THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 4 minutes

Are you preparing for the right things?

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln

The greatest athletes, performers, and leaders are almost unanimously famous for their preparation.

In sports:

• Michael Jordan was known to practice 4-6 hours a day, 6 days a week

• Tom Brady spent 40 hours a week prepping during seasons.

Artists:

• Beyonce prepared for 8 months for one Coachella performance

• Daniel Day Lewis is famous for “becoming” his characters for the entirety of a movie shoot

We celebrate these people for their obsession towards their craft. We know that relentlessness is what it takes to be the best in the world at something.

Yet most of us don’t apply these concepts to our own work. We spend a few decades developing competency in our craft, building our hard and soft skills, and gradually move towards a level of skill where we don’t have to try all that hard to complete the vast majority of our workloads.

We get to the point where we can “do our work in our sleep”.

Most people stop at this point. It’s hard to keep getting better, especially after we’ve developed a high degree of competency.

This is because of the law of diminishing returns. In any new skill, once we’ve gotten through the beginner’s phase - where progress feels extremely difficult - and into a more advanced phase, marginal progress slows.

At this point we develop competency, and improvement requires finer tweak and adjustments to continue improving. Those finer improvements can become tedious and boring, they’re also often not required to continue our work.

• The surgeon who achieves competency doesn’t need to improve much over the rest of their career to continue doing high impact highly paid work.

• The sales executive who achieves consistent performance doesn’t need to develop much further to continue a high-earning career.

• The Lawyer who learns how to provide for their clients consistently doesn’t need to do much more than stay on top of new legal precedences to maintain a very successful career.

This concept is top of mind in my own work. I coach leadership teams and help them implement a business operating system that I started using over a decade ago in my own business.

Learnings and growth the first year were dramatic as I learned how to be a better teacher, coach, and facilitator. But because of my experience with the content and leading groups of people - baseline competency came very fast.

This means I could likely improve through repetition for another year or so, and have an extremely lucrative coaching career just picking up little things here and there over the next decade.

That’s pretty appealing to be honest.

But that’s not what I want - I want to develop mastery, and become the best in the world at what I do.

And to become the best in the world, I need to dedicate myself to getting better. Through study, personal development, learning, repetition, and constant work to improve.

One way I’ve found to ensure I do this? Preparation.

Preparation for every aspect of the work I do with my clients.

A great example of this is The 90 Minute Meeting - this is my version of a sales presentation, where i meet with a leadership team for 90 minutes and go through a specific agenda in order to evaluate eachother, with the objective being them knowing whether they want to work with me (and me knowing whether I want to work with them).

This meeting has a very specific agenda that we follow about 90% word for word. Because of that it involves a great deal of repetition, and is like a performance in some way.

Since starting as a business coach I’ve done about 50 of these meetings. I memorized the content before the 1st meeting through practice and repetition.

It was extremely hard to remember all 90 minutes of the content at first, but got easier every tie. After about the 20th I started internalizing the content and didn’t need to actively think about what was next. And I’m now at the point where I don’t need to think about the content at all, and I can start making it my own.

At this point I’m good enough that I don’t need to prepare much for these sessions and I can get by pretty well.

But I don’t want to get by, I want to be the best. For my own personal reasons, and also because I want to earn as much as I can doing the work I do.

And being the best has real monetary impact for me.

• Good enough means I’ll close about 50% of these sessions at the current rate I charge clients.

• Developing mastery means I can close 60-70% of these at an increasing rate

That difference equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Very clear difference. Not to mention the gratification of developing mastery and achieving my potential. This is what I want.

For you it may be a little less clear - but if you look closely the benefit is there.

If it’s not clearly financial, it can be found in our purpose - how we wake up every day and our attitude towards our work.

Do you want to spend most of your day on autopilot? Or on the path towards mastery?

I know what I want.

So what do you prepare for? If you’re like my clients - you’re running a business and don’t have anything you’d call a performance.

For those people I immediately point to how they run their team meetings. Those are performances. Or their 1:1 with direct report. Also performances.

And how you prepare for those performances directly affects their results.

So my question - what’s something this week you do regularly and can do in your sleep - where a little more preparation will yield positive results?

For a 90 minute weekly meeting that may be 15 minutes or preparation that’ll make it go from a 9 to a 10.

Happy Easter for those who celebrate!

Talk to you next week,

Mike