Sticky Notes - Creative leverage

June 02, 2023 | Read Online

Creative leverage

Creativity is finite so spend it wisely

Cole Schafer
June 02, 2023

The world’s largest bank heist happened fifteen years ago, deep beneath the city of Fortaleza, Brazil.

A band of criminals rented a storefront, set up a fake landscaping business and hung up a shingle outside the door reading Synthetic Grass.

They then bored a hole in the store’s floor and started digging.

Over the next ninety days, these “landscapers” removed thirty tons of dirt from the Earth as they dug a 260-foot long tunnel from Synthetic Grass to Banco Central.

The tunnel cost them an estimated $200,000 to dig and it was designed to include wooden beams, plastic lining, wiring, air-conditioning and even a ventilation system.

Dirt was removed with an intricate pulley system equipped with buckets and basins, which were then hauled out to dump trucks.

(The police later scratched their heads as to why none of the neighbors thought twice about thirty tons of dirt coming out of the building for the better part of three months…)

Eventually, the criminals arrived at their destination directly underneath the vault floor of Banco Central, where they emerged covered in dirt wielding sub machine guns and stealing what amounted to $70 million.

While many of the robbers would end up in prison, the police would only recover $8 million from the heist (one of them is on an island somewhere living out his days with $62 million to his name).

Experts would later describe the heist as “masterful engineering”. I would counter with “masterful creativity”.

After reading about this peculiar crime, I couldn’t help but wonder what a band of misfits creative enough to dig a 260-foot long tunnel in 3-months behind the guise of a landscaping operation could have achieved legally.

This is where we talk about leverage… creative leverage.

The creative energy we have each day is finite.

Even the best, most focused writers claim to only be able to write for 4-hours each day. Because of this, it’s really important to consider creative leverage.

When we find the right project or pursuit to focus our creativity, leverage happens and overwhelming change is made possible.

It was Archimedes who said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

For our pickaxe wielding bank robbers, the creativity was there but the leverage was not.

Creativity is finite so spend it wisely.

By Cole Schafer.

P.S. If this newsletter made you weak in the knees, do me a huge favor and tell one person to subscribe.

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Key phrases

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