Yesterday was a crazy busy Monday. In looking ahead over the week, my plate will remain overflowing.
You probably have bouts of incredible busyness too. How do you keep working on growing your business when you’re in a storm of day-to-day issues?
While I was telling my wife about my crazy busy day, she said, “I told you this would happen.” What she was referring to was me adding responsibilities this year with service work through a couple of organizations who met yesterday and contributed to the storm.
She’s not wrong. But also: growth concerns building capacity. One route to do this is to create constraints that you embrace and learn how to work with.
My father was one of the more financially successful farmers among his peers. One of the reasons that he attributes this to is getting his masters degree in counseling when he was forty.
He said it was incredibly stressful to leave work early and drive an hour to take night classes all evening. He would race by his friends, hard at work combining fields and driving tractors and wave as he set off to class.
This wasn’t sustainable at the level he had been operating at, so he had to figure out how to keep up while maintaining his commitment of getting a degree. During this period, he began to employ a foreman, something that few of his peers did.
Rather than a tax on his progress, the classes forced him to try new things and learn how to remove himself from some of the day-to-day storm. The constraint of his commitment provided energy to build capacity.
Your impulse in the storm is to shelter and wait for it to pass. But there’s an opportunity in it to elevate your game.
What changes would it take to transform the storm to something manageable or helpful? Where is the pinch that fixing it would actually help drive growth?
Featured image is Don Quixote being struck by a windmill (1863 illustration by Gustave Doré). Used under public domain.