"Imagine a life where all your time is spent on the things you want to do." The opening line of the New York Times bestseller $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau is a picture-perfect portrait of what makes entrepreneurship so bloody romantic. It hints at the dream of every entrepreneur I've had the pleasure of working with over the last three years. It's also a line of thinking that leads to frustration. Without a plan for prioritizing what's most important, your business will be stuck as a seasonal lemonade stand.

Would I be right in thinking you feel a little confused about how to move toward the life you want? You wake up with absolute certainty that what you're doing is high-value work. Let me introduce you to your new superpower, The 4 Disciplines Of Execution (4DX).

One thing you can count on in life is a reliable stream of problems. You're running late and you have no idea where you put your car keys. Your dog continues to eat more furniture than kibble. Your kid thinks sleep is overrated. You have a job you want to leave, but what the hell would you even do? You start by adopting a belief that everything is figureoutable.

As a kid, you have no qualms about letting people know what you want. If there's not an orange popsicle unwrapped in my hands in the next minute, I'm going to burn this entire house down. You get good at asking for material things you want because they fill an immediate need and are easy to ask for. But have you ever sat down to answer the question of what do you want to experience in your life?

The last thing any of us want to be known as is an amateur. I get rip-out-your-hair frustrated when I don't pick up something near immediately. It comes back to my days in school of not wanting to look stupid or feeling like a clueless idiot. That's until I learned being an amateur leads to endless possibilities.

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?