There are those days where you wake up, and you can feel the surge of energy. Where you’re on the move and unstoppable. There are months like that, too. Even years. If you’ve had that for years, this is not for you. This is for the rest of us. For the times where yesterday was the same as today, where not even the coffee gives you the kick you need, and where you can’t wait for lunch to come around or, better yet, for the day to end. It’s for those days when 4:30 hits, and you’re finally caught up on your emails and ready to do some real work. But why bother? It’s 4:30. So you just turn to Facebook or YouTube or read up on a stock market that went down. And the day ends. One day down. 10,000 more to go. Because anyone who has run a small business for any measure of time knows this one simple truth. There is no better way to kill your love for a subject than to make it your business.
A couple weeks ago, Apple briefly overtook Exxon to become the world’s most valued company. They went from a market cap of $3.1 billion when Steve Jobs returned in 1996 to $340 billion today. Fitting in his retirement and a tribute to an amazing 15-year run by one of the greatest CEOs ever. Was it tenacity? Inspiration? Constant improvement? All of the above, no doubt, but loving what you do has to surely top the list. Anyone who knows Steve Jobs knows he is deeply involved in every aspect of the company. And that’s really the thing, because there is loving the subject, and there is loving the process, and they are two distinctly different things. Passion for a subject isn’t enough for a sustained 15-year run. A passion for the process is.
You can love looking good, that’s not hard. But loving a proper diet, that’s all different. Loving the workout and the run? All different. You can love a sport, but what about the training? The drills? Passion on its own is great. But it is overrated. At least in its raw form. You have to cull it. It’s not just about the passion. It’s finding a process that lets the love of the subject spill over into the entirety of the business. It’s loving the misery, so much that it’s not misery. It’s purpose. Connecting the small things with the big. Businesses might grow by brilliance, but they live by process.
Workshops and seminars are the caffeine of the wedding industry. You find workshops on building passion all over the place. And why not? You want to get revved up. But what about workshops to keep it going? Getting a quick jolt of energy is great, but you can only supercharge yourself so much until you have to hit the ground and go somewhere with it. Otherwise, it just dies down and goes to waste. I couldn’t say how many times I’ve walked into the office ready to change the world, only to be smacked down by a single call or request from a mother of the bride. In the middle of the season with two weddings sandwiching each end of a five day work week, a love of photography can only take you so far. Process gets you through the rest.
Here are 6 gotchas to kill process and ways to manage them
1. Focusing on efficiency
Efficiency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It is, in many ways, essential, but not when it squeezes out space the space for inspiration. Running a business is about the human spirit. Foster it. Inspire it. Protect it. You need to give yourself the room to breathe without burying yourself in mounds of production. Getting things done is great. But don’t lose sight of tomorrow for today. If taking half an hour to yourself gets you going, do it. If a walk around your office keeps you refreshed, do it. See what turns you on and gets you motivated. It’s different for everyone. Don’t get stuck in the trap. Don’t run in every morning to answer every annoying email. They’ll just keep coming at you, until find yourself half through the day and fully drained.
For me, I like reading. When I started driving into the office instead of taking the train, I lost my morning read. I was sure it would be better getting an extra 40 minutes a day with my new commute, but I lost more in motivation than I gained in time. I now let myself read a bit during the day. It gets me excited. Protect your spirit, not the bottom line.
2. Applying other people’s models to your life
Everyone has a different way of doing things. There are thousands of self-help books out there. A lot of principles are shared and common. Some are not. Some work for one person, some work for another. Just because something works for your friend doesn’t mean it will work for you. Try things out, see what really fits, and not just what you think fits. Don’t get in a habit, and spend the next 5 years doing it for no reason other than that your started that way.
I always dreamed of keeping myself organized with a portable device. The iPad was what I was waiting for. I was bubbly when I got my copy of Things and iThoughts, and I was ready to go all digital. I tried for months, but I learned that writing things out on paper helped me organize my thoughts. It made me feel better and learn better. It even made me more motivated. Back to paper I went.
