If you only had 5 hours a day to work…

An interesting question posed by Seth Godin this morning" 

One way to do indispensable work is
to show up more hours than everyone else. Excessive face time and
candle-burning effort is sort of rare, and it's possible to leverage it
into a kind of success.

But if you're winning by cheating the
clock, you're still cheating.

The problem with using time as your
lever for success is that it doesn't scale very well. 20 hours a day at
work is not twice as good as 18, and you certainly can't go much beyond
24…

What would happen if you were prohibited from working more
than five hours a day. What would you do? How would you use those five
hours to become indispensable in a different way?

Go ahead, try
it. Just for a week. See what happens. Even if you go back to ten,
you'll discover you've changed the way you compete.

When you’re ready to start something, ask these questions…

With thanks to Seth Godin.

1. Who are you trying to please?
2. Are you trying to make a living, make a difference, or leave a
   legacy?
3. How will the world be different when you've succeeded?
4. Is it more important to add new customers or to increase your
   interactions with existing ones?
5. Do you want a team? How big? (I know, that's two questions)
6. Would you rather have an open-ended project that's never done, or
   one where you hit natural end points? (How high is high enough?)
7. Are you prepared to actively sell your stuff, or are you expecting
   that buyers will walk in the door and ask for it?
8. Which: to invent a category or to be just like Bob/Sue, but better?
9. If you take someone else's investment, are you prepared to sell out
   to pay it back?
10. Are you done personally growing, or is this project going to force
    you to change and develop yourself?
11. Choose: teach and lead and challenge your customers, or do what they
    ask…
12. How long can you wait before it feels as though you're succeeding?
13. Is perfect important? (Do you feel the need to fail privately, not
    in public?)
14. Do you want your customers to know each other (a tribe) or is it
    better they be anonymous and separate?
15. How close to failure, wipe out and humiliation are you willing to
    fly? (And while we're on the topic, how open to criticism are you
    willing to be?)
16. What does busy look like?

In my experience, people skip all of these questions and ask instead:
"What can I do that will be sure to work?" The problem, of course, is
that there is no sure, and even worse, that you and I have no
agreement at all on what it means for something to work.

Socks!

Great post by Seth Godin about a remarkable little company. Am always a fan of mixed up socks.

Apologies for the delay in posting. My blog provider changed the way we post and it has taken some time to figure out the new MO. Quite frustrating really. Weird interface things like now flashing cursor so you're not quite sure where text is going to end up. And an inability to load videos at this point…ugh!