3 Foolproof Ways to Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome as a Physician Entrepreneur

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If you really, really, really want to live a life where the shiny object doesn't get you, you gotta get comfortable being bored. There's nothing in life, really that is worth a lot that keeps you in this excited state forever. That's not the way it works. Hi, docs. Welcome to the on podcast where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you, embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, Dr. Una. Well, hello. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of the on trendy podcast. One of the things that I've noticed that entrepreneurs struggle with a lot is shiny object syndrome Syndrome. They are working in their business. Things get a little challenging or things get a little boring and they start finding other things they could do, other businesses they can start. And you know, every good entrepreneur has 72,000 new ideas every time they take a shower. And so we are very prone to shiny object syndrome. So what I want to do is today I want to show you the antidote to the shiny object syndrome so you can become this person who follows the yellow brick road, who builds the business of your dream. Don't get distracted and it's going to be amazing. Okay, so. So shiny object syndrome is something that I have not personally struggled a whole lot with because I learned what I'm about to show you pretty early on, but I have watched it cripple so many amazing businesses. So an entrepreneur starts out, they're doing really well, they're bringing in the revenue, they're serving their patients at the highest level, serving their clients at the highest level. And then they get this brand new idea and they almost ignore the original business and make it like a stepchild and throw all their energy into these new. That is, you know, shiny is fun, it's something new, but it doesn't have anything to do with where they're going. Right? Um, sometimes people have a private practice and it gets hard and they pick up something not because it's not a strategic decision, but they pick up something because it got hard. Right? And so they may decide, I am going to start a course or I'm going to coach and all of that. And again, not strategically is just to get rid of the pain that they would have to go through. And when I say pain, it's more like discomfort they would have to go to to take their practice to the next level. Right. Or sometimes they figure, you know, I want to be a speaker and all this stuff and all that stuff is good. Don't get me wrong, I do all of those things. But again, it's not strategic. The reason behind it is they know, well, I have to build a team. I need to hold my team accountable so they can get bigger results. There's a critical hire I need to get, I need to work on my processes. And when they think about all that, they're like, forget it. And they find something nice and shiny and new and you know, they live in the energy of that and they don't focus on primary business. I remember a mentor of mine said, you never kill. You never kill the cash cow, right? Like when, you know, especially when you have a business it's already established, is doing really well. You know, it's funding other things that you want to do. It's funding your life is funding your dream life is funding maybe investing that. You're doing all of those things and all of a sudden you take away your attention to it and put it into something that is really a shiny object, right? So it is something that is dangerous. The ability to stay with something and see it through is a very powerful thing. If you think about, think about professional athletes, right? Like elite athletes, they're not going from sports to sport to sports. They're in a sport, they're mashing the sport, they're getting better at it, they're becoming the world class in it. Am I saying do only one thing? I identify as a Serial entrepreneur. Of course, I'm not telling you that. But you needs to be a strategic decision, not something you do to get away because things are hard in your business or things are boring in your business. Okay, so what is the. What is the overarching thing? Like, what is the one thing that makes it really easy to identify shiny objects as what they are? Which is just that shiny objects, they're distractions. And for me, what I find that is. Is leaning into your why. Right? Your why is something that you want to be very aware of. It wants. You want it to be something that you think about all the time. You want it to be something that has a. At the forefront of your mind. And for me, I am so tuned into it. I am so dialed in. I have it on my mind all the time. I attend my 90th birthday party a lot, and I'm like, okay, this is where I want to be at that time. These are the results I wanted to have created. These are the accomplishments I want to have had. These are the things I want my business to have done. And so if that's the case today, I'm burning daylight like, I'm 45. I have 45 more years until that is a reality. And if that's going to be reality or not is tied to what I do now. And so when I think about that, when I travel to my 90th birthday and I really think about where I would want to be at that time, it's very easy for me to see, well, this is something that takes me there. This is something that takes me away from there. This is a complete distraction. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. It becomes a lot clearer. It becomes a lot clearer. This is taking me in the direction. This is not so. It. It. It really is this beautiful editing tool. Knowing your why. It's a beautiful editing tool because it makes everything else make sense, right? And so you want to think about that like, what is your why? Right? What is your why? You know, with my private practice, my why was really giving patients the experience of not the. Not the black and white and cold experience in health care, right? For me, I was like, I wanted them to come to a place that was warm and it was friendly, and they felt like these were their family members and. And cousins and friends who just happen to be medical professionals, right? And I want them to be a number. I wanted them to have that experience, right? And I also wanted my team to have the experience where they're like, this is the absolute best place where I've ever worked. I want them to identify my practice as a place where they grew the most professionally. And then I wanted to build a practice that, you know, beat the odds. That was a profitable practice and we were able to. It was a sustainable practice, and it's a practice that could work without me. Right? So it was a model practice, if you will. So those were the things that drove me. And then when it got to entremd, the driver is, I want to help a hundred thousand doctors build profitable businesses. I want to rewrite the narrative for physician communities, for the physician community. Because now the narrative is a private practice doesn't work. Doctors suck as entrepreneurs. If you're a coach, you can't replace your physician salary with coaching. You know, woe is us. And all of those things. Our healthcare system is completely messed up and all of that, which a lot of those things, you know, like, especially with the challenges in the healthcare space, like, it's true. But the thing is this, we're not going to run away. The healthcare space needs a calvary, needs saviors. It needs a leader. Not leaders that are going to emerge and say, okay, this is what we're going to do for that. And, you know, I've decided we, we need empowered physicians. And so I'm going to empower physicians, and they're going to turn the system right side up, right? And so that's my why. And when I think about it and, you know, so there are many shiny things that come my way, and I'm like, if it's taking me there, I'm like, no, it becomes very easy because this is where I'm going, right? And so reconnect with your why. Tune into it doesn't have to be perfect, but you have it. What is it? Why are you doing what you do? Right? You really want to lean into that. Okay, so, but this is the thing. We're humans, and humans, we like new things, you know, like, we love that honeymoon period of the new things. And we're not just gonna sit and do the same old boring thing in, in, you know, day in and day out and all. So practically, you know, like, okay, I'm tuned in with my why, but I'm still susceptible to this whole, you know, shiny object syndrome thing. And so what can I do? What can I do to save myself from the shiny object syndrome? Okay, so I'll give you a few things.

