Your Special Gift
“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?” – Benjamin Franklin
Do you get tired of being interrupted by phone calls? By the ding-dong of your e-mail program? By “crises” that need your immediate attention?
Do you become irritated by people who don’t get back to you when they say they will? Or who don’t do what they say they’re going to do? Or who act as though your time is a public charity?
Do you get frustrated by accounting issues? Or travel scheduling problems? Or computer breakdowns?
In summation, do you get tired of being distracted by a tsunami of trivia and B.S. that crashes through your office walls, the Internet, and your telephone each and every day in a seemingly relentless effort to prevent you from focusing – with total and intense concentration – on the projects that have the potential to put real, live cash into your coffers?
I thought about all this when a business acquaintance recently sent me a great quote, which I’d like to share with you here. However, I first want to make certain to credit Bill Wallace, who is purported to be the source of the quote. The only problem is that not only do I not know who Bill Wallace is (24.7 million listings on Google make it pretty obvious that there are a lot of Bill Wallaces), neither does the person who sent me the quote!
Sorry about that, Bill. Anyway, wherever you may be, please accept my thanks for the great insight.
Here’s my slightly edited version of Wallace’s words: The biggest challenge you have in business is getting out from under the never-ending wave of trivia and B.S. long enough to do something profitable – even if it’s only one thing a day.
Legendary management consultant Peter Drucker put “profitable projects” under the umbrella of innovation and marketing. “Innovation and marketing”? My preference would be “product-development and marketing.” Either way, the longer I live, the more my firsthand experience convinces me that financial success is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend on projects that bring money through the front door.
How, then, do you rid yourself of the trivia and B.S. in your life so you can focus on moneymaking projects?
Realistically, you can never totally eliminate it. But you can reduce it, bit by bit – daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. And to do that, you have to have the self-discipline to make a conscious effort to pull away from it.
How? Through delegation – which means becoming adept at outsourcing and hiring good people. However, delegation works only to the extent that your vendors and employees understand that you don’t want to be involved in the details, but that you do expect results – and that you expect those results to be exactly what you asked for.
Once you start making money, the wisest investment you can make is to hire great people. It takes people – good people – to advance to a serious income level.
And when you do take people on board, you should train them to understand that their number one job is to protect you from trivial matters and B.S. Any employee who can’t provide that protection needs to be replaced as quickly as possible.
Again, what I’m talking about here is understanding that your financial success is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend on projects that produce income. And in most cases, they are projects that utilize your “special gift.” By special gift, I am referring to that one thing you do better than anything else – perhaps better than anyone else.
Each of us has a special gift, but all too often we overlook it. And the reason we overlook it is because we tend to take for granted that which comes easy to us.
Learn to appreciate yourself and focus on that one thing that you do extraordinarily well. This requires you to stop worrying about what everyone around you is doing. They have their gifts, you have yours. Don’t be greedy and try to horn in on their territory.
Nurture and make use of your gift until it becomes a cash cow for you. Then keep right on going by nurturing and employing it ever more efficiently.
Tomorrow, when you walk into your office, consciously focus on your special gift to the exclusion of everything else – even seemingly important matters. Make a commitment not to work on problems until the end of the day. Your freshest hours should be reserved for applying your special gift to opportunities that are all around you, because that’s where the money is.
Trust me on this. It works.
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