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Last year, “crunch mode” would have meant long nights, little sleep, and endless amounts of worrying about how every little detail would come together.
But not this year, my friends. Thankfully I’ve learned a few things from my various project launches last year, and one of my intentions for 2016 was to make launching a lot less stressful and a lot more fun.
So today I want to share with you one of the biggest mental tools I use to remove stress from my business projects or my life.
But first, I want to kick things off with an illuminating story from one of my favorite books, Essentialism. (If you’re tired of hearing me talk about this book, go grab a copy (aff link) and then you’ll understand why I use it in just about every aspect of my life!) The story is called The Slowest Hiker:
Imagine a scout troop on a hike. The troop is 10 miles away from their final campsite and the scout master is in charge of getting all the scouts to camp before sunset. As they move through the woods, the scout master notices that some of the scouts are naturally moving faster than others. Before long there’s a large gap between the slow scouts and the faster scouts. The slowest scout named Herbie is so far behind that the scout master can’t even keep him in sight. So the scout master tells all the fast scouts at the front to stop and wait for Herbie, and once they’re all together he starts them again. Within minutes the problem is recreated. It’s clear he needs a new strategy.
So he puts Herbie in the front with all the other scouts lined up behind him in order of speed: slowest to fastest. This strategy succeeds in keeping the scouts together, as every scout can keep up with the one in front of him, but there’s one hitch: they’ll never make it to camp by sunset if they move at Herbie’s pace.
That’s when the scout master realizes that the answer is to do everything he can to make things easier for Herbie. With Herbie leading the group, every increase in efficiency for Herbie, however small, will benefit the pace for the entire group. So they remove weight from Herbie’s pack and distribute it across the troop, which does speed up the pace of the entire troop and they make it to camp on time.
In business and management, they use The Slowest Hiker story to deliver this lesson: if you can identify the true “constraint” — the one part of the process that is holding up the rest — than you can improve the entire system just by alleviating that constraint.
That’s a helpful reminder, but I actually glean an even broader lesson from The Slowest Hiker and it’s one that I continue to apply to my business and life. I think this story is about IMPACT.
Not all effort is created equal. You have to decide what effort will create the most impact in achieving your final goal.
“Not all effort is created equal. You have to decide what effort will create the most impact in achieving your final goal.”
This idea is beautifully described in an article that my better half Jason wrote to his list last week called “Put Down The Toothpick and Pick Up The Hammer.”
So often we approach our businesses or lives by making toothpick-sized changes. We nitpick at the imperfections on our website or we spend days tweaking one line of sales copy until it’s perfect or searching page upon page for that perfect icon.
What we really should be doing is looking for the hammer-sized changes. We should be tackling things that have a direct correlation to the goal we’re reaching for. Those kinds of changes might feel riskier or bigger, but they ultimately will result in an impact that can be felt and seen. Maybe it’s nailing down your ideal audience or finally committing to a content schedule and sitting down to write those blog posts you’ve been meaning to write.
With every single item on my to-do list getting ready for this pre-order launch, if I find myself at a sticky point, I simply ask myself these three questions:
That last one usually seals the deal for me and I realize that spending two hours searching for the perfect stock photo when I haven’t even loaded all the products into the shop is NOT an efficient use of my time.
I know it may sound silly and overly simple say focus on the foundational things, but I also know that there are tons of you out there who, like me, often find yourselves debating the minutiae as a way to hide from the big, scary stuff that matters.
And unfortunately, when we spend our precious time on stuff that doesn’t have a substantial impact, we end up down to the wire, beyond stressed, and wondering where all that time went. It went to the toothpicks!
Learn to evaluate tasks based on the impact they’ll have on your final outcome.
When you’re able to finally let go of all the toothpick-sized tasks and only focus on the things that will get you to your goal, you’ll be amazed at the time and mental energy you can free up.
Because making things should be fun, not stressful, right?!
There are just a handful of days before the first pre-order window goes live for the Art Shop, and there’s no scrambling, no sleepless nights… just pure excitement.
Thanks again for all the support, you guys! It means the world.
Why so many of us often have these wishes and desires to improve our lives, yet fall just short of taking action (myself very much included.)
How many times have you thought to yourself:
I want to be a better friend.
I want to make more time for my art.
I want to read more books.
I want to brush up on my Italian.
I want to travel the world.
I want to do something today to make someone else feel better.
How many times have you had that thought in your car at a stoplight, in bed before you fall asleep, after watching a touching video online, after having a conversation with a friend, after hearing someone inspiring speak?
And how many times has that thought then vanished into the ether without some sort of action to tether it to reality?
If we’re talking about me… it’s hundreds if not thousands of times.Â
There are so many things in my life that I WANT. Even things I know I need, things that I know will bring immense value to me, but inevitably I fall just short of putting those things into practice. Because it’s hard to change our everyday behavior without making at least one significant intentional action.
If you want to read more books, maybe that’s picking out one book a month and blocking out 30 minutes on your Google Cal with an alarm to your phone.
If you want to be a better friend, maybe that’s writing down the five friends that you want to have for life and sending one of them a letter each week for the next five weeks.
Whatever that aspiration is, if you want it to be real, you have to ACTIONIZE it. (Yep, I just made up a word. Actionize. But honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t exist yet because I think we all need a LOT more actionizing in our lives.)
“Intentional actions form the only bridge to lead our aspirations out of our heads and into reality.”
It may seem overly simple, but I believe THIS is the thing so many of us struggle with. We have dreams and ideas and goals and desires, but dreaming is so much easier than acting, isn’t it?
And yet I believe that if we can adjust our internal settings so that we’re just a little bit more biased to action, we can make some amazing things happen in our lives.
Yesterday morning I was in bed reading Essentialism, and the book was talking about giving yourself time and space to think. It suggested using an Out Of Office reply to curb your email monster, and I thought, Man, I should really put an auto-responder up for the month of December while I’m on creative hiatus. Just something to give myself the space to not feel beholden to my inbox when I’m supposed to be creating freely.
In the past, I would’ve had this thought and may or may not have acted on it later. But with this perspective fresh in my head, I dropped the book right then and there, opened my laptop and drafted the auto-response. I took one significant, intentional action to bring that desire to fruition. (And can I just say, it felt amazing! It was so satisfying to grab a potentially fleeting thought and take action on it.)
So.. here’s the how-to. Are you ready?
When you find yourself starting a statement with “I really wish….” or “I want to…” or “My life could use a lot more…” make sure that your next question is this:
What’s ONE SMALL ACTION I can take in the next five minutes to bring this further into reality?
AKA How do I … actionize this aspiration?
Commit to asking yourself this question for the next week and see how satisfying it feels to act on all those tiny desires that pop into your head.
