Last year, I took over a small second office next to the one I have now. I’ve had it painted and recarpeted. But setting it up and getting my current office painted / recarpeted seems overwhelming.

I know. I know. I’ve got to make the time to plan out how I want it to all look, what I want to get out of it, where I want what, etc. because my current office just feels too congested.

But I find it overwhelming.

It’s the same with clothes. Sometimes I’ll put clothes on myself (or my son) on a Saturday morning and my wife will look at me and say:

“You’re not going to wear that, are you?”

I guess we all have our strengths and weaknesses.
And while I find writing easy now (although I didn’t in the beginning. I can remember my sister’s father in law tearing me to shreds over just how bad the writing I created for a seminar I spoke at once was) there are things which I
don’t have a natural talent for.

My advice for all of this stuff: focus on your strenghts.

For instance, I am not very “handy” around the house. I don’t fix cars. Or hang up pictures. Or put up dryers on the wall. Or any of that sort of stuff.

The thought of it overwhelms me.

However I can make a quick phone call and pay a handyman $50 an hour to do it. He’ll do it quicker and faster than me and I can focus the time I would have spent on it towards building my business or enjoying my life.

How about you?

Which tasks do you find overwhelming because they are just not your thing?

Why don’t you hand them over to someone else?

For instance, if I want to learn a new piece of software, I’ll seek someone out who has already mastered it and ask for their advice.

I won’t try and wade through hours and hours of online tutorials to learn in 3 hours what a master could teach me in 30 minutes.

I’ll get my mechanic to fix my car rather than doing it myself.

I’ll get my doctor or naturopath to look at me when I am sick.

Personally, I consider myself like an advertising doctor. So if you’ve got an ad or sales letter which seems to overwhelming, why don’t you get me to critique it by hopping along to http://www.scottbywater.com/critique

I woke up today with a stuffy nose. A tickle in my throat and feeling less than 100%.

It seems I’ve come down with a cold.

Which is good in a way – as it explains why I’ve been a bit off centre the last few days.

And it’s bad in a way too, as it destroys my long record without a cold since I started getting more sunshine and salt water swims. So a bit of a blow to my pride ;-(

Anyway, that brings me to the point I wanted to make today.

Over Xmas, I bought a business book about Aesop’s Fables. And from memory, one of Aesop’s Fables is
about the ox and the fly.

In a nutshell, it goes like this.

The fly sits on the ox’s head one day and thinks he is annoying the ox.

“Am I bothering you, ox?” he says.

And the ox replies…

“No, I didn’t even know you were there.”

Now I can’t remember how the author interpreted this story.

But I interpret the fly being the problems I face on a day to day basis.

And whenever I have a problem, I now visualise it as a fly…

If someone is bothering me…

If I have a cold…

If a marketing strategy isn’t working the way it should…

If my web designer is taking forever to get something done the right way…

… whatever.

By visualising myself as an ox and the problems I face as just a little fly, it allows me to remainfocused on the end goal and not get distracted.

So today… start to see yourself as bigger than your problems.

After all, to get where you are today, you have to have beaten all of your problems.

Nothing has killed you yet, right?

It’s only made you stronger?

Do you think the jockey who won last years Melbourne Cup would have won if he had hopped on a horse with a broken leg?

Of course not.

And it’s the same in business.

You are the jockey.

But if you’re on the wrong horse, you probably won’t move very fast.

For instance, I wrote a piece of sales copy once which flopped like a dead fish.

And based on my other successes with that company, I believe my success had more to do with the fact I got handed a product where I was so restricted in what I had to say, it was hard to get the horse moving.

Personally, I thought I did a good job as the jockey. And that the horse failed me.

And it can happen in so many other instances in business.

Think about it:

If you’re a salesperson selling to an unqualified customer, you can deliver the best presentation in the world. But you are delivering it to the wrong customer (horse) so you’re not going to hit a winner.

If you’re in a business where margins are low and you have massive amounts of competition, you could limit your ability to capitalise on your skills simply because the horse (business) you are riding is too old, grumpy and seen its best days.

If you’re trying to train salespeople, but you picked staff with a bad attitude, no matter how good of a trainer you are, you probably won’t win the race.

If you’re a consultant who gets a difficult client who refuses to follow your guidance, they are not going to progress because at the end of the day… you can lead a horse to water… but you can’t make it drink.

The bottom line to all this is:

Choose your horse carefully.

And think twice before taking on a client, going into business, hiring staff, or meeting with a potential customer.

If you’ve built your skills up, you probably know you are the right jockey.

So make sure you choose your horse carefully or you’ll never end up a winner.