” or “Interview with Guest Name” in the title.

When I had listed about 280+, I knew I had a reasonable list because he’s published over 300 episodes, and a good number of them up to 2017 were solo episodes. Next, I needed to transcribe them, and that’s when I began meeting some challenging limitations.

The limits of free AI accounts and other challenges

My first attempt at transcription was entirely manual. Basically, there’s no free online transcription service that allows you to feed AI multiple audios and get them as text on the same day. Trust me, I came to this conclusion after serious, extended trials. That said, I eventually found Evernote’s audio-to-text feature, which allowed me to upload audio files and receive text in batches of ten.

Hold up. There’s one step I haven’t told you about: downloading the episodes.

This, too, was a major bottleneck because I found no free online tool that could directly pull each episode from the RSS feed and convert it to text. I downloaded them on Spotify, but it didn’t save them to my local drive, and if it did, I didn’t bother finding out how to get them as MP3s because I could only manually download the podcast episodes. I wanted a method to bulk-download, or at least everything, in batches.

I found PodcasttoMP3 useful, though the bulk feature only allowed 100 episodes (in MPGA format, I think), so I used it to download 100 of the most recent episodes, but without a filter option, which meant I couldn’t select the guest episodes that I wanted.

I continued searching for tools, but eventually found Beamly, which allowed me to bulk-download only the 200 most recent episodes. I used it too. So, it meant I had downloaded 300 audio files in mixed formats, about half of which were duplicates.

Add to that the fact that I hadn’t succeeded in downloading only the guest episodes since 2015. I also found a tutorial detailing how to transcribe audio files in Google Drive with OpenAI’s Whisper. So I uploaded all the nearly 200 guest episodes I had after deleting duplicates and ran the script I got from this video. The problem was that I hit a limit on my free account, but it still gave me 20 transcripts in purely narrative format (without speaker labels or timestamps).

Frustrated, I paused downloading and set out to transcribe the files I had downloaded. This, too, was painstaking. I had to upload 10 at a time to Evernote, wait for the results, download the output, and manually split the combined transcripts into individual documents (because the product assumed all the files in each batch belonged in one document).

The other transcription product I tried was Audio Converter AI. Fortunately, it used the interview transcription format with time-stamping and speaker identification, but it only allowed single-episode uploads. I used it a few times, and that was it. It wasn’t sustainable. I used Evernote to transcribe most of the downloaded episodes.

At that point, there was only one method I had yet to try: coding. So, I turned to Claude, my favorite AI for problem-solving operational issues like this, and after telling it my goal and the struggles I had gone through, it advised me to use a Python Script (which it wrote to run Whisper on my desktop) and guided me through the entire process.

But first, I had to put all the guest episode titles. I downloaded titles in a spreadsheet, indicating which ones I had yet to transcribe, so the script would check my spreadsheet against the episodes in the RSS feed and both download and transcribe each remaining guest episode.

This method worked as planned. It used the Python script to read my master spreadsheet, identified which episodes still needed transcribing, fetched the correct MP3 files directly from the RSS feed, transcribed each one using Whisper, saved the output as individual text files, and automatically updated the spreadsheet to track progress.

It took me a few days to finish transcribing the remaining 80+ guest episodes this way, since I had to shut down my laptop at the end of my workday to let it rest, but it worked. There were only two issues at this point.

First, because the script was based on my spreadsheet, it didn’t automatically download and transcribe guest episode titles published thereafter that weren’t in my list. Second, the transcripts lack time stamps and speaker labels. Other than those, I call the project a success.

What do you stand to gain?

I have compiled the complete transcript library into a master spreadsheet. Every one of the 272 guest interview episodes is listed with its title, guest name, publication date, episode length, original MP3 URL, and a direct link to its transcript. I will continue working on this as I’ve found duplicates in the spreadsheet and a few lacking guest episodes at the time of writing this article.

This is the first public release of this project. I will continue building by God’s grace and share updates with you.

God willing, the goal is simple: anyone who wants to study, research, or do anything useful with this body of Christian business wisdom should be able to do so without starting from scratch. But to make it really immersive, I advise you listen to at least all the guest episodes. And you may do so on Apple Podcasts. I hope that this would ultimately advance Darren Shearer’s legacy.

You can access the full spreadsheet here.

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In this matter, many Christians take a binary stance from the outset. They assume that nonprofits exist to serve others and that businesses exist to generate profit, or that a nonprofit is a ministry, while businesses are ordinary.

Here’s a concern posted on Reddit:
“Does anyone else feel a bit of guilt when turning a profit? It sounds odd I know, but I feel like I didn't really "earn" the money. Like any one could call up the factory and buy stuff for cheap. I almost feel like I'm "ripping people off".

These biases have produced under-resourced nonprofits because their managers felt entitled to their donors’ wealth and guilt-laden for-profit founders who doubt their work is acceptable to God. It’s also common to hear about honest Christians abandoning corporate work or entrepreneurship to “serve God in ministry” (that is, the church). I have written previously about how Plato’s dualism influenced the church into preaching that such a move is fine. But it’s not.

That said, in this article, I wouldn’t argue for one structure over the other. Both are as legitimate as they are necessary, and can equally be operated with Kingdom intentionality that serves people and glorifies God.

That said, in what follows, I will discuss four specific operational and theological considerations to help you choose the better structure for your good intentions.

Can you keep the lights on long enough?

The first consideration is sustainability.

Simply, which structure best enables this mission to continue long enough to accomplish something impactful?

According to Peter Drucker, mission-driven organisations face serious financial fragility (funding trap). A nonprofit is typically dependent on donor cycles, grant applications, and fundraising campaigns. So, they are largely consumed by the work of sustaining themselves financially, which consumes the time, energy, and leadership attention at the direct expense of programme delivery and strategic development. That’s why nonprofits with independently verified program impacts are few and rare.

What makes running a nonprofit even more taxing is the administrative skill it requires.

Nonprofit formation often demands significant compliance requirements, from board governance and fiduciary responsibility to restricted fund accounting, annual reporting and public disclosure, and the management of donor relationships with all their attendant expectations. The extent to which you can fulfil these statutory obligations annually (even with a team) will impact how long your nonprofit will last.

Moreso, if your primary gifts are in building, designing, launching, and executing, your first few hires would have to be skilled in governance, compliance, and relationship management. You must be honest about whether the structure of a nonprofit operation is a good stewardship of your particular capacities, and if it isn’t, how quickly can you find someone equally mission-driven and faithful to take up the job? Can you also afford to hire this person or provide a stipend to the committed volunteers you might find during the early days? A few years ago, I started a nonprofit and recruited some volunteers, but a few months in, they all had good reasons to move on and it shut down.

