Keep Your Eye on the Prize

How many times has someone said to you, “Do what you love and the money will follow”? And now many of you have ever wondered if that is really true?

But what if you took those words of advice and looked at them a little differently – what if “Do what you love,” actually means, “Stop doing things you don’t love doing?”

If you take the time to discover what it is that you truly love doing, then you will have discovered something that my mentor Jack Canfield calls, “your core genius.” Your core genius is the thing that you do so well, it’s actually fun and easy. It’s your unique skill or gift – that thing that makes work feel like play. And what if you were able to use your unique skill or gift to earn a living? Wouldn’t that be great? Who wouldn’t want to discover their “core genius”?

So what’s keeping you from concentrating on doing work you love? What’s preventing you from capitalizing on your core genius?

For most people, it’s the day to day tasks that eat away at our time, leaving little if any time to focus on anything else. These tasks can be anything from administration to research, advertising to accounting, generating leads, customer service, returning phone calls or writing thank you letters. It doesn’t take long for a few of these things to become a mountain of “must-do’s” and it could take you weeks to climb over them to glimpse your real goal somewhere in the distance.

Highly successful people have found an efficient route around those mountains.

It’s called delegating.

For some, delegating work can sound scary – what if they don’t do it right or what if they forget and it doesn’t get done at all. If that’s you, then start small. For instance, paper shredding. Consider what an hour of your time is worth and then compare it to a shredding service where you can drop off two months’ worth of shredding for $10. The same goes for any of the other time-consuming tasks you don’t love. Instead of wasting your time on stuff you hate doing, delegate it. If you can’t afford to contract-out everything, see if you can share, trade or barter services.

There’s just one rule to delegating: don’t reclaim the delegated tasks. You’re not likely to run down to the shredding service at the end of every job to make sure they had completed the service you paid for. No. Do the same with the other jobs that are standing between you and “your core genius”. Find the right person for the job, and let them own the problem. Do the delegating once.

Then you can take that extra time and apply it to doing work that you truly love. Let your core genius thrive. Jack Canfield estimates that most entrepreneurs spend less than 30 per cent of their time focusing on their core genius. No wonder progress toward our goals is often slow! Don’t waste your available time by 70 per cent. Delegate.

Then keep your eye on the prize.

photo credit: treehouse1977