Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful

It’s the day after Labour Day, the first day of the financial advisor’s and investment advisor’s year as it all starts here after the lazy days of summer.

We’ve had a very busy summer with clients and business development and we are standing on a strong foundation as evidenced by our budget cash flow document and sales report which are significantly ahead of last year.

We are as successful as we can get and we cannot do any more and have to find ways to do less to be more successful.

These are the thoughts that are behind the above comment “find ways to do less to be more successful” and the title of this Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful blog.

We saw fellow 2011 Senior Market Advisor Expo Speaker Larry Winget’s presentation in Las Vegas on Wednesday, August 24th. Larry’s presentation was about how the attitude of Entitlement was taking over Empowerment and that people have lost the values of excellence and hard work. People need to get used to less in order to be more successful.

This reminded me of Stephen Pressfield’s thoughts about Success from The War Of Art. Avoid resistance at all cost. Resistance is an all-encompassing term for what Freud called Death Wish. Resistance cannot be reasoned with. It understands one thing. Power. Resistance takes on the form of drugs, shopping, TV, gossip, alcohol, drugs, and the consumption of all products containing alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, fat, salt and sugar. The greatest danger is Resistance knows when the finish line is in site and it will throw out one final assault.

These also tie in with Seth Godin’s thoughts on Strategic Quitting from his book called The Dip. The gist of The Dip is about “getting” that quitting is a winning strategy. In essence, know when to quit or take a mini retirement to re-evaluate and outsource, outsource and outsource.

It might sound odd but The One Page Business Plan also includes the notion of do less in order to be more successful.

The five components of The One Page Business Plan are Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies & Actions and they answer the following questions;

• Vision What are you building?
• Mission Why does this business exist?
• Objectives What result will we measure?
• Strategies How will we build this company?
• Action Plans What it the work to be done?

An Objective can be written by either Increasing or Decreasing an Objective using the following examples:

Increase ____ from ____ to ____ by ____.

Or

Decrease ____ from ____ to ____ by ____.

The complete example could look like;

• Increase 2010 income from $250,000 to $330,000 by December 31, 2011.

So having said all of this, I’ve started a list of things that I am going to Decrease and I’ll share them with you in my September E-Newsletter.

For now, I am going to share one;

• Decrease daily blogging from 5 per week to 1 – 5 per week by September 6th, 2011.

My reason for saying this is I started blogging back in February of 2005 and I committed to blogging on a daily basis because I believe there was nothing worse than arriving at someone’s blog page when it had not been updated in 6 months.

Now I believe that blogging is part of Marketing / Social Media and there is so much more to business so I am decreasing daily blogging and Doing Less & Quitting To Be More Successful and investing the time in other areas of the business.

“I try to use social media to share interesting things with people. It isn’t about what you post but what you listen to. You don’t want to be the source for everything, you want to be the pipe for everything.”  Ashton Kutcher – Details Magazine September 2011