George Kao argues that illness shouldn't stop you from building your business, only slow it down. After seven years coaching entrepreneurs, he's seen people use health setbacks as excuses to halt entirely. His advice: rest and skip major performances, but keep doing short tasks and incremental work.
Hi, I'm George Kao. Today I have a cold and I could have taken the day off, taken the week off and not made this video because it would be an imperfect video. But I decided to do it anyway because even though I'm not feeling well and it's going to be imperfect video, I realized that all of my videos are imperfect, right? And at the same time, all of my videos are per perfect. As a journal of my life and thoughts in the moment, this brings me to the realization that in the course of the seven years where I've been working for myself full time for 7 years, I teach and coach entrepreneurs for a living. I have encountered thousands of entrepreneurs and many of them use excuses to stop them from making progress. They say, well, I'm not feeling well today or I'm not feeling well during this time in my life, so I'm not going to be able to build a business or someone so and so is not feeling well, so I'm going to take care of them so I can't build my business. Now, I'm not saying that you should be expected to perform at the same level as if everything were perfect in your life. I'm not saying that. But I am saying to be very wary, allowing excuses, even health excuses, to stop you from making progress on your dreams. So, for example, I did have to make adjustments this week because I just started the cold just started yesterday. Today I feel worse, tomorrow I'm probably not going to feel a whole lot better. So I canceled my two hour class. I was going to teach a two hour class tomorrow and I postponed it for a week because I won't be able to perform for two hours straight anywhere. It wouldn't be fair for the students. However, I'm not postponing the creating of my slideshow. I can work on that on my own. I'm not postponing other projects I could work on where I don't have to be performing steadily for two hours or whatever. I could just work on a couple minutes here, a couple minutes there. And here's the thing, you might say, well, George, you're being too harsh on yourself. Well, I will say back to you, is that you actually, if you're making excuses, you're being too harsh on yourself because you are actually believing that you have to do things perfectly when I just believe that everything's already perfect anyway and things are going to work out really amazingly for you and for me. So we're just asked in this life to do what we can to keep learning and to keep contributing. So ironically, I think you're ironically. I'm not being too harsh on myself because I can do this video, you know, imperfectly, and I'm okay with that. Right. And so what my final advice in this video is to, yes, make some adjustments to rest more when you're sick. I'm gonna I'm napping a lot more yesterday and today and the rest of the week. However, don't let that excuse stop you from making progress. You can make any progress. It's all going to be perfect. The progress you make now, no matter how unwell you feel, is perfect. And just keep learning and contributing. That's all. You're well taken care of anyway in the bigger scheme of things. So until the next video, I wish you diligence coming from a place of knowing that all is well for you and all will be well for you. Take care.
