I traded 5 hours of sleep for the best monday i've had in a while

It's the end of my Monday, and I'm making it a habit to share the journey here. Honestly... this lifelong game of business can get lonely if you let it.

So this is me not letting it.

Last week I volunteered 5 hours of my sleep time for a worthy cause. It ain't much, but I promise my heart was all in.

It was for

@Eshara K

(who I swear has a heart bigger than mine). She's on a journey to help B Lab verified businesses (businesses committed to positively impacting the planet) get access to the grant money they deserve for the hard work they're already doing for our communities.

Saying she's making an impact would be an understatement. Any hours I can invest in her mission make the world a little better for our kids. Definitely, worth giving up my time for this.

But I didn't want this to be the last time I did something like this...

So today I want to end that day with an idea Mr. Rogers himself would promote.

I call it Collab for Cause.

The seed idea actually came from

@Pedro Gomez

. His idea hit me so hard I had to revisit it. In case you missed it from the AIS plus community, it was this: what if we paid each other instead of big tech companies like Google?

Inspired, I ran with it. Problem is... I took it a bit too literal.

My first version: I'd figure out what you build, then dig through my own relationships to find someone who'd actually want it. And it worked beautifully.

You can ask

@Joshua F. Lewis

@Mohamed Bah

, or

@Denis Patru

... for each of them I found a lead genuinely interested in their service.

But it only got us so far.

Truth is, I spread myself so thin hunting those diamond-in-the-rough leads for everyone that I accidentally disappeared on giving the value to the great relationships I made along the way (shout out to

@Tanya Maslach

@Matthew Sutherland

@Crys Wood

and the rest of the amazing folks I've had real conversations with... you deserved better than my silence).

So I went looking for a version that compounds instead of drains. Here's what hit me:

Your time has a dollar value. If you've ever worked a job, you can tell me the most you ever got paid in an hour. Maybe $30. Maybe $8. Either way, it's a real number.

So what if we gave that value to each other... on purpose... pointed at each other's causes?

That's Collab for Cause.

For

@Eshara K

, my 5 hours became a warm-lead machine: 377 B Lab verified companies scraped from public data, filtered down to the people who just started new jobs there and post actively.

Why this?

People in new roles are wired to connect (Cialdini's Influence explains why). It's about the warmest list you can build without knowing a soul, which means winning new AI projects sooner.

Now her mission got a pipeline. I lost 5 hours of sleep and gained the best Monday I've had in a while.

Here's where you come in. Two things:

1. Drop in the comments: what do you build, and what cause (or person) would you invest one hour in? Tag them if you're feeling brave. Maybe someone in here becomes your first collab.

2. If you or someone you know serves the nonprofit or B Corp space... I recorded the whole build. I'll hand you the method free, no strings. Just comment "cause" and I'll get it to you.

Who knows. Maybe we really can pay each other instead of Google.

Ps. Amazing thought ideas like these are found in

@Nate Herk

's amazing AIS plus community. I seriously suggest trying it for a month; i swear the gold found there is worth it.

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I traded 5 hours of sleep for the best monday i've had in a while