Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

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When there’s so much vying for our attention and especially when we’re feeling more than a little burned out with our current efforts, a little “stick-to-itiveness” can go a long way. Here are a few ideas for developing the trait.

1. Allow yourself the occasional slip. There will be times when you simply don’t have the motivation or inspiration needed to stay on track and moving forward with your vision. On those days, it can be hard to break away from email, blog feeds and social networks long enough to make any kind of progress with your business, but an occasional slip doesn’t have to mean total failure. Make a resolution to get back on track tomorrow. In the long run, the occasional off day won’t be what determines whether you make it or break it, but rather the overall consistency that you manage over time.
2. Find ways to encourage patience and consistency. For a lot of business owners, it’s hard not to chase after every new opportunity that comes along. Whether we’re talking about new marketing tactics or altogether different business ventures, “entrepreneurial attention deficit disorder” is common for many a small business owner. Finding creative ways to encourage patience and consistency can keep E.A.D.D. at bay, while helping you keep your current efforts on track toward success. One solution is to consider starting side projects that build up over time and that won’t distract you from your main goals. Having several ventures or ideas at varying stages of development can keep your interest levels up, while allowing you to move your attention to and from projects as demand and priorities change.
3. Create “built-in” backup. One of the best ways to keep projects moving forward, while allowing you to focus on those areas of your business that most interest you, is to build in reinforcement through a team. By having more than one person concentrating on the key responsibilities within your company, you can feel confident knowing that the most important jobs are getting done, even if you’re not the person doing them. One tip is to use a “divide and conquer” mentality to separate your core responsibilities into chunks that can be outsourced, one at a time. As new responsibilities come into view, you can either create new roles or see if they fit within those already created.
4. Take a break. Often those feelings that show themselves outwardly are only symptoms of an underlying problem, and treating them will only mask or temporarily relieve them. If you’re feeling distracted or overwhelmed, there’s a good chance that you could simply be overworked. Don’t feel guilty about taking some much-needed R&R. By having some time completely away from the business, you might find that you’re able to regain your focus and motivation without having to make changes in projects or commitments.

So many great business ideas go by the wayside simply because the people behind them burn out and give up too quickly for the ideas to take hold. Developing a few insurances to help you stick with your plans and maintain consistency might be all you need to see your big idea to success.

What tactics have you found for increasing “stick-to-itiveness”?

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I think about this all the time as it relates to my business. Generally, we come up with plans, ways we’re going to market our businesses, manage them, and keep things growing and moving along smoothly, but what are we missing? Are there blind spots we don’t yet know exist that could potentially be fatal to the success of our companies?

Blind Spot #1: Giving Up Too Soon (or Not Planning to Weather the First Years)

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen small business owners make is simply giving up too soon. We all want to chase after shiny new distractions as they show up, but many times, we already have everything we need to succeed, if we would only stay the course and allow enough time for our business ideas to take hold.

It’s so important to plan for the hard times of that first year or so in business, when there’s very little money coming in. Plan to cut corners as much as possible, both with your personal and business expenses, so that you can afford to stick with it until you start generating revenue.

Many times, it’s easy to look back on past ideas and failures and think, “If I had only stuck with that, I think it could have worked.” You have to be willing and able to hang in there for the long haul, and so often, it’s just too hard for business owners to weather that first year or so.

Blind Spot #2: Not Consistently and Actively Promoting the Business

A close runner-up in fatal blind spots is not actively and consistently promoting the business. So many times, business owners get caught up in planning and tinkering the minor things within the business that they neglect actually going out and finding new customers or clients on a regular basis.

I was fortunate to have gotten my start in real estate, where you have to work under the guidance of a broker for several years before being able to go out on your own, and in the real estate industry, one of the first things you’re taught is how important lead generation is to your success. I can remember my broker telling us that the most successful and experienced agents in the firm still did lead generation a couple of hours a day. Of course, I had no idea what lead generation was at the time, but at least the importance of it stuck with me all these years.

Part of the problem for most business owners is not knowing what to do when it comes to promoting their businesses. There are so many different tactics for marketing and promotion that it can quickly become confusing and overwhelming.  It would be far more helpful for new business owners to hear that they should simply pick two or three tactics for promoting their businesses, plan to stick with them for six to twelve months, and to be very aggressive with them for at least two hours each and every day.

Blind Spot #3: Thinking You Can Do Everything Yourself

A third blind spot most business owners have is thinking they can do everything themselves (or thinking that they have to do everything themselves). Lack of money, time and even experience can make a business owner think he or she is not in the position to hire help, and the process of finding and building a support team can seem like a full time job on its own.

The good news is that it’s possible to inch your way into delegation by finding ways to outsource one piece of your work at a time, and if you don’t think you can afford a paid assistant at the beginning, start with a few interns. That way, you can slowly test the waters with a support staff, while also seeing if the interns you hire would make good permanent additions to your team.

For most of us, the thought of starting a new business is as exciting as first learning to drive: we just want to be given the keys, jump in the car, and go! Certainly, there’s room for the thrill of being in control and finally going where we want to go, but if we want to avoid as many fender benders as possible, it helps to know to look out for blind spots.

What blind spots do you think most small business owners have in the beginning?

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#1 Be persistent.

