The Difference of Effort

Happy Easter. Happy Easter Bunny Day. Hope you had a wonderful holiday. If you’re lucky, you got Friday off and made it a 3 day weekend. If you’re even luckier, you’re going to take tomorrow off as well.

If you’re a business owner or someone in search of a promotion, you likely caught up with a bunch of work and enjoyed some peace and quiet to focus and implement some ideas you’ve had on your mind for a while.

Talk about a polar opposite!

In all my years in business I’ve been able to narrow down the difference between success and failure to one thing: effort. Not money, not education, not lack of creativity. Simply, effort. As in people that fail never showed any effort beyond what their job description called for. Same for business owners: so many people closed doors this year because they never put in the effort to build a diverse company.

Even in my personal shortcomings, I can pinpoint the failures and missed opportunities simply to the lack of effort that went into a product and a feature. It happens to everyone, it’s just that some people make a career out of doing the bare minimum in order to survive.

Inverted Week

I recently blogged about turning my week upside down. Concentrate all the work and deadlines at the end of the week, not at the beginning. This way nobody is stressed on Monday and folks look forward to starting the week on a positive note.

For business owners and driven people, there is such a thing as the sixth day. Yes, I know, we all dream of working a 4 hour week selling drugs on the Internet in a questionably legal operation, but that is just not feasible or sustainable in the long term. However, you can always count on results that come from hard work.

Once upon a time I talked to K*** who told me about his job in his previous lifetime and how he would do his calls at 7 AM because he knew school administrators would get in early to get things done before everyone else showed up.

Most people that are failing at work or entrepreneurship are often surprised that I don’t work on Fridays. That I don’t have a business cell phone. That I don’t do 9-5. Then they proceed to explain how they don’t have the time to move up to Managed Services, that they’ve been meaning to read this book or that blog, that they intended to go to that conference and are otherwise full of best intentions and regrets.

Nothing happens with wishful thinking alone and nothing comes to you as a result of only hoping for it. Over the past 3 days I’ve put in 30 days of work. I’ve enjoyed several long meals, visit from parents, a fantastic radio show on Friday. Personal life doesn’t take a back seat to the professional life.

However, professional life deserves respect and sacrifice in order to move up and grow. This is of course easier said than done but I’ve spent years with people who year in and year out have the exact same issues and problems. The disappointing thing is that they are not difficult – but they are very demanding and time consuming.

Which brings me to my point – if you are hoping to move up or grow by working only during business hours, you are doomed. Business hours, or rather – operating hours – are meant for the purpose of delivering a service or producing a product.

Improvements, expansion, creative work and all the other things can only happen when you have the time to work on them without interruption. Find the time.