Monkey bread. It’s not just for breakfast anymore.
If you’ve ever fallen victim to the lure of monkey bread, you know how dangerous it is. Not only is the flavor delicious (think sugar, cinnamon, and/or honey), but it’s made of small, snarfable pieces of individual fabulousness, expressly designed to be pulled easily apart.
Just as popping corn can serve as a model for effective business development, so can making Mr. Monkey Bread. Its lesson can be simply summed up: Plan for easy, successful implementation.
After all, the entire point of monkey bread is to be easy (and tasty) to eat. Face it: Things don’t get much easier than pulling off a chunk that’s been designed to be pulled off.
So put this same forethought and planning into your business development activities. How can you break down those mondo tasks into small pieces that are easy to handle? While a particular task may not be quite as yummy as a chunk of monkey bread, it will be a sweet sensation to look back on your day’s work and realize the strides you’ve made toward your next business goal.
While this monkey chunking is straightforward, it’s not without its perils. That’s because that one easy-to-swallow chunk might remind you of something equally easy, but not nearly as important, to take care of.
In Monkey Bread Land, it could look something like this: eating monkey bread chunk > making a cup of coffee to accompany it > “needing” to brush your teeth > giving the sink a quick swipe > deciding to toss in a load of laundry “while I’m at it”…
In Entrepreneur Land, the sequence might go like this: outlining blog post > looking up a related statistic > clicking on a related link > diving head-first into the rabbit hole…
If this sounds distressingly familiar, you can make life easier on yourself by checking out Zoom In: How to Do What’s Important and Let the Rest Go, my quick-read e-book on Amazon. It will help you not only help design your business monkey bread, but focus on it until the work is done.
(BTW, thanks to Phil Denton for posting the monkey bread image in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.)
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