5 harsh truths I’ve learned recently—and how I’m leveraging them for business growth

I recently learned some hard truths while hanging out with a bunch of other entrepreneurs on a ski trip retreat recently. Most of them were miles ahead of me in business, but I learned *so much* from them. In today's episode, I'm sharing what I learned so that you can leverage them for your business growth too.

– Using the Pareto Principle to understand where you're putting in the most effort to get the most results.
– The unexpected benefits of “deep thinking time” and how it differs to “overthinking”.
– How wasting time on low-value tasks is interrupting your focus on the high-value tasks that really move the needle in your business.
– Why reading books is essential for any business owner.
– Using the pain points in your business as a starting point for growth.

 

 
Today, I'm sharing five harsh truths that I have recently learned about growing to the next level in business. So I'm going to share five of these harsh truths that I realised while I was on the retreat.

 

#1: 20% of what we do in our business usually delivers 80% of the results. 

This is the Pareto principle, but I'd never really thought about it in a business concept, right? The Pareto principle is that roughly 80% of outcomes or consequences come from 20% of inputs or causes.

You might notice this in areas of your business where 20% of your clients are the ones who are delivering 80% of your revenue or 20% of your students in your course are the ones who are asking 80% of the questions or 20% of your Instagram posts make up 80% of your engagement. And this happens also in a broader business environment, right?

Where maybe 20% of the businesses are making 80% of the revenue. So what I am reflecting on is the 20% of effort that I am putting in right now that is delivering 80% of the results and then looking at how can I double down on that. So rather than trying to do more new things, how can I then put an extra 10% into that effort and leverage that for growth?

 

#2: Deep thinking time is essential for coming up with new ideas. 

I often say, Oh, I'll just think about it, whenever I'm facing a challenge, hoping that I can avoid thinking about it until the solution just pops into my mind at 3 a.m. but the reality is that we can't avoid deep thinking if we want to come up with creative solutions to the challenges we're facing and new ideas for growth in our business.

I know a lot of us, overachievers, can happily overthink till the cows come home and overthinking is usually what happens when we try to solve a problem without the facts, simply by trying to think our way through it and it usually ends up in this thought spiral where we just go round and round and round in this never-ending loop and in the case of overthinking, the solution is to take action so that we can get the facts that we are missing. 

 

#3: I realised I'm still wasting a lot of time doing lower-value tasks in my business.

The sooner that I can stop doing these, the sooner I can start focusing on the higher-value tasks. So the retreat was the concept of 000 tasks in terms of how much value they are creating for the business and then looking at my to-do list I realised how much of my list is still 10 and 100 tasks simply because I've been too lazy to delegate them to my team because it's like, oh, it's going to take me five minutes to do this, whereas it's going to take me 20 minutes to document it and explain how to do it.

So that's another thing that I will be reflecting on is what my 10 and 100 tasks and what the 1, 000 and 10, 000 tasks I can replace those with.

 

#4: I realised that the most successful people read a lot and I realised that I actually need to read a little bit more.

I'm not reading enough books and I'm a total bookworm but you know the one thing that I realised from this retreat was everyone was throwing book recommendations around and so many of these recommendations had been on my list of books that I wanted to read for a very long time and I just not got around to it because you know in the evenings I get to the end of the day I'm like, oh I just want to watch Melrose Place reruns, right? 

So instead of doing that, I know I need to carve out a little bit more intentional time in my evenings to read a little bit more and a lot of the books that were suggested, they're not even business books, they're books around mindset, spirituality, autobiographies. These were all really commonly recommended ones, not just practical business books. 

 

#5: You won't grow into pain.

This one was a really interesting one for me. So if something is really painful in your business right now, you're not going to grow in that area. You need to fix that pain first before you will be able to grow into it.

And in hindsight, I can see how obvious this has been in the past. So one thing that I'm going to be reflecting on is what are the pain points in this business as it currently is, and how can we fix those before we try to pour more fuel on the fire and add new things to the business?

 

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