Often we mistake “maintenance work” as growth efforts. Doing the work (maintenance work) versus efforts to grow and transform your company into something “better.”
Life Example #1: every morning at 6 am I go for a 30-minute walk, this exercise will not make me ripped, I will not lose a ton of weight from these efforts. After my walk, I come home and stretch for 15 minutes. This physical activity is about maintenance of cardiovascular and joint health.
Life Example #2: It’s summertime here in Florida and every week I cut the grass around our house. Cutting the grass is a maintenance task.
For LessEverything, travel, meeting new people, seeing old friends, blogging are all growth efforts. You have to attempt to balance growth tasks with maintenance tasks, doing the daily work which keeps the company running against growth work.
For years, we worked 40 hours a week doing maintenance tasks which were us “doing the work”…billing clients, making sure the company had positive cash flow. Then we worked +20 hours a week of growth by building LessAccounting, blogging and traveling.
At a young age schools teach us there is a cap on your efforts, it’s called an A+. Do the work, and you’ll get an A+, do the work plus learn additional stuff, and you’ll still just get an A+. We’re programmed to “do the work in front of us” additional growth efforts will not be rewarded. This learned behavior is the exact opposite of how adult-life/entrepreneurship works.
If you want a company or career which you are proud of, you must become a person who can handle balancing growth efforts and maintenance efforts.
If you wanted it to build a product you’d find a way to get time to work on it. If you really wanted to start that new hobby you’d sacrifice something to find the time and money to do it.
I'll define a "Wannabe Entrepreneur" as someone who has never made money from their businesses. Here are the different types of wannabes.
In the past few years I've built go-carts, built a 200+ sq ft workshop, written several eBooks. How do I create a life where I have time to work on side projects?