Helmsley Media

Whenever I watch tennis I am amazed at how these players make it look so easy. Of course it isn’t easy and this is why these players are making millions of dollars. The better a player is, the easier they make the game look. When I watch Andy Roddick play against some guy in the first round he seems pretty comfortable, but when I watch him play Roger Federer he looks like he is working extremely hard, while Roger almost always looks like the game is effortless to him. I have experienced this in my own sporting endeavors before, a state of being where you feel as though you are hardly trying, and yet you are performing better than you have ever performed before. Oftentimes this means you are “in the zone”.

The zone is not just applicable to sports though, it can happen at anytime in your life really. It is being in the moment so that you can allow your training to take over, so that your choices are more automatic, and you are less likely to doubt yourself. So how can we apply this principle to business? It’s difficult because business is more of a marathon than a sprint, and to maintain this state constantly is quite difficult. Even if you can’t be in the zone all the time, you can implement the art of not trying.

If your mind is overloaded with things you need to get done, and your life is quite complicated, using the art of not trying is probably not going to be feasible. In order to successfully not try you need to cut out the trivial many, and focus on the critical few as Tim Ferriss says. The sports analogy I would use is that you need to have smooth and efficient technique in order to appear effortless. Roger Federer looks like he isn’t trying because he is so smooth on court, and regardless of whatever pressure he is under he still looks smooth because of his impeccable technique. In business this means focusing on what really matters, and not being overwhelmed by numerous small things that should be delegated to someone else, or batch processed at a later time.

If you feel like you’re working too hard, you probably are. Unfortunately that also means that you are probably doing things in an inefficient manner, and until you become more efficient you have to keep working hard. In reality the better word to choose would probably be effective, because if you are really efficient at doing trivial tasks, you aren’t really going to be getting ahead. This of course applies to sports as well. If Roger Federer only had smooth technique he wouldn’t be the champion he is today, but because he also hits very effective shots, he gets amazing results.

So, think about your daily routine, how could you become more efficient, and more importantly, how could you become more effective? Decide what are the most important tasks that you need to get done, and do those tasks first. In a worst case scenario, if you didn’t get to respond to some email or to do some other trivial task, at least you got that important item done, and you will be feeling a lot less stressed as a result. Really break down your day, and find the time hogs. Write out what you need to get done the night before, and when the morning comes, attack the most important items first.

For those of you who buy into the law of attraction, which is the foundation of “The Secret”, you’ll understand what I’m getting at here. It’s important to be clear on what you want in life and for your business, but you can’t try so hard. When you start trying too hard what happens is you start to focus on the opposite of what you’re hoping to accomplish, and by focusing on the negative you tend to attract something negative.

Sometimes it’s easier to keep our bad habits, we’re too lazy to change them, even though changing these habits would mean we could be lazier later! So don’t be lazy now, find and fix your bad habits, you’ll thank yourself for it later.

I wanted to avoid the clichéd “ideas are a dime a dozen”, but I really couldn’t agree more with that. For as long as I can remember I have been coming up with “genius” business ideas, ideas that if executed would make me, or anyone else billionaires. That is always the problem, if they are executed, but they rarely are.

So many people are the same way. You come up with this gold mine of an idea that you protect by not telling anyone because you don’t want anyone to steal your future fortune, but you also protect it by sheltering it from criticism and daylight. You tuck that genius idea of yours away and let it rot while you keep doing the same thing you’ve always been doing. While I do agree that you have to be protective of your dreams as people will often stomp on them unconsciously (a totally different post for another day), but you have to eventually let them out.

It is important to try and be creative, that’s basically what the entrepreneurship process is all about, creating a business. However, what is more important is making a business model that functions, and that people can understand, because if nobody understands your business model, how do you expect your managers and employees to execute for you? Oftentimes the best businesses are from the simplest ideas, but these ideas are executed like clockwork.

Whatever your business ideas are, you need to have a clear plan of attack. You need to know what your action items are, and you need to do them. One of the keys to business success is execution of simple tasks, not planning some complex business model that you will never execute. Businesspeople need to get things done, and if you are always trying to come up with the best idea or novel business model, you won’t be getting the things done that you need to get done. So on that note, if you could only get a small number of things done tomorrow for your business (or for you future business) what would they be? Are they concrete real actions, or are you just brainstorming? Do stuff now, don’t just think about what you need to do.

I’d like to be a pro-athlete. I think playing on the pro badminton tour would be pretty cool (I have played badminton since I was 4). I covered a lot of major events as a writer and thought it was pretty awesome. The travel would be cool. I am a very competitive person and I love the sport as well, so if I could make a living traveling the world playing badminton I would do it, but I don’t want it bad enough to do the things necessary to achieve that. A lot of people are like that about all of their dreams. It would be nice, but their not interested in the work required. This brings me to another point, people want success so they can take it easy.

The idea that success will allow you to relax or retire completely is in my opinion one of the greatest barriers to people achieving success in anything. The mindset goes something like this “I will build up this amazing business, make a whole bunch of money, and then I’ll take it easy”. If you work hard for success so that you can take it easy, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful. You become used to hard work, so your tolerance goes up. Things aren’t so hard anymore. So you shouldn’t be working hard so you can take it easy, you should be working hard so that what you used to think was hard work, is now easy for you. Now don’t confuse working hard with mindless inefficiency, that’s being mentally lazy, or if you want another analogy that’s like someone who’s a workhorse in a sport, but refuses to work on their technique (cause it’s hard for them!).

I know that Donald Trump once said that the time he ran into the most difficulties with his business was when he sat back and rested on his success thinking that he didn’t need to work hard anymore. Big mistake. The more success you have the more you have to lose. This attitude is of course entirely applicable to sports. Do you think now that Raphael Nadal has made it to the top of tennis, and Tiger Woods is dominating golf, that either of them are slacking at all? Of course not, they are working harder than ever because otherwise the rest of the field is going to catch up with them.

You need to have a hunger, an insatiable appetite for whatever your idea of success is. If you’re not obsessed with achieving your goal someone else out there is, and they’ll beat you to the punch. My attitude is that there are thousands of other people out there all vying for the same things that I want, and so long as I work harder than they do, and I want it more, there is little that they can do to stop me. This of course means that you are the only person you really need to compete with, your inner loser who is going to be whispering in your ear that you have done enough, that you can finish later, or you’ll do more next time. It’s now or never. Life balance is important too, but that’s something that we can address in other posts.