Rupal Y. Patel
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I love a good quote. I've got a notebook full of wisdom uttered from the mouths of everyone from Plato to Tupac Shakur and every now and then when I have a good flick through, I come upon a new gem or find new significance for an old classic.
It was during a recent flip through that I came back upon one of my all time favorites, a real diamond from Henry Ford: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse... Idiots!" Now, I know Ford didn't call his potential customers idiots, but I'm guessing he was probably thinking it. And I love that Ford, inventor and industrial revolutionary, was like "Hey, you know what customers? Forget you! I'm building something great here, and what you think you want is irrelevant. So get back in your slow-a$$ carriages and scram!" How gutsy, how totally against the grain of our nice-nice society, how incredibly brave to say to a customer you're NOT always right. Because the thing is, dear Entreprenoras, our customers can sometimes be our worst enemies. They will ask and ask and ask and the trouble is, sometimes what they want is something you can't or shouldn't give. And sometimes even when you DO give your customer what they want, they change their mind and decide they don't want it anymore and then you've wasted all that time and effort and money for nothing. How frustrating! For example, just a few short weeks ago, on the heels of an over-subscribed event, I polled my waiting list and other potential customers to see if they'd like me to run the event again. I got almost two dozen thumbs-ups so got busy putting everything together, setting up the ticket site, ordering workbooks, clearing my weekend, and after all that, guess what? Guess how many customers bought what they asked for once I had it ready for them? Exactly zero. "But I did what you asked!" I wanted to scream at the registration page. "Where did you all go?" I wanted to shout into the wind. But all I got in response was crickets. And it reminded me again that I don't always have to listen to my customers and I don't always have to oblige. My customers aren't always right. And neither are yours. We can only offer what we can offer. And sometimes a customer doesn't know what they want until you show it to them (like the Model T). And sometimes what they want is not part of YOUR plan for your business, so you have to just ignore it. I'm not saying we should ignore all customer feedback or pretend like all requests are irrelevant. What I am saying is that we should work hard to make our service or product as good as possible, hold ourselves to really high standards in how we deliver them, commit to always improving, listen to feedback and requests, and then filter the feedback and requests. Some ideas might be worth considering, others might not. A request is not an order. Feedback is not a command. Take on board what your customers say and then use your best judgment to filter and decide what is worth implementing and what is worth forgetting about. Your relationship with your customer is exactly that: a relationship. And like in all relationships, one side isn't always right or more important. Your relationship is a conversation, an exchange, and sometimes you will have to agree to disagree. If Henry Ford hadn't disagreed, how far behind would automotive technology and car culture be now? If you don't sometimes disagree, how far behind will you be in growing your business according to your vision? You don't always have to listen to your customer. And sometimes when they ask for a horse, you have to give them a Model T instead.
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"If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself..."
Ever heard those words before? I'm guessing that you've often found some version of that "perfectionist's creed" playing in a loop in your head as you've started and grown your business (and run your day-to-day life!). I get it. We love to be in control. We love to get things done. We love having things done our way. And we are really, really, really good at some things, maybe even a lot of things. But perfect at all things? Is that even possible? The more I think about it, the more I hear it from my clients, and the more I try to train myself out of it, the more I see self-proclaimed perfectionism as something quite different: laziness and anxiety in disguise. Let me explain. First of all, I think we can agree that doing anything "perfectly" is basically impossible because "perfect" is subjective. What I think is perfect, others might think sucks, and what they think is perfect, I might find seriously flawed. Perfect is a standard that we define and our definition will inevitably be different to someone else's. Secondly, perfectionism is often used as an excuse for not doing something - "Oh, that website, will never be as perfect as I want it to be, so I may as well not build it"; "My business will never be as big as I want it to be, so I'm not going to start it"; "This marketing campaign will never capture everything I want to convey, so why bother planning it" - OR perfectionism is used as an excuse to keep doing everything ourselves because we can't be bothered to TRY to delegate to someone else or TRY to find someone who might, just might, be able to do it at least as well as (or maybe even better... gasp!), as we can or TRY to have a difficult conversation with a colleague or a partner about how they can contribute or improve. Perfectionism maintains the status quo - we either don't do something or we keep doing everything - and the status quo is, well, lazy. And perfectionism keeps us from addressing our often baseless anxieties. "It has to be perfect or people will never buy it"; "No one will execute my vision as perfectly as I can"; "If I don't do it, it won't ever get done"; etc, etc, etc. Do you think Richard Branson comes up with new business arms AND does the marketing plan AND does the pricing AND chooses the words for each ad AND makes the coffee? No! Do you think Sara Blakely turned her product idea into a billion-dollar business by sewing each item of Spanx herself AND building her website AND shipping her products AND ordering the paper clips for the office? Hell no! So why do we? Why do we think we can grow a business AND do it all because no one else can? Why do we hold ourselves back by deluding ourselves that we are the exception to every rule of success (delegate, leverage, focus on what you're good at, test and iterate...)? Are we really perfectionists? Or are we being lazy? Are we really perfectionists? Or are we just anxious? Done is better than perfect. Trying is better than worrying. An imperfect business is better than one that stays in your head. Get something out there and improve, iterate, and - dare I say it! - perfect it later. Be honest about what your "perfectionism" is costing you and your business, and then try, at least try, to hide behind the Perfectionist's Creed a little less often. Every evening as we put our daughter to sleep, in between getting her ready for bed and taking her to her room, my husband goes down to our office for a few minutes. For the longest time, this annoyed me to no end. "What's the point in leaving for five minutes?" I would say to myself. "It's just unnecessary back and forth."