Number one.

Number one is you want to do something new, you can do something new, but do it within your old business, right? And so Let me break that down. You know what that could look like? So say you own a private practice or you could be a coach. You could be any, any business at all, really. And you have this itch. I want to go try this new thing, right? You can build that new thing within your practice. I'll give you an example with, with Entre md, right? You know, I may want to do, I may want to innovate, right? And I want to try new things and all of that. I have so many opportunities to try new things within the business that I already have, right? I have the opportunity to completely revamp the way that we market. It's a new thing, right? I completely revamp the way the business is administered with the type of team that I have. You know, like if I only had admin people, what about marketing people? What about sales people? What about operations people? What about executive level, level leadership, right? I have different ways of, I have ways I market. What if I try new ways of marketing? So maybe I've done, you know, workshops. What if I start doing, you know, like frequent live events and that becomes the way I promote it or whether I, whether I do a speaking tour and I start going to a associations and all these places to speak about what I do. Like I can do so many new and exciting things within the business that I already have, right? If you're somebody who's in private practice, like we've done all kinds of fun new things, right? Like we've brought email marketing in like the same way an online business will do it. And we try that out in the practice. We had the challenges with the great resignation and we built our own system to train medical assistants for the practice, right? And that's a whole thing that we, we built and it's almost like building a new business so it bring all that fun and excitement and something new and all those kind of things. Right now we're in the middle of considering like a new model, right? As far as bringing in new physicians and things like that. And so we get to innovate and we get to do all these fun things, but we're doing them within the business. Some of you have verticals or you have verticals that are so congruent with your practice, right? You bring those verticals in, it's something new. But we're trying to keep it all within and direct all our energy into the one big thing that will give us the biggest impact, the biggest financial returns, the big, biggest time returns. And we truly spend the time, you know, building it as an asset that we can walk away from if we choose. And so think about it. You want to do something new. How can you take something old that's already in your business and do it in a new way? How can you take something you haven't really paid attention and you know, to. And do it like you mean it, right? Like, how could you do that? You. You know, we call our, you know, like patients coming in door to door. We call that the assembly line, okay? And we don't call it to be cold, but we call it so that we can measure efficiencies and all of that. And so. And so, you know, the assembly line, you can bring that. That becomes a project. Like, how can we make this more efficient? How can we make it a better experience? How can we drastically reduce the wait times? How can we do all of those things? That's innovation. That's something new within something old. So all that energy that you want to use for new things, use it within the business that you already have.

Have, right?

