So full disclosure here. I am a recovering hyper-technician. I believed that for the majority of my life that hard work, and especially hard work for others would pay off in very big ways, especially if the “right” people would recognize me and my potential. The sage advice my father gave me as a young boy of “work smarter, not harder, Bobby” would haunt me throughout the years since I couldn’t necessarily quite figure out how to qualify what he actually meant by “smarter.” Sure I was creative and got very used to aiming for clever and interesting solutions and even inventions, but that still was not quite right. In fact, that sort of thinking made things dramatically worse. I got really good at coming up with ideas and even pursuing them and jumping all over them towards execution, but then the bottle necks started to happen. My backlogs would grow seemingly never-ending tails that I could no longer tuck away or hide, let alone face and complete. I was top-heavy, full of ideas and not nearly at the level of execution or finish that I knew I had in me.
So what changed? Really what happened more than anything was my intense dedication to figure out for myself what working smarter actually meant. For me it has come to mean to automate as much as I can and to aim to systematize everything possible. This meant learning how to do several new things. Then learn how to do it good enough, begin a documentation process, and then bring in the hired help to take it over and continue the iteration and refinement process of fiddling away all the excess and trimming the fat from off of any work. The goal here is to make your job as easy as you possibly can so that you can hand it off to the next person in a manner that would make them succeed and thus relieve you of your current obligations and open the window to newer, more exciting opportunities. This is one of the key operating principles at ToiBox. Sure there’s a lot to do with collaboration, but at the end of the day we al have technical responsibilities, because we must in order to contribute to the unique demands of our Stellar teams.
Thus I will go full circle here and share some practical wisdom via experience over the first steps I took to liberating myself and that was simply to hire the best help to do the jobs that were not best suited for me. It began slowly at first during the time when I was really hustling to nurture the start of ToiBox along with my Real Estate Investment company. It was here that I learned the value of hiring (aka paying for) high-quality expertise to fill in my
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