#105 - Slowing Down

Read time - 3 minutes

I had a familiar conversation with a business leader last week related to his work priorities and delegation as they grew their business.

He was the primary sales leader for his organization, along with being the driver of innovation for their services. I asked him “what’s the value of your work getting new clients and coming up with new product features?”

He thought about it, and responded, “a lot”.

“$1000 an hour?” I asked. “Is that a realistice number?”

He thought about it again, and said “yes it’s up to $1000 an hour, sometimes more.”

I nodded, and then pursued to note that it seems like he’s spending a few days a week doing $25-50/hr work, and perhaps he should do less of that work to free up time to do more work.

He said “that makes sense, but I don’t mind doing some of that work to break up the monotony so I don’t want to drop it all.”

We continued our conversation and got to a few actionable moves that would allow him to free up some of his time, but I didn’t let us move on until I dug in a bit to that comment and why I think it’s something him and his team need to learn.

This guy is like so many high performers I know and work with. He’s like me in fact. We spend our entire lives, starting from about 10 years old, learning how to add more and more to our lives so we can be more productive. We do this through college and our early careers.

And when we build companies this skill is extremely useful - because we’re doing all the things to get it up and running.

But the problem is, at some point in the journey doing more will not help us. To get where we need to go, we actually need to do less.

Less of the busy work, and more of the strategic work.

Less things so we can be fresh enough to do more creative things.

Less doing and more thinking.

The primary line and theme of my favorite business book “Essentialism”, is - Less but better.

This is a foreign concept to most people who have built up high-performing careers to a certain point.

And common knowledge to 100% of the most successful people I know.

There are MANY tools and tactics to develop this new skill of doing less:

• Delegation tools

• Clarity breaks

• Meditation

• Purpose exercises

• 1-thing priorities

I could go on with that list for awhile.

But the thing I want to focus on today is a simple but very difficult concept. When you’re actually thinking about something you should stop doing, so you can do more of whatever it is you want.

Instead of thinking what you should replace it with,

consider how it would look to replace it with nothing.

For many people, myself included, the magic is in the nothing.

Talk to you next week,

Mike