STAY FOCUSED ON YOUR CORE GENIUS

You have inside you a core genius — some one thing that you love to do and do so well that you hardly feel like charging people for it. It's effortless for you and a whole lot of fun.

And if you could make money doing it, you'd make it your lifetime's work.

Successful people are able to do this by focusing on their core genius. They then delegate everything else to the people around them.

Compare that to most other people in the world who go through life doing everything, even those tasks they're bad at or that could be done more cheaply, better, and faster by someone else.

They can't find the time to focus on their core genius because they fail to delegate even the most menial of tasks.

Many salespeople, for example, spend more time on account administration than they do on the phone making sales, when they could hire a part-time administrator (or share the cost with another salesperson) to do this time-consuming detail work.

Most female executives spend too much time running their household, when they could easily and inexpensively delegate this task to a cleaning service or part-time mother's helper, freeing themselves to focus on their career or spend more time with their family.

Even most entrepreneurs spend less than 30 percent of their time focusing on their core genius and unique abilities. In fact, by the time they've launched a business, it often seems entrepreneurs are doing everything but the one thing they went into business for in the first place.

Don't let this be your fate. Identify your core genius, then delegate completely to free up more time to focus on what you love to do.

When you delegate the grunt work — the things you hate doing or those tasks that are so painful, you end up putting them off — you get to concentrate on what you love to do.

You free up your time so that you can be more productive. And you get to enjoy life more.

So why is delegating routine tasks and unwanted projects so difficult for most people?

Surprisingly, most people are afraid of looking wasteful or being judged as being above everyone else. They are afraid to give up control or reluctant to spend the money to pay for help.

Deep down, most people simply don't want to let go.

Others — potentially you — have simply fallen into the habit of doing everything themselves. "It's too time consuming to explain it to someone," you say. "I can do it more quickly and better myself anyway." But can you?

If you're a professional earning $75 per hour and you pay a neighborhood kid $10 an hour to cut the grass, you save the effort of doing it yourself on the weekend and gain one extra hour when you could profit by $65.

Of course, though one hour doesn't seem like much, multiply that by at least 20 weekends in the spring and summer and you discover you've gained 20 hours a year at $65 per hour — or an extra $1,300 in potential earnings.

Similarly, if you're a real estate agent, you need to list houses, gather information for the multiple listings, attend open houses, do showings, put keys in lockboxes, write offers, and make appointments. And if you're lucky, you eventually get to close a deal.

But let's say that you're the best closer in the area. Why would you want to waste your time writing listings, doing lead generation, placing lockboxes, and making videos of the property, when you could have a staff of colleagues and assistants doing all that, thus freeing you up to do more closings?

Instead of doing just one deal a week, you could be doing three deals because you had delegated what you're less good at.

One of the strategies I use and teach is complete delegation. It simply means that you delegate a task once and completely — rather than delegating it each time it needs to be done.

When I hired the gardener for my Santa Barbara estate, I said, "I want my grounds to look as close as possible to the grounds at the Four Seasons Biltmore in Montecito, using the budget I'm providing you."

When I go to the Four Seasons, I don't have to check whether the trees need to be trimmed or the automatic sprinklers are working. Someone else is in charge of that.

Well, I want the same luxury at my home. "With that as our operating principle," I said, "here's the budget. Take charge of the grounds. If I'm ever not happy, I'll let you know. If I'm not happy a second time, I'll find someone else. Does that feel like a workable agreement?"

My landscaper was, in fact, very excited. He knew he wouldn't be micromanaged, and I knew I wouldn't have to worry about it again — and I don't. See what I mean? Complete delegation.

DON'T LET ANYONE TALK YOU OUT OF YOUR VISION

There are people who will try to talk you out of your vision and rob your focus from your core genius. They will tell you that you are crazy and that it can't be done.

There will be those who will laugh at you and try to bring you down to their level. My friend Monty Roberts, the author of The Man Who Listens to Horses, calls these people dream-stealers. Don't listen to them.

When Monty was in high school, his teacher gave the class the assignment, similar to the vision exercise above, to write about what they wanted to do when they grew up.

Monty wrote that he wanted to own his own 200-acre ranch and raise Thoroughbred racehorses. His teacher gave him an F and explained that the grade reflected that he deemed his dream unrealistic.

No boy who was living in a camper on the back of a pickup truck would ever be able to amass enough money to buy a ranch, purchase breeding stock, and pay the necessary salaries for ranch hands.

When he offered Monty the chance of rewriting his paper for a higher grade, Monty told him, "You keep the F; I'm keeping my dream."

Today Monty's 154-acre Flag Is Up Farms in Solvang, California, raises Thoroughbred racehorses and trains hundreds of horse trainers in a more humane way to "join up" with and train horses.

So, let me end as I began. What do you want to accomplish in life? What do you want to experience? And what possessions do you want to acquire? What does success look like to you?

Success in life works like GPS navigation. All you have to do is decide where you want to go by clarifying your vision, lock in the destination, and then start moving in the right direction.

Focus on your core genius and your inner GPS will keep unfolding your route as you continue to move forward. The exact steps — the how — will keep appearing along the way — sometimes just when you need it and not a moment earlier.

Share Your Vision

When you've finished writing down your vision, share your vision with a good friend whom you can trust to be positive and supportive. You might be afraid that your friend will think your vision is too outlandish, impossible to achieve, too idealistic, unrealistic, or materialistic.

Almost all people have these thoughts when they think about sharing their vision. But the truth is, most people, deep down in their hearts, want the very same things you want.

Everyone wants financial abundance, a comfortable home, meaningful work he or she enjoys, good health, time to do the things he or she loves, nurturing relationships with his or her family and friends, and an opportunity to make a difference in the world.

But too few of us readily admit it.

You'll find that when you share your vision, some people will want to help you make it happen. Others will introduce you to friends and resources that can help you.

You'll also find that each time that you share your vision, it becomes clearer and feels more real and attainable. And most importantly, every time you share your vision, you strengthen your own subconscious belief that you can achieve it.

Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow

Strategic Coach Dan Sullivan once stated that all entrepreneurs are really con artists. They get other people to pay them to practice getting better at what they love to do.

Think about it.

Tiger Woods loves to play golf. People pay him big money to play golf. Every time he plays, he learns more about playing better. He gets to practice and hang out with other golfers, all the while getting paid for it.

Or consider baseball power-hitter Sammy Sosa when he played with the Chicago Cubs. It took him about one second to hit a home run — as long as it takes for the ball to meet the bat.

He earned $10,625,000 for about 70 seconds of batting time per year, so he got really good at making the bat meet the ball.

That's where he made his money. That's where he put all his time — practicing and getting ready for the bat to meet the ball.

He had found his core genius and devoted the majority of his waking hours to perfecting his genius.

Of course, most of us are not on par with Tiger Woods or Sammy Sosa, but the fact is that we could learn a lot from their level of focus on pursuing what they love.

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© 2007 Nightingale-Conant Corporation

Jack Canfield is one of America's leading experts in the development of human potential. In his new book The Success Principles (coauthored with Janet Switzer), Canfield takes the principles that he's studied, taught, and lived for the past 30 years and offers them in a practical and inspiring guide that will help you get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen are the #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling coauthors of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, currently with 32 different titles in print, and worldwide sales of over 80 million copies in 39 languages.

 

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