If you prefer using more of your actual strengths to build an organisation faster and more efficiently, a business allows you to do so, and if you do it well, the business could be an inheritance someday. A business produces value and generates its own funds. In fact, your success is largely determined by the value you offer your customers or clients, so to fall short on value is to lose profit.

Does that make businesses better social companions? Not necessarily. The point is that before choosing a nonprofit structure, you must have a clear, honest, tested answer to the question: where will the operating income come from, and is that source stable enough to allow you to focus on your mission rather than primarily on persuading donors?

How will you relate to your beneficiaries?

A close consideration of sustainability is the nature of beneficiary relationships. The recent USAID funding suspension across Africa showed just how much our nonprofits rely on foreign aid rather than on sustainability. When aid was cut, a good number of them had to lay off staff and suspend vital services, exposing a failure to build local resilience.

The problem, though, is that if it were easy for the nonprofits to sustain themselves locally, they wouldn’t have sought or structured themselves to require external aid in the first place. Needless to say, many of the issues African nonprofits address are the responsibilities of corrupt state governments like Nigeria.

If you start a nonprofit, your beneficiary typically receives a service they could not otherwise afford or access, but if you start a business, your customers pay for the value you provide.

These are different relationships, and they require different operational models. Amy Sherman, in her book Kingdom Calling, says that there is a difference between programmes that develop human dignity and programmes that, despite good intentions, inadvertently reinforce dependency.

In a business, your customers’ choices and continued engagement make you accountable for quality, whereas the beneficiaries of a nonprofit have limited ability to withdraw their patronage when the service is poor, leaving donors, who sometimes may not have experienced the issues being addressed, as the primary source of accountability.

Therefore, your donors (likely more than your beneficiaries themselves) will influence your ability to reach and truly serve your target audience. Despite your good intentions, both you and your beneficiaries will be dependent on your donors.

If your desire is to serve a target audience directly and earn based on how well you serve them and how much they can pay you, a for-profit organisation is likely the better option.

Where do you belong?

The third consideration is an often-underrated part of modern Western life: community. Or, according to Os Guinness, the stewardship of influence.

In The Call, Guinness says that a person’s calling is always expressed within and shaped by a particular community. When you choose to build an organisation, the structure you choose determines which communities you and your organisation can access and serve. A nonprofit founder typically operates within donor communities, grant-making foundations, government service delivery systems, and beneficiary populations.

A business owner operates within commercial markets, industry ecosystems, and economic communities. So, for the Christian looking to expand their influence, knowing which community God has placed you in or that you’ve had affinity with for most of your life will help you further decide which organisation to start. If you choose to situate your organisation in your existing community, you could gain the connections you need to sell your minimum viable product or execute an outreach.

A Christian entrepreneur whose mission is to disciple the technology industry will almost certainly need to operate as a business to gain the proximity and credibility the mission requires. A founder whose calling is to serve low-income communities will need to start a nonprofit to pursue that mission.

What kind of success would make you happy?

Everyone wants success. It’s in our nature to think of a later “self” that has done something worthwhile, something big, whether that something is deeply personal or interpersonal, like making your “haterz” eyes roll, is a different question entirely.

To say it simply, what kind of success do you want to achieve, and would you be happy with?

When you think of running a nonprofit, are you comfortable with the idea of courting donors long enough and well enough to pursue sustainable strategic partnerships and replicate successful programmes? The biggest nonprofits in the world pay their staff well enough, but never so well as many global corporations. If you started a nonprofit today, your wealth in 15-20 years would be measured mostly by impact, not assets.

If you’re building a business, for example, your clients paying for genuine value delivered allows for more rapid growth, higher service quality, and more sustainable expansion. The richest men and women in the world all have businesses that made them rich. Then some created nonprofits through which they give back to their communities, but stay rich because otherwise they’d be unable to finance their nonprofits or lead the lives they have.

So you see, this isn’t merely a conversation about which path to follow. It is one about your attitudes toward money and success.

Some Christians choose nonprofit structures only because it “feels spiritually safe’. They feel it saves them from the guilt of building great wealth while people are starving elsewhere, even though their business may have little, if anything, to do with the corrupt forces depriving others of the common wealth.

Moreso, nonprofits are a way for some good people to achieve their ambitions of “making the world a better place”, even though that means getting money from prudent and charitable businessmen and women to execute projects that are often the legitimate use of paid taxes.

Let me emphasise again that the question of whether making a profit is consistent with deep Christian faithfulness is: Yes, it is, especially when done faithfully, generously, and held with open-handed stewardship that acknowledges God.

The operational and organizational structure you choose should follow your mission's requirements, not your need for spiritual comfort.

To wit, you can be creative with the structure of your organisation. Social enterprises, benefit corporations and businesses with explicit Christian missionary commitments and transparency are appropriate ways to do good, profitable work that serves people and glorifies God.

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Now thirteen seasons in and with several awards, one of my favourite episodes remains Hallelujah (episode 7, season 1).

The host, Malcolm Gladwell, uses Cézanne as a prime example of what economist David Galenson calls “experimental innovation,” the opposite of conceptual genius (represented by Picasso).

Cézanne would spend months on a single painting. He’d arrive at his studio before dawn, prepare his canvas, and study the same mountain, the Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he’d painted dozens of times before. He’d apply a few strokes, step back, observe the hill again, and sometimes scrape away what he’d just painted. He was that intent on bringing most of his inner paintings to material life.

He did version after version, “iteration after iteration, trying to stumble on something that seized his imagination,” says Gladwell. For example, the fourth portrait of his wife, Gladwell says, is actually less finished than his second and third versions because he’s not marching toward completion in the conventional sense.

By the time he died in 1906, he had abandoned more works than he finished because he never stopped trying to grasp what his mind saw and told him was possible.

The other genius featured in the episode is Leonard Cohen. He wrote more than eighty verses for “Hallelujah” and performed various versions in concerts, testing them against his mental image of what the song could be.

I’m narrating these stories because they’re interesting enough to compel me to theorize a lesson or two on their applications for talent development. But I’ll admit that there’s some obsession in both of them. I mean, Cézanne once made 100 sittings with his art dealer (instead of five) and didn’t sign many of his paintings because he didn’t want to admit he’d finished them.

Many of us cannot afford the luxury of countless iterations like Cézanne.

We have deadlines. Bosses, clients, projects, and other demands are cataloged with imminent delivery dates in our heads. We usually complete the work as soon as possible.

