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Growning is serious business, always. Design

Keeping a Growth Mindset

February 5, 2019
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If you’re not moving forward or growing, you may be standing still or even moving backwards. What does this mean? I probably don’t have to explain to you what growth looks like. It is a condition of the mind, it is intuitive to life and anyone knows if they are growing or not. The hard part is admitting lack of growth and doing something about it. Choosing to grow is a  choice, like exercising or eating healthy.

Reality is that the world, and the way we do things, is changing faster and faster.  Keeping up with the pace can be really hard. Since I contend that a growth and service mindset is essential to relevance in today’s marketplace, I had to consider the “keeping up” factor before I went into business. Here’s how that looked for me.

Both award businesses I bought were at a point where they were experiencing years of declining sales. A small business naturally loses a few customers every year due to attrition. Customers die, they retire and move on to other employment. But the key to a healthy business is whether it can consistently replace those customers lost to attrition with new customers.

Don’t misunderstand, both of my businesses still had many good loyal customers. Their products, for the most part, were good. The service they provided was good and relevant. Those were the reasons I bought them. Both businesses, in my opinion, were declining because their owners were either unable, for various reasons, to keep up with the changing structures and technologies in today’s business world. These were growth problems.

Just to clarify, growth is not always about making things bigger. Sometimes it’s a requirement just to keep things the same. For example, a business may be in a geographic area or a competitive market where there are only so many customers, and this is okay. But growing is still  necessary to address natural attrition and keep the customer base large enough for the business to remain viable.

Even when I was working for someone, growth was no less important. I knew if I didn’t grow I could become irrelevant and easily replaceable. The best book I have ever read regarding this is Linchpin by Seth Godin.

This brings me back to purpose, if you have a purpose for doing what you do, I believe you will naturally want to learn and grow to satisfy that purpose.  Your purpose could be as simple as providing for your family, or as difficult as providing clean drinking water for people that don’t have any. Both purposes changes the world for the better, today and tomorrow.

What to do? Are you continuing to grow, learning through curiosity and taking risks? Do you need some inspiration? Check out this video  How ya gonna Live? Answer these questions, and the world will thank you!

 

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Feel Like Quitting Early? Design

Quitting Under Stress

January 5, 2019
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Feel Like Quitting?

Quitting, in our culture, doesn’t always have a positive reputation.  I was always told that “quitters never win, and winners never quit”. Like a lot of other sayings, this one might need a little evaluation. Should we continue every project, every direction, every goal indefinitely? If not, how do we know when to quit – an idea that has probably crossed all our minds many times. Quitting sounds so attractive during moments of high stress!

I first learned a term, “the dip”, during my enrollment in the altMBA .  It’s a term coined by Seth Godin, the creator of this course. The term may be new but the concept has been around forever and is definitely something that all of us (depending on age) have faced literally hundreds of times in our life. The dip is that moment when something gets so hard that you feel like quitting.

Good NewsThe Dip

Seth wrote a book called “the dip” (yes, all lower case). Under the book title on the cover reads the words A LITTLE BOOK THAT TEACHES YOU WHEN TO QUIT (AND WHEN TO STICK). Wait a minute, is he implying that there are times when it is actually okay to quit when it gets hard? Could it be that at times the best strategy for winning is actually quitting?

Here is the gist of this little book, and you don’t even have to pay me for the two hours it took me to read it. This is free, late Christmas gift from Seth and I. Use it wisely and by all means share it.  Quitting, as a short term strategy, just because you’re in a dip, is a bad idea.  Quitting as a long term strategy, for good reasons, can be an excellent idea. 

 “Never quit something with great long term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment” Seth Godin

 

 

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