Fortunately, in every one of the situations I’ve had to resolve recently, not finding a solution was not an option. Although I would have loved to give up and declare a stalemate, I knew that wasn’t possible without accepting consequences I wasn’t willing to take, so I had to stick with them until I figured out a way to move forward.

Whatever problem you’re facing, trust that there must be a way to work through it and get to the other side.

#2 Stop avoiding it.

Although I’m pretty good at not procrastinating most of the time, when it comes to solving tricky problems, I’m one of the worst procrastinators. I want to take breaks, surf the Web, and call anyone and everyone I think might be available to chat. I’ll delay and avoid until I’ve wasted the majority of the day.

With one particular issue I had to figure out recently (which I had already postponed for nearly two months), I finally decided that I simply would not allow myself off the hook until I worked it out. I paced a path through my house and thought I’d never get through it, but eventually, the strategy worked, and I was very satisfied with the outcome.

Allow yourself breaks when you absolutely need them, but if you’re anything like me, you probably know when you really need a rest and when you’re just procrastinating. It won’t work 100 percent of the time, but there are occasions when not allowing yourself off the hook can really pay off.

#3 Work in reverse.

In the recent month or so, I decided to hire a couple of interns, in the hope of finding motivated and talented people I could add to my team permanently. I started the process of locating prospects through several university job posting boards, as well as a few privately-owned sites, but the pool of potential new hires was slim.

At first, I was a little discouraged, and in an effort to fine-tune my job postings, I started searching for terms like “what interns do” and “how to be a good intern” and began stumbling on blogs of actual interns who were exactly the type of candidates I wanted: aggressive, enthusiastic, eager, etc. Of course, these interns were already more than busy, but I started paying attention to the people who were commenting on their blogs, and it turns out, many of them were considering doing internships. As I followed the links back to their owners’ sites, I started finding unique, highly talented and motivated students who were perfect candidates for the job.

Instead of going more traditional routes for solving particular problems, try to think of other ways you might connect with the solutions you need.

#4 Pay attention to what’s right in front of you.

My latest dilemma was figuring out what to write for today’s post. I had been so busy with solving the other issues, I hadn’t backlogged ideas for this week’s article. After thinking on possibilities for nearly two hours, I finally said to myself, “I’m stuck,” and then it hit me: that’s it! I could have saved myself two hours, if I had only paid attention to what was right in front of me.

When you feel like you’ve searched high and low to find a solution, ask yourself if you’re missing the obvious. Turn to the resources immediately available to you, like pulling from past experiences or relying on your network of business contacts, family, and friends. Many times, the answer is not that far away.

What tricks do you use for getting unstuck and solving challenging problems in your business?

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Recently, I stumbled across a new service called Alice that lets you buy all of your household essentials online, things like toilet paper, toothpaste, trash bags and so on. Alice is awesome, and as soon as I figured out just exactly how awesome Alice was, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew about the service.

Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

I hate grocery shopping, especially for household items. I can be out of aluminum foil or coffee creamer for weeks before finally convincing myself to go to the store. There are many reasons why I dislike it so much, but here are the main two:

1. I hate making grocery lists. It takes too long. I have to think of everything I’ve been running low on or out of for the past month or so, and I inevitably forget something, which means I either have to go without out the item until the next time I convince myself to do this chore, usually two or three months later, or I have to go back to get the item. Plus, the list must be organized, or else I’ll end up running from one end of a 20,000 sq.ft. store to the other (which, let’s face it, ends up happening at least once per shopping trip anyway, because of some big conspiracy going on at the big box stores).
2. I hate the experience. I have to get ready and drive out to no less than two stores, because it’s impossible to get everything at one place, unless I go to one of the really unpleasant big box stores, which is a nightmare. Once I get there, I have to deal with parking, rude people, frustrated employees, long lines, price checks, loading the cart with the groceries, unloading the cart to check out, reloading the cart after checkout, and finally unloading the cart into my car, and then I get to go home, unload my car, and put all the groceries away, only to realize that I’ve forgotten something and to be discouraged, because I spent more money than I had planned, and a week later, I’ll need to do the entire process all over again.

Remove the Pain and Make Them Love You

Enter Alice (cue sound of choir). Alice solves my problems:

1. Alice knows me very well. When I signed up for my account, I got to go through and pick out all of my favorite and commonly-used household items and put them into my own custom, always-there product shelf. When I’m ready to shop, all my favorite items and brands are waiting for me, and all I have to do is load them into my cart and check out (if I haven’t scheduled them to be delivered automatically).
2. Alice will shop for me — automatically. I can set up my products to be delivered at specific times (say, toothpaste every two months and coffee filters every three). Alice will send me my items at preset times so that I no longer run out of things. Even if I do forget something, it only takes two or three business days for delivery, which is usually how long it takes me to convince myself to go to the store anyway.
3. The price is right. Manufacturers can sell directly to me through Alice and as there are no inventory costs as with regular retailers, the savings are passed on to me. However, even if the items were priced the same, I still don’t have to take time out to worry about restocking the toothpaste. Plus, there are no shipping fees, so I save on gas, not to mention the aggravation.
4. Alice looks after me. Just before checkout, Alice offers me some custom deals and coupons that I wouldn’t have otherwise found. Even if I don’t need the items just yet, Alice will save the discounts for me for a set time so that I can use them later.

But is It Real Love?

