Min to Max: How Thinking Small Can Lead To Big Wins
The other day I was sitting down with an entrepreneur and we were discussing some of his challenges. As we moved through the conversation and I made suggestions he diligently took notes. Suddenly, as we were wrapping up, there was this disheartened look on his face. I had seen it many times before and what he said next, I have heard more times than I can count:
“How am I going to find the time to do ALL of this?”
Whenever we meet with someone who has a certain domain of expertise and we ask for their advice we can get a good amount of information. We are also often presented with tasks to complete. They’ll suggest we read a book or watch a video. They may ask us to write something or develop something on our own that can help grow our business. The most common reaction to this is to take our notes, look at all of the things we have to do, and then end up doing nothing. The reason: we feel overwhelmed.
If you are looking at a page full of notes from a mentor, advisor, or consultant and are feeling overwhelmed, here is a tactic that I use to help me advance through my notes:
Think of how you can spend the least amount of time to get the most information.
For example, if someone gives you advice about how to use social media and you are thinking that you now have to spend your entire day tweeting and retweeting, posting, etc. you’re probably going to avoid it and never do it. But if you decide that you can take 15 minutes out of your day today to use Hootsuite and write 5 to 6 timed tweets and check on the progress throughout the day, that seems more manageable.
You can apply this principle to any task that you have in front of you. Let’s say you have decided you want to start blogging. You don’t have to blog every day. You can choose when you want to distribute you content and then plan for it time-wise. You may only blog once a week. If, after a while, you notice your blog is getting some traction and interest, maybe you want to spend more time writing but, again, that is up to you.
There is something in us that causes us to look at any change we have to make as a massive time-consuming monster and, the fact of the matter is, we are the ones in control of our time. We decide how we choose to invest it every day. If we look at an investment scenario, we’d never say that we have to put all of our money into one single investment. Why would we do that with our time?
So today, dust off those notes from that coffee meeting that you put aside and really ask yourself how you can spend a little time to get a lot of valuable information.
I promise you, it will be worth the investment.