For some people, that’s okay, but for a good number of others, that’s not what we want from our work. We want our outputs to bring us pride in the present and the future.

If you often feel a nagging sense that something you did could have been better, that if you’d had one more day, one more revision, you would have done it differently. Or, more like, the work you submitted isn’t quite what you wanted to submit. It only means one thing: you did not realize your creative ambitions, even if the job met the brief.

Why?

How the mind iterates

First, let’s talk about how the mind makes us productive.

The mind typically engages in a back-and-forth with the hand or whatever instruments serve its creative desires. It generally forms an initial image of a thing, which it updates as the object is created.

I think that when Cézanne finally walked away from a painting, it was likely because his mind had stopped arguing with his canvas. The image in his head that had been evolving with each brushstroke had settled.

Let me explain.

There’s something called a “taste gap,” the distance between what you can recognize as excellent work and what you can actually produce. “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners,” Ira Glass says. “All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple [of] years you make stuff, it’s just not that good... Your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

The taste gap theory helps explain part of your dissatisfaction: you can envision better work than you can execute. Our internal standards exceed our current capabilities, particularly when we’re relatively inexperienced in our fields.

But that’s not all.

With every creative project, a presentation, an essay, a design, or a strategy, your brain begins forming a prediction, an evolving image of what the output could be. Neuroscientists call this “predictive processing.”

Your brain is constantly generating predictions about what should happen next, then comparing those predictions to what you’re actually building. When there’s a mismatch, your brain either updates the prediction or tries to change reality.

It’s really just iteration!

You have an initial idea of what you want to make. You start making it. As you work, your brain gets feedback, which refines your mental image of what the work should be. The duty of your hand or feet, as the case may be, is to catch up with your mind’s eye.

Cézanne was fond of doing this. In fact, he enjoyed it! Each brushstroke told his brain what to do next, though he sometimes destroyed what he didn’t like in his work. The entire process gave his mind clearer information about what his painting should be in reality. And he kept painting until his prediction stopped and the image in his head aligned with the one on the canvas.

The same with Cohen and “Hallelujah.” Each performance, each revision, each new verse gave him feedback until the gap between what he heard in his head and the song he wrote and played (prediction error) was small enough that he could stop.

We can think of this kind of satisfaction as resonance, the moment when what we hear, read, see, or feel matches what’s in our mind.

Taste gaps and prediction errors result in cognitive tension

Some deadlines will be too tight for you to make multiple drafts or revisions, but when you have to submit something before your prediction has stabilized, your brain doesn’t stop forming that image.

Your execution didn’t match your mind’s ambition for the job (the taste gap) because your internal standard was still forming, but you stopped before it could finish.

Some psychologists have identified stages that may help us better understand the mind-reality gap. They are:

• preparation

• incubation

• illumination, and

• verification.

If you compress or skip incubation, the period during which your mind processes several possibilities for your work, even if you hit illumination (your “aha” moment), chances are that your mind won’t have adequate verification (testing, refining, and aligning your execution with your vision).

By the time you’ve submitted that rushed work and are free from anxiety, you’ll likely have a prediction error, a mismatch between what your brain predicted the work would be and what you actually produced. Add prediction errors to your taste gap, and you’ll be dealing with cognitive tension.

Why?

Because your brain doesn’t like unresolved gaps, it will bother you with all sorts of: This isn’t quite right. You could have done it differently. There’s a better version you didn’t have time to find.

Another psychological explanation for this is the Zeigarnik Effect, which states that unfinished tasks occupy more mental space than completed ones. Your brain registers every rushed work, even though it’s technically “done,” as incomplete because it hadn’t closed the prediction loop when you submitted your work. In other words, you finished the task, but not the mind’s creative process.

Despite that, when it comes to mental things, there’s hardly ever one or two sufficient explanations, so while I was ruminating on this article, I asked myself, what else might be involved?

You see, there’s a choice dimension here, too, that explains why we could be dissatisfied with a job we completed.

According to Barry Schwartz, people who constantly imagine alternative possibilities experience greater regret. When you rush through a task for which you didn’t explore alternatives, your brain is unhappy because it thinks that the other options you could have tried but didn’t would have been better.

Perfectionism is the fear of judgment or the need for everything to be flawless. This is instead about creative ambition, our innate desire to realize our best work when we give our minds the time and resources it requires.

Again, why isn’t this perfectionism?

It isn’t because the problem I’ve discussed here isn’t merely a matter of high standards, but failure to allow our minds enough time to settle on what the standards should be, and our hands, feet, or whatever else we use enough time to meet them.

Whenever possible, never rush your work

People like Cézanne and Cohen iterate so much that it becomes second nature.

They don’t rush the prediction loop but allow their vision to evolve. They iterate not out of indecision but out of respect for the process their brain is running, and they know that the first version of an idea is rarely the clearest, that mental image needs time to refine, and that execution requires revision to catch up.

Though many of us make presentations, write reports, design, pitch, and develop strategies, the same process applies. Your brain predicts an output that evolves as you work. If you iterate, your execution will eventually align with your vision. And your satisfaction increases only as the prediction error shrinks.

If you have an ambitious mind, your prediction won’t stop evolving because a deadline is looming over you.

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I’ve been learning about him and consuming much of his content lately. This article is based on lessons he shared in a short clip.

It was Jim Rohn, his mentor, who said it so clearly that it reset his mind, and it doesn’t matter what aggrieved Marxist armchair philosophers say in response; it’s absolutely true:

Tony Robbins eventually became a millionaire at 24 and a billionaire at 63.

In the 39 years in between, he’s been mastering a simple three-process system essential to wealth creation:

1. Pattern recognition: seeing what many people miss.

2. Pattern utilization: using the patterns you’ve recognised optimally.

3. Pattern creation: creating new patterns and categories that other people will copy.

That’s it!

Patterns!

This doesn’t mean watching out for new trends or new ways to make money.

The point Tony Robbins makes is that, to build wealth, your sole focus must be on becoming more valuable and doing more for others than anyone else in your field.

Someone else put it this way: the person offering the most value in a niche wins.

The mindset to take here is that wealth is a mathematical certainty for those who increase their marketplace value, because that’s the fundamental difference between us all. Other than that, as creatures of God, we’re all equal.

Here's precisely how Tony Robbins used those three patterns to build an empire.

Pattern recognition

One thing he noticed while working with Jim Rohn was a lack of access to Rohn’s speeches.

Tony learned early on that there’s much information in the world, but not much wisdom. He was convinced more people needed to hear Jim Rohn, but couldn’t afford the seminars.

