Mastering Business Growth: How Simplifying Your Life Can Help You Succeed
Dan Sullivan
What you’ll learn in this Multiplier Mindset blog post:
- Entrepreneurs often try to run their businesses using bureaucratic concepts and ways of doing things, which can hinder business growth and success.
- To simplify your life and avoid wasting time and effort, limit your daily to-do list to three important things that will bring money into your business.
- How to design a game you can win by setting achievable goals and focusing on a 100 percent result.
If you’re a fellow entrepreneur, you know that the entrepreneurial world is very, very different from the world of corporate and institutional bureaucracies. But even though the vast majority of entrepreneurs know this, I’ve observed that most still use bureaucratic concepts and ways of doing things, even though they won’t work for long-term business growth.
It’s understandable that many entrepreneurs would naturally organize their time and attention this way because most of the world operates with a bureaucratic time-and-effort mindset.
But this will never work the way you want it to.
An entrepreneur gets paid for one thing and one thing only: results. That’s what fuels your personal growth and your business growth. As an entrepreneur, you have to do things differently if you want to continually grow your business and success.
Simplify your life to achieve business growth.
As your business starts to grow, there’s a tendency for things to get complicated. Eventually, you hit a ceiling because you can’t work any harder or any longer. You’re stuck.
You became an entrepreneur to have the freedom to work on your own terms. In essence, you wanted to design your own entrepreneurial career. It’s my guess that you still might be working with a time-and-effort mindset instead of a results-based mindset. If that’s the case, the way you’re using your time on a day-to-day basis almost guarantees that you’re going to lose the game that you designed. It’s time to simplify your life.
Like many entrepreneurs, you also likely schedule too many things to be accomplished in one day. Let’s say you put down ten things on your list, but at the end of the day, you’ve only completed six. You don’t see the six things you did accomplish; you only see the four things you didn’t get done. As far as you’re concerned, that was a losing day, while most people would say that getting six important things done in a day is a fantastic result.
It wouldn’t be too bad if you did this on just one day, but there are entrepreneurs who have done it every day of their entrepreneurial career. They designed a game, but ever since they started playing, they’ve been on a losing streak.
Instead of getting home at night and going to bed with a sense of accomplishment and increased confidence, they go to bed on a losing streak. They’re awake during the night because of the losing streak, with their confidence in their ability to achieve business growth steadily decreasing.
What do you think their frame of mind will be as they start their day the next morning, faced with another ten-item to-do list? You have to design a game you can win. My winning strategy is all about simplifying your life, and I’ll lay it out here.
To multiply, first you have to simplify.
One thing that new clients who come to Strategic Coach for their workshop and meet me for the first time notice right off the bat is:
- My work life is very simple.
- I’m very successful doing very few different activities.
- I find these activities completely satisfying.
My strategy for achieving business growth is that I never try to get more than three important things done in a day.
I don’t have a long list of things to be done; I have three things that I want to accomplish. And my mindset is always that it’s not a matter of putting in the time and effort; it’s about achieving a 100 percent result. In other words, it doesn’t matter how long it takes, it’s the result that counts.
Most entrepreneurs who hear this are startled to learn that I’ve had days where I’ve accomplished my three things before lunch, and I’m finished for the day. What I’ll do next is plan my three things for the next day. Then, I might do some reading or explore something that interests me.
Sometimes it happens that I finish a fourth thing, which I consider “bonus territory” — because the three things I have on my list are my 100 percent result.
The secret to making this work.
My secret for how to simplify your life is to focus not only on getting your list down to three important results for the day, but on making sure they’re activities you should actually be doing. As a business owner, that almost always means activities centered on bringing money into your business.
Why not follow this strategy and see that it is possible to multiply your results and business growth, even as your life becomes simpler and simpler?
And to take your business growth to the next level, discover how to work smarter, not harder by pre-ordering my new book 10x Is Easier Than 2x.
