Think Inside The Box! Part 2

In my pre­vi­ous post I out­lined some of the prob­lems with launch­ing an advi­sory ser­vice busi­ness while you’re still work­ing at a job or in another business.

This can be a hard road: On the one hand you have to envi­sion, imag­ine and cre­ate to undergo a required trans­for­ma­tion; on the other, you have to con­tinue to pay the bills and put food on the table with income from cur­rent gigs.

This is a kind of incre­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion that can at times be all-encompassing, frus­trat­ing,  and dispir­it­ing.  When you’re in the mid­dle of it, your world appears to be a never end­ing series of sched­ules, tasks, and demands.

For many, this is when the rein­ven­tion stalls. You begin think­ing, “Hey, I started this to get away from all that. I’m rein­vent­ing so I can have a bet­ter life, not one that’s worse than I had before.”

But there are ways to tame this beast.  Since I have mul­ti­ple inter­ests and have often rein­vented, I’ve had to learn a few ways to con­trol the riotous think­ing that comes with fill­ing sev­eral roles at the same time. They’re not always per­fect, but they gen­er­ally work.

Over­all, they involve think­ing inside the box, not out­side it. By that I mean you have to con­cen­trate on tasks and not on strate­gies or big ideas. It becomes a case of orga­niz­ing your­self so that you can think in big pic­tures, and then switch to detail very quickly.

Here are the first two techniques:

Deter­mine which type of mind you have before you take action

Some peo­ple are very pre­cise and so are more dis­ci­plined; some are cre­ative and so tend to dream a lot; some, like me, are like hunt­ing dogs in the woods – when they smell an idea that’s inter­est­ing, they chase after it with­out any thought to where it will lead. (I call these my “bea­gle moments”, after the dog that some­times gets lost when fol­low­ing a scent.)

If you’re going to live within the dis­ci­pline required to work in two jobs – which is really what you’re doing when you launch a busi­ness while con­tin­u­ing in an old role – you have to cre­ate a sys­tem that works for you, not for some­one else.

Yes you can buy one or more of the many canned time man­age­ment solu­tions out there, or sub­scribe to one of sev­eral online ser­vices, but you prob­a­bly won’t con­tinue with them for long.

That’s because, with them, you’re being forced into some other person’s sys­tem and it might not fit you. The answer is to deter­mine which is your unique mind, and then build your own sys­tem around it, either by adapt­ing an exist­ing sys­tem or cre­at­ing one that works bet­ter for you.

For exam­ple, maybe a technology-based sys­tem won’t work at all, and you’ll have to go old school — using a paper-based sched­uler. Or maybe you need to hire a vir­tual assis­tant to keep you on track.

Rec­og­nize That You’re Going To Fail Often

“I have mea­sured out my life with cof­fee spoons,” moaned the poet T.S. Eliot’s hap­less anti-hero J. Alfred Prufrock almost a cen­tury ago.

He was express­ing the frus­tra­tion of being stuck in an unful­fill­ing life while desir­ing some­thing larger and deeper.

Prufrock wasn’t mis­er­able sim­ply because he real­ized he was a bore, but because he had given in. This meant he was as incon­se­quen­tial as a crab scut­tling around the ocean floor.

Brrrr! Pretty awful self assessment.

If you go off your dis­ci­pline, you don’t have to reach the level of self-loathing to which old Prufrock succumbed.

We all fall down some times. So, because we  revert to old habits or fail at some dis­ci­pline doesn’t mean we have to give in. The key is to get back up and keep moving.

Change doesn’t hap­pen overnight, and so the jour­ney can some­times be a case of two steps for­ward, one step back — espe­cially at first.

But at least you’re advancing.

So, these are the first two tech­niques. In the next blog I’ll pro­vide a few more.

But in the mean­time, I’d like to hear from any­one who’s expe­ri­enced this type of change. How do you avoid going crazy while try­ing to make a career switch?