Are you looking at the world through flies’ eyes?
It’s often challenging to be an entrepreneur, but it could always be worse.
You could go through life as a fly.
Not only are flies short-lived, annoying, disgusting disease carriers (let’s not even mention what they eat), but their view of the world is fractured. Looking through all those tiny little lenses means it’s gotta be really tough to get a good sense of the big picture.
Do you sometimes feel like you’re looking at your world through flies’ eyes? Do you get so buried and overwhelmed by all the little details that you struggle to keep sight of the big things, like your goals and the reasons why you started your business?
Success requires focus and intentional action.
If you get a buzz reading this, then maybe you can use some help in shifting from a fractured perspective to one that serves you better. See what a difference the following tactics make for you.
- Keep a reminder of your emotion-based “why” front and center.
Why did you start your business?
It’s almost never just because of the money you stand to make. Instead, it’s about how owning a successful business will make you feel and how it will support your core values.
So you want to build a six-figure consulting business. Sure, it’ll be gratifying to say you pull in that much money each year, but so what? What does that income enable you to do? Maybe you’ll use it to fund a non-profit foundation to serve cancer survivors as a way to honor your mother. Or maybe it will allow you to donate a thousand dollars a month to support The Heifer Project, thus providing the means for families living in poverty to increase their standard of living and their feelings of self-respect and self-sufficiency.
Your big “why” can act as a magnet, pulling you through challenges and beyond obstacles to your compelling goal.
- Identify 3 – 5 key strategies for achieving your important goal. Use these strategies as criteria for deciding what activities to tackle.
It may be tempting to try every new success tactic that comes along, but that approach can also trash your results. You get to balance flexibility and a willingness to try new things with a commitment to staying the course you’ve already strategically identified as the one that will get you to your goal. This tool is closely related to the following one.
- Always know why you’re doing something before starting it.
“Because it’s so cool sounding!” is NOT a valid reason to spend your precious time on a new activity. If you can clearly state how you expect an activity to propel you forward, go for it; if not, walk away.
- Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about whether or not you’ll commit the time and energy to effectively implement a new strategy.
Sometimes you’ll encounter tools or tactics that sound highly effective, but if you know in your gut you’re not going to implement them at this time, don’t “should” on yourself about doing them, and don’t bother adding them to your To Do list only to ignore them.
- Have the courage to let go of “nice idea” activities in order to concentrate on those that are mission critical.
And sometimes an activity will have real, immediate value…just not enough value to justify your time and energy. You get to say “no” to these nice ideas so that you can bring all your resources to bear on those activities that are truly critical to the success of your business.
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What’s been your experience with keeping the big picture in sight so that you can avoid drowning in details? How do you keep from seeing the world through flies’ eyes?
(Thanks to the USGS Bee Inventory Program for the fly close-up and to Francisco Gonzalez for the fly’s-eye view of the Swiss flag. I found both in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)
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