Clinton Skakun

As far as I can remember I’ve had a strong curiosity to know how things worked. Growing up I’d constantly tair things apart, until one day I figured out that it costs too much. Entrepreneurs love to build business systems, they don’t often have to bother with small details. Once the entrepreneur has mastered his own skills, and his mind, his work becomes very simple. Not easy … but simple. Something we all learn eventually is that the person who knows how to create a simple life, and still get everything he wants, is paid more than the multitasking yes-man who micromanages everything. The more technical a job is, the more average the pay. Even a technical consultant gets paid more for teaching others how to do their work than he does working him self.

You don’t need to know what you don’t need

If you ask someone to spent four years of their life in college will tell you it was a “great learning experience” but they never learned anything about on the job activities. In other words it got them a job with a yearly salary of 36K, barely enough to pay bills and rent/mortgage never mind other little things that add up…oh and student loans. If you don’t need to know something, don’t muck up your brain. Time is too important. For example, the other day I was installing Kubuntu on a computer for one of the people I serve, and a screen came up asking which processor we use. I didn’t know … so what did I do…take a crash course on computer processors? Hell no…all I did was Google it…it took a max of 3 minutes. No degree needed. No college experience needed…maybe I can spend those 4 years building wealth so I can sun tan while everyone else is still looking for a job.

Challenge old ways of thinking and learn new ways

Why do old companies die, old people live in the past and old habits die hard? This is why…they’re all based on the past! What worked back then wont work now days. Lately, the world has had a habit of rearanging itself every few years. If you stick to your outdated way of thinking you’ll get rearranged out of a job. Don’t pre-suppose that just because something has been done the same for decades or cenuries that it’s been proven. It may been been proven 40 years ago but might not make any sense now days.

Learn Timeless Principles

There are laws that dictate time and space, there are also laws that dictate our finances, our business, what we do subconsciously, the friends we make and the person we become. Timeless principles don’t change with time but rather prove themselves with time. Make it a habit to get curious about life and learn principles that dicatate life. This way, whether you’re in a down economy or the horse and buggy age you’ll know more about life than the people who study the markets, or stay stuck in practices that were rendered ineffective years ago. Principles are more important in an age where things can change over night than in any other age.

Learn how to speed seduce life

Who makes the most money in a free enterprise system? People who know how to leverage resources, money and time to serve them. These are the entrepreneurs, leaders, CEOs, salespeople, connectors and inventors. In all my reading and learning I constantly look for ways to leverage. How can I leverage time? How can I leverage one spending habit or one working habit that makes a long term difference on my income? Even learning is leveraging. Because if you’re constantly learning to leverage everything, you’re leveraging your life. People who rely purely on conventional wisdom stay at the bottom of the bin.

Conclusion

So again, don’t spend time learning what you don’t need to know. There are very few wealthy PHds, so that should tell you something. Challenge old ways of thinking and learn new ways, the past is the enemy of the future. The past is gone so prepare for the future, all your hope is in it. Learn Timeless Principles…practices are great but even practices go out of date. And finally, learn how to speed seduce and leverage life and use the latest human and computer technologies to simplify and streamline various aspects of your life.

Burnout occurs through a few different sources. When I was still in high school, working between projects and school at the same time was  a little stressful and demanded that I get up early enough to kick start the day … and work late enough so I wouldn’t have to even later the next day. Those days are kind of a blur and needless to say both grades and projects suffered. Certain activities get really addicting, there’s always that “just one more day of this crazy coding and I’ll have something ready” months, which seem more like weeks, fly by and it seems as if you’re moving backwards. Sometimes you are. Finally you realize that no matter how hard you work you’re still in the same place as last week, and the week before. Unless you change something.

Your body will only allow you to stare at a computer screen for so long until your eyes turn to chock and your memory slips like a skipping disk. In the case of burnout, you probably blank out in the middle of conversation or zone out when someone asks you a question. Basically, when you burn out, your mind is just overworked. Maybe you have a zillian things to do in a few days time and as the days go by your interest diminishes.

I’m not a big advocate of the 4 Hour Work Week type of thinking. Sure life isn’t all work. But when you find yourself broke, don’t look for a “4 Hour Work Week”, just work towards your dreams and choose your hours as you go. Being committed to your dreams means doing what it takes, it takes more than a few hours a week and it often means raising the bar. Too many people are looking for a fast and easy way to be entrepreneurs. It doesn’t often happen. Even Tim Ferris, author of 4 Hour Work Week, had some major lessons to learn early in his entrepreneurial career.

