Shane Muller has just launched his new book, Your Unique Edge™ – Living Your Masterpiece, a practical guide aimed at helping people break free from societal pressures and embrace their true selves.
Drawing from his 25 years as a successful entrepreneur and impact advocate, Shane’s book offers real-life lessons on overcoming self-doubt, navigating challenges, and creating a life that reflects your authentic self.
In this interview, Shane talks about what inspired him to write the book, shares some personal experiences from his career, and offers advice for anyone looking to unlock their unique potential and make a lasting impact.
Shane, congratulations on the launch of Your Unique Edge – Living Your Masterpiece! What inspired you to write this book, and how does it reflect your journey as both an entrepreneur and empowerment advocate?
Thank you. The idea of the book was born as a result of the process of birthing ideas into reality, one which is integral to my annual quiet week. This is mainly around taking a week off the grid each year and the entire process surrounding it.
This is a process I’ve followed for over three decades and it has been a key element to working through identity, gaining inspiration, focusing on purpose, and refuelling for impact. As most of the ventures are impact focused, it’s very aligned with the objective of the book – to support people to journey and discover the masterpiece within them, and then ensuring the world doesn’t miss out on that masterpiece.
In the book, you encourage readers to break free from societal pressures and embrace their authentic selves. What advice do you have for people who struggle with self-doubt or feel stuck in conformity?
I believe everyone at some level struggles with self-doubt. So, I recommend first work on acceptance of oneself. Without that, it’s a constant battle of a smorgasbord of thoughts, expectations, disappointments, and confusion.
You also save a lot of wasted energy once you learn to love you. From there, realise that you are truly unique, your upbringing, experiences, culture, the highs and yes, even the lows you’ve experienced – they all add to a flavour that’s unique.
Realise too, that the world will seek to have you conform, so they can label you – it’s the easiest way for the world to relate and engage – but I say within the book, and explain how, love your unique masterpiece what’s within you and live that picture, not the one other’s want you to live up to.
You’ve been a visionary entrepreneur for 25 years. How have the lessons you’ve learned in business shaped the empowering message you share in the book?
Almost the entire book has been lived out within the various ventures I’ve been involved with and filled with real life examples. With business, there’s lessons every day. Some of these are major lessons that last a long time – such as perseverance & commitment and handling a crisis. Over the decades, I’ve covered most of the content with my teams, as part of our regular One Page Push Up meetings.
One of the key themes in your book is turning challenges into opportunities for growth. Can you share an example from your own life where this mindset helped you overcome a major obstacle?
One example of turning challenges into opportunities is during an 18 month review of progress we had pitching to over a dozen major global brands, we found that all those we competed with were multi-billion dollar businesses and we felt quite humbled to even be part of such a company of brands.
Our review showed us we were shortlisted as low as 4th and as best as 1st, with 2nd being the most common. We later learned that we won most of the bids, but simply were not awarded the purchase order because of our balance sheet. That led us to expedite birthing Architect Consulting, which essentially would take the years of experience we had and partner and deliver ‘through’ multi-billion dollar businesses.
In essence, Architect Consulting would now partner with all those it one would have bid against. Another example of where this mindset helped overcome a major obstacle was around how to handle a crisis. There’s a chapter called 12 Days and Handling A Crisis. Within that chapter I outline how I have learned to handle and manage a crisis and how I would train my teams to do the same. The theme example within that chapter for me was one of life and death, where I had to put into practice the crisis handling muscle when a major situation developed with my two year old.
Building genuine relationships is a big part of your message. How do you think embracing one’s uniqueness can help foster deeper connections, both personally and professionally?
I would say that’s critical. Similarly to animals who can sense fear, people can sense if a person embraces themselves or is trying to be somebody else. If you don’t really and truly like you, how could you expect the world to have those same vibes about you.
For many, where they try to be like somebody else, the vibes most people feel is one that’s unauthentic and often a replica. A critical theme within much of the book is this point and coupled with practical how to elements, my aim is to support people with this.
As you celebrate the success of Your Unique Edge, what can readers expect from your next book, Impact Worth, and how does it build on the ideas in your current work?
Impact Worth™ aligns very well and forms almost the next level from Your Unique Edge™ which is more of a foundation. Just as net worth is the easy mechanism to measure financial wealth, I hope to guide the readers on Impact Worth™, the mechanism to measure the impact they make while on this earth.
Essentially, why, and how to build an eternal paying dividend portfolio. Within the book Impact Worth™ I hope to journey people to see how making an impact adds purpose, joy, and energy to themselves. There’ll be concepts such as giving while alive vs with an estate once passed away, how generosity opens doors, creating master plans that have value both during one’s lifetime and beyond. I’ll walk through some research of deathbed experiences associated with one’s wealth vs the impact one’s made.
With so many projects like OBT, SafeWatch, and Paladin AI Ventures under your belt, how do you balance your entrepreneurial ventures with your passion for empowerment and self-discovery?
As soon as you find you need to balance, you feel you’ve got a pie to cut and the only way one part of the pie gets bigger is by the other being smaller. I don’t subscribe to balancing the various work I do through ventures with passion for empowerment and impact. Instead, I prefer to be myself in all things and situations, that way impact isn’t something you try to just do.
My goal is to help people not to ‘do’ impact, but instead to ‘be a person of impact’. That way, it doesn’t matter about the venture, the sport team, the classroom setting, the nation – everything a person is about would be a result of them being an impactful person. All the other things simply form an expression of them being an impact.
