Doing more isn’t moving you forward.

We all know those people who look like they’re doing everything under the sun.  They run multiple businesses, have a ton of content that they post online, and seemingly have more than 24hrs in the day to do all of the things.  The natural inclination for anyone who’s driven towards success is – “I need to be doing more.”  I have news for you – IT’S A TRAP! 

I always have a really hard time deterring someone who always wanted to do more to achieve a goal.  That is coming from a place of drive, dedication, motivation – all great things.  You never want to discourage that.  The issue is that they’re asking the wrong question.  It shouldn’t be, “what more could I be doing?”  It’s “what could I be doing better?”  Whether it’s training, or business, the missing link to success is very seldom to “do more.” 

In my opinion, there are only 2 reasons you might seek to do more:

  1. You lack the confidence.
  2. You don’t have a plan.

That might ruffle a few feathers, but it’s the honest truth.

Doing more is a cheap ego-boost for the person who feels inadequate in their pursuits.  They can rest easy at night, despite their poor outcomes, knowing that “they’re doing everything they can be” to reach their goal.  They get the dopamine hit from checking off boxes on their to-do list, despite not helping more clients and earning more revenue.  They come well equipped with the excuse, “I’ve tried everything!”  Lucky for this individual that doing everything is just a tad more effective than doing nothing, so they might see a smidge of a return on their massive investment of time, which unfortunately will reinforce this “do more” habit.

As you can see, this person has no plan.  When you’re trying to do everything you can, it’s next to impossible to know what works and what doesn’t.  Within any pursuit, you need to have a plan, execute it and gather data on the outcomes. Through this iterative process, you learn to make better decisions.  You learn what works and what doesn’t and you learn the outcomes of the small changes you make along the way.  When you do everything, you’ll never know what’s effective and what is a waste of your time… but you don’t care because you’re doing everything you can!

I can say these things with full confidence because I’ve been there.  I’ve made these mistakes.  There was a time that I was working a 40hr per week job, coaching 50 clients online and tried launching an app as a 2-man tech start up.  I’ve worked the 90hr weeks and invested close to a $100k in something we couldn’t get off the ground.  The number 1 reason we couldn’t get it off the ground was that we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t have any confidence in our ability to do it, so we tried everything under the sun to make it happen.  Guess what? It wasn’t enough.

Doing more will never be enough. 

That served as a massive learning experience for me. We had an amazing product that could have helped a lot of people, but we didn’t have the maturity to make the tough choice of doing a few things really well and chose to do everything we could.  In that situation, the outcomes never match the output – no matter how high that output was.

Doing the right things, in the right amounts will always be the better path.