Business isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon where you need to focus on managing your work pace to reach your destination.
While this seems like a logical statement, most entrepreneurs and careerists get caught in a fast-paced environment. It’s not uncommon to fall into a sprinting work pace routine where business owners work 7 days a week, sacrificing sleep and social relationships to the company. In the long term, a race isn’t sustainable. It’s an exhausting process that requires both physical and mental endurance, which nobody can maintain through exhaustion.
Additionally, wanting to do everything too fast can lead to harmful decisions and processes. You need to learn to slow down your work pace. You must hit the brakes and take your time to drive your business to success.
Managing your work pace
Running a business requires a combination of skills. While you might have a great business idea, that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to lead a company successfully in a fast-paced environment. On the contrary, you want to take things slow so you can build up the skills you need as a business owner.
Improving your leadership know-how can go a long way. It’s hard to communicate effectively with a team, and even less if you want to sprint through the business marathon! Therefore, learning to convince, manage, and motivate can be a game-changer.
Read twice, decide once
Every individual produces 1.7MB of data every second of every day. That is a lot of data to consume and digest. Therefore, it can be helpful to make time to read through important documents and projects. Reading on a screen is not always the best option as we tend to scan diagonally through the page.
Instead, you want to use a printing program, such as the Epson Business Inkjet Office Printers, to make sure your company always has a functioning printer in-house. Reading complex information on paper makes it more understandable. You can break it down into manageable chunks of data and make notes as you go. The bottom line: Entrepreneurs need to make reliable decisions based on the information available. Therefore, you can’t rush through the process!
You can’t rush for an opportunity
Business opportunities are everywhere. As a new business owner, you may assume that your task is to spot and seize all the opportunities that arise. Yet, the strategy could be counterproductive and damaging. Indeed, an opportunity is only beneficial when it suits your business vision and progress.
That’s precisely why it’s crucial to have a fair audit of your business strengths and weaknesses using a SWOT analysis. Once you understand where your business stands, you are in a better position to consider how opportunities could propel you forward. Just because the opportunity is here, it doesn’t mean it’s yours to take or good for you.
Fast pace harms EQ
Your EQ, or emotional intelligence, is the art of understanding and managing emotions, both yours and the people around you. A fast-paced workplace heightened stress, frustrations, and frictions, leading to emotional imbalance. Trying to win the business race makes it hard to maintain trustworthy and valuable relationships with your staff and partners.
Why go fast and fail when you can go slowly and win in the long term? It’s the famous fable of the tortoise and the hare by Aesop and later reprised by La Fontaine. The hare, for all its speed, never won the race. So, this year, be a tortoise in business.