The pattern was: transformational content limited to seminars alone leaves a massive gap of interested, low-budget customers.

While other students took notes and went home inspired, Tony saw an opportunity. He started promoting Rohn’s seminars and learning the personal development business from practice.

By the late 1980s, infomercials were considered low-rent advertising for domestic gadgets. Tony recognized that millions of people wanted transformation but couldn’t afford Rohn’s seminars. They were price-sensitive but hungry for transition. So, late-night TV was an untapped direct-to-consumer channel for premium personal development.

This way, transformation could be democratized without diluting value. The infomercials generated millions of customers who never would have attended a live event. It provided the same content, in a different format, to an exponentially larger market.

When that proved its success, he recognised another pattern: high-ticket sessions.

While other coaches charged $500 to $5,000 per session, Tony thought that at certain wealth levels, people stop being price-sensitive and become obsessed with results. A CEO making $50 million a year doesn’t care if intervention costs $1 million. They cared about the outcome.

Tony positioned himself accordingly, selling private interventions, million-dollar engagements to presidents, athletes, and Fortune 500 CEOs. He didn’t create this pattern, but just recognized it and positioned himself to serve it.

But perhaps the most essential pattern recognition came later: the compound business model.

Most speakers build one business. They speak, they get paid, and they go home, or if they could, write a book. Tony Robbins has applied his methodology (frameworks, psychology, and transformation systems) across multiple industries, from nutrition and resorts to financial services and technology.

It’s the same personal brand, but with multiple revenue streams that reinforce one another.

According to one account, Tony is involved in over 100 companies, totalling over $7 billion in annual revenue.

The fundamental secret to Tony Robbins’ success is that he recognizes patterns and capitalizes on them earlier and more effectively than other motivational speakers.

“You’re rewarded in public for what you constantly practice intensely in private,” Tony says. By this statement alone, we may say that he practices pattern recognition obsessively.

Pattern utilization

Noticed how he acts on the patterns he sees?

Tony Robbins is also very good at content multiplication.

Before YouTube, a weekend seminar became an audio tape series. The tape series became a book. The book became a TV special. The TV special became streaming content. Now with YouTube, you can easily watch his recorded or live sessions online, and the platform pays him. Same as Mr Beast or other influential YouTubers.

Except that his content becomes a certification program in which his trainers deliver his methodology. And that’s not all: the certification program becomes a licensing model in which partners use Tony’s frameworks.

One weekend event but ten revenue streams. I’ve seen this content revenue ladder applied by many coaches and consultants today. It’s efficient.

It’s systematic pattern utilization. Every piece of content serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It’s similar to how a talk/article doesn’t generate book sales, coaching inquiries, partnership opportunities, and media appearances.

Take one of his programs, named after his book, “Unleash the Power Within.”

Tony creates a transformational weekend for participants who practice his signature habit, Firewalk, which, in turn, drives viral word-of-mouth/influencer marketing. The program’s venue selection ensures a broad reach. His trained crew means events can run several times per year without him being present at every session.

One of the things I found really interesting about this is that he generates revenue through strategic partnerships, which is his most effective strategy.

He knows that his brand has value (pattern recognition). Instead of building companies for each interest from scratch, he utilizes his brand value by partnering with the founders of existing companies he’s interested in.

Resort companies provide infrastructure for the immersive events he hosts. Nutritional companies provided products aligned with his health methodology, and financial service firms offer wealth management systems.

Each partner brings existing assets.

The lesson?

When you find a pattern, think about how many times or in what ways you can use it. If each variation creates value, you will earn a decent income from each one.

Best of all?
You do not need to own all the resources you need.
If I have a valuable brand, you can partner with resource owners.

Brands like Tony Robbins are highly credible, which means they deliver what they promise. They depend on their credibility to be sustainable, because “What you need is to get results. There’s no better marketing tool than results. Then you’ll not just have attention, you’ll have raving fans,” he said.

Someone who’s earned good results working with a president has proof for the next CEO client, just as A coach whose athlete wins a championship has a case study for other athletes.

Each result becomes evidence for the next engagement because, again, “credibility kills all bad attitudes,” Tony says.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a system that multiplies your success.

Pattern creation

“The third skill,” Tony says, “the one you want to get to, is pattern creation. That’s when you become the greatest of all time in your particular category.”

Decades ago, “coaching” meant sports. Coaches trained athletes. That was the category.

Tony Robbins popularised a new industry entirely: the life coach through the RMT Center (Robbins-Madanes Training). Now thousands of coaches operate in a market that didn’t exist before 1990.

That’s pattern creation or, as others would call it, category creation. When you create or popularise a category, you own or lead it.

Perhaps the most effective way Tony Robbins achieved this was by launching the weekend format.

Motivational speakers and coaches often offered two options: therapy (long-term, weekly sessions) or seminars (informational, one-time events). But Tony Robbins introduced a package model, a 50-hour immersive transformation experience at a priced location.

The people who really wanted it and could afford it paid a premium rate.

Tony Robbins also created “Date With Destiny,” a seven-day deep psychological experience in which participants revisit childhood trauma, rebuild their belief systems, and redesign their entire life trajectory.

The brand Tony Robbins has built is so valuable that there’s little to no competition to it. Various coaches like Daniel Priestly, Alex Hormozi, Steven Bartlett, and Rich Litvin have built successful businesses and sold bestsellers, but it’s rare to see direct competition to Tony’s events.

I watch Tony Robbins on YouTube, and that’s it. The total experience from his events remains unexperienced. That’s to say, how much has been put into building the brand and the experience.

That’s the power of pattern creation.

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It’s a play about a wealthy Ghanaian family. The father has compelled his children into careers they don’t want. Aaron wants to be a graphic artist. Maanan dreams of dancing. Their father wants an engineer and a lawyer instead.

The entire play unfolded in one location: the family house. The drama was resolved within a single day, and a single central conflict drove the resolution (ending).

I didn’t like the play because I thought, why would someone write a play that ends like that?

We didn’t see the characters going to bed or travelling to another city, but the play was compelling enough for a complete reading in less than an hour.

I recall my teacher explaining that De Graft employed Aristotle’s three unities: action, time and place. One main plot in one location over one day. The play was included in the national curriculum, so it was worth our learning we had been told.

As for the structure of the play, these were the classical rules of drama, the framework that made Greek tragedies so intense and engaging.

Fast forward to this day. I’m considering increasing my daily output so I can improve outcomes for my clients.

What if, I thought, there’s some productive insight to learn from that structure of Greek drama?

