momentum – Chuck Blakeman

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Balance – How to Lead a Boring and Unremarkable Life

July 30, 2013/in Uncategorized/by chuckblakeman

Day 20 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

Balance is another lousy Industrial Age artifact. It’s a disease, not a cure. Successful people don’t live a balanced life. They don’t want one, either. Do you want a successful life? Then stop seeking balance.

Teeter Totters rule.
When a teeter totter is perfectly balanced, nothing is happening. Both people are sitting there in mid-air staring blankly at each other, wondering if anything interesting is going to happen, slowing realizing that for what they are experiencing, it was not worth getting on the seesaw.

Welcome to the Ozzie and Harriet, My Three Sons and Leave it to Beaver life the Industrial Age wanted us to live. We were taught to seek “balance” so we could live highly predictable, and as a result, highly unremarkable lives. Just like the Silent Generation did in the 1950s.

“Which one do I choose, work or play?”, became a central theme of the Industrial Age. We became haunted by whether we had spent enough time at work to win the “car in the parking lot the longest” contest, and then whether we could balance that with some good family time, etc.

Integration, Not Balance
In the Participation Age, successful people don’t seek balance, they seek integration. Tony Hsieh moved Zappos’ headquarters downtown near the fun so they wouldn’t have to seek balance. In the Participation Age, we bring our whole self to work, and we blur the lines between work and play. We leave at 10 a.m. to see our kids in the only fifth-grade play in which they will be the lead raccoon. We take bike rides or go for walks at 3 p.m., and we even work in the evenings or what used to be the weekends if it fits the rhythms of our businesses and our lives to do so. Ricardo Semler calls this finding “equilibrium.”

Full Engagement, Not Balance
In the Participation Age, we seek full engagement with whatever will make us successful. It’s not about balance, but about full engagement; for example, leaving work both mentally and physically when it’s time to play or build relationships, and going nuts at work when that is appropriate for building the business.

I’ve built eight businesses. The first year building the Crankset Group, I worked seven days a week. There was no balance at all. I was fully engaged in starting the business. Seven years later, I have every Friday off, every other Monday off, the last week of every month off, and a month a year. That is around 59 percent of the work year.

My wife and I get to choose what to do with that time—ride a bike, build businesses in Africa, visit a 3to5 Club in Ireland, go on a vacation. In each instance, we are almost always out of balance, going nuts either in vacation mode, work mode, family mode, etc. People having the most fun on a teeter-totter are fully engaged and always out of balance. If you’re not fully engaged and are paralyzed in the pursuit of balance, expect to hit bottom hard, as you would on a teeter-totter when you are not fully participating in the workload.

Work Less Time, Be More Fully Engaged
Loehr & Schwartz wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement. They had it right by recommending that we make sure we develop each major area of our life–mental, physical (exercise/diet), emotional, spiritual, and the productive output of work and play. And if we don’t, we will atrophy and be much less likely to build successful businesses.

Get More Done in Less Time
Too many business owners go into business immediately looking for an Ozzie and Harriet “lifestyle business”–assuming that they can step right in working three to four days a week so they can be “balanced.” Success almost never comes that way. It was the willingness to go all in and be completely imbalanced on the front end that allows me to be imbalanced now in the direction of free time.

Momentum doesn’t come from balance; it comes from being very imbalanced and focused on something. An airplane burns up to 50 percent of its fuel just getting to its cruise altitude. Fred Flintstone did a lot of flailing with his feet before his car ever started moving. Balance doesn’t work for building a great life or a great business.

Shoot for Next Year, Not Tomorrow
Full engagement is tied directly to wanting the best in the long term, not right now, and wanting it badly enough to go all in—abandoning anything that the Balanced Life folks would recommend. I didn’t get to three and a half days of work and the last week of the month off by living a balanced life.

Stop seeking balance.
Find something to throw yourself at and do it with everything you have. Then take a break from that and throw yourself at something else just as hard (playing with your kids, another business, writing a book, etc.).

I love my teeter-totter life. If you don’t have one, don’t expect to be successful, and certainly don’t expect to live a life that is built to Make Meaning. The Industrial Age company you work for might want you to live a balanced life and leave your personal stuff at home. It’s a trap. Find another company to work for—there are plenty of Participation Age companies out there, and the number is growing fast. You would also do your company a service by leaving. It might just make them face the fact that they need to change to keep up with where the world is going.