I could go on and on about Alice, and that’s really the point: I love this service and plan to tell everyone I know about it. Rarely do I get so excited about a company that I can’t wait to rave about them. That rarity is something that, if we’re smart, we can capitalize on within our own companies.

Make sure your customers love you, and I mean really love you:

• To the point that they literally have trouble listing all of the ways,
• To the point that they can’t wait to tell friends and family about you at every available opportunity, and
• To the point that they would hate to have to live without you.

Find your customers’ pain points and solve them. More than that, turn something they once dreaded into something they actually enjoy.

What companies do you love and rave about at every opportunity, and why?

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ambition, n.: an earnest desire for some type of achievement and the willingness to strive for its attainment

Thinking about ambition reminds me of Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford. The words “stay hungry” have followed me ever since reading his address in a magazine soon after it took place.

It also reminds me of my first years in business and of my first venture that was a real success: my web design business, which has since taken a back seat to other ventures, but still has the power to motivate me when I think of it.

In the first full twelve months of starting the business, I had earned what was for me at the time quite a bit of money, but I didn’t really pay attention to that fact in the beginning. I just did the work. Now, though, I can appreciate that accomplishment and how I achieved it by myself, and for me, that’s what ambition is all about.

Take away spouses and parents, mentors, physical possessions. Take away everything, and you’re left with yourself; knowing that, no matter what, you can create something from nothing, and you can survive. Knowing that makes you think anything is possible.

It’s not about being on your own or not having anyone to help you, quite the opposite. The greater that inner source of power, the more you have to offer those around you and the more you appreciate the true strength that can result from coming together around a shared passion.

However, it is important to know that we can build something with our own hands, that we have that ability within us. When challenges find us, and they will, we need to know that we are resourceful and that, as before, we will find a way through them or around them, whichever comes first.

That’s so very powerful, but wanting something and being willing to do whatever it takes to get it are two very different things, and lately, I’m coming to appreciate how you need both the wanting and the willingness in order to achieve.

I’m starting to apply that distinction to my own decision-making when it comes to where I spend my energy. I’m coming to accept that if I don’t want something bad enough, I’m never going to do the work it will take to reach it. My time and energy would be better spent on something I actually want to achieve and for which I’m willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish: those things that make me want to get up early and stay up late, where sleep becomes unnecessary and something I have to force myself to do, because I simply can’t wait to do whatever is next on the list to move the vision forward. It truly is a hunger.

Over the last year, I’ve found it especially difficult to build a team of people who take pride in their work and are ambitious when it comes to their own success or sense of accomplishment. I’m not sure what the ultimate solution to that problem will be, but when I think about adding someone to my team, I know that it’s important for that person to have dreams and goals of his or her own.

I’m OK with the fact that he or she might see my business as a stepping stone, a means to an end, because that means that while that person is with me, he or she will be striving, reaching for something. He or she will be ambitious, and I need, we all need, people like that around us in order to make each of our dreams a reality.

Do you let ambition drive your business and the decisions you make around it?

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I call these items a “moving to-do list,” and I’m always on the lookout for them. They’re those things that follow me around for weeks or months on end, until I finally own up to it and say, “I’m never going to get to that. I might as well quit moving it forward.”

I’m not talking about those pesky to-dos that eventually really do have to get done. I have a couple of them on my list right now, things like fixing a mirror on my vanity or the trip lever on my bathtub. Eventually, if I keep ignoring those to-dos and moving them forward on my list instead of just doing them, the mirror on my antique vanity will break, and my bathtub won’t drain (not good). Hopefully, I’ll get to those things before that happens, but the point is, eventually, as annoying as they might be, we get to these kinds of things, because if we don’t, there are consequences.

What I’m talking about are those things that might not have obvious consequences if we fail to do them, or that have consequences we’re subconsciously willing to pay. These are things like:

• Writing that book we’ve been meaning to write, or
• Launching that new product or service. or
• Making changes to our service offerings or websites so that we stop taking on certain types of clients.

These are those tasks that we’re avoiding for some reason, and we need to figure out why. A few of the possible reasons?

1. Obligation. We keep saying to the people around us (business and accountability partners, customers and clients, family and friends) that we’re going to write that book. We say that it’s something we really want to do, or we say that it will bring in additional revenue for our businesses, but it turns out that we’re not really all that motivated to do it, yet we keep moving the task forward, because we’ve promised that that’s what we’re going to do.
2. Guilt. We think it’s something we should do, maybe because everyone else manages to get it done or because it’s our “responsibility” to do it, but internally, we’re doing it for all the wrong reasons and don’t really want to do it, and we feel guilty because of that, so we just keep moving forward and saying that we’re going to get it done.
3. Motivation (or lack of it). A lot of the tasks we take on are driven by financial motivations. Maybe we want to (or think we should) make more money, but in reality, we’re quite comfortable where we are, so even though we might think or say that we want to achieve greater financial success, the financial motivation alone is never going to be enough to make us do the task, but we keep moving it forward, because we think we should want more money.

At the end of the day, it comes down to acceptance. Acceptance of what we really want, of our own definition of success, and of who we really are (and who we’re not).

Once you accept all those things and are OK, saying, “You know what, I just don’t even really want that. It’s not who I am, it’s not what I want, and it’s not important for me to be happy,” give it up. Take it off the list and file it away as a “someday/maybe,” if you think it will ever come back on the radar or if you need that little bit of security, just in case you change your mind.

