Business Leader Brain Joy, Innovation, the Bigger Game & Ending Suffering
How does one enjoy the process and business challenges, lead creativity and innovation consistently and keep stretching limits for what can be achieved in your enterprise (even if it is one person for now)?
How can you bust through (like the Hulk) – the concrete walls of hopelessness and hopefulness that we elaborately construct daily, weekly, and monthly?
1. Stop Business Challenges: Keep Ambitions in Check
Start easy and small and build up to the future.
Most people who start out with high ambitions, burn out fast or cause their teams to do so as fast as you can say “BURNOUT”.
Recognize the challenge and skill levels for yourself and your team – in what areas are your skill levels insufficient for the challenge you took on (ANXIETY)? In what areas are your challenge levels too low for the skills you have (BOREDOM)?
How can you adjust realistically for yourself or your team and then build up?
2. Manage Business Challenges: Build Your Willpower
Willpower is now a scientific term used to measure how much you can withstand distractions and other impulses to stay focused on a selected objective.
If you don’t manage your challenge and skill level, wave farewell to the ability to maintain a calm focus appropriately.
Start with easy tasks and then increase the challenge over time. Notice the tasks or decisions that you are putting off. See the paragraph on chunking below.
3. Ignore Past Business Challenges: Focus on the Future
Most people tend to refer to the past – past judgments, failures, successes, and opinions color the future from the present position.
Create a mission statement or future vision statement and read it every day.
Also, pick one project or task every day (minor or large project or task) that is a realistic expression or fulfillment of your vision or future mission statement. This pulls you out of your head – out from the past – into looking to the future.
4. Minimize Business Challenges: Build A Team
Start identifying tasks and projects to delegate to others. What roles do you need in your team?
Even if these are administrative tasks to start with – start listing these out.
Also, identify people around you who are smarter and more creative? Would you like them to be on your team? Why?
If you cannot pay them, will they come and dialogue with you at least once a month? See paragraph on dialogue below.
5. Business Assets > Business Challenges
Recognize the true assets in your company; the assets or systems or functions or things or people who give more results to you than you pay them or invest into them.
Recently our meetups have shown to be true assets, delivering ridiculous returns on investment for little risk and perceived opportunity cost.
What kinds of assets would you like to create?
6. Process Business Challenges Through Dialogue
My informal business partner and I meet every week to chat and discuss business ideas.
We both are very stimulated in our ideas and realistic about which ones to implement.
The combination of our different approaches results in a high-temperature crucible test of reality for our ideas and implementation. You need the ideas. You need the reality of where to focus first.
Dialogue makes this easier.
I suggest a coach, implementation coach, partner, etc. on a weekly basis.
7. Chunk Down, Have Fun and Explore
Too many people burn out every day – what am I saying! … too many people burn out every hour! This includes me some days – very rare – but it does happen. How did I make this rare?
I practice chunking down my projects into more manageable chunks and then giving myself a time limit with a countdown timer (you can get smartphone apps for these today) to get each chunk done. This must be done in the spirit of inventiveness and the choice to have fun no matter what.
This coupled with humor and the curiosity to explore once in a while leads to more joy, fun, and innovation at your work.
Ready to get started? Contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
