Kermit thinks it isn’t easy to be green. Try being a cow. If you don’t produce you become hamburger. And being a cow can seem so ordinary. A cow isn’t supposed to build airplanes, or sing songs, or paint. The dairy cow is meant to fill the world with glorious milk.
The key for being a great cow is to know your constraints and how to work with them. Dean Jackson challenges us to “Imagine that you have some cow-hoof mittens and you put them on for the day and you observed how much of your stuff that you did today could you have done with your mittens on.”1
The key for being a great cow is to know your constraints and how to work with them. Dean Jackson challenges us to “Imagine that you have some cow-hoof mittens and you put them on for the day and you observed how much of your stuff that you did today could you have done with your mittens on.”1
Think about your day. What do you do that isn’t high value? What could you have someone else do or hire someone else to do? Maybe you aren’t supposed to do the graphic design, edit the post, do the social media post. Everything. You do whatever the part is that only you can do. Whatever your milk is…produce that and let other people process the rest.
One constraint that might be useful to think about how you could operate if you only had your cell phone. What if you had to get everything accomplished by going mobile-only? No more spreadsheets, word-processing, or long emails. You’d be limited for sure. But you could still do a ton.
Gary Vaynerchuk, serial entrepreneur and businessman, answered that question on his #AskGaryVee show. He suggested, “Anything that isn’t great on the phone, you scale through another human being. If you’re able to afford an admin or use some AI assitants and things of that nature…. But I think the human element of having an admin or somebody else to close the shortcoming but I think of living in a mobile-only environment is real.”2
Take a look at how Dan Martell, another entrepreneur that produces content to build his personal brand and authority. Dan schedules a couple of days 3-4 times a year where he records about 5 minute videos. The video content comes from questions that his audience would like him to answer.He has his team record and edit his responses. That video gets posted to YouTube.com. The audio is extracted for the Growth Stacking podcast on Apple’s iTunes and SoundCloud. He then writes a quick intro to the video and publishes the blog post to his personal blog, Medium.com, and LinkedIn.com. He also sends it out to his email list.
Take a look at how Dan Martell, another entrepreneur that produces content to build his personal brand and authority. Dan schedules a couple of days 3-4 times a year where he records about 5 minute videos. The video content comes from questions that his audience would like him to answer.He has his team record and edit his responses. That video gets posted to YouTube.com. The audio is extracted for the Growth Stacking podcast on Apple’s iTunes and SoundCloud. He then writes a quick intro to the video and publishes the blog post to his personal blog, Medium.com, and LinkedIn.com. He also sends it out to his email list.
He has quotes pulled out from the video and added to a photo for quote cards to be put on Instagram. He does a quick Facebook post and tweets to drive traffic to to the posts so that people see it and he gets more exposure. He constrains himself with time and content production but still produces his “milk.”
Constraints are all around us. The key is to use them to your advantage.3 How can you put on some cow hoof mittens and multiply your productivity?
Footnotes
- I first started thinking about this after listening to the I Love Marketing Podcast with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. In their 3-part episodes on the Self-Milking Cows, they discussed how to delegate, automate, and systematize content creation so that you are only working on the things that you can work on. This quote comes from Dean Jackson, episode #127.
- Gary Vaynerchuk produces a ton of content. This quote came from the #AskGaryVee Show, episode #234 with Oliver Luckett. He is the master of producing content through delegation and systematization. Watch his video How We Make the Sausage to see how he takes one piece of content and multiplies it.
- Constraints are all around us. When we acknowledge and work with them we can create and innovate in new and wonderful ways. Phil Hansen’s TedTalk Embrace the Shake provides excellent insight into how he did that with his art.