How Every Solopreneur Can Minimize The Risk Of Losing Control And Avoiding Overwhelm With Harry Mack's Freestyle Rap Technique

Add this problem-solving framework to your solopreneur toolkit to minimize the risk of losing control and avoiding overwhelm.

Solopreneurship is a never-ending cycle of problems. When you solve one, you open the door to another. If you aren’t setting yourself up to reduce problems, you won’t have the time and energy to progress your business.

Your only goal is to keep the business going.

Sometimes the right solution is the one that minimizes the risk of a new problem, not the one that brings the best results.

To put this into practice, steal Harry Mack’s freestyle rap technique.

Harry Mack is a freestyle rapper and creative genius. His sole focus is to connect lines with rhyming words, keep going, and not lose control. What makes Harry unique is that he asks the crowd for words that must rhyme (on the spot).

And he crushes it every time.

The key to Harry Mack’s rhyming excellence is his set-up punchline technique.

If a novice freestyler were given a target word from the crowd, they would instinctively use it first, then scramble for a word that rhymes with it (often losing control).

Harry flips it. He uses the target word second. He thinks ahead to set-up the target word so he can drive the punchline home in the second line (and the crowd loves it).

This proactive technique can be used to attack problems in your business.

Reverse-engineer problems using the set-up punchline technique.

Consider the solution’s impact first, then pick the one that prevents you from dealing with various additional problems.

Here’s why it works so well. We hate pain more than we love pleasure. A modest solution that does not cause new problems is far preferable to a high-impact solution that creates more problems.

Because continuing to face problems repeatedly makes you the novice freestyler that often loses control.

Here is how this framework can be applied to your business.

How Harry Mack does it:

• His set-up punchline technique starts before he starts (structure).

• The crowd gives him a word to rhyme (problem).

• As he rhymes, he thinks ahead to find words that rhyme with the target word (process).

• The set-up word comes first, then the target word with the punchline word comes second (solution).

How can you apply it (with an illustrative example):

• Establish the set-up punchline framework as a problem-solving technique (structure).

• Let’s say you have been manually entering client information (leads) into a spreadsheet because it only takes 5 minutes each time. Although free and easy, sometimes you enter the wrong information or forget it in your inbox, causing missed opportunities (problem).

• As you continue to operate, you evaluate whether learning and building an automation tool to capture this information reduces future problems. You analyze how many leads you need to break even, accounting for time and money to invest (process).

• You set up the process by finding the minimum viable time for learning the tool and buying the lowest subscription so that you can test it quickly. Even though it costs more (than free) and takes multiple hours to learn and set up (vs. 5 minutes), it provides you the certainty you won’t enter wrong information or forget it in your inbox (solution).

The set-up punchline is a problem-solving technique that minimizes the risk of losing control and avoiding overwhelm by reducing the risk of new problems.