Big Minds Make Money, Small Minds Get Fired

I got irrationally mad at one of my good employees… over a spreadsheet.

We were reviewing the performance of a sponsorship deal we did.

I’m scrolling through the numbers, half‑distracted, when something smacks me in the face. We’d driven a reported 8 figures in revenue to a partner… and we’d charged them low 6 figures.

I stared at the screen as if it had personally insulted my mother.

“Wait, wait, wait. Walk me through this,” I said.

He spun his laptop toward me, proud. “So, they paid us $120k for the package. Based on tracked links and their reported close rate, we drove, well, it looks like about $14 million in revenue. So this is the ROI sectio—”

I cut him off.

“Stop. Say that again, slowly.”

“We, uh, drove… about $14 million. They paid us $120k.”

“And you feel good about this?” I asked.

He blinked.

“Well, yeah. It’s an insane ROI for them. This is why they’ll renew. I positioned it as a steal, so it’s a no‑brainer.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “You positioned us as a steal.”

He frowned. “Isn’t that good? We’re supposed to provide overwhelming value, right?”

“Sure,” I said. “But overwhelming value doesn’t mean offering Ferrari results for Honda Civic prices.”

He looked genuinely confused. And this is a good operator. Sharp, loyal, hardworking. He was doing what good employees often do: protecting the deal, reducing risk, trying to make the customer happy.

But his ceiling for what we were allowed to be was painfully low.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “If some other media company walked up to that same sponsor and said, ‘We’ll bring you $14 million in revenue,’ how much do you think they’d charge?”

He shrugged. “Probably… more?”

“Try 10x more. And they’d say it with a straight face.”

He laughed, a little uncomfortable. “Yeah, but those guys are big. We’re not at that level.”

“There it is!” I said. “That sentence right there is costing us millions.”

STOP RIGHT THERE

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Your team will never think bigger than you.

But even when you think big, there’s another problem: Your team will often drag your vision down to whatever level they personally believe is “reasonable.”

We call it the Ceiling Effect.

Take the employee from my story.

I believed we were building a category‑defining media and advisory platform. He believed we were a scrappy little upstart that should be grateful anyone wrote us a six‑figure check.

So when he priced us out, he did so based on that belief.

“Why did you charge $120k?” I asked.

He pulled up his notes. “That’s what I felt we could get without scaring them off. I thought if we pushed for more, they’d say no. I’d rather guarantee the deal and overdeliver than risk losing it.”

“So you protected their fear,” I said, “instead of protecting our value.”

He went quiet.

“You did great work. This is a vision problem. You don’t see us the way I see us. You think small because your ceiling is small. And because you’re the one in the room, your ceiling becomes ours.”

“That’s harsh,” he said, though he didn’t disagree.

“Good,” I said. “Because you’re too good to think this small.”

Every week, as a leader, your job is to take your team to church.

Not in the religious sense. In the “remind them what the hell we’re doing here” sense.

Church is where you:

Most companies try to do this with a sad, recurring calendar invite called “Weekly Meeting” that everyone secretly dreads. You go through metrics, a few people give updates, someone screenshares a dashboard, and everyone leaves slightly more dead inside.

French aviator and writer Saint‑Exupéry reportedly once said:

Your job as a leader is to point at the sea so often, and so clearly, that your people start to taste salt. Enter the Weekly Compass.

The Weekly Compass is the meeting where you show the team where you’re going, not just what you’re doing.

Tactically, it’s simple. Symbolically, it’s everything. Here’s how it works:

Do metrics matter? Yes. Do you still do normal ops meetings? Yes. But the Weekly Compass is where you raise the ceiling and install a window. You show them the sea.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

If you want to make a lot of money as an employee, the worst thing you can do is have a small mind.

A small mind asks, “What’s my job description? What’s safe? What’s the minimum?”

Small thinking leaves fingerprints all over the P&L.

It shows up as underpricing, discounting, lower margins, slower growth, missed revenue, bloated costs, and “safe” decisions that quietly murder upside.

A big mind asks, “What’s the real game we’re playing? How big could this be if we weren’t scared? What would this look like if we weren’t pretending all the constraints are fixed?”

Now, how does a leader or employee actually move up to a higher level of the game? Here’s one way to quantify things:

Score yourself 1-10 on each:

Then:

Big Mind Score = Vision + Evidence - Fear

If that number is low, you will habitually set tiny ceilings, even if you’re talented.

If it’s high, you’ll push for deals, projects, and responsibilities that match reality instead of your insecurity.

My sponsorship guy, before that conversation, was basically:

Big Mind Score = 4 + 9 - 8 = 5 → mid ceiling.

My job in that moment was to jack up Vision and lower Fear so his future decisions weren’t capped.

At Contrarian Thinking, we have a creed:

That’s not just a cute line for mugs.

In that sponsorship story, my employee said, “It can’t be done.”

My job, week after week, is to take them to church, point out toward the sea, and live the creed loudly enough that it drowns out that voice.

Early in SpaceX, Musk basically told a room full of engineers they were going to pop 40 Raptor engines on the bottom of a skyscraper, launch it, catch it, then do it again and again.

At the time, rockets were one-and-done. You launched it, it burned up, everyone clapped, and you spent a few billion more to do it again years later. Reuse was considered “impossible.”

Well, we all know how that’s gone…

Good news for you is that you don’t have to launch and catch flying skyscrapers.

But inside your business, you’re either the person saying, “Let’s make it 3% better,” or the one saying, “Let’s do the thing everyone else is saying can’t be done.”

Which one are you?

-Codie