Distractions To Success Are Always Demanding Attention

I Love To Ride.  Not When My Tax Deadline Is Due, However!

How organized are you?  Do you have trouble trying to remember stuff?  I do.  I get my plate so full of things I want to do that I actually overload my ability to remember all of them.  Some of the things I would like to complete do not matter as much as I think they do.  Even those things can weigh my list of thoughts down.  If I get too many of those 'not-so-important' things listed in my head that I want to see done, I can overload my list and forget to do some of the more important things that need to be done.  This can grow into a fairly serious problem for a business owner.  Skipping to do some important 'need-to-do' stuff can creep up later and bite the business bad.  Make sure you do a better job managing the list of things you need and want to do in your business life.  Getting yourself better organized on the lists of things you plan to do is a vital part of where your success will land.  Get your list of do's better organized.

First of all, what kinds of things should be on that list?  Keep in mind, a business owner should somehow develop a serious pattern of work habits that take care of the routine required responsibilities.  If the owner does not actually perform these routine tasks, someone hired should.  In the end, required business duties should not be something that must be remembered to be placed on a list of things to do.  They are routine tasks that are already being managed in a time structured way.  If not, change that kind of arrangement.  Routine responsibilities must be met on a regularly known, already applied schedule.  Routine business tasks should never be something we try to remember to place on our "to-do" list once in awhile.  They are routine work that is completed in a routine fashion.  That is one of the secrets to success.  Make sure your business practices this step.  Get a routine schedule knocked out to support the required duties the owner performs.

To make this first step happen well, an owner needs to decide what kind of required work is part of the owners daily routine.  If the owner has adopted to perform some of these routine responsibilities, make sure they are completed with a routine level of success.  For example, if the owner becomes the daily radio advertising voice of a marketing campaign, make sure that owner stays disciplined enough to perform that daily task, every single day.  If the radio deadline to do that daily segment clip is 10 AM, then the owner must make sure that task is not interrupted at 10 AM.  There should be no reason why the owner needs to add that routine step to his daily "to-do" list.  It is already part of his routine pattern.  Every day at 10 AM he is calling the radio station to complete that daily message.  That responsibility has already been set in place, established in the daily routine of the owners schedule and therefore does not need to be on a reminder list.  The owner does not need to add, "put pants on" to his getting-ready-for-work list of activities.  He already puts his pants on in a routine way.  He does not need a reminder to put his pants on, too.  It may sound silly, but I have watched many really smart business owners get this kind of stuff out of control.  They can struggle with routine responsibilities.  They will often make arrangements to sabotage their required work duties.  I have seen it happen a lot of times.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

Speaking of distractions, I have seen loved ones call the owner at 9:57 AM and want to talk about something they think is very important, and it usually is.  Unfortunately, they do not fully know the owners routine at work and when they hear his radio spot every day at noon, when it actually airs, they do not know he makes that segment happen at 10:00 AM every day.  When they call him at work at 9:57 AM and he says I will need to call you right back, they feel shunned a little bit.  They know their news is also important.  They do not fully comprehend his structured routine to success.  I have watched many owners fail to properly manage this challenge.  It gets messed up a lot.  Learning how to juggle loved ones needs with the requirements of the business is a tall art to paint.  Get good at communication on this one.  It can come back to bite the owner very hard, in one fort or the other!  Trust me, both the business model and the loved ones care a lot about the owners level of attention.  It is a tough nut to crack.  Good luck with finding the balance.

My point in this post is to identify where the routine stuff needs to be placed and respected.  So many business owners fail to perform their leadership tasks really well mostly because they are so disorganized.  They are whimsical about what they need to do each day.  They usually hate the domination effects of a routine pattern of required duties.  Owners also hate to be told what to do.  They like their freedoms.  That is one of the main reasons why they decided to own their own business.  If today they want to travel to the city to go see a new manufacturer of a line of goods they are considering to offer, they like the power of making that decision at 9 AM this morning and skip right past the radio responsibilities.  I watch business owners perform this kind of disorganized managerial crap all of the time.  They do not like to be controlled by the routine of responsibilities.  As a result, they justify the decision to go to the city and add failure patterns to the rest of the required work they need to do.  I see this kind of stuff happen more than the owners will ever admit.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

One of the main reasons why smart people do not often win at the business game is that they do not know how to control the quiet ways they sabotage their success efforts.  Most owners do not recognize how success happens.  They truly believe that success comes from their good creative ideas and their subsequent spot on, whimsical "direction-making" efforts.  Not true.  Never true.  Not ever to be true.  These notions of how success actually happens are completely false notions.  Unfortunately, thousands upon thousands of business owners still believe them to be true.  As an outsider looking in, it is so disturbing to see this kind of sabotage keep so many owners away form simple success.  They get sideswiped by quiet, yet effective moves of disrespect for an organized approach to their business routine.  They fall for the love of the freedom call and break their routine strides for doing what needs to be routinely done.  They permit more distractions to take control.  They give those distractions too much attention.  It is part of the internal drive of the owner to produce more of the freedom call.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

I Love The, "I'm Outta' Here Feeling!" 

