Long term progress, built on today.

For an entrepreneur, results don’t come in tidy little taxable calendar year packages. Your results this year, manifested financially or not, are part of a longer continuum that will show itself over 5, 10 or even 20 years.  

Have you made progress on this continuum such that next year will build on the progress you made this year?

Read – and think better

Feeling stuck? Feeling uninspired? Don’t have any new ideas or motivation?  

Read. Read or listen to authors who know more than you in an area you need to know more about. You’ll get all the food you need to think better thoughts about your business.

I have listened to countless audiobooks and programs over the last 35 years. I made it my habit and I look forward to it when I drive and run.

Is reading and listening to audiobooks a habit for you?

Limit your objectives

Like individuals and armies, organizations must limit their objectives or face the consequences of divided focus, resources and attention.

What is your organization focused on these days?

Thinking with someone else's head

“Reading is the equivalent of thinking with someone else’s head.” – Arthur Shopenhauer

Whose head do you want to (need to) think with today?

Economize your attention

If you don’t have big goals, you are free to cast your attention about wherever others may take it. But when you do have big goals, you’ll have to say no to most things that compete for your time and focus a disproportionate amount of attention on what it takes to move in that direction.

You have a limited amount of time and energy. What are you “spending” it on? 

Spend wisely. 

Prejudge – it's what we do

Thousands of years ago in our tribal days, we had to look at someone and make a quick decision – friend or foe? Making that decision properly could be a matter of life or death.

We still do it. We look at someone and based on what we see, we size them up quickly. We can tell a lot about how someone looks, dresses, grooms, holds their body and acts. What kind of person are they? Do they respect themselves? If they don’t, they don’t respect others either. What are their intentions? What behavior are they likely to be capable of?

Is it right? It is necessary and natural – we look and we make assessments. We take in most information through our cameras – our eyes. When we engage that person we start to treat the person from the position we fabricated from how they appear.

Knowing this, can we change our appearance to make prejudgement work in our favor? How about our customer facing employees?

Smoking hurts sales

When someone smokes, they smell like smoke. Most people don’t smoke, and find the habit distasteful. 

Smoking doesn’t help one’s ability to influence others.

Just another reason to be a non-smoker. 

A wealth of information, a poverty of attention

We are awash in information. We can spend all our time paying attention to it, and gathering it, but how much time does that leave for us to act on what is important to us? Most information is someone else’s agenda. What about our agenda?  

PS – “A wealth of information, a poverty of attention.” Guess when those words were written?  

1971! Way before the Weapons of Mass Distraction (smart phones) got into our pockets!

Good people squared

A leader’s primary job is team builder. Add one virtuous competent person to the team and the whole team gets a little better as a whole. Add another and it gets better still. There is a compound effect that happens when virtuous competent people are surrounded by virtuous competent people – everyone gets better.

What about your team?

Work – a source of energy?

Many people think about work as a drag on their energy – a drain. But what if we could do the work in a way that gets us excited? What if we could set out on an obsessive quest to build the coolest darn thing our industry has ever seen – or at least that we have ever seen? Can we do it in a way that excites us and is a source of energy for us?  

I think so.  

If you dread going to work, consider you’re doing it wrong. Change your mind about what you are really trying to do, get clarity and set new and different kinds of goals that energize you.