This is a short transcript excerpt of Simon Sinek discussing time-management and delegation for business leaders and entrepreneurs. Sinek emphasizes prioritizing important over urgent tasks (Eisenhower matrix), delegating or outsourcing work despite short-term dips, and adopting different ‘hats’ (leader vs doer) to focus on strategy versus execution. He also distinguishes entrepreneurs from small business owners.
We've all suffered focusing on the urgent at the expense of the important. Dwight Eisenhower used to talk about this. He called them, they've been since called the Eisenhower principles, where you organize basically all the things you have to do based on what's urgent, what's important. The things you do first are the important urgent things, then you do the important non urgent things, then you get to urgent and unimportant and unimportant and unurgent. And the opportunity is what can you delegate?
Jack Daly, the famous sales coach, says, if you don't have an assistant, you are one. Basically what it means is we need help, everybody needs help. And it has nothing to do with being an assistant. It means that there are things that we can actually give away that we don't think we can, or there's things that we don't actually have to do. If you're like me, I focus on the urgent stuff as a means of procrastination, you know, because I can get that stuff done and I know I can do it. And the whole idea is like, I'm just gonna do it because I can do it better. Yes, but you're driving yourself crazy and you're gonna hurt your business. There may be a short term dip. Like one of the mistakes that she made was, how can I focus on everything and make this transition without losing anything? Well, if you're gonna start to delegate and teach somebody something, there may be a short term dip in, in performance, but that's only while there is a learning curve. And so ultimately you have to accept that there's no such thing as teaching somebody and maintaining steep growth. And you cannot go back to the, I'll just do it myself. And you have to make a decision, what are the things that I have to work on and only I can work on and what are things that I can delegate, Automate, ask for help, outsource. And the more you can do that, the more you learn to ask for help, the more you start working up and out versus down and in. One of the things that I found helpful as well is to think of myself as my own employee, right? So I have two hats. I have leader hat and I've got doer hat, right? And so I'll make decisions as to like, okay, I'm in leader mode now. I'm going to focus on up and out. I'm going to focus on networking, I'm going to focus on strategy. And I accept that doing will have to come a little later. And then I put on my doer hat. So I sort of like force myself to recognize that I'm focusing too much on urgent at the expense of importance. So I remember that I have two hats that I have to wear. Both.
Small business owners own small businesses. Entrepreneurs solve problems. There are entrepreneurs in big companies. They're entrepreneurially minded, right? They're problem solvers. They're a little more maverick than everyone else. There are people who have small businesses who are not entrepreneurs. They just run small, healthy lifestyle businesses perfectly fine, but they sort of go through the motions. And so I think there's a couple questions, which is if somebody wants to start their own business.
I think they have to be brutally honest with themselves as the reasons why. Because an entrepreneurial venture is balanced, just like having a job is balanced. Like when you have a corporate job, you work for an established company, you know, your highs are not that high, but your lows are not that low. It's balanced, right? Like a win is exciting but a loss, you know, it's like it's over here when you do your own thing. The highs are amazing and the lows are excruciating, right? It's balanced. And so everybody wants this, but not everybody has the gut for this. And so I think somebody has to recognize that it's the thrill of the journey because you may not make more money than you used to make. And so the question is, is it worth it? And you may be working more hours than you used to for the same amount of money. So the question is, why are you doing this? You have to be crystal clear why you're doing this. And if you are clear on why you're doing it and the, the reasons are compelling. Meaning you're running to something, not away from something, then quite frankly, the risk seems to just go down. You start to feel like, I have to do this, I have to give it a try. We're very lucky that we live in the United States, because in the United States we love the try. If you live somewhere else in Europe, for example, people look down on failure. And so people are more risk averse. Here. If you try something and it doesn't work out, we're like fricking great. You know, we love that. And I think when you set out, make sure you know who you're going to ask for help, you know, because you cannot do it alone. No one of us is strong enough or smart enough to build a business by ourselves. And I don't mean we have to hire people. It means we need support, we need emotional support, we need advice, we need people to lean on. We need people who've done it before. Doesn't mean we follow all the advice, but. But we have to be really good at saying, I don't know and I need help. And if you have that nagging curiosity, it's kind of like, you know, you saw something in a store and you're still thinking about it, maybe you should just go back and buy it. It's the same thing. Like, if you're still thinking about it, but you're doing it for the right reasons, you're not doing it because I hate my boss, I'm just going to start my own business. But you're doing it because you believe you have a better mousetrap, because there's a better way of doing this, that there's a problem you can solve that hasn't been solved solved. Or you just believe you can do it in a way that nobody else wants to do it. You're frustrated, then it's the greatest, most exciting, scary, wonderful, awful, fantastic, brilliant thing you'll ever do, all at the same time. Yeah.
