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Are you committed to becoming a balanced
model of excellence? Have you resolved to enlarge your territory
and expand your positive impact on the world? Do you find
it unacceptable to succeed in your career, but fall short
in your marriage, your family, your health or your faith?
Most likely you answered "yes," but in the
process of becoming successful, you have accumulated habits,
skills, systems and mindsets — which work up to a point —
but then tend to become a form of resistance, like a thick,
steel cable that prevents you from making it to the next level.
Higher Levels of Income
In my experience working with thousands
of individuals, I've observed that balance does not happen
by accident. In The 1% Club, we teach well-seasoned entrepreneurs
and business leaders a Strategic
Operating System for reaching significantly higher
levels of income, balance, and peace of mind.
Clean Up The Mess
As an entrepreneur's financial success grows,
she often finds a corresponding increase in complexity of
operation. This snowballing accumulation of administrative
tasks, maintenance, servicing activities, follow-up and a
wide variety of other busy work, stalls productivity and creates
a barrier to higher levels of achievement.
This necessary but low pay-back activity
that flows from past accomplishments and transactions can
be thought of as clutter. Clutter is just a byproduct of being
effective.
Complexity
It's really anything that adds to the complexity
of your life without improving the quality of your life. It's
like the mess left behind after the creation of a gourmet
meal. You achieved your goal — you fixed a wonderful meal,
but now, before you can effectively and efficiently cook the
next meal, you've got to clean up and put away the left-overs.
Attempting to produce another gourmet meal
without first cleaning up the clutter will require more time,
more energy, and is likely to produce an inferior product.
Lifestyle Irritants
This is often how it is in the life of an
entrepreneur. As a result of past success, so much starts
to happen so fast that thinking and planning time gets squeezed
out.
Too much time is squandered on hectic, energy-draining
Lifestyle Irritants and there is little time left over to
strategically plan, generate new business, or adjust course
to take advantage of the biggest and most profitable opportunities.
This wall of clutter and complexity leaves
many entrepreneurs bogged down, run down and frustrated.
The Myth of More
To compensate for this increased complexity,
most entrepreneurs immerse themselves in what I call "The
Myth of More." "The more time I put in, the more hours I work,
the more productive I must be." This is ineffective, at least
from a long-term perspective. Initially, there is just no
substitute for long, hard work. After a certain point, however,
success no longer equals time and effort.
Sprinting In A Dense Fog
Working harder and longer actually becomes
counterproductive. It's like sprinting in a dense fog. It
shrinks creativity and blurs business vision. Tension builds
between work activities and personal life, promoting strained
family relationships, lower energy levels, poor health habits,
and weakened faith.
The fun and excitement of being an entrepreneur
diminishes. And when you're drained mentally and/or physically
you tend to gravitate toward lower payback activities that
won't result in higher levels of income or satisfaction.
It doesn't have to be this way. You don't
have to make a choice between business and family success!
There is a way out. It's all about focus!
The Breakthrough
We have identified a series of focusing
principles that, when integrated and mastered, provide a structure
for harnessing all of your time, talent, creativity, and skills
so you can enjoy the highest level of personal effectiveness
and life balance. I'll discuss the first four here.
If you're serious about putting these principles
into practice, you will dramatically increase your free time,
eliminate the clutter that attacks your productivity, and
sharpen your focus on your most vital relationships and moneymaking
sources.
Clarity
Clarity precedes all productivity. Your
potential for productivity and for achieving Huge, bold goals
is limited only by your ability to fully crystallize what
you want, why you want it, and exactly how you're going to
get it.
All great leaders possess tremendous long-term
perspective that builds character, wisdom, and self-discipline.
Long-term thinking is the hallmark of high performance living,
yet it's often neglected in favor of the treadmill of reactive,
urgent activities of the moment.
Whenever you seem to be locked into a certain
range of productivity or quality of life, it is an indication
that you have insufficient clarity about what changes need
to be made in your goals, your habits, your systems, and your
daily activity.
Become A Precision Thinker
Breaking through plateaus and cutting a
new, higher-level path in your life demands more than just
a "sense" of direction. It requires deliberately re-setting
a bigger, better, and more compelling vision for your future.
You must invest the time to develop exceptional
clarity about the specific outcomes you want to achieve with
your career, your finances, your marriage, your family, your
faith, your health and the impact you want to have on your
community.
