There's a script the world installs in us: "someday, when the moment is right…" That patient drift is a lie. There is now, or it doesn't happen — and that's true of anything you put on camera.
You don't get to wait for the audience to assign weight to your idea. If urgency doesn't start with you, why would anyone else feel it? You bestow the importance. That's essentiality: the knowledge, in your body, that what you have to say cannot wait.
Two old stories make the case
In Hamlet, there's a messenger — a minute of stage time in a play that runs for hours. Ask the lead what the play is about and you'll hear about the prince, the ghost, the revenge. Ask a truly fine actor playing the messenger and he'll tell you: Hamlet is about a messenger who has a very important message for the prince. He travels to the castle, he waits, he delivers it, he leaves. To him, the message is everything — which is exactly why he sells it as everything.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux left one line that does the rest: pick up a pin in the name of the Lord and call your day well spent. The pin is nothing. The intention you place in it is everything.
The takeaway
Significance is something you give the work. It is not waiting for you out there. Don't pass your information off. Don't pre-apologize for it. Deliver it like the messenger — like it's the whole reason you came.
The full system — every exercise and the 36-day practice — lives in the book MEAN IT. and the 5 Minute CEO program. Work with Paul →