There are a few things you can leverage to decrease burnout and get more done. They don’t mean that you’ll never be tired again, but you’ll be able to operate at a much higher level and get more juice out of life. My explanation for burnout is running your engine and never changing the oil. The first one is to simplify, organize and eliminate. Much of burnout is just inability to focus well on everything from things that aren’t important to average importance. Don’t decide to start a business, go to college, work a full time job and become an author all at the same time. Decide what’s good in your life and what’s great and choose between the two. You can’t have one or the other and be a success. Will Smith calls it, paraphrased … “being focused, not being in 100 different things at the same time, mastery takes laser like strong focus.” For example, I said no to learning to play guitar, to going to college and to a number of other things. All of these were “good” but I chose to focus on the “great” which was worth much more to me … Say no to more people more often. Schedule your time and set priorities. Don’t give your direct phone number to every client(especially if you have a large client base). Be like an executive at a large organization: checking every activity, finding ways to cut out steps, measuring the gains and the costs, outsourcing to save time and money–innovating to run at a higher level with lower maintenance. Put weight only on the valuable tasks. Put time where it’s valued. Three hours of social networking won’t be the best return on your time. Checking e-mail every 15 minutes will turn a 8 hour day into a 16 hour day. Get rid of access projects and worthless activities.

The second is to take care of your health and rest often. Things like smoking, consuming too much sugar, not taking breaks from staring at a screen for long periods of time or sitting at a desk all day will eventually take its toll on your health. Maybe you don’t exercise enough, maybe you don’t take the weekends off, maybe you don’t socialize enough. This is all vital, not only to your physical health but also to your mental health. Studies show that Americans are one of the most sleep impoverished people in the world. On top of that we don’t get enough oxygen, not breathing deeply enough and not going out side and we don’t drink enough water. And…we literally eat shit, called fast food. It’s an amazement our minds can still function! High productivity calls for high energy, high energy comes from putting the right things in your body.

Scheduling the weekends off to do something fun is something we should all consider non-negotiable. First thoughts are always, “I can’t afford to miss two days of work” … hey, you can’t afford NOT to! Great ideas come on the weekends, the ground work is done on the week days. Keeping the big picture in mind is key to knowing whether your actions are worth doing. And that brings us to number three…constantly reviewing the destination.

It’s easy to just work away like a crazed ape, burn out and crash, and then find out that what you were doing had nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish. Setting goals is simple, even though most people never do it. If you can manage to join the minority that sets goals, you’re closer but it’s not enough: you actually have to follow through. The second mistake is that people follow through but fail to assess their actions and end up in the wrong direction, or fall short. Constantly tracking yourself is critical in knowing how far you are. Every night ask yourself, what did I do today and how much closer am I to my destination?

You must have reasons enough to trigger that drive inside of you. Some people live off that drive alone. If you can find strong enough reasons to do something you’ll most likely do it with a lot of passion.

Photo by scottburnham
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford

The word “team”, instead of staff, has become popular among many organizations now days and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are understanding why teams are important. The days of management and carrot and sticking is slowly but surely coming to an end. It has far outlived its time.

Personal Weaknesses

John C. Maxwell, one of the world’s experts on leadership, says that strong teams compensate for individual weaknesses. Everyone has special strengths and talents. But no matter how talented we are we’ll always have weaknesses. A strong team goes through self-assessment and finds strong points in the their team members. They then coordinate and use these strong points to compensate for members with weaknesses. For example, a web design firm would assign technical tasks to people are gifted in technical areas, presentations would be given by people who are gifted at presenting, design would be given to people who are good at design, etc.

The Power of Leveraged Time

The real power of a successful business probably shows its teeth in the way it leverages OPM, OPT. What do big businesses have that sole proprietors or one-man-shows don’t? They know how to leverage man power! I really got excited about this idea when I first really “saw” and understood what this meant. It’s so simple that the world class seem to be the only ones who want to leverage it.

Take for example you work as a self-employed gardener. In the morning, you need to water the plants, open the store, and set anything else that needs setting up. During the day you have to water the plants, be the cashier etc etc. At night you need to close the place down and do whatever else needs doing. You’re the entrepreneur and the technician, the brains and the labor, the person who makes or breaks your business. But lets say you got tired of standing behind a cash register, so you hire someone to take over that area. Now your business has 32hrs of potential man power(lets say a potential 16hr days at max). With the extra time it gives you, you start getting time to think about innovating your business. You add on a little to the green house and set up for plants. The problem is now you’re working even harder than you did before. So you hire someone to take care of the watering and tending to the plants. That now gives your business a potential 40+ hours in a day. Plant sales are good so you add on even more, hiring two more people to take care of customers and other tasks that need doing. You add another 32 hours to your day, that’s almost 65+ hours in one day. Needless to say, 65 hours per day impossible for one person. That’s the power of leveraging.

