It would have been better if my card was declined
I paid $40 for a cup of coffee last year.
No, I wasn’t on some special coffee tasting. No, I wasn’t balling.
The latte was only priced at $6, but my foolish behavior slapped me in the face.
Here’s what happened.
I was in my usual daily routine.
Strolling downtown Los Angeles to a neighborhood cafe, trying to knock out a sprint of work in an hour.
It was casual. I stopped to share pleasantries with the Barista. “How’s your day?” All that jazz.
The amount for the latte flashed on the screen. $6. I brought out my business card to pay. I tapped it, tense, thinking the payment might not get approved. Let’s just say – the way my bank account was set up – things were tight. I pushed the thought out of my mind.
The payment screen circled. Then circled. Then pinged. “Approved.”
I breathed a gentle sigh of relief. I walked over to my seat, and enjoyed my golden latte. No stress. A week later I looked at my account, and realized that I had overdrawn my account on that transaction. My bank had set up an overdraft coverage that charged $34 for every new transaction.
Even though I was happy to escape the embarrassment of a declined card on the day of the purchase. I paid for it on the back end.
For someone that was pinching his pennies, I was crazy to pay for a $40 latte.
Even worse, I had bought about 5 of these lattes over the week.
$200 on coffee. Sounds crazy right.
It made me realize that the most expensive things in my life are the ones I’ve chosen not to look at.
Inaction is cheap in the short-term but very expensive in the long.
When you don’t see your punishment, you keep doing stupid things.
Stupid actions always have a way to come get you at the end of the day.
Just like my fancy $40 latte that I couldn’t afford. I had so many ways to check and avoid the expense. I could have logged into my bank account to check my balance. I could have checked QuickBooks to monitor my cash flow more diligently. Instead, I chose to wait to receive payment from a client that was outstanding. I didn’t want to see my account in the negative. So I chose to ignore it. If I did, I could have moved money around. I could have sat my ass at home and drank my black tea in peace.
Instead I chose not to confront reality.
Life of an entrepreneur. It’s expensive, not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s a grind.
It’s a grind because you have to be on top of everything.
Even when you choose to be oblivious, it eventually catches up and bites you in the yansh.
And one of the easiest things to do is ignore reality, especially when it gets hard and the immediate effects are not so glaring. The same invisible cost compounds in the wrong job – it just shows up as disengagement, burnout, and deflated self-esteem instead of overdraft fees.
That is the price of the invisible punishment. It’s worse when you don’t see it. It’s the behavior that made me buy $40 coffee when I was struggling to buy a $7 pumpkin spice latte.
What I’ve found is that you can’t manage what you refuse to see.
A lot of times, we have performance metrics and KPIs but they are usually for actions taken. But we don’t tend to measure the performance or costs of actions not taken.
That’s what I’m calling the Invisible KPI. The compounding cost of what you’re not doing.
Build Your Invisible Metrics
Here’s something I’ve learned on the sales practice ground – the best decision makers are clear about the cost of inaction.
The Invisible KPI.
There’s a question in sales calls that you can use to tell whether someone is self aware about their situation.
“What will happen in 12 months if you decide to do nothing about the situation you’re facing now?”
The cost of status quo.
From my experience, when people answer that question with sincerity, it really changes their mindset. They see the dollars ahead of them as less of a cost and more of an investment.
When things are going well, I stop doing sales calls, and I don’t measure what that silence costs me until the pipeline dries up.
For instance, every week I have to meet about 5 new business owners that I can help. That’s 5 phone calls. For every phone call I don’t make each week that’s thousands of dollars in missed opportunities for the year.
I’m putting that number up on the wall as we get into SOND (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec) season. One of the most important times for any business owner.
So here’s what I’m experimenting with heading into SOND season: instead of tracking what I do, I’m tracking what I don’t do. Every sales call I skip, I write down the estimated annual cost next to it. It changes how the week feels. I’ve tried a new sales tactic around this season that I end up abandoning because it gets too complex. This time I’m keeping it simple – one number, one post it, one season.
I’d invite you to experiment in your own way.
What is the annual cost of your most avoided action? Numbers have a way of making the invisible hard to ignore. I’ve started measuring the distance between where I am and where I want to be, and putting a dollar figure on it. That number doesn’t lie.
For me, making the cost visible is what finally breaks the invisible cycle.
Closing Reflection:
Buying a $40 coffee wasn’t a luxury. It was a $200-a-week punishment for making it convenient to ignore a crucial part of my business I should have been paying attention to.
It’s easy to prioritize the ease that comes from inaction in the moment when the cost of it is invisible. I’ve found that the longer it goes, the more expensive it gets.
That’s it for today.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
P.S. I’m launching the campaign that I’ve been delaying on for my latest book in the next few weeks. If you want early access or to be part of it, reply with “book” and I’ll send you details first.
