Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier Sunday!
Here are three ideas on the power of procrastination and patience for you to ponder in the coming week.
Procrastination is a Teacher
Dan spoke to my soul with this tweet.
Procrastination is something I’ve always struggled with in varying degrees. For years, I beat myself up about it. But over time I have realized procrastination is actually a gift.
A fraction of the total actions you take each day contribute the majority of outcomes.
The 80/20 principle applies. Looking back, I see now that most of the things I procrastinated turned out to be the wrong things to do anyway. So now I have a rule: if I consistently put something off for several days and no negative consequences emerge, then I simply don’t do it.
What I learned is that often times nothing bad happens. Actually, almost never.
A couple of examples:
I procrastinated cold calling for the longest in the early days of my real estate sales business, and I felt terrible about it. Eventually I realized that calling people I knew and talking to them about real estate was much more natural and fun.
The procrastination was trying to teach me something.
My wife has been procrastinating working out. Recently we learned that she enjoys kickboxing. So we are kickboxing regularly together now. Since she enjoys it, there is nothing to procrastinate.
Instead of trashing yourself for procrastinating, ask yourself if you’re working on the right thing.
Procrastination is a teacher.
The Hardest Work is Deciding What Work to Do
Working harder doesn’t guarantee better results.
In fact, if you work really hard on the wrong thing, you can move further away from your goals. Particularly when you are working on something creative that has many paths to solution and therefore no “right” way to do it, patience is key. Instead of working hard on the wrong stuff, give yourself permission to take a step back and spend the necessary time thinking through what you should do in the first place.
One question is in a league of its own when it comes to doing this hard work.
Gary Keller, the founder and owner of Keller Williams Realty (the largest real estate brokerage in the world) wrote a whole book on it called The One Thing. The book is an exploration of many different ways to apply what he calls the “focusing question,” which goes like this:
What is the One Thing that if it were done would make everything else easier or all together unnecessary?
If you are in a creative field or you are working on an open-ended project, this question is absolutely invaluable. Before reading the book I never considered how the tasks I needed to do related to each other. But a small amount of investigation revealed that my never-ending to-do lists was filled with tasks that would be wholly unnecessary were I to do just a handful of the right tasks.
So I want to challenge you to take some time this week to review your list of tasks and/or projects and ask yourself the focusing question.
If this is as transformative as I know it will be, please share with me your results. I’d love to learn how you apply the idea.
The hardest work is deciding what work to do.
The Hardest Part of Building a Business is Choosing which Business to Build
When I started my first business, RV Heroes, I was desperate to be my own boss, so I didn’t consider very much which business to build.
I was working as a salesman at an RV dealership and the idea to do onsite RV repair just showed up in front of me. So I ran with it. I’m grateful for the three years I spent building that business because I learned so much about running businesses and about what I did and didn’t want in a business.
Many years later, I came across a book that completely changed my understanding of the entire process of business selection.
Russell Brunson’s book Expert Secrets blew my mind with a simple concept.
Instead of starting whatever business happens to be in front of you, take the time to ask yourself a simple question. Who do you want to spend all your time with? You spend 80% of your life at work. If you enjoy your work, you’ll be more successful because if you don’t enjoy it, then you’ll compete against people who do. And you will not win over the long-term.
The key to figuring out which business to build is building what Brunson calls a “dream customer avatar.”
Here is an excellent video of him talking about this idea:
The basic notion is to think through who you want to spend all your time serving.
- How old is he?
- What gender is she?
- What sorts of things is he interested in?
- Where does he live?
- What problems does he have?
- Where does she go to solve her problems now?
- Which of her problems would you enjoy building products and services to solve?
If I would have started here in the beginning, I would have saved myself 10 years of work.
The hardest part of building a business is choosing which business to build.
Looking for some help with these things?
If you are procrastinating your work, odds are you are doing the wrong work.
If you want help deciding what business to build and what work to do, consider joining the beta cohort for my upcoming Freedom Writing Challenge (still workshopping the name…and everything else…that’s kind of the idea).
It is a 28-day guided writing sprint to draft an comprehensive, custom business and life plan alongside friends for aspiring entrepreneurs. The central deliverable is a dashboard in an incredible information management system called Notion that will become a living hub for your life. One that can transform and grow and change with you from then on, if you want to use it in that way.
My goal is to turn this into a life-altering experience that will put participants onto a whole new path toward professional, personal, and financial freedom.
So far I have six confirmed participants for the October beta cohort. I am capping it at 24.
If you are interested in learning more, just reply to this email, and we can setup a call to discuss the details.