How to Live a Life that Matters
In the Participation Age, we are called to live a committed, fully engaged, fully integrated, and imbalanced life. As Margaret Thatcher, who lived an imbalanced life, said, “One’s life should matter.” If you live a balanced one, yours won’t.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Stop trying to achieve balance

January 21, 2012/in Uncategorized/by chuckblakeman

Teeter Totters rule.

Balance is another lousy Industrial Age artifact. Successful people don’t live a balanced life. They don’t want one, either. Want a successful life? Stop seeking balance.

When a teeter totter is perfectly balanced, nothing is happening. Both people are sitting there in mid-air staring at each other wondering if anything interesting is on the horizon, slowing realizing that what they are experiencing is not worth getting on the see saw for. Sound like fun?

Welcome to the life the Industrial Age wanted us to live. We were taught to find the “balance” of the three “Ss’ of the Industrial Age – safety, security and stability/predictability and live unremarkable, highly balanced lives.

Full Engagement, not Balance
Successful people don’t seek balance, they seek full engagement with whatever will make them successful. It’s not about balance, but about full engagement. People having the most fun on a teeter-totter are fully engaged and always out of balance. If you’re not fully engaged and are paralyzed in the pursuit of balance, expect to hit bottom hard.

Work Less Time, More Fully Engaged
I’m not advocating being a workaholic. Plenty of research shows that workaholics spend 12 hours a day at work but only invest 6-8 hours in actually getting something done. You can get almost as much done in half the time if you’re fully engaged. What I’m advocating is full engagement in whatever needs the highest and best use of your time right now. Balance would say take lots of breaks and stretch it over 12 hours. Workaholics live balanced lives that usually don’t lead to success.

Loehr & Schwartz wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement. They had it right by recommending that we make sure we develop each major area of our life – mental, physical (exercise/diet), emotional, spiritual, and the productive output of work and play. And if we don’t, we will atrophy and be much less likely to build a successful business.

Get More Done in Less Time
Too many business owners go into business immediately looking for a “lifestyle business” – assuming that they can step right in working 3-4 days a week so they can be “balanced”. Success almost never comes that way.

When I started Crankset Group five years ago I worked 6 1/2 to seven days a week for almost a year. I exhibited the same kind of imbalance in starting five other businesses in the previous 20 years. Five years later I work 3 1/2 days a week and take the 4th week off each month. But I got there gradually over the five years, and it was the willingness to go nuts and be completely unbalanced on the front end that allows me to be unbalanced now in the direction of free time.

Momentum doesn’t come through balance. You burn a lot of fuel on take off. An airplane burns up to 50% of its fuel just getting to its cruise altitude.

Shoot for Next Year, Not Tomorrow
Full engagement is tied directly to wanting the best in the long term, not right now, and wanting it badly enough to go nuts, all in – abandoning anything that the Balanced Life folks would recommend. I didn’t get to 3 1/2 days of work and the last week of the month off by living a balanced life.

And I don’t live one now. Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving, I went to Kenya for a week to work with some business owners and encourage them to build a business that makes money while they’re on vacation. I flew for two days, had 2 1/2 days on the ground and flew back for two days.

I was totally out of balance the whole time. I switched to Kenyan time the morning of my flight, getting up VERY early. And on the plane there I didn’t eat breakfast food when served because it was dinner time in Kenya, slept during Kenyan time when it was daytime on the plane, etc. And I did the same thing on the way back.

Being completely out of balance while everyone else on the flights was comfortable allowed me to overcome 80% of the jet lag and hit the ground running both in Kenya and when I got back.

Rest With Full Engagement
I rarely sit around during that fourth week and seek “balance”. The fourth week of May I’ll be on a week long bike trip in Corsica, riding 60-100 miles a day for six straight days, drinking wine at night – completely out of balance. (Somebody else might lay on a beach the whole time – totally unbalanced.) Go off the grid while you do it.

Stop seeking balance. Find something to throw yourself at and do it with everything you have. Then take a break from that and throw yourself at something else just as hard (playing with your kids, another business, writing a book, etc.)

How to Live a Life That Matters
Live a committed, fully engaged, unbalanced life. As Margaret Thatcher, who lived an unbalanced life, said, “One’s life should matter.” If you live a balanced one, yours won’t.

I love my teeter-totter life. If you don’t have one, don’t expect to be successful.

Get a teeter totter life and start having more fun!

Business is like Surfing

October 1, 2010/in Uncategorized/by chuckblakeman

Don’t Float. Paddle Hard. Catch the Wave. Enjoy the Ride.

