Cultivate my laziness took me forever to learn.
Jason Long
You have likely heard this advice before, but the importance of being able to give work to other people is worth reiterating:
You’ve got to give things to other people.
When you’re running a business you need to be constantly working yourself out of running a business. Everything (ok, almost everything) that you do, especially when you’re getting started, should doable by somebody else. So when you start a new task, your job should be to make sure that you are setting up processes to enable other people to do the job.
If you’re doing that, you’re automating the business. You’re building something that is scalable.
What happens if you get hit by a bus?
If you hoard your responsibilities, then you quickly become the bottleneck. You become the person who is the source of problems.
This happens because you end up with a workload that is too heavy. You can’t complete your work, things start dropping, and your teammates can’t complete their work. Eventually, you reach a point where everybody is waiting for you in order to progress with their own work.
If you make yourself that integral to the company’s day to day operations, then it has substantially less of a chance of surviving long-term. Delegate now, and your company has better chances of growing and becoming a system that supports you, not that you support.
Your Best Sloth Impersonation
A friend of mine recently told me I needed to work on cultivating my laziness (Thanks Connor). That is true for so many business owners. We tend to be hands-on, hard-working people, and that isn’t always the best path for our businesses – for the company or for ourselves.
