Author: johnhooley

I work in six week sprints and at the close of every sprint I self-prompt with some questions on how the six weeks went. During a recent personal retreat, I reviewed my answers for the past year.

Here are some excerpts from that:

• The challenge is that I’m always ambitious,so I stepped over the lines I set up…
• I filled my mornings with tasks and meetings that weren’t essential and ended up working on important work in the margins…
• I re-realized that protecting focus is a primary strategy for enabling my strengths and to do that I need to limit my commitments…
• I didn’t have time to chase sales because I was doing client or personal stuff…
• … competing priorities have created a habit where I note I need to do something, but don’t always make it a priority….

When I failed at completing an objective, much of the time the reasons why had to do with my drive.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting stuff done, it was that I was doing too much. In and out of work. Objectives weren’t completed not because I wasn’t moving, but because they were eclipsed by other objectives.

In my Strengthsfinder profile I have a couple very closely scored strengths: achievement and strategic. Achievement is a reflection of drive and a focus on getting things done. All the goals I pursue and commitments I make are a manifestation of that drive.

I’ve noticed that people often use discipline and willpower interchangeably. They say something like, “She’s incredibly disciplined,” but what they mean is, “She’s strong willed enough to keep on track with her goals.”

This false equivalent is an issue because willpower is an expensive resource that quickly erodes as time passes.

Discipline, on the other hand, concerns consistently meeting your commitments. You could do it through willpower, but that’s only one option and not one you can rely on.

Discipline matters in a business because it affects the quality of your execution. You can have a brilliant strategy and a great culture, but if there isn’t discipline in execution, the business doesn’t progress.

Just like in your personal life, you could attempt to maintain discipline in execution through force of will, but the chaos of your environment will naturally break it apart.

I have a long list of backlogs in my to-do list tracker. These are full of things that I didn’t get around to doing:

• 4/12 Micro Distributing SOP
• 4/29 Tefi’s Admin questions
• 5/10 Schedule backup and shut down of Pantheon
• And many more…

In your business, these tasks will focus your attention on the here and now. Many of them have to be done or there will be consequences. Of the items above, two of them are important and when I found them in my backlogs, I thought, Crap! How did I lose track of that!?

There’s always lots to do.

The gut reaction to this pressure is to focus your attention on the here and now. This introduces a problem though: what got you here won’t get you there.

I spoke with Melissa, an owner-operator out of Chicago today. She runs a management and events planning company for associations. She’s a 10,000 Small Business (10KSB) Alumni like me.

If you’re unfamiliar with 10KSB, it’s a small business accelerator funded by Goldman Sachs and operated by Babson University. It’s a three-to-six month program that provides education and access to capital and is organized around the participant creating a comprehensive growth plan.

She told me, “I went through 10KSB in 2013 and expected that my business would just take off after I created my growth plan. But actually, nothing much happened until 2019.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I had to sort of settle into all the ideas. Then in 2019 things seemed to catalyze and the business did take off. I’ve been busy ever since.”