Good Life Project - When to Grow and When to Say No.
Episode Date: June 8, 2017What if you said no to every new idea and opportunity, until whatever you're currently working on is operating at a level of stun?We have so many opportunities come at us all day long. Ideas, projects..., products, partnerships and paths that could lead to new experiences, ventures and impact. And fun!It's easy to become dazzled into saying yes to all. Entrepreneurial and career ADD is alive and well.Problem is, with rare exception, saying yes to something new is the wrong call, unless and until the thing you're currently doing is already operating at or near it's true potential. How and why, and what to do about that is what we're talking about on today's GLP Riff.Rockstar sponsors & supporters:Camp GLP - Come spend 3 1/2 days with "your people," make amazing friendships, drop the facade, reignite your vitality and learn powerful strategies and breakthrough business ideas. Learn more & grab your spot now. http://goodlifeproject.com/camp/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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So I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea of ADD, entrepreneurial ADD, capacity and success.
And that's where I want to go on today's Good Life Project riff. We'll be right back. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,
making it even more comfortable on your wrist,
whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.
And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,
getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.
The Apple Watch Series 10.
Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.
Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So back in the day when I owned a yoga center in Hell's Kitchen, New York City,
I remember I was trying to figure out, you know, what should we do when we first open the doors?
In theory, if we wanted to present ourselves as,
you know, we're big, we're new, we're the place to be,
we should have a full schedule of classes
and kind of like people should look at it and say,
wow, you know, like these guys are opening big
and I need to be a part of this.
But then there was something else in me that also said,
you know, the truth is that it matters less how many offerings we have on the
calendar. What matters more is that whatever we do offer, it should feel like that one moment
is the moment to be, the place to be. And what I realized was that if we started with a whole
bunch of class offerings on the calendar, that if we had 1,000 people come through our location in a one-week window of time,
that if that was divided between 50 classes,
there would be a lot fewer people in each class than if it was divided between 10 classes.
And what I realized was that in the early days,
it was actually more
important for us to have fewer classes, fewer offerings. But every time somebody stepped into
a room, there was a certain energy. There were enough people in there. So the experience made
people say, wow, this is really powerful. This is the place to be. And that's the approach that we
took. So when we opened our doors, we had two classes per
day, one in the morning, one in the evening. And very quickly, because of that, we were able to
book them out. What I realized also was that there are really only two peak times in the day.
So during the two peak times, when people came, no matter when they came, which was really just
two times, everything was busy.
It was packed.
It was wall to wall.
And because of that, word got around that this was the place to be.
And pretty soon, the rooms got maxed out and people were going mat to mat.
And in a hot, sweaty vinyasa yoga class, people started saying, we need more room.
People started to get there early.
People were vying for a position. And I made a decision that I wouldn't actually add new classes until the ones that we brought in and never incur additional expenses, never expand until we
absolutely had the ability to cover the new expense.
But I was also able to optimize the energy, to really build and sustain a really high
level of energy as we grew in a slower, more deliberate way.
And I was recently kind of thinking about that in the context of decisions that I'm
making these days.
And this is, you know, probably 15 years removed down the road, a number of businesses later.
And I, to this day, have that entrepreneurial ADD. I wake up in the morning and I have shiny
object syndrome. I see blank white pages and blank white canvases. And I drool because I want to
start something new. I walk down the street,
I see problems that need to be solved that I can solve. So I have no lack of ideas. And I have
these pangs to constantly start new things, to try new things, because that's what lights me up.
That's what jazzes me. The creative process, the process of going from nothing to something is the part of it that
I enjoy the most. And I've kind of been rethinking this lately. As I sit here and record this,
we're growing a really wonderful company. We're five years old and we've got a number of different
quote products. We've got media products, we've got education products, we've got a number of different quote products. We've got media products. We've got education products.
We've got community products.
We've got events.
Beyond that, I have a career speaking.
There are multiple things that are going on.
At the same time, the idea bombs continue to be dropped all around me, and I'm dropping them because there's new stuff that keeps coming up that I want to pursue doing.
I get kind of tickled, and I think about doing them. And I was reflecting back on my approach to
be much more intentional about never really initiating something new or never expanding,
never adding to my current workload, my current bandwidth, my current capacity, until the things that I was working on currently
had reached a level where they were pretty close to capacity already.
We were bursting at the seams.
And I had the capability to then, it was almost a mandate to do something different.
And I was thinking about the current projects that I'm working on.
