Pleasure Vs. Happiness

"Don't mistake activity with achievement."

- John Wooden 

Have you ever noticed how we get such pleasure in doing the urgent all day and mixing in the pebbles (the small things) on our "to do" list? The pleasure we get from putting out that fire, answering employee questions, scratching through that small to do - sound familiar?

Notice I used the word pleasure. Too often people confuse that word with happiness. They are entirely two different things. Pleasure is all about the short term. We get pleasure from eating a nice warm donut. We get happiness from being active and eating right and staying in shape.

We get pleasure from being busy, knocking off those must do's. How often do you look back on your day, your crossed off lists and unhappily say to yourself, "Did I really accomplish anything today"? You might be thinking, "I never got to the Rock, the big thing I needed to do". We get happiness from working on the big things (the Rocks), the essential things that will keep us energized, passionate, and fulfilled.

We put off the big things until we don't feel like doing them or try to fit them in and procrastinate.

So think about it for tomorrow morning. Do the big things first (the Rocks) while you are the most energized and in a good mood.

Steve Chandler:

"Know ahead of time what the Big Thing is.  Set it up to be TAKEN OUT WITH MASSIVE UNSTOPPABLE ACTION while you are at your most resourceful and energetic.  That is the ultimate source of a person's professional happiness...the feeling of accomplishment you get when you take out the big thing!

 The look on your face alone will motivate others to follow you."

I might add, it will also give you a tremendous amount of energy to take on the rest of the day, and at the end of the day you will be happy with what you got done. Put the Rocks in the bowl first, the pebbles will all fit in.
 

All the best,

Rick Wallace

The Rabbit Is Not Real

"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's. And guess what they might have planned for you? Not much."

-- Jim Rohn, Motivational Speaker

My guest blogger this week is Michael Neill whom I met at a coaching school with Steve Chandler in 2007.

Over the years, each one of these stories has helped me to step back, slow down, and enjoy my days more than ever before...

1. On Best-selling authors and Billionaires

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.

I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel  to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"

And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."

And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"

And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."

Not bad! Rest in Peace!

2. The Reverend and the Greyhound

I suspect it didn't happen quite like this, but I'll let Dr. Fred Craddock share a surprising encounter he had with an old greyhound dog his niece had recently adopted...

I said to the dog "Are you still racing?"

"No," he replied

"Well, what was the matter? Did you get too old to race?"

"No, I still had some race in me."

"Well, what then? Did you not win?"

"I won over a million dollars for my owner."

"Well, what was it? Bad treatment?"

"Oh, no," the dog said.  "They treated us royally when we were racing."

"Did you get crippled?"

"No."

"Then why?" I pressed.  "Why?"

The dog answered, "I quit."

"You quit?"

"Yes," he said.  "I quit."

"Why did you quit?"

"I just quit because after all that running and running and running, I found out that the rabbit I was chasing wasn't even real."  

3. The Rich Man and the Beggar

Many years ago, a man was sitting in quiet contemplation by a riverbank when he was disturbed by a beggar from the local village.


"Where is the stone?" the beggar demanded. "I must have the precious stone!"

The man smiled up at him. "What stone do you seek?"

"I had a dream," the beggar continued, barely able to slow his words to speak, "and in that dream a voice told me that if I went to the riverbank I would find a man who would give me a precious stone that would end my poverty forever!"

The man looked thoughtful, then reached into his bag and pulled out a large diamond.

"I wonder if this was the stone?" the man said kindly. "I found it on the path. If you'd like it, you may certainly have it."

The beggar couldn't believe his luck, and he snatched the stone from the man's hand and ran back to the village before he could change his mind.

One year later, the beggar, now dressed in the clothes of a wealthy man, came back to the riverbank in search of his anonymous benefactor.

"You have returned, my friend!" said the man, who was again sitting in his favorite spot enjoying the peaceful flow of the water before him.  "What has happened?"

The beggar humbled himself before the man.

"Many wonderful things have happened to me because of the diamond you gave me so graciously. I have become wealthy, found a wife and bought a home. I am now able to give employment to others and to do what I want, when I want with whomever I want."

"For what have you returned?" asked the man.

"Please," the rich beggar said. "Teach me whatever it is inside you that allowed you to give me that stone so freely." 

This week, do your best to enjoy your life and everyone in it. You have enough. The "rabbits" you've been chasing aren't real. And there is something alive inside you which will make your life richer than the wealthiest beggar in all the world.

Have fun, learn heaps, and happy exploring!