Every business has routine requirements that must be kept.  These requirements are not major secrets.  There are only three seriously dominate components that make up our business models.  One, the accounting.  Two, the marketing and its plan.  Three, the product, the service and the knowledge of these combined things.  That is it, folks.  There is no new component that needs to be added to perform a healthy level of business success.  These are the core three things that a successful business owner will perform well on a routine basis.  Any new twist that is subsequently added will be an unnecessary addition that will eventually undermine the demand for attention these three components require.  We only have 24 hours in each day.  Nobody gets a larger allotment.  Tommy down the street does not get awarded 45 hours in his day.  All of us get our daily allotments.  We get 24 hours every single day.  It is what we do with that allotment that makes or breaks our success patterns.  This is exactly why it is so vital to success that the owner gets used to performing a very organized system in his routine of leadership work.  The system will become the king, not the owner.  System is king.  Never forget this success rule.  System is king.

Genius has often times been described by scholars as the performing art of making sure routinely patterned good stuff is recognized and honored with total respect.  Genius is often times found right next to perfect routines.  Genius is not random.  Genius is not whimsical.  Genius is not haphazard.  Genius is not about pure freedom.  Genius comes only when controls are in perfect place.  There are a ton of business owners who never practice what genius looks like.  They are usually the same ones who are trying to make genius happen, however.  It is such a wasteful fight to witness.  The real villain in this whole deal comes from the internal self.  We hate to be controlled.  Routine patterns look a lot like being under complete control.  We hate being under control of those routine patterns.  It looks to us a lot like a prison term.  It does not look like freedom.  Even though this is the perfect place where genius lives, controls, we avoid it because we want more freedoms to occur.  We create and permit more distractions to slip onto our scene of working lives.  We feel good about allowing our desires to dominate those unwanted routine controls.  We get unorganized, by design, on purpose.  It is usually performed subconsciously, too.  We allow our whims to be better served by the freedoms we take to feel better about being controlled in an uncontrolled way.  We actually create our own distractions.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.  We are most happy to comply.  It gives all of us a sense of freedom.

I like to do spontaneous stuff.  I like to wake up and decide to go to the mountain for the day.  I have no problem doing this kind of spontaneous stuff without any previous plan to follow.  I can get up in the morning, go outside and start a small campfire in one of my landscaped burning pits.  Then I can easily sit by that fire for an hour or two and sip a great cup of coffee.  I can come into the house, have a nice breakfast and go get dressed for travel.  I can come downstairs, grab the keys and decide to drive to the mountains with my camera and binoculars.  I have absolutely no problem doing these things, without a plan to make them happen.  Some people would shutter at that kind of spontaneity.

Unfortunately, for those who love to do what I spontaneously like to do, this is a great way to kill routine responsibilities.  Those of you who love to live like this spontaneous way of life, watch out, success will be hard to manage.  The owners who have these spontaneous freedom ways to live their lives are the ones at the greatest risk for business failure.  Your potential to produce more unnecessary distractions is higher than a less spontaneous person.  Your managerial skills to respect the high value of an organized approach to produce better success is at risk.  Likely, your business model lack of good results has become very good proof of that affliction. Furthermore, I have not personally removed my affliction for that kind of spontaneity.  That kind of spontaneity is who I am and where I am most comfortable to live.  I have just learned how to recognize it, manage it better and respect where it can hurt my business success the most.  I still pop up and do some very spontaneous stuff.  I just make certain I do not permit that kind of 'freedom' move when my tax deadlines need to be filed.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.  Learn how to manage those distractions better.

I make lists.  Those lists are filled with items that pop up that are not part of my regular business responsibilities.  My business routine is set in place.  I have learned how to delegate much of the important stuff my business needs to do that I have not included inside my routine of duties.  Someone else is expected to manage those routines well.  I just check up on them once in awhile.  I want to make certain they are still getting done effectively and efficiently.  The rest of those duties are on somebody's list or routines.  I have mine to manage, they have theirs.  I do not place "put-my-pants-on" on my daily list of things to do.  I do not have a sign on my bedroom wall, next to my bed that reads, "First Pants, Then Shoes."

As silly as this may seem, I watch many business owners fail at getting the right kinds of responsibilities done well, on time and in a routine fashion.  I see this business error happen a lot more than it ever should occur.  A ton of business owners are too spontaneous, too undisciplined and too random in their success efforts.  Most of the owners who fail in business fail at performing the important stuff on a routine and disciplined basis.  They are too random in the work they do.  This is simply a way to perform their work in a poor leadership fashion.  Genius does not come from this kind of arrangement.  Learn how to manage the distractions more effectively.  Get better at placing attention where the attention can become your business models best friend.  Attention is the key, only if it helps or hurts where your model succeeds.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.  Pay closer attention to how you permit this stuff to happen.

By the way, I also love to ride Harley's!  But not when I have a marketing deadline due.

Until next time...