Unity of action, time, and place

Aristotle’s three unities, which Sons and Daughters reminds me of, were one of the strongest impressions of a 24-hour conceptual force I could recall.

What does this have to do with productivity?

But first, let me clarify a misconception.

What Aristotle actually said about a Greek tragedy is that a play should focus on one main storyline (unity of action) without meandering subplots, and casually added that tragedies tend to occur within “one revolution of the sun.”

It was not until the 16th and 17th centuries that Renaissance Italian and French critics began attributing a rigid “three unities” framework to Aristotle.

French dramatists like Racine and Corneille picked up these rules with utmost devotion, creating tight, intense dramas in which everything happened now, here, with these stakes.

It adopts the notion that tragedy befalls people suddenly and is concluded quickly.

And though Aristotle never said tragedies needed to occur in one place, they took his hints and turned them into a tradition that De Graft followed.

In contrast, Shakespeare wrote his plays however he wanted. His plays span years and continents, juggle multiple storylines. That’s why it takes several subplots, characters, divine interventions, or deus ex machina (using a machine to lower an actor portraying a god onto the stage), and so on to pull off a Shakespearean piece.

What makes the unity of time, place, and action effective, especially for smaller plays, is that the constraints it imposes intensify the story.

That is, if you can’t escape to another location or delay until tomorrow, you must confront everything immediately.

As with other things in life, some deadlines are inevitable.

You must finish certain bits of work at the office or at an exhibition, the market, or wherever else your job takes you within a day to claim success.

Some people approach their jobs like soap operas, as if they have the entire season to achieve one thing and go on pushing tasks forward.

They act as if all their work is inextricably tied to that of others, to the point that they permit others to enter and exit their schedules at random.

In one day, you’re at the office, at a client’s, and later, at home. Endless subplots. Shifting locations. Day after day without resolution.

No matter how organised you are, this kind of structure isn’t optimal because you’re trying to create focused work in a format designed for perpetual distraction.

All of that comes at a measurable cognitive cost. Research shows that the average knowledge worker switches between apps nearly 1,200 times per day, losing about four hours each week just reorienting themselves.

When you switch contexts, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain focus. This “context switching” reduces productivity by up to 40% and costs the global economy an estimated $450 billion annually.

Making a workday as intense as a Greek tragedy

Cal Newport calls it “Deep Work.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it “Flow.” But the core insight is similar.

You accomplish meaningful work every day when you impose dramatic constraints.

So instead of treating your day like a soap opera, structure one part of it like a Greek tragedy.

If you do not have ample control over your workday, planning to control every aspect would be unrealistic.

Create a 4-hour “act” with its own unities.

Research on focus and productivity suggests starting with smaller blocks (90 minutes to 4 hours) and gradually building up your capacity for sustained concentration.

Who knows? If making the most of your day through this practice increases your productivity, you might gain a promotion, which could give you greater control over your workdays.

Unity of Action

Choose to start your day with one key or primary task (the protagonist). This one gets the dramatic priority.

This one must be urgent and important.

This is the task that, if achieved, will make your day successful and determine the weight of the secondary functions for that day.

Everything else is either:

• Small tasks that directly advance the main task

• Background or admin work

• Different play entirely (defer it)

If you have a project for which you must commit 20 work hours, divide it into acts of no more than 4 hours each work day. You can complete secondary tasks using the time remaining after your primary task is completed.

Once you achieve this core action (plot) within your allocated time, the curtain closes.

Unity of Time

Greek tragedies resolved by sunset.

Your morning act needs a hard deadline.

Set a specific time window: “This drama runs from 9 AM to 1 PM.” Not “I’ll work on this today.” Not “whenever I finish.”

It should be a time block of 90 minutes (minimum) to 4 hours (maximum).

When the timer ends, the curtain falls. This compels you to complete the task you choose within this period.

Whatever state you’re in becomes the resolution, complete, incomplete, or somewhere between.

The play will end when you’re out of time, so you’d better make each scene count.

Unity of Place

In Greek tragedy, the stage doesn’t change. You can’t escape to a different location when things get hard. This constraint should compel you to finish your protagonist task in that location before you leave.

This is a primary location, not necessarily a spot. If you’re spending the day at the office, it doesn’t mean you can’t use the toilet or heat your food in the kitchen.

What’s important here is the effect that leaving this space has on your primary task. If you change location, would the drama pause or, worse, end abruptly?

The essence of this constraint is to prevent you from exercising negative freedom, doing anything you want or feel like that isn’t your core task.

Designate a physical or digital stage for your key task of the day.

This might be:

• A specific room, chair, or workstation

• A full-screen application with all other tabs closed

• Noise-canceling headphones that block out all noise

Make your success inevitable

The three unities create what the Greeks called inevitability.

When characters can’t escape their location or expand time, and when the plot can’t be broken into subplots, everything becomes essential. Every action matters. Every moment counts.

This is exactly what happens in deep work or flow states.

Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as a state where people are “so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” You’re characterized by intense concentration, integrated action and awareness, and a distorted sense of time (not 8 or 24 hours, but 4 hours at most).

You wake up every day and enter a bounded space and time with a clear focus, so that the only thing you can do is to accomplish something, not to procrastinate or move about like you own the place, but to get one thing done.

One scene (smaller action) leads to the next, and your work builds momentum, tension, and narrative arc.

The narrative arc is a straightforward statement that would satisfy the curiosity of someone who asked, “What did you achieve today?”

Why?

Greek tragedies often ended in ambiguity, but were resolved. You confronted the task. You moved it forward in a meaningful way. So, there’s closure, even if the larger project continues tomorrow.

Aristotle never intended the three unities to be universal rules, but was describing what he observed in the best tragedies of his time. The best plays in his day.

In those days, speaking, acting, and dancing were all they had, so they best plays really nailed it with these unities.

As for the Renaissance critics who turned his observations into a rigid doctrine? They were accidentally right about focus. I don’t think, as some say, that Shakespeare beat them. I think Shakespeare proved that plays of his day needed to change and that his writing was better suited to his time.

In this age, we face numerous distractions and have unstructured processes that hinder our success, even at work.

The three unities may be wrongly attributed to Aristotle, but they’re at least a model for addressing the lack of structure that prevents some people from getting meaningful work done.

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Around 2009, they noticed that listings in New York with professional, high-quality images received far more attention than those with blurry, low-light photos.

Chesky and Gebbia personally traveled to New York City, visited their early users’ apartments, and took high-quality photographs of the listings. They worked as photographers, customer service staff, and quality inspectors to improve the pictures.