- Michael

But What Do YOU Do?

 "You can't be in the parade and watch the floats."

- Tony Beets, Gold Miner

For Business Owners, Management and Coaches:

From Seth Godin:

"Do you make your own paper? Do you start with wood pulp and mix and bleach and set and produce the sheets you use? My guess is that you save time (and a lot of money) and just go to Staples and buy a ream or two.

The theory of the firm shows us that when people work together in an institution, they are able to produce more than if they work separately. Pareto optimality makes it obvious that if one person mixes the dough while the other bakes the loaves, they'll get more done than if each did the whole job.

This explains one reason why big companies keep getting bigger. They gain economies of production and marketing as they specialize their workforce.

But what about the small enterprise, the freelancer, the soloist?

The web now makes just about every task outsourceable with a click. Not only don't you have to make your own paper (or hire a paper maker) but you can have someone process payroll and bills, design a website, answer customer calls, schedule appointments and a thousand other things you used to need to do on your own.

Which leads to the key question: When you can outsource everything, what do you do? When you can choose the kind of value you create, you are also choosing what you're going to outsource and what you're going to do yourself.

Here are three reasons to do something as part of your work, from worst to best:

1. Because you are the cheapest available worker. Because you need to do something, and it's more profitable for you to do this task than to pay someone else to do it. Because you can't find something more beneficial or profitable to do.
2.  Because people (clients) will notice when you do it. That might mean that they notice your presence, or they notice the unique nature of what you create (your art) or they will notice that you've learned something doing this when it leads to you doing something great later on. Mario Batali doesn't cook for 99% of his customers (physically impossible), and they can't tell. And he doesn't design 99% (or 5%, I have no idea) of his recipes, ecause we can't tell. In fact, the only thing people can tell is that it's him on the TV, and that his decisions are guiding what his organization does next.
3.  Because you love it. Because the work matters to you, and this task, right now, is the best version of the work you can find.

Every time you hire yourself to do something (make paper, pay a bill, change a logo design), you've just decided not to do something else instead.

The first step: your job is to make decisions about what you do. And my guess is that what you do is make decisions."

Focus on the Essential things, the right things. The things that will add the most value to your company and not the comfortable things, the easy things, the reactionary things. Delegate or outsource those things.

All the best,
Rick Wallace

Pay Attention - Grow

"If I have an area of the business I want to improve I simply set some goals and begin measuring and posting the numbers to the team every week and it gets better. "

- Keith Koetting - Owner North Texas Sales and Distribution

 

From Steve Chandler:

"It will become amazing to you, your client or friend can increase whatever she wants in her life if she only remembers to pay attention.  She "pays" attention because she "invests" it.

My friend Jim Blasingame hosts a popular nation-wide radio show called The Small Business Advocate.  He recently told me that the first year he was on the air with his show he directed all of his attention to the worries and problems of the show......and the show really struggled.  The next three years he began to pay more and more attention to the audience....and the audience grew!  Whatever he put his attention on would grow.

Anything you pay attention to expands.  It grows.  Pay attention to your house plants and they grow.  Pay attention to your favorite sport, and your passion for that sport grows.  Attention is like that.  Anywhere you point it, the object of that attention grows.

When you have conversations with people who are struggling, you will notice that their attention is fastened on problems and obstacles. If you want to help them, your work will be easy. Shift that attention to the goal - e.g., shift it to the customer."

As a business owner pay attention to ONE BIG THING a quarter. Inventory, Customers Acquisition, Virtual Bench, A/R, whatever it is, set some KPI's or goals then decide on 3-5 Rocks (Projects, Actions) that, when executed, will return big dividends from the Attention you Paid to them. Then measure and track progress of those goals and Rocks in your weekly Huddles. The results will astound. 

All the best,

Rick Wallace

Save Cash Instead of Saving Taxes This Year

  "You can only build wealth with "after tax" income."

- Craig Crabtree

 

From Craig Crabtree, author of "Simple Numbers":

Every business owner knows the drill; we made a profit this year so we need to spend our cash to save on taxes. I want to challenge you to think differently this year to "save cash" not "save taxes."

The inherent flaw in spending your cash is that you have to spend a dollar to save 40 cents in tax. Last time I checked, that just seems like a bad idea. Every year, you come up with every excuse to go ahead and spend money that you think you would have spent anyway. You buy new computers, you buy some extra supplies that you always use, buy a new vehicle because you heard you can "write it off."

