What if your biggest opportunity didn’t involve doing more but doing less?

What if scaling back and simplifying wasn’t only a way to make your life better but a way to build a more successful business, too?

This month on What Works, we’re exploring opportunity—how we discover it, how we decide to pursue it, and what we do to take advantage of it.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we are prone to waiting until “opportunity” comes to us nicely packaged and easy to use.

We wonder if the latest social media platform will be the key to growing an audience or if the new trend in products or services will unlock a new revenue level.

But I find that the best opportunities don’t come nicely packaged.

Instead, opportunities often present themselves in messy ways—a series of “What if?” questions, a loose synthesis of seemingly unrelated information, or a jarring new perspective on an old problem.

And I have found, over and over again, that the best way to notice these messy, half-formed opportunities is to put myself in the thick of other people’s “What if?” questions and the din of their seemingly unrelated stories.

I’ve discovered my best opportunities at conferences and meet-ups, as well as in masterminds, direct message threads, and even when I’m doing podcast interviews!

We have a whole world of information at our fingertips.

But what’s really useful are the ideas that are filtered through our conversations and connections—curated, social ideas that help us turn questions into opportunities.

These settings hold one of the keys to new opportunities because they help us see things in a new way. They change our perception of what’s possible by presenting options we might not have ever considered on our own.

And this is key.

Because no matter how creative we might be, it’s hard to come up with a completely unfamiliar idea. Instead, we use what’s familiar or known to make smaller leaps.

This contributes to the phenomenon that I’ve been calling “The Squeeze.”

“The Squeeze” occurs when you’ve run out of capacity in your business.

You simply don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth to do more, and so you can’t really see a way for the business to grow. Still, The Squeeze convinces you that if you just rearranged the pieces or tried a little harder, you could force some fresh growth.

But alas, you just end up squeezed into a different arrangement of the same pieces.

In other words, you use what’s familiar to try to work your way out of the Squeeze… and so you can’t quite escape because “what’s familiar” is what got you into the Squeeze in the first place.

To actually alleviate the Squeeze, you have to take a completely different perspective and see things in a new way. And that’s how talking things out with others and learning how they see things differently really helps inspire opportunity.

Now, I know it’s challenging to have those conversations or connect with people who see things in different ways. That’s one of the reasons I started this podcast 5 years ago; I desperately wante...