It’s about becoming fit for transactions far larger than the ones you’re fit for today. That requires not just growth in size, but growth in Transactional Intelligence™—the ability to manage and influence exchanges with others. Expansion doesn’t mean running faster on the same treadmill. It means designing transactions that multiply value, free you from bottlenecks, and extend your impact.

Expansion begins with big ambitious aims. If your aims are small, your transactions will be small. Ambitious Adults, a term we use to describe individuals who set and achieve ambitious goals across health, career, money, relationships, and legacy, articulate vital (and often lofty) aims. These aims bend every exchange toward a bigger future. The first act of expansion is to set an aim that forces you to reorganize every transaction you’re in.

Time is also central to expansion. Most people treat time as neutral, but Ambitious Adults treat time as a contract. When you commit, you enter into a transaction with the future. That clarity accelerates cooperation and prevents drift. Expansion requires compressed time frames—not “someday,” but “Friday at Noon.”

Raising your floor is another essential practice. You cannot expand if you continue transacting at yesterday’s level. Accepting vague commitments, low-value contracts, or incomplete exchanges guarantees mediocrity. Expansion requires a higher floor: declining poor offers, enforcing clear standards, and eliminating what drains value instead of producing it. A useful question is: What am I no longer willing to tolerate in my exchanges?

Complexity also threatens expansion. The Transaction—must be elegant. Clean. Repeatable. If your process is so complex that only you can run it, you’ve become the bottleneck. And you can’t expand yourself. Simplifying these processes can relieve you of this burden.

Expansion also demands that you solve the right problem. Growth doesn’t come from chasing every small issue but from addressing the substantial breakdown that holds everything back. This requires asking: Where does the exchange actually fail? Until you solve that crux, energy will continue to pour into symptoms instead of causes.

Another dimension of expansion is alignment with the current marketplace. Every environment has forces—social, technological, economic—that carry some transactions forward and drown others. Expansion happens when you study those currents and design exchanges that move with them rather than against them. Effort alone won’t expand you; fitness with the environment will. This strategic alignment is key to your forward-thinking expansion.

No one expands alone. Transactional Intelligence™ teaches that every Personality—Inventor, Performer, Producer, Judge—has a role to play. Expanding your ecology with people who complement your blind spots ensures you stop being the bottleneck. Expansion requires networks, teams, and cooperations that amplify your value. It’s not about being indispensable—it’s about being replaceable.

Finally, expansion is sustained by culture. A culture of accountability ensures that contracts are clear, facts and judgments are visible, and breakdowns trigger inquiry rather than blame. Culture is simply the environment of agreements you create and enforce. And culture always expands—for better or worse.

Expansion is not about doing more. Expansion is about becoming fit: fit aims, fit timing, fit transactions, and fit ecologies. Transactional Intelligence™ is the method by which we become fit for larger and larger exchanges. The question is not, “How do I do more?” The real question is: How do I become fit for the transactions that create the future I’ve aimed for?

That is expansion through Transactional Intelligence™.

Author
John Patterson
Cofounder and CEO
INFLUENTIAL U
John Patterson steers the ship at Influential U, boldly challenging the traditional, often myopic views of success in our hyper-individualistic era. He isn’t afraid to poke fun at the archaic obsession with attributing every win or loss to single actors, calling out the industry’s penchant for oversimplified 'transactional' comprehension. Leading a crack team dedicated to innovating businesses and business ecosystems, John is all about integrating the personal with the whole system—because, let’s face it, no one wins alone.