The intensive work they did that year led to increased bookings and profitability.

Bill Gates once shared a tip that’s worth keeping in mind for all of us: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

This is a pattern that researchers have spent years quantifying, and the numbers are precise.

A 2021 study tracked 271 participants as they pursued ambitious goals. Only 10% succeeded. The other 90% not only failed but also experienced emotional distress.

There’s a particular type of delusion that infects goal-setters, especially entrepreneurs. Research shows that 81% of entrepreneurs believe their chances of success are at least 70%. What about the other 30%? They believe their chances reach 100%. However, only about 25% of businesses survive the first five years.

So just what is going on?

I’ll tell you.

Compared to employees, entrepreneurs and managers tend to overestimate their abilities, and they’re equally bad at predicting realistic timeframes for their goals.

Yes, your junior colleague might have a better instinct for timing than you. But that’s not the point.

Research has consistently shown that our brains are poor at long-term thinking. We can imagine what we’ll accomplish next week or next month with reasonable accuracy. But to predict what we can achieve in one year? As Gates said, we systematically overestimate.

“We tend to be overly optimistic about our own abilities,” says Ebuka Akara. “We think we’re smarter, stronger, and more motivated than we actually are. This leads us to set unrealistic goals for ourselves, which we fail to achieve.”

As I said in an earlier article, failing at an ambitious goal doesn’t just mean you didn’t hit your target. It also means you’re statistically likely to aim lower next time, creating a downward spiral of diminishing ambition.

So why not set a steady 2X goal that’s aligned with a realistic timeline?

After all, it’s not the slow and steady who win the race, but those who take steady steps and are consistent enough to see it through.

But first, what’s wrong with ambitious 10x annual goals?

Set a 10X goal at your own risk

Nicolas Cole recently stated in a goal-setting mastery session that when you set a 10X goal in a year, you’re not making a single leap forward. You’re making five different deviations of difference, each requiring fundamentally different skills, systems, and capabilities.

Of course, it makes sense for motivational speakers to hype you. You don’t believe in yourself, that’s why you tuned in to hear someone tell you what’s possible.

Let’s say this year you couldn’t take a gym membership, and it makes you feel bad. You tell yourself you have to do so next year. You’ve seen your friends doing it, training often and staying in shape as they pose on their WhatsApp status and Instagram reels, and you think, why not you?

So, you set a goal to go to the gym every day for 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening. You’ll adjust your calendar to make it happen. You write it down and listen to beast-mode music to keep yourself motivated.

Well…

Someone else in a similar position who decides to use the gym only once or twice per week would need different habits to make it work. They could choose to exercise at the gym only on weekends. That person needs discipline.

But if you are going from 0 to 10 times per week, you need discipline, recovery protocols, nutrition optimization, and injury-prevention strategies.

Can you get it all together in one year?

Your situation fundamentally changes with each double goal, not to mention with each 10x goal. If you set a 10X goal from your current position, you’re asking yourself to navigate five separate transformations simultaneously, without knowing what changes you’ll need to make at each level.

You can’t skip the middle by thinking bigger.

The power of doubling

What’s the alternative to 10X thinking?

Think in doubles. It sounds less ambitious, but it actually works.

Doubling five times results in 32X growth, but setting a 32X goal initially is overwhelming. Each double you achieve teaches you what’s needed for the next level and boosts your skills, systems, and confidence.

One researcher described it as compound interest for personal development: “The progress made within a single double may seem relatively modest. But the collective impact of consistent doubles over time is transformative.”

Matt Mochary has spent over 10,000 hours coaching CEOs at companies such as OpenAI, Coinbase, and Reddit. His Mochary Method recommends breaking down ambitious visions into actionable weekly commitments.

So align your timeline with the goal size. Small doubles get short timelines, typically weeks to months. Medium doubles get medium timelines: months to a quarter. Large doubles get long timelines: quarters to years.

Consider the attempts you need to make

• Have you had 10 clients in the last 2 years?

• How many attempts are needed to achieve your goals?

• How much effort would success require of you?

If you completed ten projects this year, how many proposals did you or your team submit to get those projects? How many times did you pitch your business ideas to people, and how many of them said yes?

What about the effort it will cost you to achieve your goals? Multiply your estimate by 3. Whatever you think it’ll take, just triple it.

Why?

Because you’ve never done it before, that’s literally why you’re setting it as your goal. You’ve likely got the experience and skills, but you’ve never accomplished this exact thing you’re about to attempt.

The beauty of this framework is that it accounts for what researchers call the planning fallacy, our tendency to underestimate how long tasks will take and how many attempts it will take to succeed.

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Want to ensure your goals stick? Read our companion piece on why behaviour change is the only goal worth setting.

Skills?

Yes.

If that sounds too simple to be true, let me explain.

Sometimes, we reach a point on the road where we stop to check what’s happening around us, and we usually find someone who’s doing better. And want some, if not all, of what we think they have.

The end of the year is one such milestone. You’re looking around to see where you ought to be next.

But, it actually all comes down to the greener grass syndrome, also called the “grass is greener syndrome (GIGS).” When we hit friction, we look at someone else’s success and think, “Oh, they must have it so easy.”

With this mindset, we believe our success is clearly evident. That, if our circumstances change, we will be better off.

We make the switch, experience a brief high that almost convinces us that we made the right decision, only to find the same familiar problems on the other side of the fence, as before.

This concept is also known as the “honeymoon-hangover” pattern, and there’s sufficient research to support it. One study tracked employees who moved across occupations and found that job satisfaction declined for at least 6 years and even fell below their previous level.

So, the data confirms it: your low job satisfaction level is hardly ever a function of your circumstance. It ight be a skill deficit.

Can you have everything you want in a job?

One therapist who specializes in GIGS describes it this way:

Typically, a lot goes on in our minds, so we often miss the little things that can help us make better decisions.

For instance, when we’re thinking of changing jobs or a relationship, moving house, or relocating abroad, we often overlook that we’re giving up something to make the change.

What we have is already ours, so we instinctively pay more attention to what we lack. It’s the starved needs that have your attention.

A friend once said about an abandoned limousine that trended over a decade ago: for others, it’s easy to condemn the owner for having spent so much money on it. But to them, buying, owning, and using it meant something. Whatever trade-off they made in owning the vehicle served a purpose.

So, don’t get me wrong. I’m the first to consider making changes more timely, so I’m not opposed to change. Every trade-off we make has its benefits.

I am simply making the case for a more conscious career or organisational trade-off.

What’s behind the greener grass syndrome?