So that's the first thing. The second thing is if you're looking for something new and shiny different, all of this stuff, immortalize your business. Immortalize your business. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. I was listening to somebody, and, you know, I was listening to him, is talking about, I don't know, something about purpose or. I don't remember what it was, but I was so. It was a YouTube video. I was so moved by it. It felt like he was talking to me. I was like, this is wild. And then I thought about it. I was like, this man has been dead for 10 years. This man has been dead for 10 years, and his life is still changing my life, like, completely blowing my mind, even though he's been dead for a decade. And it dawned on me that day that you can actually live forever. You can live forever if you will download you into something else that will be here when you're gone, okay? And so when I talk about immortalizing your business, there's the big part of it, which is, you know, building a business that can work without you. So that even after you're gone, whether that's you, you know, walking away and retiring, or, you know, you're gone, either way, it's still here, right? You build it that way. But then, you know, think about, you know, like, I have a client, Dr. Karen Kaufman, who's an allergist, and she's a phenomenal allergist, and she's built. She's building a really amazing you know, like business practice. And she's doing so well. But imagine she launches a podcast and she's talking about those core things about allergy and what the parents need to do for their kids in the spring and what, you know, like, what the, you know, what they need to do in the fall and what they need to do if they're in sports and, you know, what kind of equipment to get all of those kind of things. And, you know, like, she does an episode a week for five years, that's over 250 episodes. But that's something that will be there after she's gone. It'll be there for a really long time, and it can continue changing. Like, it can have such demand that it's a national thing. Like, she's known as the voice of allergy and immunology. And after. After she's gone that. I mean, when I say after she's gone, we don't even have to go that far. But it establishes her as an authority. It will open so many other doors. And the truth of the matter is, if you want something shiny, that's something shiny that will work perfectly for. It could be that. It could be a YouTube channel, it could be books. You know, it could be all of those kind of things you do that really just immortalize it could be processes that you've built, you know, like that, you know, can make your business like a business asset, but could also help other businesses and things like that. So you're looking for where to innovate, or you're looking for where to, you know, put all this energy that you would give the shiny object. Like, you can put the energy there and it will make all the difference in the world, right? So that's the second thing. So the first thing is you can innovate within your business. The second thing is you can immortalize your business, right? And so this is the reason I buy, I write books. This is the reason I have the podcast that I have. This is the reason that I am working so hard to fine tune the content of entremd so it becomes this formalized curriculum. This is the reason why I do all of those things, right? Because I know I, you know, I can do. And so this is. This is my shiny object, but it was within my business, okay? And it's working for me because guess what my podcast is doing? It's attracting new people that I can impact, and some of them will eventually go on to work with me. Guess what my books are doing? Changing lives everywhere. Number of people have come and they're like, oh, my goodness. I started a practice because of what you said. I started hiring people because of what you said, like, all of these things. So it's changing so many lives. It's like massively increasing my impact, attracting new clients for me to work with and all of those things, creating opportunities for me. So this is the deal, right? Like, it's working for me now. It worked for me then. And that shiny object energy, I can use it here. And then the third thing, if you really, really, really want to live a life where the shiny object doesn't get you, you got to get comfortable being bored. You got to get comfortable being bored. There's nothing in life, really, that. That is worth a lot that, you know, keeps you in this excited state forever. It's. That's not the way it works. There are many marriages where, you know, that's the problem. They want like a high, high, high, high, high the entire time. But there's Sometimes you're really just cooking or taking care of kids or. And so there are ebbs and flows and there's a rhythm and all of that stuff. But you gotta be okay just sitting with your spouse and just sitting. You know what I mean? Boredom is not bad. It's not bad. It's like raising kids. It's always a hi, hi. It's not always like that, but that doesn't make it bad. Like, there's some boredom. That's okay. I actually read an article and a guy was making a case for allowing kids to be bored. Like, the constant stimulation dampens their creativity and all that. Like, give them strength, space to be bored and to think how to come up with stuff and have downtime, right? And so boredom is not bad, and you want to sit and be okay with it. Like, sometimes things can be quote, unquote, boring. But this is not. This is not a problem. This is not a problem that needs to be fixed. Right? And the more you can tolerate boredom, the less at risk you be, you know, the less of a victim you'll be. Right. When it comes to the shiny object syndrome. And so why is this important is so critical because there's so many businesses that could have become, you know, big entities that could have helped a lot of people, that created a lot of time, freedom of financial freedom for the owners. But, you know, like, shiny object syndrome keep. Kept getting the better of them. I have. I have people in my world I've worked with and really, like, my only job is just to help them stick to one thing. Like, every time they tell me, and I thought I would do this, I just say, no. Like, no, you can't do it right. And if all I did was told them no, they'll be so successful that that's all they need is, no, don't do it. Right. But I want to invite you to not be a victim, right? Not be a victim of Shiny Object Syndrome. The business you have deserves the attention that you can give it. So I want you to embrace these things. I want you to start playing around with innovating your business. I want you to start playing with immortalizing your business as you create the bandwidth. And I want you to play around with just being comfortable being bored, because it's not a bad thing. Okay? So imagine that. I want you to imagine that, yes, you get your. Your fix because you're doing all these new things, but you're doing them in the context of your primary business or the business you're working on at the time. And you build something that really has the potential to have a lot of impact, to change a lot of lives, to create a lot of financial freedom for you and time freedom, and you are able to avoid the distraction that is the Shiny Object Syndrome. Okay? So go practice this, share this with the doctors in your life, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Entre Envia Podcast. It.