The bottom line is that a moving to-do list adds unnecessary stress and frustration and a feeling of failure, when really you’re just attempting to achieve something that you don’t even want or that’s some arbitrary achievement that won’t even matter to you if you do accomplish it. Let it go, and be OK with it. Free up that mind space for something that you actually do want and that you stand a chance of accomplishing, because you won’t get in your own way.

What needs to be taken off your moving to-do list?

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“What makes the difference between wishing and realizing our wishes? Lots of things, of course, but the main one, I think, is whether we link our wishes to our active work. It may take months or years, but it’s far more likely to happen when we care so much that we’ll work as hard as we can to make it happen.” – Mister Rogers

Getting from Point A to Point B

We may have big ideas and hopes for our businesses, but getting from Point A to Point B is often where we run into trouble. Success, though, comes when we can connect our goals for our businesses to where we are today (and every day) through consistent action, but how can we ensure consistency each and every day?

We have to care about the work we’re doing — really care. If we love our work, we’ll be a lot more willing to stay the course and work as hard as we can (for as long as it takes) to see our vision to reality, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Loving the Work (to the Extreme)

I’m sure you’ve heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s the author of “Crush It!” and the face of Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine, which took his family’s business from $4 million to $60 million annually in just a few short years.

I’ve read many times that Gary Vaynerchuk is a workaholic (he might even be a self-proclaimed workaholic). I’ve heard that he works 18-hour days, but no matter what you think about working that much, the real question is, do you love what you do so much that you are willing to put in that kind of time and effort?

From what I’ve seen of Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s one of the most passionate and enthusiastic people one could meet. Personally, I don’t know a lot of people who are all that passionate or enthusiastic about very much of anything (and they generally work far less than 18 hours a day).

Certainly, Gary takes his work to the extreme, but maybe that’s part of the reason he has been so successful. I don’t think very many people ever take anything to an extreme, opting instead to live in the middle and ending up bored to death with it. Passion and enthusiasm, though, can make you want to take your work to the extreme.

Finding Passion

Many of us are not so lucky as to know from an early age what it is that we want to do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find passion just the same, and by finding passion and enthusiasm, we’ll be much more engaged in our work, which will lead to greater contentment and success in our business endeavors (whatever they may be).

So, how do you find passion when your calling is not so obvious?

• Find a way to serve. Many times (and at probably the most rewarding times), passion comes from helping others. Teaching, sharing and offering support to someone else can bring enthusiasm for finding more and greater ways to be of service.
• Do what you enjoy. If you love writing, there’s a way to leverage that to help you build a thriving business. The same is true for speaking, entertaining, or meeting people. You can integrate any of these talents and strengths into a tool for building almost any kind of business. You can also leverage things like your love of sports or home-making or technology.
• Follow your curiosity. Gary Vaynerchuk was curious about wine, so he started exploring that interest and then decided to share his findings with an audience who wanted down-to-earth advice on the topic. If you’re curious about something, leverage that curiosity and see if there might be an audience who is also interested in learning about it.

Finding work that you truly love to do is key to being able to stick with it and put in the time and effort necessary to build a thriving business. If you can find something that ignites passion and enthusiasm within you, you’re much more likely to find true and lasting success.

No matter what your business, how do you make sure you remain excited to show up and build your business day after day?

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A post from Chris Brogan stirred my entrepreneurial spirit. In it, he discussed how the phrase “looking for work” used to mean mean looking for (and creating) opportunities to work, rather than just looking for a job. He laments that, “We’ve somehow decided that ‘security’ equals working for someone else who has all the cards and pulls all the strings.”

Brogan goes on to describe how people can create their own work by being entrepreneurial. Certainly, that applies to creating opportunities where others might say they don’t exist (starting a new business, for example), but it also applies to how you look at your business right now.

For the guy running the screenprinting shop, don’t just make t-shirts; create opportunities to make t-shirts. For the lady running the bakery, don’t just make cupcakes; create opportunities for people to want cupcakes.

For each of us, we have something we want to make, do or sell, but we can’t just do the work; we have to actually create the opportunities for doing the work.

So, how does this work in practice? Let’s take the cupcake lady. Business is slow. People aren’t buying cupcakes. She needs to find a way to make people want to buy cupcakes. How can she do that? A trendy idea I like is people substituting cupcakes for their actual wedding cake, so why couldn’t she position herself as the local baker for the job? She could find and create unique wedding cupcake displays and showcase them in her bakery window or in posters around her shop. Certainly, in big cities or in trendier locations, this might be something seen at every bakery, but what if she’s the first in her area to offer it? Cupcake gold, at least for a while, and then she’ll have to create a new reason for people to want cupcakes.

So, how can you implement this for your business? You just need to think outside the box.

Think about your product or service. How do people use it now, and is there a way that you can get them to want to use it more? No matter what your business, your customers and clients all want the same thing, whether that’s more time, more money, less aggravation and annoyance, or a greater sense of security, well-being, acceptance, or achievement. How can you help them get one or more of those things?

No matter what you do, no matter what product you create or service you provide, you can find ways to create demand around your business. All it takes is a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit and a good dose of creativity.