My argument is that if you did without all of those costs up to December, maybe you did not need to spend it after all! My most successful entrepreneurs spend a dollar at the last possible moment it is needed.

Build Wealth or Save Taxes?
You can only build wealth from "after-tax" income, so every attempt to lower your taxes lowers your ability to create wealth. The number one key performance indicator of wealth creation is "how big of a check did your write to the IRS." If you did not write a big check, you either cheated or you did not make any money, both are bad. Do not pay more taxes than you should, but you should be focused on building wealth above savings taxes.

What if I am Cash Basis? For those of you who are cash basis businesses, you can easily fall into the trap of draining your cash paying off vendors at year end. While this seems enticing, you eventually take it to the illogical extreme and have such a huge amount pushed forward it causes you to make sloppy decisions at year end. Here are just a few of the issues that you could encounter:

• Bank financing - Your year-end financials are more important than ever these days. By focusing on taxes instead of good business fundamentals, you distort your balance sheet at year end and spend the next year explaining why your balance sheet looks bad at December so you can get your line of credit or bonding renewed.
   
• Missed Opportunities - Because you dumped all of your cash in December, it takes longer than you think to build it back in January and February. By not having cash available to start new projects, you delay or miss out on new opportunities. To delay acting on an opportunity wastes a day of potential productivity that can never be recovered.
   
• "Deferring Taxes" versus "Saving Taxes" - Did you really save taxes or did you just defer them? Be honest with your language when you spend your year-end cash. It is not saving taxes unless you are saving at a high rate this year and you pay a lower rate in the future. Not likely to happen. Most entrepreneurs defer taxes at year end and push their rates down into the lower brackets to end up paying at a much higher rate in the future when they have kicked the can as far down the road as they can.
   
• Borrowing money to finance that year end equipment purchase - This is the ultimate tax trap. You borrow $100,000 to buy that new piece of equipment (that could have been delayed) and you end up taking the expensing election on the equipment. Inevitably, this purchase pushes you down into the 20% or lower bracket. The only way to repay debt is to make after-tax profit. To make enough profit to repay the loan, it pushes you into the higher brackets and you end up paying close to 40% tax to generate enough cash flow to get out of debt (if you are lucky). The politicians (and most tax advisors) are not doing you a favor to trap you into this bad decision by calling this a tax break.

Please heed Mr. Crabtree's advice - especially the part about kicking the can down the road. Saving on taxes this year by buying non-essential things or incurring non-essential expenses only costs you more and pushes the inevitable down the road.

Don't make financial decisions about your business or your personal finance based on avoiding taxes. You can't build wealth unless you pay taxes.

 

All the best,

Rick Wallace

Pay Attention

From Steve Chandler:

This I mean to remember: whatever I pay attention to grows. 

That's why they call it "paying" attention, it operates like a money investment. 

If I pay into a certain stock, by investing in that stock more each month, my holdings grow.

If I pay attention to my worries, they grow. I become more worried. 

If I pay attention to my opportunities, they grow. I see more and more and bigger opportunities, because that's what attention does. It grows things. So, if I want more of something (anything) I need to pay more attention into it.

The only thing that would throw me off the road to success is this:  Distraction.

Being distracted all day.....all those things that clamor for my attention! They want my attention....so I don't really pay much of my attention during the day to my major Want in life...why? My attention was called away by other things.  

So the final determination of my success is this: does my attention get called away from me?

Or am I the one directing it?

In the end, that's what decides whether a large success in any area will occur. Who's in charge of my attention?

Another way of seeing this: 

 "The law of your mind is no respecter of persons. The law indicates that what you think, you create. What you feel, you attract. And what you imagine, you become."
- Joseph Murphy

 AND THIS:

 "When I open my eyes in the morning I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds."
- Colin Wilson

All the best,
Rick Wallace

The Choice

"Whatever you focus on grows."

"Winners focus , losers spray."

- Steve Chandler

A new study by Gazelles reinforces what we all know, but most of the time forget or ignore. Plus, some additional information we were not aware of:

"Executives who have four or fewer priorities on their dashboards in a quarter achieve strong results. But when an executive is loaded down with six or more priorities, only two get done well and the other four or five or more are not completed."

 

In other words, there is a tipping point where it is not just one or two Rocks that don't get done, but we are ineffective across the board because of lack of focus. What is more striking is that we are not aware of which ones will not get done. Thus we are better off narrowing the list down up front and following my favorite saying:

Success = Doing the right things, in small amounts,
over a long period of time.

Choose your Rocks well or fate will choose for you.