By Shane Snow; LinkedIn
When I left journalism school, I and half of the grad students in my
class entered the job market as freelancers. (It's a tough market for
journalists, even today). And then a peculiar thing happened: all of
these amazing, Columbia-educated journalists who'd written for The New
York Times and NBC and Time Magazine started approaching me for
help—despite the fact that they were far better writers than me. In the
past, I had run a website consultancy, so my friends asked my advice on
building a website, promoting themselves online, getting clients,
managing invoices and taxes, and so on. Essentially, they needed help
becoming entrepreneurs, which required an entirely different skillset
than the journalist's craft. While some of what we freelancers needed
was practical (sales skills, websites, etc.), what we really had to do
was start thinking of ourselves as startups.
But
truthfully, startup skills are not just useful to the self-employed app
developer or forced-into-freelance journalist. The habits—and the
mindset—of successful entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly valuable
in every 21st century workplace.
Having spent most of my life
around entrepreneurs—and having attempted to mimic their best moves in
my work as a business owner, then freelancer, and now startup founder—I'm convinced that the following habits will make anyone twice as successful, not to mention employable:
1) Systematizing Repeat Tasks
Entrepreneurship,
by definition, is the art of creating systems that generate more value
for less effort. Startups realize that the opportunity cost of doing
mundane tasks adds up quickly, preventing them from doing the
high-impact work they have set out to do.
Though this is a mindset
more than anything else, there are all sorts of tech products you can
use to automate repeat tasks in your work right now. Sanebox for hiding email you don't need to see during the day. LastPass and Dashlane to save all your passwords, so you never have to keep track of more than one master login. And one of my favorites is IFTTT,
which lets you set up automatic If>Then triggers for almost
anything. For instance, IFTTT sends me a text message on mornings when
the weather forecast says rain (so I don't have to waste time looking it
up or heading back to my house when I forget my umbrella), and it sends
all my Gmail attachments automatically to be backed up to Dropbox, so I
don't have to hunt for files online when I need them.
If your
time is worth $25 or $50 or $500 an hour, then fork over the $15 for
someone else to do your laundry for you and work on something for two
hours instead. If you have to do tedious data entry to create a report
every week, set up a spreadsheet to pull in and add the numbers for you.
This is the entrepreneur's philosophy, and it can make you more
productive than almost any other thing.
2) Great Storytelling
"Those who tell the stories rule the world." This Native American proverb is painted on the wall of
my office, reminding everyone in the company that narratives—and the
ways you tell them—matter.
Entrepreneurs are constantly pitching.
Ideas, products, investment opportunities.
The most important element of
a successful pitch is the story. Great start-ups are fantastic at
painting a big, ambitious picture that gets people excited. Indeed, if
there's one skill that will get you noticed and remembered, it's the
ability to give a great speech, make a riveting presentation, and write
compellingly. Entrepreneurs spend more time preparing and honing these
details than most lackadaisical PowerPoint junkies out there, and that's
because for a start-up, everything hinges on them.
3) Carving Out "Heads Down" Time
Interruptions eat up a huge amount
of the average person's work time. Great startups have the habit of
finding ways to protect their people from needless distractions. And
smart managers block off swaths of their calendars for "productivity time."
4) Split Testing And Iterating
A hallmark of the Lean Startup
movement, entrepreneurs are wont to constantly pit two or more
approaches against one another and let data inform their decisions. What should the home page call-to-action say? Split test two different sentences and see which gets more clicks. How do I get more people to respond to my emails? Test different subject lines, lengths, and endings like "Thanks for your help in advance" versus "Warm regards." What kind of outfit makes me look more professional? Try two different styles and keep track of the compliments.
(I
realized this habit had spilled over to my regular life when I found
myself "split testing" salsas at a taco joint the other day.)
Truthfully,
we're not all as good at making decisions with our guts as we think we
are. But a good split test doesn't lie, and entrepreneurs are constantly
pitting their test winners against new ideas.
5) Looking For 80/20s
There's
a strange phenomenon in work that almost always holds true: if you
examine your life, you'll often see that only 20% of the things you do
account for 80% of the results you get. Being productive and being busy
are two different things. If you want to quadruple your productivity,
focus on the 20% first, and if you can, cut the other 80% that just
makes you busy.
6) Rather Than Planning, Doing
Too
many of us have meetings about meetings, and end meetings with lists of
follow-up conversations to be had later. But startups, for which every
second counts, have a habit of taking on-the-spot action. Instead of
promising to email an introduction for you, a startup founder will pull
out her phone and write the email while you sit there. Then the issue
doesn't have to take up future brain- or calendar-space.
7) Ditching Meetings... But Taking Every Networking Meeting
Most
meetings are worthless. They usually have too many people, who feel
obligated to talk because they are there, and they're almost always too
long.
"Meetings are typically scheduled like TV shows. You set
aside 30 minutes or an hour because that's how scheduling software
works," write Jason Fried and David Hansson in their book, Rework. "If
it only takes 7 minutes to accomplish a meeting's goal, that's all the
time you should spend."
Startups often hold meetings while
standing up, so the desire to get the meeting over with outweighs the
desire to dilly dally on unimportant things. And often they simply cut
meetings in favor of asynchronous coordination over email.
However,
entrepreneurs also know the importance of serendipity in their work, so
they make a point to network as much as possible. "I take every
[networking] meeting," says Michael Ventura, CEO of digital innovation
agency Sub Rosa. "Because in our industry, you never know what could happen."
(P.S.: The way I solve the dilemma of having networking meetings eat into important work is by dividing my weeks into "heads down" days and "explore" days.)
8) Asking "Why" Like A Five-Year-Old
Entrepreneurs
aren't satisfied with the status quo. They ask "why" over and over
again until they get to the bottom of things, rather than ascribing
superficial blame on people, or worst of all, accepting the explanation,
"That's just the way it is."
This relentless inquisitiveness in fact, helps entrepreneurs find and fix the 20% wrong that causes 80% of their problems.
9) Seeing Every "It Can't Be Done" As An Opportunity
This
is the mindset from which innovation springs. To an entrepreneur,
convention means average, and impossible means profit potential. People
who see the opportunities in the can'ts in their work—and seize them—create positive change, get promoted, and work happier.
Read the full article on LinkedIn.
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