How can you “find a place to apply what you know how to do”? How can you “create work” for yourself instead of waiting for it to come to you?

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A Story About Change

My friend Betsy Talbot and her husband Warren are forging their own path and making their own way. Two years ago, they decided that they wanted to travel the world. Life was too short, they decided, to wait for that dream life to magically create itself. They had to figure out a way to make things happen — their own way, right now. They created a plan for saving money and paring down to make room for an around-the-world trip of one to two years, and one month from now on October 1, just over two years from originally setting out their intentions, they will be embarking on an adventure of a lifetime.

What’s Their Secret?

Betsy and Warren’s story is very inspiring, but unfortunately, the most probable initial reaction as an outsider is to think, “I could never do something like that. I have [x, y, z] obligations, and anyway, even if I wanted to do it, I wouldn’t know where to start.” The thing is, I have known Betsy for many years now, and she’s just like a lot of other people I know, myself included, and yet, somehow she and Warren have made this happen, so what’s their secret?

One thing that struck me that Betsy said recently was, “I’m becoming more comfortable with the unknown.” I don’t think it occurred to her that she and Warren had become comfortable with the unknown quite some time ago.

I’ve watched them carry out their plan over the past couple of years, and at almost every step of that journey, they were not exactly sure what to do or how things would go, and yet, they kept going and remained confident that they would figure things out along the way, and that’s exactly what they did.

When You Don’t Have the Answers

As business owners, we have to get used to not having all the answers, knowing that if the answers were easily found, anyone and everyone could attempt to start a business, and they would all succeed at it.

I think our first instinct, anytime we don’t have the answers or when things don’t seem to be moving along as smoothly as we might have expected, is to think, “I must be doing something wrong,” when in all likelihood, it’s just that what we’re doing has never been done before in quite the same way, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Instead of immediately thinking we should change course and do things the way someone else has done them, perhaps we might step back and ask ourselves, “Is there really one answer, one right way to do this? Has this even been done before, or do I simply need to become comfortable with creating my own way?”

Working in Spite of Not Knowing

Perhaps the biggest part of it is learning to stay the course, even when the course doesn’t yet exist. There’s no path laid out ahead of you, and you’re learning to navigate as you go. Learn to keep going, in spite of not having clear directions. Create a plan you believe is most likely to succeed by studying the cues of those who have succeeded before you, but accept that you are forging a new path in many ways, so the answers may not always be immediately available.

How have you learned to become comfortable with the unknown?

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I was thinking about this recently over something that’s been plaguing and frustrating me on a daily basis for quite some time — not consistently sticking with an exercise routine, and I started wondering if there was something more to it.

The fact that I don’t exercise more bugs me all the time. “You need to exercise,” or some variation of it, crosses my mind a minimum of ten times a day. That’s ridiculous. The energy, attention, and time I spend on simply thinking about exercising is far greater than what it would take to simply stop everything and actually do it, so what’s the problem? The answer: Something is controlling me. In my case, it’s a schedule.

I feel a constant pull to conform to someone else’s idea of when I should work and what times things should happen: What time to wake up, eat, work out, run errands, go to bed, etc. It’s silly, but true. A schedule (or really some crazy idea I have of what constitutes a “normal” schedule) is controlling me and making me not live the way I want to live. It doesn’t matter that I might function better and be more productive and content following an altogether different routine than everyone else on the planet. No, I’d rather struggle to do things the way everyone else does. I’d rather see how many ways and how many times a square peg will not fit into a round hole.

Why is that I can commit to forging my own path in every other area of my life, but struggle with this one? I think it’s because it’s so easy to become controlled and not live or work the way we really want to live or work. Think about it. Maybe you’ve wanted for many years to:

• Write a book,
• Become a runner,
• Get up early,
• Get in shape, or
• Build a thriving business.

But, why haven’t you? What’s stopping you from doing what you want to do?

• Maybe you long to be a writer, but hate the thought of having your work criticized. The critics are controlling you.
• Maybe you wish that you could get into better shape, but can never seem to find the time or routine to make it work. A schedule is controlling you.
• Maybe you want to build a thriving business, but can’t imagine putting yourself out there and promoting yourself or your business. Your fear is controlling you.
• Maybe you need to hire an assistant or a coach, but hate to have to turn to someone else for help. Your pride is controlling you.
• Maybe you’d love to get up early, watch the sunrise over coffee, and enjoy some quiet time to yourself before starting yet another busy day, but have never been able to stick with going to bed and getting up early. Your laziness, indifference or complacency is controlling you.

If there’s something in your life or business that you want to do, something that you know would make all the difference in your productivity or contentment, think hard and honestly when answering, “Why am I not doing it?” Are circumstances, other people, your attitude, your complacency, or anything else controlling you?

Once you know (and perhaps admit) that something is, in fact, controlling you, what are you going to do about it? How will you take back your power?

Sometimes simply being aware of something can change the way you approach it. Just having the knowledge that I’m allowing some arbitrary definition of a “normal” schedule control how I live and work makes me reevaluate how I spend my days and, at the very least, question my motives for doing things a certain way.

In the past, what’s stopped you from doing things the way you wanted to do them in life and business, and how did you find a way to overcome them?

