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The missing half of creative intelligence
Coyotes and badgers are an all-time great interspecies duo.
Equal parts clever, weird, and unusually wholesome.
They hunt together on purpose because badgers can dig, but they're slow to run. And coyotes are quick, but terrible at digging.
So they team up.
And they seek each other out intentionally, have playful interactions, and together have a higher shared success rate while hunting than either would on their own. It’s not as cute as otters holding hands… but it's cute like, "You're good at what I'm bad at!"
And perhaps that's nature's way of saying:
"You don't need to be the same to work together."
Which brings me to something I've been thinking about lately. There's this concept from The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks called your "zone of genius." It's that playful space where you could just do something endlessly for hours because it's fun for you.
But most of us get trapped in our zone of expertise.
Or even worse, our zone of competence.
Those are the things we can do, but do not necessarily light us up inside, and they do not necessarily encourage us to perform at our best. They’re the zones that allow us to just kind of “phone it in” and get good enough results. They’re the zones where we end up concentrating all our precious life force energy on something that doesn’t truly serve our highest purpose in life.
This is typical.
We get good at something, so we keep doing it… even when it drains us.
And here's the thing about building a business…
Early on, I was such a fan of personal development and all these modalities that I thought in order to be successful in that world, I needed to become a yoga teacher or a personal development coach or whatever. So when I tried to execute on those ideas, or build offers, or bring in clients, I was competent because I did those things for me.
But actually teaching it didn’t light me up inside.
It was the marketing that did.
And it took me a while to realize that I could use my technology strengths and my writing strengths and my obsession with human behavior to serve that industry.
I recently had a call with my money coach, friend, and business partner, Justin David Carl, and he said:
"You're really good at taking the messaging part and combining it with the technology part and making them work together seamlessly. Most people are usually only good at one or the other. But you have a rare and unique ability to combine the two.”
And I think that comes from an early knack for computers and technology at a young age mixed with social / emotional struggles in my youth that led to my obsession with understanding human behavior.
I can mess with tech, vibe code, and hangout for hours.
But at the same time I can write about people and their stories ‘till the cows come home.
And once I realized that I could just be the badger, or just be the coyote, instead of always trying to be everything, or forcing myself to be something I'm not, that’s when things really started working out for me.
So what’s your version of that?
Where are you the badger in your business? Or where are you the coyote in your business? What strengths do you already have that could be an extra ace in someone else’s hand? Or who do you need to borrow one from in order to make the play you’re wanting to make?
Chances are… you already know everything you know to make you’re next big move… you probably just need to find the team mate that helps make your success inevitable.
And if you want a place to explore that with other people who are doing the same, I’d like to invite you into The Nature of Marketing community.
Here's the link:
Talk soon,
Kevin Hood