And then I did the math. Those five minutes that I was so dismissive of add up. I mean really add up: five minutes every day for 365 days equates to 1825 minutes or 30.42 hours or 1.27 days. A whole extra day and then some. When I did the math, I was stunned. I mean what more could I do with an extra 1.27 days each year? How many more books could I read in 30.42 hours? How many more trips to the gym could I fit in? How many more blog posts could I write? How many more walks could I go on?... We often dismiss - and squander - small increments of time because we think they are insignificant. We ignore the power of compounding. There are so many things about which we say "Oh, it'll just take five minutes" and then we plunge in. But even if it does just take five minutes, are those five minutes being used in the best way possible? I often get clients and students resist my suggestions to delegate small things because they say it only takes them five minutes to do and it's just easier to do it themselves (sound familiar?). But using the math above, you can see how lots of little "five minutes here" and "five minutes there" can eat away DAYS of your year. So what are you spending "only five minutes" on that you could or should delegate to someone else? What could you START to spend five minutes on each day to move you closer to one of your goals? Five minutes is never just five minutes (even when it is five minutes), because that "five minutes" mentality keeps so many of us stuck doing things that we should NOT be doing, or keeps us from starting things we should. We all underestimate the power of five minutes. I still find myself doing so. But we need to pay attention to all the minutes, and - to paraphrase a famous saying - Watch the minutes so that the years can take care of themselves. You may not know this about me, but I have always loved, LOVED to write, and have been writing since I could hold a pencil in my “sinister” left hand (as a child, I once spent an entire day transcribing the movie Superman 2 for the sheer joy of filling up an entire notebook with my scrawl — we had VCRs back in that day, so it was an even more tedious task than you can imagine!).
But until recently, I had let work, career, parenthood, other “stuff” take over, and years and years had passed without my having written a jot. And it wasn’t until a few years ago when I started writing regularly again that I realized how much I missed the creativity and thought that goes into choosing just the right word or capturing my ideas in written form, and how much it fills my brain and my soul to create. I am a writer. I always have been. But I also love math and science and astrophysics. I am a contradiction in so many ways. But aren’t we all?… One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the past seven years of being my own boss is that I need to honor who I am. Most of us don’t do that. I still struggle to do it from time to time. We waste years of our lives trying to work on our (perceived) deficiencies or force ourselves to do things we hate or beat ourselves up for struggling with certain things. And we are told over and over again that working harder, not necessarily smarter, is the way to succeed. Culturally and socially, we are rarely encouraged to focus on what we do well, only told to improve on what we don’t do well. How demoralizing and depressing is that? And what a horrible way to live. What if instead, we accepted that we will never be good at ALL THE THINGS and just moved on? What if instead, we valued ourselves for what we are good at and worked on amplifying and leveraging our strengths? What if instead we accepted and honored who we are and let go of everything we aren't? I know it’s not always clear-cut, and we all have responsibilities and rules and pressures and financial realities to contend with. All I’m suggesting is that if we can do things a little bit easier, if we can spend more time leveraging our strengths, if we can try to design our lives to be a little truer to who we are, don’t we owe it to ourselves to do so? It can be baby steps (for me, that means writing more and not forcing myself to run… I hate running!). It can mean outsourcing or delegating some of the tedious admin tasks that suck the lifeblood from us. If can mean subscribing to a recipe box if you hate the question "what's for dinner" as much as I do! You don’t have to quit your job or move to an ashram or become an ascetic or start to meditate 12 hours a day. You just have to make decisions based on what is right for you and who you are, and then try to live in the world in a way that makes sense for you in every way possible. Delegate one thing that you hate doing at home and in your business. Stop thinking about topics that make you angry. Leave that WhatsApp group. Find one way to exercise that brings you joy instead of stuffing yourself into wedgie-inducing yoga pants just because someone else swears by the practice. Everything won’t suddenly be perfect and you won’t suddenly be pulled to new heights of success and fulfillment and self-actualization. But we can all take baby steps that compound over time and distance, and the more we do, and the more consistently we do it, the bigger the impact will be in honoring who we are. |
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