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Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. — Thomas Edison

There comes a point when being a business owner gets really hard (and I mean really hard). You’ve come up with your big idea, you’ve done all the initial legwork to set it up, and now comes the hard part: Getting the word out about your business and, more importantly, hanging in there while you get the word out about your business. The hard part now becomes not giving up too soon.

The Real Work

When you start a business, when you start a new product or service, when you launch anything really, that’s when you feel like you’re working really hard. That’s when you’re willing to stay up late and get up early to get all the groundwork completed so that you can start making money. As hard as it can seem during this time, you generally know what to do, or you can at least figure out what to do, and you just plow through getting the work done. Then you finish the work. (Cue sound of crickets.) Now what?

All right, now you figure out that you need a marketing plan. Great, that gives you something else to do! You finish the marketing plan and begin implementing it. (You believe in this plan. You’ve given it a lot of thought. You feel really confident about it. It’s going to generate the business you need.) You run through your plan for several days, maybe even several weeks, and then … nothing. Nothing happens, and in our instant-gratification-seeking world, this is where things start getting testy:

• When you’re over the rush of your big idea,
• When you’ve completed the work of creating it,
• When you need to pay the bills, and
• When it feels like you’re sitting on your laurels.

When you’re doing all that initial setup (building your website, creating the product, etc.), it feels like real work. Marketing doesn’t feel like real work, and it gets harder to justify and explain to those around us, particularly those who don’t have businesses. Marketing? What’s marketing? Building a website people get; that sounds like real work. Marketing? Marketing on Facebook and Twitter? All right, now you’re just playing around. Those are the conversations you have, both with yourself and with others, for justifying what you’re doing.

Writing posts for your blog, replying and posting on social networks, doing interviews, commenting on other sites and forums, searching for opportunities to guest post — all these things don’t feel like work, but they’re very necessary for building a successful business, and sticking with these activities for the bulk of your time each day for the six months or year it’s going to take you to gain some traction seems impossible.

Not Giving Up

So, how do you do it? How do you avoid giving up too soon?

1. You make a commitment. Do you want to do this? Are you willing to bet the next 6-12 months of your life on it? You have to be willing to say, “This is my commitment. These are the milestones I intend to reach. This is my intention.”
2. You maintain discipline. Each and every day, you have to say, “This is what I’m committed to doing. These are my top priorities.” You have to focus on what you believe to be the “highest and best use” tasks that will get the word out about your business and start generating income for you. You stay focused, not only on what you’re going to do, but also on what you’re not going to do (compulsively checking email, surfing the Internet, taking a dozen breaks each day, etc.).
3. You trust your plan. You’ve given a lot of thought to the best way for promoting your business, and now you just have to believe in it. Don’t keep switching plans and changing things up. It’s going to take time to see results. Give yourself at least a 90-day test with your current plan before doing any tweaking.
4. Be willing to stay up late and get up early. Although it’s not easy to think about, success isn’t just going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work to get things going. No one’s going to do it for you. As you start to get more successful, you still have to continue getting the word out, and juggling priorities can be a challenge. Know that handling incoming work and generating opportunities for future work are equally important.
5. Find support. Get an accountability partner to help you stay the course. It’s a lot easier to waiver when you don’t have someone else holding you responsible and accountable for your original plans and intentions.

Finding a way to hang in there and not give up on your vision can be the hardest thing you ever do to see your business to success, but you have to figure out how you’re going to stick with it for the time it will take to gain some momentum and start seeing results.

In the past, how did you find ways to hang in there until your idea took hold?

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As more demands are placed on you, tasks that once seemed extremely important become trivial. You have one hundred things to do and a limited amount of time to do them, so you have to become very selective with what gets your attention, but the question becomes, what do you give up?

In many ways, the answer to that question is unique to each of us. It requires a lot of consideration and, most importantly, realignment with our intentions for our lives and businesses.

What to Expect

Before deciding on what to give up, here are a few things to expect when making the shift away from “busy-ness.”

• Some tasks to give up are obvious. You probably already have a list of tasks you wish you could snap your fingers and have a genie appear to handle for you. Those tasks are probably low-priority or are simply not well-suited for your interests and personality. Outsource or eliminate them, if at all possible.
• Other tasks to give up are not so obvious. For some things, it might not occur to you that they should be off your plate. You might underestimate or fail to even realize how much time they take you to complete, which is why it becomes important to track everything you do on a daily or weekly basis so that you have a better idea of exactly what tasks are hiding within your routine that could be outsourced.
• Some tasks to give up are painful. Let’s face it. There are tasks that we think no one can do as well as we do them. While that might be true in some cases, usually it’s just our ego getting in the way, and we have to be willing to let those tasks go for our businesses to succeed.
• Some tasks to give up require faith. Sometimes, it can be hard to let go of certain tasks out of the fear that something bad will happen if you aren’t the person handling them. At the end of the day, though, if we want to grow our businesses and not hit a plateau, we have to build a support team and have faith that things will work out OK.
• Some tasks to give up make you feel like a jerk. Chris Brogan mentioned this in a comment last week, and I’ve struggled with the concern myself, but this is another good time to check your ego at the door and say, “I’ve thought this through, and this is not the best way to spend my time.” Accept that you may feel like a jerk and may even be called a jerk sometimes, but it’s very necessary for you to spend the bulk of your time adding value to everything you do. Is the task you’re considering giving up really adding real value?