3. Getting stuck on the hurdles
The world is not just a series of obstructions. Find value in the small things. It’s essential. No one likes a customer complaint. But if you see every challenge as suffering, you’re missing out on opportunity knocking. A complaint is a chance to interact with a client. To make them happy. More importantly, it’s a chance to extend yourself. Be happy that they reached out to you. Better than badmouthing you and posting all over the boards before you found out about it. Everything is a chance to be better. Everything is a chance to help you get where you want to go. The better you can make something out of everything, the better it will feel and the more you’ll tie together the small stuff and the big stuff. It’s like losing weight. At first, you do it based on motivation. But if it goes right, and it starts to work, you come to believe in the value of what you do, and your lifestyle becomes habit.
When Pierce Ruane posted a YouTube video calling 50 Cent a media whore and his video went viral, 50 Cent flew him out to New York and posted a YouTube video of the two of them hanging out. How’s that for a smart response? Challenge is opportunity. Use it to go from surface actions to a deeper understanding of the process. Business should not be martyrdom.
4. Schemes of grandeur
I think business plans are fun. I love putting together my 1 year plan, my 5 year plan, my entire life on paper. Everyone knows that a business plan is the essential component of a successful company. But is it? I can’t predict 2 weeks in advance, much less, 1, 3, or 5 years. I can’t even figure out how long it takes to clean up my place, and I do it all the time. I’m even worse at knowing whether some initiative will be a hit or a miss until I put it out there.
Business are tactical as much as they are strategic. Your life changes, the market changes, everything changes. I’ve stopped mapping out the next decade of my life. Even the next 5 years, I keep vague. It’s more about finding motivation and giving yourself a place to move towards then specific actions. Look at your next year, but keep your business plan alive and open. Don’t lock yourself into crystal ball predictions you made a year ago.
At its best, a business plan facilitates getting things done and constant assessment. At it’s worst, it can serve as a straight jacket. Keep yourself open to opportunity, and don’t put together a plan to feel complacent and good, while stalling on acting. If you’ve just had some unexpected success with something new, stay with it. Failure’s function is to lead to success, but it’s success you want to seize. Learn from success, and capitalize on it, and don’t get stuck chasing things that don’t work. Steve Jobs had plenty of failure and problems. He wasn’t just a genius for the fact that he did so much right. It was also for the fact that Apple cut its losses, and didn’t get stuck with sinkholes that kept draining their resources. Plan or no plan, focus on getting things done.
5. Comparing yourself to others
Don’t get caught up in chasing your competition so much that they’re leading the game. It didn’t work for Dell, it didn’t work for Microsoft, it didn’t work for HP. All great companies at one point, but lost at the moment. In the 90’s, IBM was flailing away, famous for its hardware. It resurrected itself by becoming a services company. Looking to the competition will not give you that type of answer. You have to look to yourself, to see what you can and cannot do. What you can pull off that others can’t and what you can’t pull off that others can.
Know the market, but don’t spend all of your time looking over your shoulder to see who is gaining ground. You’ll just steer yourself into a tree. There are no wrongs, there are no rights. Everyone runs at their own pace in their own way. Every idea takes a certain amount of time to come to fruition. Picasso was a genius from the start. Cezanne took 40 years before he got cooking. Seeing people rip past you just puts unnecessary pressure to perform, and forces you to look at the short cuts. Short cuts never let you build the connections you need to understand how it all works for you.
6. Never putting the pieces of the puzzle together
There are never any bookends in life. You never know where you’ll wind up and what it will all be for. But you have to believe it will. Belief powers change. And you do that by putting the pieces together. By seeing the what works and recognizing it. Without that, you can read all of the books you want, but you’ll never internalize it. You never attach the love for the subject to the love for the tasks. You just fall back into your old habits.
You want to be in a place where you the workout as the result. Where you see the one extra repetition as the result. Where you see every single moment at every single wedding as the key to getting you to the next big thing. You never know if you’re only an inch away from success. A lot of people give up before they ever get there. When you believe that every little thing is the difference between the gold and the silver, you start to do every little thing.
You create that belief by experiencing it, and not through theory. Try taking a moment at the end of each day for a week and look at your own activities. Are you using your time well? When do you feel good? What are you running away from? Find what works, and repeat it. Find what doesn’t work and remove it. That constant cycle builds belief. It’s a natural tendency to look outwards towards the rest of the market. Don’t ever forget to look inward.
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