I’m a huge champion of people running Lifestyle Businesses* and, as you probably know, am in the throws of creating one myself.A question I am often asked is “Is it possible to run a profitable business when you are constrained by the number of hours you can spend on it?”
You bet it is.
The human brain is a funny old thing and often behaves in unexpected ways. One of the surprises is that it often works better if it is constrained in some way.
Here’s why:
Every day the brain is subject to a cacophony of activity and if it didn't chose to ignore most of it we'd go bonkers. The brain works so hard ignoring stuff that all the other work it does has to be performed with mega efficiency. As a result, when the brain is asked to think about how to solve a problem it doesn’t bother digging too deep for a clever solution, rather it just grabs the closest answer.
But when you put an obstacle in the way of the brain so that it can't grab the nearest information it steps up a gear, and magic happens.
First of all the brain sorts through it’s impressive store of information and then it plays with it, matching seemingly unrelated bits of information in various permutations and combinations until, amazingly, a clever solution appears.
So how does this relate to running a business against the clock?
Well because you have set the clock as an obstacle, your brain can’t default to solving your business problems using the most obvious resource, time. Instead it has to dig deeper and that’s where it gets clever and imaginative.
Classic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, who think nothing of spending 100 hours a week on their business don’t get to activate that aspect of their brain in the same way. Their brains see a problem and immediately want to solve it by throwing hours at it.
So your business will be more creative, imaginative and innovative because you restrict the number of hours you work, not despite it.
*A Lifestyle Business is one that’s designed to complement the owners life, and often that means it’s run on less hours than most entrepreneurial businesses.
Often Lifestyle Businesses are run by Mums, but not exclusively. A dear friend, for example, runs a Lifestyle Business which allows her to spend 4 months a year trekking in Nepal.
Comments
Post has no comments.