This article is contributed by Jason Dirkham.
It’s the kind of thing we all hear, at multiple points throughout our lives – and it’s the kind of thing that seems to make good, intuitive sense, too.
“Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do,” “you are going to have to grind through with stuff you don’t enjoy at your job,” and various other words to that effect.
It might be that this is true. It’s certainly the case that most of us do end up doing things in our professional lives that we don’t really enjoy – even when it comes to running our own businesses, and being hypothetically completely in charge of things.
Interestingly enough, though, more and more figures within the entrepreneurial world are claiming that they actively avoid doing things they don’t like in their careers, even if those things are hypothetically supposed to have the power to radically benefit customer engagement, sales, or anything else.
If there are various things that you absolutely hate doing, but feel compelled to do for your business – such as maintaining active social media profiles, and tweeting and blogging routinely for “improved customer engagement” – here are a few reasons why it might be best just to stop doing those things at all.
There are plenty of companies, freelancers, and services to do it for you
Even if you take it as a given that it really is the case that you need to do certain things that you hate, in order for your business thrive, it’s still not actually the case that “you,” specifically, would have to be the one to do those things.
These days, it’s easy to find all sorts of different specialists within a few minutes on the web, who can address many of the potential issues, and fill many of the potential roles that need to be filled, within a company. If you hate SEO, an SEO company can handle the job for you – and probably better than you would, too.
Even if you’re particularly concerned with cost constraints, it may well be the case that you could get those things you hate doing, done, simply by seeking out a freelancer who is available to work within your budget.
It’s never been easier to find freelancers, companies, and services to handle a broad spectrum of different tasks within a business – so, you may as well take advantage of that fact, rather than making your life more miserable as a result of doing a bunch of stuff you hate.
In order to succeed in business you need to be good – and you’re unlikely to be good at something you despise
Hopefully it won’t come as a surprise to anyone to hear that in order to run a successful business, you need to be good at what it is you’re doing. And, of course, “being good” is no small thing, and it’s not always a straightforward matter of putting in the hours, or hammering away at a task or project.
Here’s the thing; if you absolutely hate doing something, the odds are very slim indeed that you are actually going to be good at it – least of all that you will be good enough at it to do it justice, and get the presumed benefit out of it that you want.
The majority of prospective customers will likely be able to tell when the marketing materials they are encountering have been produced by someone who felt absolutely no enthusiasm for the job at all. And number crunches who hate number-crunching and aren’t very good at it, are much more likely to end up costing the company a significant amount, due to poorly done sums, or oversights.
Focus on doing the stuff that you are good at. That will usually be stuff that you actually enjoy doing.
Find some other solution for the things that you hate and aren’t good at – whether that means hiring someone else to handle that stuff, or whether it means just not doing it at all.
Your time is one of your top resources, and your energy is another – it’s important to spend them wisely
Every entrepreneur needs to carefully calculate and weigh up the resources they have available to use in their business, as well as any other projects they may be contemplating.
Of course, money is the resource that comes to mind first and foremost, but there’s a good argument to be made that time and energy are actually even more important resources to track, as a rule.
For one thing, everything that you want to achieve within your professional life – or just your life in general – has to be done within the constraints of time. If you waste too much of your time, you just won’t have enough of it to do the things that are more meaningful.
Then, there’s energy. If you, as an entrepreneur, are “burned out” all the time, it’s unlikely that you’re going to have what it takes to really take your business to the heights you want to take it to.
Doing work you hate will take time, and it will drain you of your energy to a disproportionate degree. This may seem like a fair trade for now, but once you’ve been at it for a while, it might end up costing you the “resources” that you need for the more pressing work that you actually enjoy.
Life is just too short to do things that make you miserable
Life, as we all know, is pretty short. Far too short, in fact, if we are ambitious and busy enough, to do everything we could conceivably want to do with it.
When you spend a significant amount of your time in life doing things that you really do not like to do, you’re likely to become pretty miserable, and to not feel as though you have spent your time as well as you possibly could have.
It’s difficult to look back at years spent in a state of more or less chronic irritation and misery, due to the fact that you were frequently engaged in doing things that you just hated to do. That’s something worth keeping in mind, and may be a decent reason for not doing those things in the first place.
This article is contributed by Jason Dirkham.