24 x 1 = 24hrs (limited cash flow, bus factor of one, if you get hit by a bus your business does to)
24 x 2 = 48hrs (Already impossible for one person)
24 x 5 = 120hrs
24 x 10 = 240hrs
24 x 100 = 2400hrs (is that time management or what?)

Synergy, when the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

When people work together an interesting phenomenon happens. Stephan Covey talks about this in his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Synergy is a dynamic type of state where 1 + 1 = the power of 3 or 4 or more instead of 2. The word synergy comes from the Greek word syn-ergos, which means to work together. Covey explains it as, “When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Synergy works in all areas of live, not just business. Synergy works when people work toward a common goal. Take for example a brainstorm session, one person might not have any ideas … until sitting down with another person, then idea begin to flood from both of them as if there were 10 brains brainstorming.

It was like the two brains tapped into a higher form of intelligence and both ended up complimenting and inspiring one another. It wasn’t two brains thinking anymore, it was one super mind. Our minds are wired for communication and when we do so they work like magic.

Interdependence Paradigm

7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best books I’ve ever read on personal development. It’s the basis of much of my thinking and has been for a few years. A powerful lesson I learned from this book is that we’re all interconnected. Stephan Covey considers co-dependence the highest stage of maturity. He explains that the first stage is dependency, we’re born into this world and have to depend heavily on our parents, teachers, etc to survive. Next comes independence, the stage at which we begin to think individual thoughts and depend on our own reasoning instead of seeking advice or support from the people we depended on as we grew up. The final stage is co-dependence, understanding that we all depend on each other and, in some way, we’re all interconnected and if one link in the chain loosens others are there to fix it. Co-dependence often exists in organizations, intimate relationships like dating couples or married people. It exists in communities, government and other such groups. Co-dependency is acknowledging that you alone can’t accomplish anything great alone.

“No one man can accomplish great things alone” – Maynas Eric Chua

I have to admit when I first picked this book up, I didn’t know what to expect from it. There are all kinds of tid-bits about productivity on the Internet, and thought I knew a thing or two about time management already. Liking the idea of learning “the art of stress free productivity” I dove into it.
Photo Credit: mslindz

What caught me in the beginning was the methodology Allen uses that focuses on clarity, keeping organized, and creating a system that puts your mind at rest and allows you to relax while working. What makes this book PRICELESS is the one concept I learned at the very beginning: the more you tasks you think about the more open-loops you have tugging at your brain, the more more open loops you have the less productive you are. The only way to get rid of open-loops are to be able to forget about them, by inserting them into a system(like on paper, a computer, physical space, what-not)

There are five core principles that Allen discusses in his book:

1. Collect – Get a load off your chest by capturing the instructions you need to remember, that you can return to, into what Allen calls “baskets”. A basket can be any number of ways to store and track your tasks. Paper, PDA, a physical space, e-mail, journals, or whatnot. What ever works best for you. Allen explains that in order to stay organized and updated your baskets need to keep reviewed once a week. This gives you a chance to update and empty your baskets.

2. Process – Do it(if it takes under two minutes–two minute rule). Delegate it(someone else can do it better if you can’t). Defer it(maybe it’s not something that needs to be worked on now). If an item does not require action NOW, file it, throw it away or give it a “maybe” for later.

3. Organize – There are different types of tasks: Next actions, projects, waiting for(stuff you’ve delegated), someday/maybe(e.g. “eat snails in Fiji” or “Add on to the house”).

4. Review – Do a weekly review on everything in your system. If you let things slip, you’re system gets out of date really fast, and that won’t maintain the quality of stess-free productivity you’re striving for.

5. Do – Probably the simplest part, now that you know exactly what you should be currently doing, DO IT.

These are the basic principles that the book covers, however, the book goes way deeper and gives more concise information on how to use the principles and apply it to your personal and business.

“Get everything out of your head. Make decisions about actions required on stuff when it shows up – not when it blows up. Organize reminders of your projects and the next actions on them in appropriate categories. Keep your system current, complete, and reviewed sufficiently to trust your intuitive choices about what you’re doing (and not doing) at any time.” – Allen

If you haven’t read this book, READ IT!