The more specific and measurable your goal,
the more quickly you will be able to identify, locate, create,
and implement the use of the necessary resources for its attainment.
If you become a precision thinker, you'll never worry about
losing focus again.
Genius
To become a low-stress, high-performance
human being you must eliminate and concentrate. You must force
out low-payback activity with increased high-payback activity.
You must leverage your time and energy so that you enjoy the
highest levels of performance and peace of mind.
This requires that you systematically simplify
by de-cluttering your entire life. Get rid of all extraneous
stuff — the little things which add to the complexity of your
life without increasing your peace of mind or your bottom
line. It is this stuff that seduces you into believing that
working harder and longer is the only solution.
Identify your Area
of Genius Potential and then create a plan and put
the systems in place so that you'll be able to devote progressively
more and more time to this set of strengths. It is possible
to progressively and permanently flush out from your work
life any and all activity except this Area
of Genius.
This transformation to Genius
is not completed overnight, but in several phases as you gradually
build the foundational support systems and structures. One
by one, like scraping unhealthy food from your plate, you'll
get tightly focused on what really matters most.
Rejuvenation
Peak performance requires that periods of
intense stress be balanced with significant periods of relaxation
and recreation. As an entrepreneur, you are compensated for
your ability to think.
You have made the shift from manpower to
mind power. Because of this, you must resist the ambitious
urge toward constant busyness and overwork. In addition to
the damage it can do to your health, your marriage, and your
family — it sooner or later diminishes your work capacity.
Addiction to constant busyness clogs your
creativity. The more you overwork, the less effective you
become. As a result, you have to work even harder and longer.
You have to run just to stay in place. Other areas of life
get neglected and output at work stagnates. Trying too hard
mentally is simply self-defeating.
Creative Explosion
Our strategy in The 1% Club is to approach
recreation and rejuvenation as a prerequisite to peak performance.
Creative breakthroughs and high performance follow ample amounts
of rest, recovery, and recreation.
Most of the world views time off and relaxation
as either an outright entitlement or a reward for good work.
This is the vital distinction: When you're paid for generating
profitable ideas, you will enhance your performance by actually
working less. This paradox is a hidden key to increasing your
creative output.
The time you take off to relax your mental
energy, in addition to improving life balance, will bring
forth its greatest fruits in the form of better economic results,
allowing you the opportunity to take more time off to produce
even more creative breakthroughs — and so on.
Strategic Disconnection
We encourage one-percenters to consistently
build into their schedules significant periods of Rejuvenation
time when they are physically and mentally disconnected from
their work. Using rest and recreation strategically tends
to be one of the toughest challenges for new members, but
the payoff is well worth it.
Habit
Almost everything you do is the result of
habit. Whatever thought or behavior you repeat often enough
becomes habitual. In the absence of an outside force, or a
definite decision on your part to do something differently,
you'll keep on doing what you've always doneÉ indefinitely.
The key to achieving better results — the
key to becoming a more effective human being — is to develop
more effective, higher level habits. While this is by no means
easy, it is simple and doable.
Bigger & Better
You must become skilled in habit acquisition
and development. Remember, all growth and progress requires
you to move out of your comfort zone in the direction of something
bigger and better. More specifically, you're not going to
earn $500,000 dollar a year with $300,000 habits. First you
must change your habits, then your habits will change you.
Success Starts On
The Inside Members of The 1% Club know
that authentic success starts on the inside and spreads to
the outside. Your self-concept truly is everything. Your entire
world of health, relationships, income, happiness and overall
quality of life originates with the way you see yourself.
And you can never achieve more on the outside
than you can imagine is possible for you on the inside. You
always perform consistently with the mental picture you have
of yourself.
A Life of Integrity
In a society where external things... homes,
cars, schools and wardrobes account for so much ... it will,
ironically, be those few who craft a winning self-concept
who experience genuine success and the peace of mind which
naturally follows. While vacationing in the popular spot or
wearing the right clothes is quite attainable, living a life
of integrity on the inside is not so easy.
As business success grows, it's easy to
pay only lip service to the concept of balance while gradually
getting nudged out of alignment with what's really most important
in life.
Balance Is Natural
Remember that your natural state is one
of balance. Consequently, when your life on the outside contradicts
your highest values on the inside, you inevitably experience
the symptoms of tension, frustration, fatigue and general
uneasiness that indicate a loss of inner peace. And living
a life of balance does not happen by accident. It takes a
deliberate, systematic approach. What's yours?
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