This is the second part of the “Is Your Business Making These 10 Mistakes?” series. Part 1 can be found here.
Trust Your Instincts
This one is hard to explain. Some people believe in instincts and some people don’t. All I know is that every time I followed my gut, I made the right decision and every time I didn’t, I screwed up. I don’t know how it works, but I know it does work.
A lot of people will disagree with me, but my advice to you is, “if all the data in the world is telling you that you should make a certain decision but your instinct is telling you the opposite, follow your instinct.”
What do you think? Do you agree?
Something Good Done Today is Better than Something Perfect Done Tomorrow
A very successful entrepreneur told me this story once:
“When I was starting my business, I needed to order shelves. They had three sizes: small, medium and large. My partner started doing all the calculations to figure out how many of each we needed. A week later, he was still working on it. Finally, I said, ‘let’s order 25 small ones, 50 medium ones and 25 large ones’. We placed the order and moved on.”
I asked, “how did that work out for you? Was what you ordered exactly what you needed?”
“Kind of”, he said. “A month later we had to order two more large ones and there were four small ones that weren’t completely full.”
“So you made a mistake rushing that decision”, I said. “You should’ve waited for your partner to finish the calculations, right?”
“No, absolutely not”, he responded. “You need to make decisions and move on. You can adjust your decisions later. But, something good done today is better than something perfect done tomorrow. We had a business to start and we needed to focus our energy on getting new clients and growing our company. We had no time to figure out the perfect order for shelves. We had important stuff to do.”
This was one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life.
- Figure out what are the top 2-3 priorities in your business (if you think choosing the right color for your website is a priority, let me tell you: “it’s not!”)
- Get your top priorities done very well.
- Everything else should be done as fast as possible and you should move onto the next thing.
I hope you liked these lessons as much as I do. Look out for Part 3 of this post tomorrow.