First, many of us don’t realize we’re projecting our internal dissatisfaction onto external circumstances and other people. So that it appears to us that what’s behind our unhappiness isn’t what we think, say, or do.

Moreso, there’s a flight mode within us that tells us to run away from pain, discomfort, or danger.

Still, the syndrome manifests when individuals hold objectively decent jobs but continually compare them to others, ruminating on whether they deserve even better.

There’s a smaller loop here, too: chronic stress makes us blame our situation, and when we do that, we feel even more stressed. Some people live within their comfort zones yet fail to fully appreciate them.

Basic strategy resolves the friction that tactics won’t

The greener grass syndrome inevitably tells us we need to pivot, change something significant about us, and do so with urgency.

I recently spoke with a real estate entrepreneur who’s considering an expansion into e-commerce. I asked why. He told me he believes he’s at a point where he needs to diversify.

I asked if he had explored all real estate opportunities; he said no. I then asked if he had the skills for e-commerce; he didn’t, but planned to hire a strong marketing team.

Let me give you another example.

A local church within a church association has encountered delays in obtaining approval for key documents from the national administrative committee. In response, the local church decides to leave the association to address these delays.

These are different scenarios, but the challenges are the same: friction.

What should you do when you face friction?

Do you employ advanced tactics or basic strategy?

The businessman and the local church are both considering tactics.

They’re willing to change direction to do something else. Whereas, the church could pilot a new operations management system to ensure a timely response from the association’s executives. Similarly, the businessman could instead solidify his presence in the current market.

In both cases, they need to develop skills in scaling operations. After the pilot, the national association of the church could deploy the new system nationwide. The business, on the other hand, needs to learn from similar enterprises that have scaled beyond transacting properties into property technology and construction, for example.

Neither solution will be simple, but the right solutions to pervasive problems are never simple. They require you to adopt a growth mindset, cultivate better habits, learn new skills, and build new relationships.

How to beat the greener grass syndrome

I suggest evaluating yourself and your circumstances using these questions:

First, have you found a GIGS pattern?

If you’ve switched niches, platforms, jobs, or industries multiple times and keep encountering similar frustrations, you likely have GIGS.

Next, be honest about your problem and your situation.

If you could change one thing about yourself, would your situation improve? If yes, your situation is acceptable; if not, you’re right to consider a change.

Research on Wharton internal versus external moves suggests asking: where do you need to do things differently to improve your current situation? What do you control about the less-than-ideal circumstances? How might an outside observer see how your behavior has contributed to where you are?

If your work environment is toxic or abusive, consider switching. But if it’s decent but less exciting than expected, shifting your focus from external to internal control is very empowering.

What does your next destination require of you?

Are you the person you need to be to get where you want to go? If your next job requires new skills, learn them. If not, reconsider because progress always demands sacrifice and growth.

You’ve got to own an active role in your own development because the only grass that gets greener is the one watered.

There’s no point envying your neighbour’s lawn when you have the power to tend to yours.

Do you really want to win next year? Read our companion piece on why behaviour change is the only goal worth setting.

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From this podcast episode with Tim Ferris, you can almost see how systematised he is. You have to learn to think and work like him to earn his trust and become a Chief of Staff. This article is an opportunity to deepen my learning by sharing the top five takeaways from the conversation, which will help me improve my work.

From the show, I learned that the bar goes beyond merely being organised or on top of things. That’s the benefit of learning about how to be a great EA from an executive. You’re learning from a horse’s mouth. Sam says that it’s about creating and maintaining high-leverage systems that safeguard the executive’s focus, amplify their impact, and lessen reliance on personal heroics.

Wait a minute: It is important to understand the key difference between an EA and a Chief of Staff. I think:

• An EA is usually responsible for imperative work: the executive tells you exactly what to do, and you do it (schedule this, book that, send this).

• A CoS is responsible for declarative work: the executive tells you the outcome they want, and you figure out how to get there.

Lesson 1: Treat the calendar as the command centre (not a to-do List)

The most important tactical shift in Sam Corcos’s system is simple but radical: stop using a to-do list. Instead, treat the calendar as the definitive record of commitments.

Most people are overly optimistic about what they can get done. A long to-do list feels productive, but time is finite. The EA’s job is to apply time constraints to everything.

When you adopt this mindset, the calendar becomes the operational heart for your executive.

In practice:

1. Immediate triage and time estimation: When a task is created (typically via email, Slack, or a comment), the EA or executive immediately estimates how long it will take. No vague “I’ll get to this later.” Every task must have a rough time budget.

2. Calendar slotting: Once the time estimate is finalised, you block the time on the calendar. For larger items, the calendar event should include:

• A link to the originating email, Loom, or doc

• A short description of the intended outcome

This prevents the executive from re-reading threads and re-building context. When they open the block, everything they need is already there.

3. Mandatory slack time: Without it, the calendar is just a Tetris. One unexpected look at Slack and everything collapses. Sam recommends starting by targeting approximately 50% open time, then using data and practice to gradually reduce it to approximately 25% as your time estimation improves.

This slack is not “wasted time.” It is the shock absorber that:

• Absorbs emergencies and overruns

• Prevents cascading failures

• Protects focus blocks and writing time

Lesson 2: Use Loom to turn work into scalable raining

If you’re working remotely, the most powerful thing you can do is leverage one-off actions into reusable assets. This is where Loom (or any async video tool) comes in.

Sam Corcos calls Loom “the most important business-enablement tool of the last five years.”

Let that sink!

Why?

Because it lets people capture:

• The screen (clicks, navigation)

• The voice (tone, nuance)

• The context (why, not just what)

Instead of writing step-by-step instructions from scratch, you record real work while it is happening.

How does this work:

1. Zero-effort training:

   When delegating a task, the executive or the EA (in case you’re sharing with other EAs or handing over to another EA) turns on Loom and simply does the task while narrating:

• What they are doing

• Why are they doing it and

• What good looks like

How this helps:

The video becomes:

• A reusable training asset

• A permanent reference for future hires

• A concrete example of how the executive thinks

2. Record in “one-take”:
   To avoid perfectionism, treat Loom like a conversation. No editing, no retakes unless absolutely necessary. If there are mistakes, pauses, or restarts, that is completely fine. The goal is speed and volume of captured knowledge—not production-quality media.

Never mind that some people hate voice notes but many teams even run “async weeks” where people are required to use video and voice notes to overcome discomfort, so recording Looms becomes second nature.

3. Use parallel tasking to build trust:
   One of the most powerful patterns for delegation is parallel tasking:

• The executive completes the task as usual (e.g., assembling a weekly investor update or an internal forum message) and records a Loom recording.

