At SHIFTER we’re big dreamers. Being big dreamers has served us well. You basically believe you can do anything, you can change the world, and nobody or nothing can stand in your way.
It’s true that there’s a thin line between our strengths and weaknesses. If you look closely at some of your greatest strengths you’ll realize they’re also weaknesses and if you look at some of your weaknesses you’ll find they’re actually strengths.
We recently realized that not only is being big thinkers one of our greatest strengths, it’s also one of our biggest weaknesses. Why? In believing you can do anything you often try to do too much.
Here are a few things we noticed about being big dreamers:
- As a big dreamer you tend to focus more on end results and despise process
- You can sometimes lose focus
- You sometimes look down on things that reflects small thinking or dreaming
- You often make simple things more complex than they need to be
- As a result you get overwhelmed
So we recently had to make some changes because this wasn’t sustainable. We felt like those people who travel and pack for every possible scenario and end up packing too much, including stuff they’ll never use. We recently decided that we needed a new, less complicated growth strategy. We started by identifying our “base” or root system- the few things we want to focus on that are foundational to our business. The objective is to dedicate time, maybe months or years, to set down your roots and have other activities be a natural outgrowth of your roots, only adding things to your business as they naturally make sense. The lesson is to pursue your anchors in life and business; not the by-products of those anchors. This gives you a firm foundation on which to build. After going through this process and creating a tree diagram we then trimmed our 10-year plan down to a doable 5-year plan.
It’s hard to eliminate things from your life and business that are important to you, but you can’t be effective being pulled in too many directions. By simplifying our business we’ve become a lot “lighter”. When you have big dreams it takes a lot of discipline to reduce your dream down to only a few things at a time but it also allows you to be a lot more effective. We encourage you to do the same.
We’ve matured this week. Having big dreams or being a big thinker isn’t an end in itself. The ultimate goal to have an impact and you can only do that if you’re executing. If you see big things it’s that much more important for you to do the small and simple things that will get you there. Real big thinkers do small things well.