“Be larger than your task.”
Orison Swett Marden
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August 2008
Your daily tasks may be getting in the way of building your business. 80 percent of my clients report they’re so busy they don’t have time to work on ‘growing’ their company.
Ironically when we uncover what they are spending their time on, it’s usually tasks that other people ought to be doing. Some of my clients will start delegating within a month and clear their decks. Others need to be weaned gradually.
Here’s the key question that gets them shifted off of “I have to do it myself” and onto “Jerry, let me tell you what I’d like you to take care of.”
Ask yourself:
“What are the 3 lowest risk items on my own To Do list?”
Be honest about it. If you can list 53, 15, or 5 items, there will definitely be a way to rank order them. You may have planned to do the ‘easiest’ first, or later when you have ‘free time.” Either way, you just found things that you can hand off in the next 48 hours.
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© 2008 Linda Feinholz
I’m a voracious reader. There have been some years when I read nearly 400 books… and worked full time and slept fewer than 4 hours a night. I love reading.
That was then… And now my body wants more sleep, and my reading has dropped off. So I use my reading time even more focused. 20 percent for pleasure and 80 percent for the joy of new ideas that I can take to my clients.
I don’t usually take the entire book or article for them to read. I extract the core idea, perhaps even a quote, and take it into a discussion to illustrate a new way of thinking about their challenge.
I have favorites that I give to management teams whose companies are facing growth challenges, leadership practices, and marketing. Those include the
- Harvard Business Review article by Larry Greiner “Evolution & Revolution as organizations grow” (I prefer the original version, not the updated one),
- Fast Company’s piece called “Measure What Matters”
- Inc Magazine’s “Cold Fish, Hot Data, New Profis”
- Fast Company’s “Start With Nothing”
- And Fortune Magazine’s “Making The Lord’s Copies”
If you get yourself a copy of these, you’ll find the following core ideas: Continue Reading
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