Why Do We Always Think The Answer is to “Do More!”?

Many people in business and in life think that the key to success is to do more. In business if you want to make more money we have to work harder. To work harder usually means doing more hours coming up with new ideas, being innovative or thinking of something that nobody else has yet thought of and making it happen.

Why is it we think this way? We been taught since childhood is that the more we do the more we get. We have been taught that we live in a transactional world; if we give we gain. If employed we earn more by doing more hours, or working harder to get better qualifications to earn a better rate. When we are in school we are told the more we revise, the more we learn, the better our grades will be. It is a transaction world that we are introduced into.

So it is understandable that we believe that the more hours we put in, the more money that we will earn. And we believe this at a fundamental level.

This is the basis of employment . Our annual salary is. going to be a product of how many hours times our hourly rate which in turn depends on our skill level, experience and the nature of the industry that we work in. This is true for 96% of all people who have chosen to work for others.

And it’s understandable also that we carry this faulty thinking into the business model.

Yes it is faulty thinking. The reality could not be further from the truth. In order to achieve more we need not to focus on the quantity of the work that we do but the quality of it. How do we leverage our activities? How do we set up our business in order to maximise our own skill level and that of others? How do we begin to build something that can truly work without us? Because anything other than a business that works without us is not a business at all – it’s a job.

The trouble is, it’s so difficult for us to see past our understanding of relationship between time and money and effort and reward. It is not easy for a successful business to think beyond doing more of what it has already done to find success thus far.

When we start out in business we have to be the technician, The manager, and the entrepreneur. We have to wear all three hats because we have to be all three people to get the business off the ground and to a point of stability. We develop attributes, behaviours and belief systems that keep us on track for early success.

Even when we have a small team we are still doing the operational whilst managing the business, and being the captain of the ship guiding it to where we want it to be. However we cannot stay there. And to believe that we have to stay there is another level of faulty thinking on top of the level that suggests that our wealth is an output of our time input.

It is time to get off the “do more” treadmill and step aside to think strategically. We can not scale up our activity in direct proportion to scaling up our objectives so we must think differently. I am asking you to consider for example not where the next one customer is going to be coming from but the next 100. Let’s not be thinking about where our industry is going to be next year but where it will be in ten years.

If stepping aside and developing strategic thinking and planning is an issue for you then please book a call with me here, and let’s see what we can do together.

Gavin Bellamy is an award winning Business growth strategist.