The 90-day no-break work schedule comes to an end in a week. If you don’t know me, feel free to scroll down to the bold part.
I’m taking nearly a month-long vacation as a result of it and will surface back at the Kaseya conference in Las Vegas. I still have way too much to do in the remaining week of the Ironman schedule but two final giant pieces of the agenda are slowly falling in place. I’m fairly confident they will come through but I’m not really willing to kill myself into the finish line.
I guess the most important thing I’ve learned (and this is personal for me, your mileage may vary) is that quitting prolongs work. Without a Saturday and Sunday to look forward to my work towards the end result simply continued and there was no artificial calendar pressure for me to get things done by the certain day or time: “I’ll look at it tonight”
The other thing I learned is that this Ironman process is simply brute-force work of getting stuff done. Everything that has been completed in Q1 was a direct result of planning last Q4 and builds on more than a year of intense road schedule talking to partners face to face. I didn’t have to stop to be creative, wait for the input, etc. It’s all been about seeing it through, making adjustments, focusing on the mission at hand.
Finally, I learned how little I need to be involved in most of what the company does. Which brings me to the topic of the day.
“It is good to have a failure while you are young because it teaches you so much.”
– Walt Disney
Entrepreneurial Frustration
Every (successful) technology company owner I know struggles with the frustration of managing stuff we don’t want to be dealing with: payroll, HR, legal, finance, client disputes, local government, landlord, vendors, etc.
Most of it happens to be extremely emotionally draining.
Not every once in a while but nearly all the damn time.
If the best thing that happened to you in a day is your cell phone battery dying so you can have a moment to think about something other than the pile of crap you can’t believe you have to deal with in order to build a company and contribute to your community, you haven’t worked as a CEO.
Welcome, you’re among friends.
Everyone that reaches any reasonable level of success gets to the stuff above. For the more ambitious dumber ones among us that have read e-myth or unfortunately lived it, the fascination with perfection and fear of failure further entangles every part of us into the company.
It’s not that you don’t realize that you aren’t delegating enough, it’s that you’ve put so much to bring your business to this level that you know that just one more thing will push you towards perfection.
This is why “balance” is bull
So you go in to work day in and day out and the pile of stuff that you’ve entangled yourself in climbs every day. Eventually the stress peaks and manifests itself in an ugly way and you give up decide to strike some balance.
“I’m going to start taking time off”. Outcome: Because you’re still a part of everything, your time off is filled thinking about all the stuff that could be going wrong at this very minute. Even worse, when you get back from your time off the problems seem to have procreated new, more annoying problems.
“I’m going to delegate, outsource.” Outcome: Whoever you delegate/outsource your problems to is far less equipped to deal with them because only you happen to know where the bodies are buried and you’re horrified every time they unearth one and fail in the same ways that drove you to giving them away.
“I’m going to start drinking more.” Outcome: Bliss. Happiness. Occasional hilarious videos of you singing along to Darkness “I believe in a thing called love” while using your two year old son as an air guitar.
Lesson here: The more you try to balance dealing with problems and not dealing with problems, the bigger your problems will get.
To Sum It Up
You don’t build a successful company without failing. A lot.
There is no ignoring, delegating or moving past the problems you’ve caused. You’re not too big to fail and nobody is going to bail you out, fire you with a golden parachute or clean up after you. By ignoring this (through the “finding balance in my life” excuses) or exaggerating it (“I’m just going to work harder, be more involved in everything) – at least in my experience – you aren’t dealing with the problem you’re dancing around it.
I personally danced around many problems I’ve caused my business (a discussion for a different time) for a better part of a decade and it took a very long time for me to prepare the people I work with to be able to help me fix the problems and hand over those responsibilities and document the processes so that we can finally move forward.
Ironman process forced me to stare down my problems day in and day out without daydreaming of not having to deal with them momentarily for a day or two. It involved me (“coming to Jesus”, pardon the expression if you’re religious) identifying the problems and working my way out of it.
My point is that everyone makes mistakes and they are just a part of life. As long as you’re lucky enough to open your eyes the next day, you can work towards correcting the mistakes, fixing the problems and seeing your dreams and vision becoming reality.
My lesson learned here is that I worked so hard for so long to get to where I’m at: what’s a little more extra effort to fix the things I messed up along the way? Go and do likewise, gents.
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