Sloan Creative

Now. Now. Now.

Business creates busy-ness. There’s simply no way around it. People to see, things to do, bills to pay.

Once you open your doors and start making promises to customers and employees your to-do list grows into a nearly unmanageable snarl. For me, it was “the stack.” My stack of miscellaneous papers, forms, mail, and ideas seemed stuck at 12 inches high. Add a bunch of employees, often lined up outside my door with a variety of important issues for me to address, my e-mail and voice mail, and the situation started looking desperate.

I was greatly relieved when reading Peter Drucker’s, The Effective Executive, in which he says that for a leader, these interruptions are a natural and important part of the job. Each was an opportunity to learn and to teach. Each urgency holds within it clues about where your market is headed, where your systems are broken, and where your staff needs more training or empowerment.

Re-contextualizing helped but, as a creative person, my interest was in moving the business towards my vision. The effort, the struggle, the joy of creating something new, whether a marketing campaign for an operational system, was my psychic reward in business. I craved the flow experience described so eloquently by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Working in. Working on.
How on earth could I ever get into flow working on the profitable projects I found fulfilling with all those interruptions and urgent important items created by others (whether customers, employees, or the IRS)? I hate to admit it, but I started resenting my employees and the job I had created for myself. I was becoming the prototypical bitter small business owner; busy working IN their business but never really connecting with the potential for profit and fulfillment made possible by working ON the business.

The machete
Rather than continuing to be bitter about my situation, I took the anger is a call to think.

First, I realized that I had to become aggressive about my time. This was not about neatly paring out a few minutes here and there. Real creativity, our unique genius, requires real focus, probably in 2-3 hour chunks. These don’t come easily in our modern, connected, engaged, world. Emerson, in his essay Self-Reliance, call upon us to put real vigor into our commitment to our own work, our own goodness:

“Your goodness must have some edge to it, - else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.”

OK, Emerson’s a bit harsh, but the point is valid, you have to be to make room for your best work to get done. Around the edges of your busy day, use a machete to chop out the time you need to deliver on your visions. It might not be easy in the moment, but in the long run you gain the fulfillment and profits of your vision. The type of folks who will resent you also resented Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Rand’s and Emerson’s messages are the same: that no one can protect you and your vision, except you and your own will. So now, how committed are you to your vision?

I remember, very early in my career working as a Realtor, talking with an acquaintance who was then one of the top salespeople nationally in the heyday of Century 21. After listening to me whine about how hard it was to get started as a Realtor, he exhorted me to,

“Grab the business by the throat!”

I wasn’t sure what he meant at the time, so I committed myself to working 12 hour days 6 days a week until I figured it out. I started by cold-calling apartment building owners to discuss listing their properties for sale. After a few months of getting nowhere, to the point where I was picking up applications for retail clerk jobs just to have some income, I stepped back, and got out my machete again.

The machete, again
I had put in the time, but the results were still not coming. I was desperate. A college graduate with no income and no deals in the pipeline. My pride was on the line.

I got out my mental machete and started looking at what I had been doing and what other opportunities I might have. I looked clearly at who I was and who I might serve.

As a young Realtor, I quickly realized that I needed to find first-time home buyers looking for small condos and homes. There were two good ways of connecting with them: open houses and answering the telephone for people who called in to the office looking for information about properties. I would simply find out what the buyers were looking for and would check the new listings each day for matches.

Within three of months I sold five homes and bought one as an investment, never working more than a few hours per week. I had figured out the formula, I had found what was essential to do, and left all the other work behind.

For me, the machete is a two-step process.

I must invest the time to bang my head against reality until I’m desperate enough to get the machete out again, this time the analytical machete, and really take a hard look at what is essential. Hopefully, this experience becomes less brutal and more artful as the years go on. But, for all of us, in every new situation, our commitment will be tested and we will have to make difficult, sometimes ugly, choices between honoring our own vision and responding to “love that pules and whines.”

So,

Have you invested the time required to find out what’s essential?

Have you taken the time to look at what’s essential and how you might do more of that? Only that?

Next time, we’ll take a look at the challenge of keeping the essentials in mind as time unrolls and distractions mount each week.

Stephen Sloan is the Extendo-CEO. He not only advises small business owners on leadership issues, he helps them with their work on a project basis. Learn more here