The Entrepreneurial Savant

There is a sales technique called ‘reduce to the ridiculous’. This is accomplished by taking something daunting like a high price tag and reducing it to the ridiculous. For instance, a car salesman might handle a price objection by telling you it only costs ‘pennies a day’ to upgrade to that fancy sports car. The same technique can be used to help you find the time to build your business. Most of us don’t have the time to work on our dreams. Yet the time can be found if we take the opposite of reduce to the ridiculous: Look at how even a small amount of dedicated time adds up. For example, if you get up one hour earlier you gain a lot of extra time. An extra hour a day is 365 hours a year or an extra 15 days! Need a month? Get up two hours earlier.

It’s better to find your time in the morning because you will have your best energy and you may be able to get some alone time to work on your project(s).

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William James once wrote that men of genius differ from ordinary men not in any innate quality of the brain, but in the aims and purposes on which they concentrate and in the degree of concentration which they manage to achieve. Napoleon described it as the ability ‘to concentrate on objectives for long periods without tiring’. In Napoleon’s case, he knew he would become emperor and spent his entire life in pursuit of his destiny. Winston Churchill entered Parliament at age 23, already planning on becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain.

He did not attain his goal (though he came close many times) until the desperate hours of 1939 when War threatened his country’s very existence. That was 40 years after he entered Parliament for the first time. These leaders were able to stay focused on a single goal or objective for very long periods of time; a lifetime or even longer.

How can a goal be even longer lived than a single lifetime? Consider the builders of the great medieval cathedrals. These great monuments to the glory of God often took many generations to build and those who designed them and laid the foundations died never seeing them rise above the countryside. They knew they were creating something bigger than themselves.

I’m not suggesting you aspire to world conquest or to creating monuments for the future. What I am suggesting is that you look at what your long term goals are. By defining life goals, you give yourself a context to work in, placing your everyday activities in their proper place in your life. No success comes by accident. Everything you do leads to where you are now and in the future.

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