In
his book No B.S. Time
Management for Entrepreneurs, business coach and consultant Dan
Kennedy reveals the steps behind making the most of your frantic,
time-pressured days so you can turn time into money. In this edited excerpt,
the author explains the people you spend time with affect your productivity and
why you should carefully choose who to associate with.
One
of the most significant things you can control is association -- your choices
of who you permit into your world, who you give time to or invest time with,
and who you look to for ideas, information and education. The people around you
rarely have a neutral effect. They either facilitate your accomplishment, they
undermine it, or they sabotage it outright.
The
first useful association tactic is the elimination of toxic people and
saboteurs. It's not an easy thing to face facts about a friend, family member, long-time
employee or long-time vendor when they are, in some way, interfering
with or disapproving of your accomplishment. It's important to face these facts
and to act on them because the more time you spend with people who are
unhelpful, unsupportive, disrespectful, envious, resentful, dysfunctional or
outright damaging to you, the less value all your time has.
These
people don’t just harm the minutes you and they are in the same place. Few
people can so perfectly compartmentalize that they can lock every thought,
assertion and act of a toxic person in a little mind box and without leakage
into other mind boxes. Paraphrasing a Chinese proverb (I found in a fortune
cookie), if you lie down with mongrel dogs, even for a short nap, you wake up
with fleas -- and they ride with you wherever you go.
Ideas, beliefs, opinions
and habits work just like
that. Even if you're associating only occasionally or briefly with someone who
is intellectually or emotionally toxic or someone who is feckless and inept,
it’s enough time for the fleas to leap from them to you, burrow in and be carried
away by you to subtly affect your performance and productivity. If your
creativity or constructive thinking or work performance is thus diminished, so
is the value of your
time.
People
who are detrimental for you to associate with are not necessarily of evil
intent. They may all be “good people,” but that doesn’t mean they’re good for
you. Good chocolate cake is not good for a diabetic. In fact, it’s poison.
Associating with somebody who is always pushing it to you, saying “Just have a
tiny piece” is just as suicidal as baking it for yourself.
There
are lots of ways a person can be toxic and poisonous to you. I’ve had clients
describe how recurring disputes with a particular employee were mentally
exhausting but couldn’t be helped because otherwise, that person was a great
asset. The “otherwise” is a big problem. Many small businesses wind up with a
ruthlessly defensive key person who goes into murder mode anytime an attempt is
made to add a second person but is “otherwise” terrific.
There's
the “we tried that before” guy. If it were up to him, we’d light the place with
candles because Edison would have been limited to one try. There’s the
“constructive critic,” always making you feel inadequate or undeserving, in the
guise of being a cautionary ally worrying over you stubbing a toe.
On
the other hand, constructive association with creative, inspiring, encouraging
people can do a great deal to bolster your performance, thus making your time more
valuable. Each minute of your time is made more or less valuable by the
condition of your mind, and it is constantly being conditioned by association.
The
entrepreneur is particularly susceptible to gaining or losing power by
association because he has so many diverse responsibilities and is often
operating under pressure, duress and urgency. Playing this game in a
compromised mental state, weakened or wounded by poor ideas and attitudes
seeded into the mind by association, is extremely difficult. Playing it
strengthened and empowered by rich ideas and attitudes seeded into the mind by
association can make the difficult easy.
Simply
put, you want to deliberately reduce and restrict the amount of your time left
vulnerable to random thought or association, and deliberately, sharply reduce
the amount of time given to association with people who won’t make any
productive contribution and may do harm. Does that mean you can only spend time
with people you are in complete philosophical agreement with? No. In fact, such
isolationism can be dangerous. But it does mean you should avoid association
with people who believe and promulgate beliefs diametrically opposed to
“success orientation.”
You want to deliberately
increase the amount of your time directed at chosen thinking and input, and
constructive, productive association. You want to associate with strivers and
achievers, with winners and champions. This is an uplifting force that
translates into peak performance, which makes all your time more valuable.
Entrepreneur
Mag Dec 27, 2013
