Crippled CEO Blog #108:
You’re wrong about when success happens.
It doesn’t happen when you’re running your business — or fixing the car, or making the sale, or writing the code, or cooking the food.
It doesn’t happen during business hours when you are doing your job.
Because you do get better from the doing, but so does everybody else. Getting better by experience alone means you’re improving at the slowest possible rate.
It means you’re only learning from your mistakes.
It means you are relying on only your ideas and your perspective.
Real success comes from what you are learning when you are not executing your craft.
The things you learn from 8 PM to 10 PM make you twice as effective during your 9 to 5.
In 2016, I got serious about reading the best books I could find on my craft, on growing and running a business.
I had read before when I had a specific task I wanted to accomplish — a specific skill that I needed.
But in 2016, I just started reading to get better. And since then, I have consumed thousands and thousands of pages on a myriad of topics that I thought would make me better at what I do.
And literally nobody is going to be surprised when I say that the result is a business that would barely even recognize itself from five years ago.
Now, maybe it is cooler to pretend that I just figured it out on my own with all of my original thoughts and ideas.
But that’s not true. I just read. And I listened to audiobooks. And I watch YouTube videos. When I’m not working, I’m working on working better. Not always, but a lot.
Honestly, though, I don’t think it takes that much. I don’t think enough people do this at all, so if you’re doing even a little bit, you are beating 75% of your contemporaries.
This is the force multiplier. It’s the cheat. It’s the hack. It sounds basic and obvious because it is. It just takes something most people won’t give: time and consistency.
We live in a time where education is cheap and available. I don’t have an MBA, but I think the education I’ve gotten in the last several years is better — I have the results to prove it. And I’m in a whole lot less debt.
(You know who’s always working on her craft? Your mom. Be like her and send a text to 484848 with the word CRIP as the message to get a link to the latest blog each week.)
Be First to Comment