Welcome to Friday 411, issue #130. In 4 minutes, with 1 insight and 1 action, you’ll make better decisions by thinking a few years down the road.
1 Insight
The decisions you make today don’t just affect today. They shape the culture you and your team will be living in five years from now.
When we set out to write Unleashed Leadership, we braced ourselves for long days of drafting, endless edits, and writer’s block. But none of that hit us. In fact, writing the book together was fun.
The real challenge? Decisions.
Nothing tested us more than the cover.
We believed it would take one week to get a good cover design. Two weeks at most. We submitted our first ideas for a book cover on May 15. We didn’t finalize the cover until August 7. That’s nearly three agonizing months!
We’re confident we drove our cover designer to the loony bin. We scrutinized 30+ iterations of the cover design and hundreds of fonts for the word Unleashed. Have you ever looked at one word in hundreds of different fonts? It’s not fun.
The reason it took so long to design the cover is this: we weren’t just designing one cover. We were designing the first cover in an eight-book series that will be released over the next few years. Every decision we made affected seven more books.
In the end, this cover wasn’t just about one book. It was about setting the tone of our content for the next decade. We knew we’d either look back with pride — or regret. And that’s a decision worth slowing down for.
There’s an important leadership lesson in this. Before we reveal it, let us share the two decisions that cost us the most sleep.
Decision #1: The Font for “Unleashed”
The word Unleashed is the heart of our brand. Every leader experiences the leash: a disparity between your responsibilities and abilities. We design all of our content to help leaders get unleashed. We wanted the word to carry a visual weight that matched the meaning.
Our vision was oddly specific: the font should resemble a rope or a chain — to symbolize a leash — but it couldn’t literally be a rope or a chain. We wanted it to feel like someone had laid a rope on the ground and spelled out the word Unleashed. On top of that, we envisioned a subtle break in the word — a crack in the leash — to symbolize what happens when leaders finally get unleashed.
If that sounds confusing, you’re in good company. Imagine trying to explain it to a designer over email. Now imagine doing that for months.
We saw hundreds of fonts. None of them quite worked. Some were too literal, like these two:
Some looked like they belonged on a Pirate ship:
There were others that we really like but they looked like paint brush strokes instead of a rope:
Each time we’d say, “Closer… but not it.”
Eventually, after dozens of near-misses, we brought in another designer just to create the word itself. We wanted the weight of the font to indicate rope-like uniformity with slightly frayed edges.
When we saw the final version, we knew: this was it. This is what “unleashed” looks like.
Decision #2: A Cover That Could Multiply
The second decision was just as challenging: we didn’t need one great cover — we needed a design that could multiply across all eight books.
That meant the cover for Unleashed Leadership had to work like a template. Each future book — Unleashed Character, Unleashed Competence, Unleashed Clarity, and so on — needed to look distinctive, yet clearly part of the same family.
It had to be unified without being uniform.
That’s why every small choice — color palettes, font families, spacing, imagery — carried more weight than we expected. We weren’t choosing just for today. We were setting a course for years to come.
Ultimately, the eight-book series will look something like this (with the word “Leadership” replaced with one of the seven traits).
The Leadership Lesson: Think in 5-Year Terms
Here’s the leadership lesson this cover taught us: make decisions today with 5 years in mind.
It would have been faster to pick a good-enough font and slap it on a decent cover. But we knew that decision would come back to haunt us.
At one point, I (Garland) was ready to quit. If I’m honest, I wanted to quit at about 300 points. I don’t do well when projects take longer than expected. But Dorothy and our eye-for-design daughter kept us focused on the goal.
Every time I wanted to settle, Dorothy would say, “If we aren’t proud of it today, we won’t be proud of it in a year. And we certainly won’t be proud of it when we see it on eight books.”
Leaders face the same temptation. It’s easy to settle for the quick fix today:
- Ignore a sloppy performer.
- Launch a product without a long-term roadmap.
- Allow little behaviors even though they don’t fit the culture.
But those small choices compound over time. The easy decision today becomes the crisis of tomorrow.
That’s why wise leaders pause and ask:
- Are the choices I’m making today aligned with the future I’m trying to create in five years?
- What are the unintended consequences of this decision?
The clearer you are about the future you want to create, the easier it becomes to make today’s choices with confidence.
Our Book Launch Needs Your Help
Unleashed Leadership launches on October 24.
Here’s our goal: 100 reviews on Day 1. Reviews are the lifeblood of a book launch, and we’d love your help.
If you’re willing to review the book on Amazon, we’ll send you a free PDF version before it’s released. During launch week, you can grab the Kindle version for just 99 cents.
Want to help? Just reply and say: “I want to review the book.”
1 Action
Look at one decision you’re making this week. Before you finalize it, ask: “Will I still be proud of this choice in 5 years?” If not, slow down and choose differently.