• The EA simultaneously replicates the process and sends the output only to the executive, not to the complete distribution list.

Lesson 3: Fight organisational entropy with living documentation

Sam Corcos says that documentation begins to expire the moment it is created. It is organisational entropy: the natural decay of processes and knowledge.

Both EAs and CoS are responsible for fighting this entropy. Our job is not just to “write docs once” but to keep them alive.

In practice:

1. Centralise the knowledge base
   Use a tool like Notion (or its equivalent) for:

• Processes and SOPs

• Onboarding flows

• Strategic memos

• Checklists and recurring workflows

Scattered Google Docs and random files guarantee entropy. Centralisation is the first step toward control.

2. Link “proof of work” to documentation
   Documentation is most valuable when it is connected to real examples. For every process, link:

• The relevant Loom(s) showing the process executed

• Recent artefacts (emails, decks, reports) produced using that process

When something breaks, or a task is done incorrectly, you can go back and “debug” the process:

• Was the documentation unclear?

• Was the Loom outdated?

• Was the person following an old version?

Instead of just fixing the one mistake, you fix the system.

3. Make documentation maintenance a cultural norm.
   At Levels, new employees are expected to update any onboarding docs they find to be wrong or outdated. The mindset is: every new document, process, or page is an ongoing obligation to maintain.

As an EA or emerging CoS, you can:

• Add a “Last reviewed” field to key pages

• Create recurring review tasks on the calendar

• Ask, “Where should this live?” any time a new artefact is created

Analogy: the librarian of the organisation
Think of the organisation’s knowledge as a library. Without a librarian:

• New books get dropped anywhere

• The catalogue quickly becomes wrong

• People stop trusting the system and start asking the same questions over and over

As the EA/CoS, you are the librarian adding energy to the system. You:

• Make sure each “book” (process) has a place

• Keep the catalogue (Notion) accurate

• Ensure people can actually find and use what already exists

Lesson 4: A lack of communication is a lack of performance

Sam also says:

It is not enough to quietly do great work; the loop must be closed.

Executives carry heavy cognitive loads. Every open loop—every “I wonder if that got done?”—burns mental energy and undermines trust. It’s our job as EAs to remove that burden.

How does this work?

1. Always close the loop.
   Any time you complete a task, send a short, clear update:

• “Done – here’s the link.”

• “Completed X. Waiting on Y from Z, will update by [date].”

What it does:

• Reassures the executive

• Eliminates mental reminders

• Demonstrates reliability

2. Use “playback” to confirm understanding.
   When you receive a new task—especially a complex or ambiguous one—reply with a concise playback:

   “Here’s what I heard: You want [outcome] by [date]. My plan is to [approach]. I’ll send you [artifact] to review.”

This simple habit:

• Surfaces misunderstandings early

• Shows that you’re thinking about the how, not just the what

• Moves you toward the declarative side of the spectrum (owning outcomes)

3. Manage the executive’s information inputs
   Part of radical accountability is protecting the executive from noise. This can include:

• Inbox triage: filter newsletters, low-value threads, and FYIs into separate folders. Flag only what needs a decision, reply, or deep read.

• Semi-automation of social channels: you monitor LinkedIn, X, DMs, and prepare suggested responses. The executive’s job becomes simple: approve, tweak, or ignore.

Over time, as you learn their voice and preferences, you can draft near-final responses and handle entire classes of messages on their behalf.

4. Create and maintain a “Working With X” manual
   A “Working with [Executive’s Name]” document clarifies:

• Communication preferences (async vs sync, emergencies vs non-emergencies)

• Meeting norms (when interruptions are okay and when they are not)

• Decision-making style (data-heavy, principle-first, memo-driven, etc.)

• What “good” looks like in updates and escalations

You can also create your own “Working with Me as Your EA/CoS” manual. This sets expectations and shows you’re thinking about the relationship as a system. It will also help the company avoid failing to onboard new hires effectively.

Lesson 5: Build a memo-first culture

Lastly, Sam Corcos says:

For Sam, serious decisions demand serious writing.

Memos replace hand-wavy conversations with durable, clear thinking.

In practice:

1. Memos over meetings
   For major decisions, strategy shifts, or new initiatives, long-form memos (typically 10–40 pages) are preferred to meetings. A memo forces:

• Calm, structured thinking

• Tradeoffs and risks to be written down

• A record that can be revisited months or years later

Meetings can still happen, but they become memo reviews rather than brainstorming sessions without a foundation.

2. Writing as a way to earn confidence
   Sam often says that leaders “earn trust” not through charisma but through clear written strategies. The same is true for an aspiring CoS like me:

• Write out how you would design a new process.

• Summarise a complex conversation into a one-page decision memo.

• Draft the first version of strategic docs for the executive to refine.

When your writing consistently makes the executive’s thinking easier and sharper, you signal that you are ready to operate at a higher level.

3. Protect “maker time” on the calendar.
   High-quality writing requires uninterrupted focus. As the EA:

• Block out large, recurring writing blocks for the executive.

• Protect that time as fiercely as you would an investor meeting or a board call.

• Add context to each calendar block, indicating which memo or topic it covers.

You can also recommend “Think Weeks” or deep-work days where meetings are minimised or cancelled, and the agenda is mostly reading and writing.

4. Turn raw thoughts into structured drafts.
   Many executives find it easier to talk than to write. Here is where you can add enormous leverage:

• Ask the executive to record a Loom or voice note where they “brain dump” ideas.

• Transcribe and organise the content into an outline, then a rough memo.

• Highlight open questions and assumptions so they can respond.

Instead of facing a blank page, they now react to something that already has structure. You have effectively moved from “assistant” to “thought partner.”

Putting it all together

These five lessons—calendar-as-command-centre, Loom-powered training, rigorous documentation, radical communication accountability, and memo-centric strategy— represent a mindset shift.

You are:

• Designing and enforcing systems

• Turning work into reusable assets

• Shaping strategic thinking through writing

• Fighting entropy so the organisation can scale

• Owning communication and trust with the executive

Start with one pillar.

Make the calendar truly accurate.

Or commit to capturing three Looms per week. Or pick one messy process and document it properly, linking a Loom and real artefacts.

As you stack these systems, you will find that your relationship with your executive changes. They will start asking not just “Can you do this?” but “How do you think we should handle this?”

Executive assistants who function using these methods are invaluable. It’s why Sam Corcos said he had four at the time of this interview, and it’s why they have a solid pool of EAs at Levels.

P.S. If you want to watch me write this live, here.