Andy has a thought-provoking post over at his Tropical SEO blog
The great entrepreneur-CEO is, at his/her core, smart and lazy.
Could you be working too hard?
Yes have commitment, energy, drive, ambition, but do not confuse those with “hard work”. Think of the old cliché “work smarter not harder”.
Many of the best programmers I have met have been lazy. They make good programmers because rather than do manual, tedious, grunt work they would rather get the computer to do it. Also because they want to avoid hard work they write elegant code that gets the job done in half the lines of a harder working programmers design. Of course there have been a bunch of coders who would just avoid work altogether, there is always going to be those who take things too far!
Rather than work you should focus on profitable systems.
When you have a good system then you will produce quality without so much effort and also without requiring specialist expertise in all areas of your business.
I once had a public blog debate with Seth Godin about this. His point was that you should hire the very best people at all levels. My argument was that you should only hire people good enough to perform your system faultlessly and make your systems as good as they possibly can be.
People are an expensive overhead, why hire a PHD to ad-lib when you could hire a teenager to work a brilliant system?
One of the reasons Google is so dominant is not because they hire PHDs it’s because they use all the brain power to use creating better and better automated systems.
Have a good look at your business. What can be done by others to free your time? Where can tasks be turned into systems to take out excessive thinking and discussion, and to increase quality consistency? What are you doing now that you don’t need to be doing? What can be automated?
You might find your profit goes up, your stress goes down and your output improves in quality.