What to Give Up

Once you’re OK with letting go, you have to decide what to give up. Here are some of the tasks you might consider.

• Email. As I mentioned in the first part of this series, email is usually one of the first things that has to change when business owners make the shift away from “busy-ness.” Once your business reaches a certain level of success, you might consider routing some or all of your emails to an assistant or simply using an auto-responder or message on your website to manage expectations.
• Blog comments. Many business owners choose to completely disable blog comments at a certain point, in order to eliminate comment spam and focus on the content. Leo Babauta and Seth Godin are just two examples. It’s a touchy subject with clear proponents on both sides of the debate, but managing comments and comment spam can be a real time drain. A word of caution before making the decision to cut out comments completely: Know that it may cost you some readers. An alternative might be to hire an assistant to manage comments for you.
• Social networks. Many business owners are deciding to get out of the social networking game, whether partially or completely. Seth Godin, Darrell Etherington, and many others are leaving or never entering social networks like Facebook and Twitter, both for time management and privacy reasons. It’s definitely easy to allow social networks to overtake your work days; the more popular your business becomes, the more you have to keep them in check.
• Requests. As your visibility increases, you’ll receive more and more requests to review books/products, participate in joint ventures, speak at events, or otherwise contribute to projects outside your business. It can become very hard to say no and stay the course with your own priorities, so it becomes increasingly important to be selective with the outside requests you take on.
• One-on-one work. The bigger your business becomes, the harder it is to justify working with individual clients without charging a small fortune (leaving you seeming and feeling like a jerk sometimes). It’s a hard line to walk, but the best way to handle it is to be direct and upfront about why you have to work this way.

Deciding what to give up through outsourcing or elimination is a deeply personal decision and a hard one to make, but as your business grows, you’ll definitely have to modify the way you manage your workload or risk hitting a plateau or burning out.

What to you foresee having to give up as your business grows?

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In this first part of the series, I’m going to talk about the shift that tends to happen to business owners once they hit a tipping point, that place where their businesses snowball seemingly overnight. One day, they’re managing their businesses a certain way, and then they come to a point where they have to make drastic changes in how they handle the increasing demands being placed on them.

Here are a few of the more well-known cases of business owners who’ve had to make drastic shifts away from “busy-ness,” in order to make the most of their time and see to it that the top priorities get the bulk of their attention.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of WineLibraryTV and author of “Crush It,” is a big proponent of working hard, putting in the time to build your business, and appreciating the people who support you along the way. He makes it a point to (attempt to) reply to every email he receives, or at least that was the case until this past  year or so. After his book published and things started becoming more demanding, he had to rethink his approach to email, and while he still has the intention of replying to every message he receives, his strategy is completely different. Now, if you email him, you get an auto-responder message along with a video explanation of why he had to change how he handled email communications.

Chris Brogan

Social media expert Chris Brogan had a similar situation. He wrote a book (“Trust Agents“), started a few new business endeavors, and became very popular over the past couple of years. Eventually, his strategy also had to change in order to manage his growing workload. He hired an assistant and developed a new way of handling email communications. Now, if you fill out his contact form, you’ll have to pick one of several options for why you’re contacting him, presumably so that his email filters can route those submissions to one or more people who can streamline those communications.

Leo Babauta

Leo Babauta is probably the most extreme example here, although that’s probably understandable, given that Babauta is a master of minimalism and the founder of Zen Habits. Over the life of his blog, he has ditched email (almost completely), turned off comments on his blog so that he no longer has to weed through comment spam, and made a variety of other changes in the way he handles communications and requests.

Timothy Ferriss

Timothy Ferriss is the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” and believes in making the most of his time as a business owner. He has a virtual assistant handle a lot of his email communications and outsources as much of his work as possible so that he is free to do other things besides manage a business. A visit to his contact page will give you a glimpse into how he manages his communications and time.

Making the Shift

At a certain point, each of these business owners had to make a decision about how to improve the way they managed their time. Any one of these people might receive a couple thousand emails per day, as well as several hundred blog comments and social network messages. If they spent all of their time responding to these communications, they would hit a plateau with the success of their businesses and eventually burn out.

As a business owner, especially as the demands on your time increase as your business grows, you have to find ways to work smarter so that you make sure the biggest and most important rocks get moved. It’s not the easiest of tasks, but it’s definitely necessary, if you hope to have lasting success.

Have you experienced a shift in your business and in the way you manage your workload? What changes did you make so that you could ensure more time was reserved for the most important tasks?

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Small business owners who find creative ways to manage their current work while continuing to expand their businesses win out in the end; those who can’t eventually hit a plateau and are usually left feeling trapped by their businesses, and figuring out how to be more resourceful and innovative might be the only way to work through it.

Steering a 70-Ton Train

The first thing you generally have to accept when you find yourself at this point in your business is that it’s going to be hard to maintain complete control. Up to this point, it’s been only you, working at your own pace and your own way, so you’ve likely had a lot of control over your business and its growth. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve experienced many lulls throughout the life of your business. During those times, you had a lot more free time to plan, to market and promote your business, as well as organize your workload to suit your style and preferences.

As your business grows, however, things begin to change. It’s a quiet roar in the distance warning you that something is coming, and then all of a sudden, the 70-ton train is moving. All that marketing and promotion and hard work has started paying off, and you now have the momentum of that big lead generation train behind you. The only problem is that you haven’t built the tracks, and now it’s hard to steer.

