How to succeed without burning out

Know what you want exactly.  Define the 10% of activities that will get you 90% of the results.  Only work on those things each day.  If it takes more than 45 hours a week, you have not narrowed your scope on the most important things enough.  

Working harder and longer than can be reasonably expected is not a good strategy to get ahead.  It’s about WHAT you are doing when you work.

What are you doing when you work?

Monotasking

Multi-tasking is one way to get lots of small to medium things done simultaneously.  Split your focus through the prism of a cluttered desk.  However, it’s no way to get high value activities done.

Monotasking is how we apply our best thinking to our most important problems and activities.  Shut out all other visual and auditory stimulation, and let all your bandwidth and processing power come to bear on the task before you.

Use all of you.

Stop doing that

You can only get control of your business and your life to the degree that you stop doing things – not start new things.

What do you need to stop doing?

Want to make (insert $#) a year?

Then why are you doing work that pays less than that?

Forced to frenzy

If you can’t slow down and focus blocks of attention on high value activites, it means you have put yourself on the front lines of customer service – the phone keeps ringing and you have to pick it up.

You’ll have to redesign your job first.  Build a team, train, and delegate.  Make yourself unnecessary in your current role.  Hire yourself out of the job you are doing now.  THEN, you’ll have more time to do what only you as the leader can do to grow your organization.

Slow can be fast

Just because the world is going Mach 2, doesn’t mean you have to also.

Slow down into a rhythm that feels right for you; a speed you can focus on your highest value activites in.  

Leadership doesn’t mean you’re frenzied.

Losing it all (or a bunch)

When we were young and had nothing, we were excited to make progress, and get results that were much smaller than what we have become used to in recent years.  Then we had a set back.  Maybe it was the market, but more likely we screwed up some how, and business, income and operations shrank.

Making the same progress for the second time isn’t as exciting – but that’s because of our state of mind about it.  The second (or third) time around can be just as exciting as the first – if we make it so.  And since we are smarter now, we should be able to “get there” faster, and move through to new heights – this time, more sustainably.

The second time is a charm.

What's TV for?

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.

What are you doing worth being on TV for?

Double or die!

Pretend that an armed gang told you you had one year to double your business or else.

How would you do it?

Don't forget your big dreams

While you deal with small details each day, don’t forget about your big dreams.

And what about them….?