As I mentioned early on in “How to be a Productivity Ninja”, we all derive personal pride or identity from our work in one way or another.
I spent the month of August “going dark” – taking some time out after the release of my book to re-energise, disconnect and ask myself difficult questions about the next 12-18 months and what I want to do next.
I didn’t discover all the answers, but I did come to a pretty strange conclusion about Think Productive UK.
As the founder, it’s been my baby for the last 3 and a bit years. And do you know what I realised in my month off? The business can survive without me.
In fact, the business has done, for most of the last year, since I’ve been largely off writing and producing the book. This was initially a difficult truth for me to come to terms with. After all, everyone wants to feel useful, valuable, indispensable.
But my challenge to you is this: build your business or build your team so that you can take yourself out of the equation for a while and things still function. It might start out being “all about you”, but by the end, make it “not all about you”.
You might be missed at times but people know what they need to do. As a young and ambitious employee, I probably came back from my times away secretly hoping that things may have gone wrong in my absence, to prove how good I was at my job and how vital I was to have around. But as time has gone on, I’ve always been focussed on building things through systems and processes so that I’m no longer essential.
No matter how difficult that fact is to hear when it actually happens.
Graham