When I say ‘slay a sacred cow’, of course, I’m not talking about a sacred cow in Hinduism, what I’m talking about are those things that are policies, procedures, or systems that have worked for you in the past, have helped you get success, but are now holding you back.
Earlier today, I asked my right-hand woman, the woman who helps me run all of my businesses, I said, “What are my three biggest complaints? What are the three things you hear me complain about the most?” Now, I had an idea of what she would answer, and two of the three were spot-on. The third one actually surprised me a little bit, and when I actually looked at it, I started writing it down, and I looked at these three complaints as I journaled, and I thought, “Wow, where am I living within these three complaints? Am I actually living my life like these things?”
What is it that you stand against? Now yeah, it’s easy to talk about what we stand for, especially in the realm of personal and business development. That’s the warm and fuzzies but what is it you stand against because often times, I find for most of my clients, that is a better driving force. It’s the things that we actually stand against that separate us.
We started this quest for Author of Your Own Story. I actually sat down with my team and asked them, “What is the biggest thing that we can do? Do you think we can impact a hundred, a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, a million people?” We all agreed that our quest was to touch and positively impact over 1 million people.
I sent an email to my team. I said, “Hey, make sure you watch those videos and take copious notes because I want to make sure you apply them to our project.” Now the next day, I came back expecting to see copious notes from my team about exactly what we should be doing with one of our projects only to see jokes coming through. Now I have a great relationship with all of my team. And they said, “Doug, first of all what videos and which projects? We’re running six different companies as a whole team here, and each of those companies has multiple projects going on at any given time.” It was actually really funny. Now what I didn’t do was really be specific about which videos I wanted them to watch and which projects to apply them to. We all got a chuckle out of it, luckily, but what we really lost was a day’s worth of work. I expected to come into the office, when I came in, and have a list of actionable items that I could task out and delegate to my team.
