Focus on Results : Work Smart, Not Hard

In this article, I have occasionally challenged the notion that working hard is always a good thing. Sometimes, working hard means wasting your life on chores or wasting your life working for a company that doesn’t value you.
Much better than working hard then, is to work smart. That means that you stop focusing on working for the sake of working and start working in order to get results.

This is where it becomes important once again to assess your past mistakes and look at what has worked and what hasn’t. This will allow you to invest your time only where it counts and only where it matters.

Freeing Up Mental Space

And sometimes, this means finding ways to remove the unwanted distractions and clutter from your life. Work that does not take you closer to your goal is not work that is worth your time. Work that takes you away from the things you are passionate about is not worth your time. And so if you’re currently spending half your evening washing up and cleaning the house  it’s time to stop!

You worked incredibly hard in order to earn money for your family – you traded your time for resources – and now the little time you have left you’re going to spend washing up?? This is another cognitive shift you need to make in order to be truly successful – you need to start valuing your time more and be willing to spend your money to protect it.

You need to recognize that Time > Money. So instead of spending your time cleaning the house, why not hire a cleaner to do it? You’ve worked hard enough to deserve one and this way you can work on more fulfilling side projects (and earn back the money you’re spending several times over), you can spend time with your family and friends, or you can spend more time enjoying the hobbies that you are truly passionate about.

Likewise, you can give yourself more time by investing in a dishwasher, a robotic vacuum cleaner or maybe even a service that will deliver you readymade meals to your door for lunch and dinner! Invest in You Don’t think that this means you shouldn’t be spending time on your appearance though – you absolutely should. This takes us right back to our ‘law of attraction’ principle from the start of this book.

To get the best jobs and to have the most success with the opposite sex, you need to look the part.And to look the part, you need to spend time or money. You don’t have the time to spend hours ironing and run a second business from home – so spend the money on your looks. And believe that this money is going to come back to you. Believe in the law of attraction. That’s how those incredibly polished people who just seem to excel in everything they do got that way.

Creating Business Models That Succeed

This ‘results focused attitude’ is also how you’re going to design your business models and choose your projects. Think about the resources you already have available to you, the contacts you already know and the skills that you already possess. If you are the editor of a magazine on a certain topic for example, then you have a huge captive audience.

What business could you launch that you could aim at that audience? And as I’ve said already before: don’t think about success in terms of what others perceive as success.A lot of people will try and start businesses that they think will ‘change the world’ or ‘offer something completely unique’. But you know what? This type of business makes it much harder to find investors and much harder to market.

If you want to make money quickly, if that is your goal, then you’re often much better off just using a tried and tested business model that countless people have used before. Don’t invest huge amounts of money into a business before you have‘verified it’.Use the ‘fail fast principle’ by creating an MVP and seeing if it is successful before spending lots of time on it.

This will also let you stay lean and jump between multiple business models. If you’re willing to look for the shortcuts and if you understand the most important variables in each equation, then you can often sidestep the work and jump straight to the good part – earning lots of cash! Success really doesn’t have to be as hard as everyone makes it out to be. You just need to the right attitude and some gumption.