A long time ago I lived on the ocean and while describing the cycles of business to somebody last week it dawned on me it’s a lot like surfing –

The first thing you have to do is jump in and start struggling against crashing breakers and strong currents. You’re swimming against the tide, diving under the breakers, getting knocked around endlessly, holding your breath too often, and not seeming to make much progress. And you’re dog tired as a reward. Starting a business or any new initiative in an existing business gets you pretty much the same response, doesn’t it?

Once you get past the breakers you are still paddling like crazy against the tide and up the swells and rollers. Most of the time you can’t see much farther than the next wave coming at you and even though you’re paddling endlessly, there are almost no reference points for whether you’re making any progress. Business is the same – once you’re past the initial struggle, the long slog to success doesn’t seem to have any context – is this getting me anywhere? Oh, and you’re tired.

Once you’re finally out where the big ones are forming, you turn around, point yourself at the beach, and after all the paddling against the waves, now you have to paddle even harder WITH THE WAVES in order to catch one going in.

This is where most businesses miss the wave. We paddle so hard against the momentum that when we finally catch some good times and the current is with us, we relax, turn over on our backs and catch some rays. It’s an instinctive reaction and after all we deserve to goof off – we’ve worked really hard to get there. But you’ll never catch the wave that way.

The reason most business owners don’t ever get off the treadmill isn’t because they don’t have the opportunity, it’s because every time they catch some momentum they start floating. When we get momentum, we should be paddling harder then we’ve ever paddled before. When we do, we can catch the wave and at that point you don’t have to paddle anymore, just ride the wave, pose for the cameras and enjoy the ride.

If you’ve got some momentum, don’t float, paddle harder. There is nothing more rewarding or exciting than finally catching the wave. Do you want a business that has enough momentum to regularly make money while you’re on vacation? Wouldn’t it be great to have a business that prints both time and money for you?

The don’t call it “catching” the wave for nothing. It doesn’t just happen. You get out in front of it and paddle like crazy. We create our momentum, THEN we enjoy it when the business gets a life of its own.

Don’t float. Paddle Hard. Catch the wave. Enjoy the ride.

We Burn a Lot of Fuel On Takeoff

April 17, 2010/in Uncategorized/by chuckblakeman

Business owners are always wondering how the next guy seems to get things off the ground so well and why they themselves are always struggling to just keep what they have afloat. It’s because we don’t understand momentum.

Ideas don’t happen because we thought them up, and they aren’t sustained because we kick started them. I have a lot of business owners right now saying to me, “Doesn’t if feel great to have your book totally done and out there?” (see my book). Some of them know it’s only the start, but a lot of them are saying this to mean, “Won’t it be fun to sit back and watch the sales roll in?”.

Birthing a book, a project, a new product, a business, hiring an employee or any other new initiative is a lot like having a baby. If you brought a newborn home would you show it the house, lay it beside the refrigerator and say “Well, you’ve gotten the tour and there’s the fridge. We’ll be playing golf if you have any questions!”

Too often we start new things to solve a problem, but end up creating one because we pull out of the process way too soon.

A jet on a 3,000 mile transatlantic flight burns at least 50% of it’s fuel just getting to cruise altitude in the first few miles. The next nearly 3,000 miles takes only half as much effort. Everything in business is a lot like this.

“Finishing” a book, hiring an employee, training on a procedure, bringing on a new client, or rolling out a new product all require outside help because initially these have no momentum of their own. The inertia is overwhelming and the only way to overcome it is to push hard yourself. When you do this, you feel like the airplane at the beginning of the runway – a lot of fussing and fuming, roaring of engines and blinking of lights…and the wheels haven’t even moved yet.

We don’t get it because we put out a huge amount of effort getting that project started and since there is no movement, we assume things are going wrong. The only thing going wrong is that we don’t understand momentum.

You burn a lot of fuel before the wheels even move, and a lot more just rolling down the runway, and still the wheels aren’t even off the ground. The only way to break through all the inertia is to push even harder. But just before the wheels are about to leave the ground is about where most business owners start slowing down. The project never quite does what they wanted to accomplish and they chalk it up to outside forces.

The joy is if you push through the initial inertia, the project, employee, book, etc., will begin to get momentum of its own, requiring less and less outside momentum from you. Just know that your commitment, excitement, vision, clarity, direction, purpose, and in-the-trenches hard work are required to get it there.

Don’t stop pushing until you’re at cruise altitude. And when you get there, make sure you have someone else pushing and someone else at the controls. You’ll make more money in less time and enjoy the ride a lot more if everything is in place to keep it all in the air for you.

Tag Archive for: momentum

Posts

Day 20 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

Teeter Totters rule.

Don’t Float. Paddle Hard. Catch the Wave. Enjoy the Ride.