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Yesterday I Met a Rich, Self-Made Hostage. Are You Becoming One?

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I was stunned when I heard it: “It’s our 30th anniversary, and I’m finally planning a full two weeks off work to celebrate.” This proud declaration from a man who owns a $30 million company is just sad. This is a man who lives in abject poverty, with no freedom and no clue he’s been doing it wrong for 30 years.

I see it all the time. Business owners whose personal lives are train wrecks, with no time to invest in their kids, spouse, or non-existent hobbies, and no time to even think about creating meaning in their own lives. They are hostages to their businesses with no end in sight for their incarceration.

People think this guy is a great business owner because he works all the time and has a lot of toys he doesn’t have time to use. I think he lives in abject poverty.

Riches vs. Wealth

Riches is just money. Wealth is freedom. Freedom is the ability to choose what to do with my time. Time is more valuable than money. It usually takes money to buy time, but unless the specific goal is to buy time, money can make us hostages.

Money does not bring freedom. Time brings freedom. This man has millions and has no freedom. He readily admits that if he is gone from his business for a few days things begin to go awry. He has built a $30 million business that depends on him personally being there every day! He is not a business owner; his business owns him. He lives in abject “time poverty”.

Intending to receive time, not just money

You get what you intend, not what you hope for. You can just hear this man starting his business. He intended to do two things:

  1. “I’m going to work really hard” and
  2. “I’m going to make me some money.”

He got exactly what he intended – hard work and some money. And he is trapped by the hard work. He did not go into business intending to get both time and money from his business, just money. He hoped that getting money would give him time and create freedom, but we don’t get what we hope (wish) for; we get what we intend to get.

A Day a Week, a Week a Month, a Month a Year

I built five businesses like he did and was trapped as a hostage every time. With Crankset Group I intended to do something different – I decided this next business was going to give me both money and time, and everything I did from the beginning was driven by forcing my business to produce both.

As a result, I now have every Monday and every Friday off, the last week of every month off, and a month in the summer – it adds up to 73% of the work week.

I use only a few weeks for vacation, and choose (freedom) to invest the rest helping others build businesses around the world, including for-profit businesses to solve poverty in central Africa.

Vacation? What Vacation?

A recent American Express OPEN survey found 66% of business owners haven’t taken time off in several years. And of those few who do take vacation, 68% of them check in daily to try to run things from their beach chair (we don’t call in at all during our month off).

It’s important to get away from your business. The famous Framingham Heart Study found those who took regular vacation are 32% less likely to die from heart disease and 20% less likely to die from anything else. Besides  being healthier, time away from the day to day grind will help you see the big picture and make you a better leader. And you’ll be more productive when you return.

The objective of your business should be to build your Ideal Lifestyle. If you’re proud that you finally get two weeks off, you need to reassess how you are running your business and your life, and refocus on wealth (time/freedom), not just riches (money).

Is this just for special people? No. I built five businesses and never got off the treadmill. The sixth time I simply decided/intended to do it differently, and – what a surprise – it turned out different.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

What are you intending to do with your business and your life?

Article as seen on Inc.com

Bismarck had it all wrong – Retirement blows chunks.

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Shut up. Sit down. LIve invisibly. Go out quietly.

I’m working on my third book “Retirement is a Bankrupt Industrial Age Idea” and the research confirms everything I’m seeing in the world around us – the title of my book reflects reality. We’ve got to rethink the whole idea.

The Industrial Age, which is a very short 175 year snapshot of life in the last 10,000 years, left us with a lot of great toys and a luxurious lifestyle, but we’ve paid dearly as a society for it. The whole bankrupt idea of retirement is one of those casualties. You should get a Business Maturity Date instead.

Retirement – The Worst of the Industrial Age
We were sold a bill of goods by Bismarck who thought up the crazy notion of retirement in 1889 (he set it at 70 when the average age at death in Germany was about 49). The entire idea is only 121 years old – for 10,000 years before that we did just fine without it.

It is the icon of the worst of what came out of the Industrial Age – “Shut up, sit down, work hard, live invisibly, don’t talk back, make the company successful, be loyal, and go out without making waves. We’ll take the best 45 hours of your week and the best 45 years of your life, and if you survive all that, we’ll let you do something significant with your life when you’re done.”

The Next Generation Has Already Opted Out
The X,Y and Z generations know this is bankrupt. But they’re still hearing their mothers voice in their ears telling them that the top three priorities in life are safety, security, and stability – all three which are deadening to the idea that anything significant will happen in your life.

Great reward only comes from taking a risk – it doesn’t even have to be a great risk, just take one.

Big Business is Dead, Long Live Small/Local Business
Retirees who bought the lie know by experience it isn’t working. There is a better way. Fortunately the world is actually going back locally.

The era of big business is as dead now as the railroad was in 1903 – neither one of them knew it at the time, but it’s over. Long live the local business owner, which is exactly what they will do – without the bankrupt notion of retirement and all it represents hanging over them.

Read more on what Rieva Lesonsky says about the retirement myth here, then come back and talk with me.

Here’s some ways to solve it, too.

I believe you will enjoy life more, have more fun, relax more, and probably even take more vacations if you never retire. Love to hear if you think I’m nuts.

Don’t focus on making money. No business can survive that.

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The biggest problem in trying to grow a business is that we’re too busy making money. It’s not a play on words – it’s a serious problem. You’re too busy making money.

The overarching swing and a miss here: We think that our purpose in business is to make money when our purpose in business is to BUILD A BUSINESS that makes money. These two things are worlds apart, and almost every business I work with is absolutely buried in making money, which will keep them from ever making a lot of it. Why?

Because businesses are in a constant fight to balance two things:

The Tyranny of the Urgent

and

The Priority of the Important

The Urgent things in our business come flying at us all day every day, causing us to be REACTIVE and defensive in just holding the business together as best we can. One of the biggest things that comes flying at us daily is the need to make money to cover today’s bills.

We get so used to this pressure that even when it’s no longer there, and we’re making enough money to buy a hot tub on a whim and go on vacation a couple weeks a year to somewhere exotic, we never leave this mode of business. We actually think the goal is to make money. It’s a dead end and a big reason why most businesses, if they every grow up, don’t do so for decades.

In contrast, the Important things sit in the corner and whisper to us “I’m really Important, but you’re right, taking care of me today won’t make you more money today.”

Taking care of the Important things requires that we be PROACTIVE, because the Important things almost never seem Urgent. Taking care of the Urgent might even bring you Riches (money), but taking care of the Important will bring you Wealth (freedom and the ability to choose what to do with my time.)

Do you want Riches that you don’t have time to use, or Wealth that allows your business to make money while you’re on vacation?

One Example of the Important: If you stop making money long enough to write down the processes that you think you’re using in production, you don’t make more money today by doing that. But you now have something that will save you big bucks in re-training, inconsistent quality of products or services to your clients, employee stress, crisis management, and on and on. But since we can’t see a way that it will make us money today, we always find a way to put it off until “later” (psst… later never comes).

The key is to strike a proper balance between making money today (reacting to the Urgent), and BUILDING A BUSINESS that makes money down the road without me even being there (proactively taking care of the Important now, not “later”!). If you’re focused on the Urgent, you’re business will never grow up.

Next week we’ll talk about how to create the proper balance between these two so you can pay your bills today and ensure you are creating a business that makes money without you down the road. It’s not as hard as we make it (and it doesn’t take as long, either).