If the Inner Game of being an Entrepreneur is Creativity, the Outer Game is Productivity -getting a lot done. Steven Covey said “Time management is a misnomer. The challenge is to manage ourselves.” To become productive, we need to shift how we think about Productivity and get a better understanding of how us “human chimps” are wired… so we can take more control of our lives and our success. That’s what you’ll learn in this important session on Entrepreneurial Productivity.
Self-control is a vital part of increasing our productivity. But largely, self-control is an illusion. Most of the things we do, think, and feel are automatic. They’re the same things we’ve always been doing, thinking and feeling. Even the people I know that seem to be gifted with high levels of self-control, they still live for the most part unconsciously. The good news is that self-control can be cultivated over time – but it’s a process. And it’s not something we can wait for. We can’t wait until we have perfect self-control to go out and win the game of becoming a powerful Entrepreneur. We must start now.
One way to approach becoming more productive and getting more control over our life is to think of switching your mode from “automatic” to “manual” as much as possible, like with a camera or the transmission of a car. For most people, their values, chains of thinking, reactions to the world – all are on automatic now. We can switch ourselves to manual, but we have to work on this one area at a time. This is what I call living consciously, or being present. Part of this is cultivating our ability to take our awareness and place it on things of our choosing, and that’s a pretty cool ability. Practice consciously placing your awareness on different parts of your body, on your business, and on the different needs people have – it’s a powerful exercise to help develop the ability to switch your system over to manual. But this isn’t about just practicing. It’s about making a real shift in the real world.
Since we’re already creatures of habit, one powerful strategy is to create habits that automatically steer you in the direction you want to go. Starting a new habit takes a lot of energy, but once it’s “installed” it takes very little energy to keep it going. To do this, we have to know what we’re up against, which is what I call Escape Velocity. It’s important to understand how big this challenge is. If you underestimate it, the steps you take won’t be big enough to avoid failure. Here’s an example to put Escape Velocity into perspective…
When they launch the Space Shuttle to space, they strap the shuttle to something called a booster rocket. The booster rocket is 85 percent of the total weight of the shuttle. If it’s THAT heavy, it must be THAT important. The reason such a huge booster rocket is needed is to get enough speed – called Escape Velocity – to escape the gravity of the earth. There’s also Habit Gravity – the force that holds our habits in place once we install them. To overcome Escape Velocity and take advantage of Habit Gravity, focus on just 1 habit a time, every day for a month. Don’t try to install all the habits you want in one month. Just pick one for this month. Then plan out the “ritual” that you do every day at the same time, ideally early in the day when you have more will power. If you do that, you’ll wake up in 30 days from now and you’ll be over the hump. You won’t have to TRY to do the thing anymore. It’ll be on autopilot.
Another key to entrepreneurial productivity is an important mindset shift. Growing up we learn the laws of cause and effect, Newton and all that. But then we get into the job world and we get programmed through habit that when we show up and do our work, we get a paycheck. We learn the mindset “Do work = get paid.” But the way to achieve huge success is to shift from focusing on work, to focus on results. That’s how you get more success. Then to go to the next level, we stop focusing on results and start focusing on creating value. And then we refine our focus even more and only spend our energy on the thing that makes the MOST possible value, and focus on that for a long period time. It’s important that Entrepreneurs don’t have the mindset of “working for a pay check” – they’re playing a bigger game. They’re focused on creating massive results and massive value, as measured by the customer.
Humans love to play the “I need to remember to…” game. We think when we say “I need to remember to…” that we will. But we won’t. And by saying we will we let ourselves off the hook. It’s a little self-lie. In business, we can’t “remember to…” We really need to take control of ourselves, and only do the things that create results and tons of value. So how do we do that? Well, the highest value activities in a business is creating products and creating marketing. Most people working in companies are doing a very small piece of the process – they don’t see the bigger picture. As an Entrepreneur, you must see the bigger picture of your business, and that bigger picture is that creating products and creating marketing creates the most value in your business. You can’t “I need to remember to… create my products and marketing.” It’s too important for that. So put rituals in place in your business that guarantee you’re working on your products and your marketing. Our natural tendency is to get distracted by everything else. Rituals are the answer.