And the truth is that any given one is doing well. But
if I look at each one individually, they're also they each also individually and collectively,
there's more space to go. Nothing is at capacity, nothing is operating at its fullest potential
right now. So if you want to think of capacity and potential as the same thing, you can look at it that way. So, you know, there are places and things that I want to do with this podcast,
that where we're doing great, and I'm loving it and having fun. And, you know, as you guys have
noticed, recently, we've started to bring in sponsorship, which will allow us to do some
really cool new different things as well. And yet there's still more potential.
There are a lot of things that I want to do and places I want to go with this podcast.
When I look at the educational experiences and programs that we create, we're doing really beautifully and we have incredible communities built around them and faculty.
And yet if I look at them and say, are they at a place where they've reached their potential?
My answer is no.
I don't believe that they are. They're doing beautifully, and there's still so much more that we can and will do with them.
When I look at my career as a speaker, I love speaking.
I love traveling around the world.
I love being on stage and sharing ideas and seeing sparks and lights happen. And yet, when I think about whether I am functioning anywhere near what
I believe to be my potential as a speaker, the answer is a clear no. And there are one or two
other sort of projects that make up my ecosystem of contribution right now. So I've been thinking back to the original
sort of idea of what I did when I built out the yoga center and why it was so successful.
And it was really about never adding something new until what we currently had, what we were
currently doing and investing in, had reached a point where it was really
operating at its fullest potential.
And I think as I look at what I'm doing now, it's a really powerful lesson.
Because I have all these ideas.
There are all sorts of new things I want to do and start.
And I have two options.
I can either keep my current projects humming along, doing really beautifully, but knowing in the back of my mind that they're probably each individually operating at somewhere between 65% and 85% of their potential, and just add new stuff and end up with a larger ecosystem of more projects and ideas and products and experiences that are probably all operating at sub-potential.
Or I can say not now to the other ideas
that are dropping into my head right now
and say my job is,
or give myself sort of a rule or a guidance.
The rebel in me is like, yeah, I really don't want a rule.
Give myself a bit of a challenge and say, okay, so what if the thing that allows me to unlock a certain amount of
investment of energy, time, money, bandwidth in something new is my ability to get a current
project much closer to what I believe to be its fullest potential. So what if I'm not actually, you know,
I set a challenge for myself to say that
everything that I'm currently doing now has to go from,
we'll just use an example,
from 75% of its true potential to 90% of its true potential
before I'm actually able to add something to the ecosystem.
How would that change things?
You know, and I realize that very often
it's actually that last
small bit. It's that last gap in potential
that we close that yields pretty stunning
differences in outcomes. It's the
85% to 90% or it's the 90% to 100%. When we close that
gap, it seems like a small percentage, but the outcomes, the rewards tend to be exponential.
So if you talk about somebody who's one of the top 10% of something in the world versus somebody who's in the top 1%
in the world, the rewards to that individual, the difference in rewards in being the top 10%
versus the top 1% are stunning and exponential. So I'm thinking to myself, well, this would be
an interesting challenge. What if I really said, made a commitment and said, I will not add anything new to my contribution
ecosystem until the projects that I'm currently working on have reached a much fuller expression
of their potential. And in doing so, trust that the outcomes that come from that commitment will give me, will return to me a level of
additional resources, bandwidth, freedom, and impact from each one of them on the communities
and the people I seek to serve that will then allow me to step away to a certain extent
and know that we have the structure and the systems and the people and the resources to keep them going at that higher level. And at the same time, give me the freedom to free up more of
my creative and cognitive bandwidth to give any new project a much better shot at it reaching
its potential. So that's kind of something that's been bopping around in my head recently. Do you want to start a whole bunch of things and know that in the back of your mind they're all operating below their true potential, but you get to do all of them?
Or do you do a smaller number of things, avoid the pull, the taunt of creative expansion until those things are operating much closer to their potential.
And then leverage the increased output capability and resources to be able to then add something else after they've hit that threshold and be in a much better place to do so.
That's the experiment that I'm running right now. So I thought I would share it with you
and see if maybe it's an experiment
you might want to run in your life,
in your business, in your career,
and see how it goes.
As always, thanks for listening.
I'm Jonathan Fields,
signing off for Good Life Project. We'll see you next time. thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what's the difference between me and you? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot.
Flight Risk.
The Apple Watch Series
10 is here. It has the biggest
display ever. It's also the
thinnest Apple Watch ever,
making it even more comfortable on your wrist,
whether you're running, swimming,
or sleeping. And it's the fastest
charging Apple Watch, getting you 8
hours of charge in just 15 minutes.
The Apple Watch Series X.
Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.
Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required.
Charge time and actual results will vary.