You’ll have to get used to keeping things moving in the general direction you want them to go, without having absolute control over every detail. As you find help, you’re going to have to accept different working styles, get used to training and teaching others on your support team, and even adjust to the demands of your new role as manager (or engineer).

Learning to Take Baby Steps

Another thing you might want to prepare for is working in small increments to get things on track. Not everything is going to work immediately or as expected, so it’s going to take a lot more patience and persistence to see your business through the growing pains.

You may have to “try on” several solutions before finding the fit that’s just right for your situation and business, but you have to trust that a solution exists or risk relegating yourself to that plateau forever. Keep searching until you find the right match.

Also, prepare to make adjustments. As you put the support structure in place for your business, it’s unlikely that it will work seamlessly right out of the gate. You’ll need to modify the plan and your support team as you go, so set out to make gradual and steady changes over time so that you’re left with a strong and sturdy foundation to support you.

Being Resourceful and Innovative

The last part of the puzzle is adding support when you’re lacking the time and money necessary to build it. How do you hire help and train someone, for example, when you (a) don’t have the money to pay him or her and (b) don’t have the time to devote to training and figuring out what to delegate?

First (and again), you’ll need to be prepared to take baby steps, but second, you’ll have to figure out ways to be more resourceful and creative when finding support for your business. Some solutions might include:

• Bartering with other business owners who might be in a similar position,
• Starting an internship program or working with local college students, or
• Bootstrapping to incrementally build a budget for a virtual assistant.

Think about everything you have to offer, and find ways to make those resources work to your advantage. Chances are, something you have at your disposal is exactly what someone else needs, and that kind of exchange can get you on your way without taking much in the way of time and money.

Seeing a business through stages of growth and change can be challenging, especially for small and solo business owners who are strapped for resources, but with a little creativity, there might just be a way to push through the plateau and take your business to the next level.

How have you used creativity and resourcefulness to grow your business when limited on time and money?

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Here are a few things that I know for sure:

• We’re more afraid of success than failure. Why? We generally know failure. We must know it to be in business for ourselves. Success, on the other hand, is uncharted territory. It changes things, and although we have the internal butterflies of hope and excitement about what’s to come, we also can’t help but feel a little uncertain and afraid of the unknown.
• We know what we need to do to succeed. We simply avoid it. Sometimes we avoid it out of fear of success or failure. Sometimes we avoid it because it seems too simple (solutions, in our minds, should be more complex). Other times, even if we hate to admit it, we avoid it out of laziness or because we’d rather be doing other things, like hanging out on social networks or surfing the web. No, we know what we need to be doing, but success comes by having the discipline and courage to actually do it.
• It’s not about the office supplies. I used to visit Office Depot probably once a week in search of that end-all, be-all solution for getting my business off the ground. It had to be there (right?) in all those reams of colorful paper and all those organizational systems. If I could just bring more order to my office, I thought, I would surely succeed. I visit the office supply store about twice a year now, after finally realizing that the solution isn’t there, and if there needs to be order, it’s probably internal and is more mental than physical.
• It is possible to bootstrap it. Just as we want that complex solution (so we avoid the simple and obvious route in search of it), we also want it to cost a fortune (more avoidance). In the past six months, I’ve conducted probably 100 interviews with entrepreneurs and small business owners, and while there were a few (very few) occasions where they suggested having enough initial financing to get a business off the ground, most entrepreneurs shared stories of starting on a shoestring and using cost-effective promotion techniques (like the media, word-of-mouth and content marketing) to build their companies.
• We must take care of ourselves. As business owners, this is usually the one we struggle with most, but taking care of ourselves is vital to the success of our companies. Balancing the demands of a business and a life can be challenging, and some would say that it’s an impossible feat, but somewhere around those demands, we have to make room for our own needs. It’s not the easiest thing to do, especially when there are deadlines and clients to please and promotional efforts to be done. At the end of the day, there are not enough hours, but kind of like an athlete maintains his or her health in order to perform at the highest level, we must do the same.
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners are a helpful bunch. I can’t imagine that a more helpful group exists out there than entrepreneurs and small business owners. Nowhere else will you see one business owner help another before he helps himself. When you first go into business for yourself, competition is the word that sticks out in your mind, but eventually, you begin to love seeing other businesses succeed, and instead of feeling envious, you feel inspired.
• Our businesses can’t be a state secret. It’s funny now to think about how little promotion I wanted to do for my business in the beginning; it was so intimidating and nerve-racking. Now, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. In the beginning, marketing and promotion have that ick-factor associated with them, but over time, you come to appreciate the value of your own products and services, but even when you come to appreciate it, that doesn’t mean everyone knows about it. We have to be willing to put ourselves out there and tell the world about our businesses.

I think the biggest lessons I’ve learned are not the most obvious ones; they’re not the ones I thought I needed to know, nor are they the ones that can be learned from a book. Those lessons (the ones where someone says, “Here’s how you promote your business through the media,” or “Here’s how you do social or in-person networking.”), those are the easy ones. The hardest lessons for me have been the ones I’ve had to learn on my own the hard way, through trial-and-error and candid looks in the mirror.

What business lessons do you know for sure?

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