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finding leads

Leads can be thought of as potential opportunities or connections that align with your goals and interests. That could include job prospects, relationship possibilities, chances to demonstrate your value, community involvement, or any other thing that improves your life.

You want to balance the leads in your life and figure out what’s important to you, and figure out what gives you joy. This section outlines a systematic approach to identifying, qualifying, and pursuing leads, and you can actually use the principles used in sales lead qualification to parse it.

It may seem odd to think about friends and relationships you form as leads, but there’s an important reason for this. A lot of people just look at what’s in front of them. What’s in their town. What’s happening in the organisation they work in. They respond to the opportunities presented to them in a moment.

Successful people try to think more holistically, but there is a caveat on this too.

Some people see the world as a series of people to extract something from. The social crawler, per se. Don’t be one of those. Ordinary people are often going to be of much greater value to you in the long run, because they come with low expectation.

But to really grow, there is a point where you’ve got to go hunting to get things done. When you stack skills, this is one such example.

Define the target opportunity profile

You want to lay out the characteristics or conditions of the connections you want to foster. This may pivot and change over time. And it’s most important to realise that sub optimal opportunities are very good ways to just get going.

For example:

  • You may want a job:
    • You may have a desired industry, company size, location, role, and company culture.
    • Remember though desirable workplaces are sometimes the worst places to work.
    • If you’re young, working in a major corporate, you’ll be bottom of the barrel. You may or may not grow in that environment that’s why you should never work for a company on brand name alone.
    • Working in a smaller, more scrappy workplace is sometimes a much better bet.
  • Relationships:
    • I’m not going to give you advice on romantic relationships, but what I will say is pretty simple. If you plan on marrying them and having children with them, you want someone that will go on accepting the worst of you.
    • At the end of the day, you want someone thats going to grow with you through life.
    • Most relationships fail when the two parties travel at different speeds, or want completely different things. Look out for that.
    • It also means you must be willing to adapt as you go too.
  • Opportunities for value demonstration:
    • One of the most challenging conundrums in society is creating the situations where you can apply your skills, such as projects or events.
    • There is a whole industry of people creating them, but finding them, getting invited, and registering is a tough one. You might want to get good at finding the opportunities and seizing them.
  • Community involvement:
    • On this one, it’ll likely funnel you into organisations, causes, or roles that align with your interests.
    • On one hand, this opens your options, but on the other, it may force you into a path you don’t want to go.
    • On this, take organisations for what they offer. Accept it or don’t. Don’t assume they’ll change for you.
    • You may want to partner with an organisation, but also, you might just want to invite an organisation to your party.
  • Work excellence:
    • It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do, if you’re not put on the right projects, or work with the right people, it’s unlikely you’ll excel at work.
    • The forces are 100% not fair either.
      • If you are too successful, you’re seen as a threat.
      • If you fight that, you’ll create conflict (again a threat)
      • If you keep moving jobs, you’ll be seen as flighty.
      • If you stay in a job too long, you’ll be seen as stale.
      • You really cant win unless you take control of your trojectory.

Prospecting for leads and opportunities requires discipline

You need the data, and functional opportunities or connections to find opportunities, and these are often tools right at your fingertips that are free to access:

  • Open your phone and start calling people you know:
    • Just talk to people.
    • Ring them up, and see what’s going on.
    • Ask them how they are.
    • Tell them what’s going on with you.
    • Every call could potentially open up multiple opportunities.
    • It pays to do this occasionally just for their interests too. Tell them what’s going on. This wins trust and reciprocity.
  • Online presence:
    • Everyone thinks social media is about your page and they treat it like a form of address book.
    • Don’t underestimate the power of building an audience. Any audience.
    • If you have 30,000 followers, and you want to do something, you have a mirror to test it on.
    • The story arc of flagging your intent will open connections galore. A lot of people think they need to go to organizations and ask for permission to do things. It’s the opposite when you’re building audiences.
    • Just tell them what you’re doing and see who turns up.
    • Also, you can go digging for hot topics, and see what people are saying. Cut through the chaff and go looking. On LinkedIn, you can see jobs. You can see comments about things. Read the news about what’s going on broadly. Pretty soon you’ll get a vector on what’s going on in that organisation.
    • One of the smartest things you can do is comment on smart people’s stuff strategically. Engage them meaningfully and sophisticatedly. Then drop into their DMs and follow up. Just tell them you like what they’re saying and say why. You never know where the discussions will go.
    • Social media is like a sluice. You can shake it to find the gold, but you’ll surface nothing if you’re just a consumer. You have to have the guts to be a player.
  • Create your own opportunities:
    • So many people look for organisations with activities to do.
    • Then they do it on their terms.
    • Flip it. Figure out what you want to do.
    • Invite people.
    • If it’s good, you’ll instantly make new friends.

The importance of measuring your lead progress

You can only improve what you measure.

Sit down and figure out how you can evaluate opportunities based on alignment with your goals, potential benefits, and likelihood of success. This is a relatively simple process.

  • You write a goal.
  • You write out the opportunities that sit under each goal and an associated criteria.
  • Next, you score each opportunity based on:
    • Alignment to your goals;
    • Potential benefits;
    • Your likelihood of success.

You should then look at that list and dream.

Your natural tendency is to just go after the high-probability plays.

Sometimes however, it’s wise to go for the bigger deals! You actually never know if you don’t ask. Putting yourself with confidence is the only way forward there.

Dominating with AI

AI is now getting built into everything. LinkedIn, Google, xAI Grok—and others.

Use the tools. Use AI to analyse job boards to figure out what opportunities exist. Use AI to scour the news for things going on that might align with what you want to do. Plug keywords into the job recommendations in LinkedIn and track what’s going on.

You can even build custom agents to go looking for opportunities for you.

Never before in history has it been easier to figure out what’s going on around you.

You can even set an agentic search to run every day at the same time, on any number of topics. Set them up—and wake up to an entree of things to go hunt for.

Another tip: if a public figure is inaccessible, one trick is to pay for the highest tier of the service. Often that will get you through.

Failing that, just comment on their stuff in crazy meaningful ways—with some great content on your own page. That’s another important thing. When people look you up, you want something there. Have an opinion. No one wants to meet a boring blank canvas. Don’t be afraid to build a public persona.

Conclusion

You can’t achieve what you don’t plan for. The default position with all this stuff is being happy with who you are now.

Everyone wants something better, but get up each day and be happy for what you do have. Being alive is a good start. Good health is even better.

Then work up from there. Just put yourself out there. Think about how you want to actualise, and start opening opportunities.

It’s amazing how likeable people are that just give things a go and have low expectations.

It’s those that push and stress that blow a gasket. Don’t be that loser.

And remember, not everyone in life can be the hero. Sometimes it just takes a grind to get what you want over an extended period.