Are You Climbing The Right Mountain?
“As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.”
You have a near unlimited amount of choices in what you could be doing at this moment. How did you come to choose reading this as what you should be spending your time on? What shapes and directs how you plan your day? Do you have a sense of where you want to go and how you're going to get there?
Inventor Benjamin Franklin shared six simple words that sum up why most entrepreneurs fail. "Fail to plan, plan to fail." When you put together a plan for your business, it can feel like there's an endless amount of tasks, to-dos, projects and shit you should be doing. So much so, that quite frankly it's impossible for you to get it all done.
Some of that comes from our own unrealistic expectations, but a lot of it comes from not understanding how much work it will be and what we should focus on. We don't factor in the many hiccups that are outside of our control. Whether it's employees, needs of our families or working with challenging customers that drain our energy.
Let's pretend for a minute that you're a pilot.
You have a flight today that's taking off from JFK airport in New York and landing at Heathrow Airport in London approximately 7 hours later. When you're up in the air, there's a lot you're adjusting for, such as wind patterns and weather. These are part of the calculations that happen on the ground when you're figuring out how much gas you need to avoid nose-diving into the Atlantic Ocean.
Right now, your business is somewhere up in the air between JFK and Heathrow. Let’s hope you're not doing circles in the middle of the Atlantic because you lost track of the direction. Or worse yet, you forgot to plan for a destination in the first place.
Before you go scrambling for a paper bag to keep yourself from hyperventilating, your plan doesn't have to be an emergency landing on the Hudson River like Tom Hanks in Sully.
What you need is a slight tweak to how you plan and navigate. As author William Locke points out, "I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things." Having a plan and working through it step-by-step gives you direction. A plan focuses scattered thinking, in the same way you plug a hole if you find out you have a fuel leak.
So, what should you do to get back on track? Simplify your plan by working backwards to ask whether a given decision, routine, or strategy performs more harm than good. It's a proactive approach to prune things that are unnecessary.
Three steps to eliminate distractions and get laser-focused on work that matters.
First, lock in your destination.
(Read How To Slay The Dragon Of Procrastination And Do Work That Matters)
Map out the most effective and efficient flight path.
Ignore everything else that takes you off course.
To map out the most effective and efficient flight path for your business, you begin by answering this question:
If there were only five major moves to make that goal happen, what would they be?
Don't worry if you're still a little unclear Brendon Burchard author of High Performance Habits says, "This doesn't necessarily mean you must have the entire path and every task figured out in advance. Often, long-term projects require you to set a plan as best you can, then figure things out on the fly. Still, research continues to show that when goals or projects are complex, planning always improves performance."
Burchard says it's helpful to "Think of each major move as a big bucket of activities, a project. These big five projects that move you towards achieving your dream can then be broken down into deliverables, deadlines, and activities."
A useful trick for determining your next five moves comes from the aha-realization that you can emulate those who have done this before you.
There's a damn good chance you're not the first person to be doing what you want to do. In my experience, most people are more than happy to grab a coffee or answer a question over email.
Before I share the question, you want to know what the prolific quality output is for your career. If you don't know what your destination is, how can you ask for directions or know who to talk to? If you want to be a successful entrepreneur you need to identify, focus on and contribute to the outputs that matter in your field. So go back and determine your PQO by reading How To Slay The Dragon Of Procrastination And Do Work That Matters.
Here's what you want to ask them: "What five major moves made the most difference in moving your (PQO) forward and (insert goal)?"
Now that you know the next five moves for your business, what do you do?
This is where you get laser-focused, because as Burchard says "Once you're clear on these things, put them into your calendar, scheduling the bulk of your time in protected blocks during which you do nothing but make progress toward the activity that the specific block is dedicated to."
If you don't know your next five moves, you're destined to keep repeating the same results. This is the curse and blessing of habits. Find the right ones and it puts you on a trajectory for success. But if you aimlessly repeat things that don't work, doing what you've been doing is going to get you what you've been getting.
As Burchard shared, here is a summary of your action plan moving forward.
Decide what you want
Determine the five major moves that will help you leap forward that goal
Do deep work on each of the major five moves — at least 60 percent of your workweek going to these efforts — until they are complete.
Designate all else as distraction, tasks to delegate, or things to do in blocks of time you've allocated in the remaining 40 percent of your time.
Nothing else has the ability to impact the trajectory of your career and business like being clear in where you're going and knowing the most effective and efficient path to get there.
It gives you the ability to go straight at your goals with everything you have. As New York Times bestselling author James Clear shared, "It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop. It’s remarkable the business you can build if you don’t stop working. It’s remarkable the body you can build if you don’t stop training. It’s remarkable the knowledge you can build if you don’t stop learning."
Having just come off a long hiatus from acting and wrestling with a new perspective on life in the midst of grieving the loss of his father, Matt Damon stepped on the set of 'Ford V Ferrari' thinking "What am I doing?".
