Don't Do ANYTHING You Don't Want to Do

Imagine you run into an old friend at the gym and they ask how you are. You say you're busy, exhausted, overwhelmed. You're really trying, you're pushing, and you're doing all you can to get things moving in a positive direction in your business and in your life. Common answers, right? Well, what's the one flawed, common denominator to all of these most common answers? It's doing things you don't want want to do. So it's completely counterintuitive, the title of this podcast episode, because a thousand coaches on the Internet are telling you that you're just gonna have to put your nose to the grind. You're just gonna have to do hard things you hate doing if you want to make it big. But I'm here to tell you why. Never doing things you don't want to do is a much faster way to rendezvousing with your dream business and life results. You interested? You're listening to the Universe has yous Business. It's the podcast for rising entrepreneurs, coaches and change makers who are here to achieve more while letting the universe do the heavy lifting. I'm your host, Andrew Donovan. I promise you, in this conversation, we're going to explore the topic of doing things, of hustling things, as someone just put it in a slightly new way that you're used to. But the first thing that I want to point out is how ironic it might sound for a business coach, a business mentor, to tell you, you shouldn't do anything that you don't want to do. That's not something that you typically hear. Right? Don't most coaches say, oh, you're going to have to work extra hard or you're going to have to hustle. You're going to have to push through, you're going to have to sacrifice things. You're going to have to eat that frog, which is a book that I'm going to talk about in just a little bit. The first thing that I want to over in this episode is you've heard about it, the 8020 rule. So let me ask you this. You hear from so many coaches that hustle and grind is just part of the equation, right? We've heard that from so many speakers, books that we've read that you heard the term grind and hustle. In fact, I mean, there are so many variants around hustle as a hashtag on social media. It's clear that hustling tends to be an attribute that we, for some reason, praise. We say, wow, look at that person. They suffered for a while. So they must have really earned their title or their fortune or their following or whatever we've used to measure their success. But when you look at your life and you look at the times when you force yourself to put your nose to the grind, is that part of your life that you'd say, ooh, I want to do more of that. I want to repeat that. Probably not for a lot of it, unless you're in alignment, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But thinking about this 8020 rule, what does this mean to you? The typical definition is that 80% of the results are from 20% of the work. Correct. But if I were to be a little fly on the wall for most people's businesses who are listening to this episode, it's probably a pretty safe bet to guess that I would watch you doing a lot of the 80% of the work that produces very little to no results. Am I accurate? Most of the time, when we've got a struggling entrepreneur, the struggle is the operative word. They're struggling, spinning their wheels in the mud, doing activities that don't produce a lot of result. So then that begs the question, why are you doing that? A lot of the struggle. A lot of the struggle, Hustle, efforty, push through, nose to the grind kind of stuff. Isn't most of that the stuff that you don't really want to do? Because if you wanted to do it, it wouldn't feel like the grind, it wouldn't feel like the struggle. Right. If you want to do it, it would be pleasurable. It would be the enjoyable parts of your business. And ironically, the stuff that you really get excited to do, if you allowed yourself to really flourish there, if you allowed yourself to take the things in your business that you love doing, and you said, okay, I tend to be really good at ABC and xyz. How could I leverage that to have a positive and intense impact on my business's profitability? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Knowing the 8020 rule and knowing that 80% of results tend to come from 20% of activities, if you then said, I'm going to identify the few things that I really love doing in my business, and then I'm going to ask the question, how could I leverage my passion and my power there to produce higher profitability? And then all the other things that aren't super necessary, the things that I don't love doing, what if I offloaded those or cut them out completely or hired them out or ditched them because, well, they're causing me pain and Suffering and pain and suffering is, isn't very profitable. Right. So that's the first thing that I want you to just kind of explore a little bit in your mind. In my businesses, sometimes I've looked at that 80, 20 rule idea and I've identified things that could be highly profitable that I really don't want to do. And so you know what I did? I didn't do them. And I'm still sitting here as someone who owns multiple six and seven figure online businesses. And I will tell you right now, I live hard. Instead, I live very steadfast to this principle of not doing something that I don't want to do. All right, let me tell you where this whole idea came from. So I was at a law of attraction workshop with my spouse Jeffrey, and the speaker talked about this idea. They said, don't do anything you don't want to do. Follow the joy, follow your bliss. Immediately my emotional guards came up and I thought, oh great. So now my spouse is going to not do things that I want him to do and he's going to do things I don't want him to do. Because this stupid speaker said that. And I thought that cannot be practical. What about stuff like paying our mortgage? If I don't want to pay my mortgage, do I just not pay my mortgage? If you don't want to feed your children lunch, do you just not feed them lunch? Like this has to be bad advice, right? Well, it's been a few years since I heard this talk and since I've been percolating on this idea of don't do anything you don't want to do. And I want to put this into a little bit of a different context. Consider for a moment the idea of your path of least resistance. You're here where you are right now, in this moment. We'll call it point A. And there's somewhere you want to be. We'll call it point B. Maybe where you want to be is going from where you are now to your next hundred thousand dollars in profit or your next million dollars in profit. Or maybe you're here as a one man show in your business wearing many hats. And point B for you is you want to have a team, a staff to rely on. You want to have other employees that can share the burden of your business with you. Okay, wherever you are now, there's somewhere you want to go, right? You probably know where that next point B is for you. Well, the path between point A and point B, it's not one path. There's a Million ways you could get there. Correct. There's infinite possibilities for how you could go from point A to point B. And one of the bits of beef that I have, the very large chunks of beef that I have with coaches that say, this is the right way, I'm like, that's bullshit. There's no right way. There's infinite way ways. But think about the path of least resistance. Your path of least resistance includes limiting beliefs, obstacles, obligations, commitments you've already made. And if you were to follow the path of least resistance, that doesn't mean no resistance, Right. It means you're bumping into as little resistance as possible, which feels pretty satisfying, doesn't it? To say, ooh, I swerved around that, that obstacle, I avoided that ditch that I could have fallen to, and this was a pretty smooth ride. So for me, not doing things that I don't want to do, I'm considering the big picture, the fact that my intention to go from point A to point B is going. I want it to be my path of least resistance. If I didn't pay my mortgage, that would be a path of pretty heavy resistance, right? So it's kind of a stupid example. You're not going to not pay your mortgage just because you don't want to pay it. And if you didn't feed your children lunch, well, depending on your children, some of your kids might go and make their own lunch, some of your kids might raise hell. And that could be a path of great resistance. The point is that you're going from point A, where you are, to point B, where you want to be. And you're asking, what is my path of least resistance? And remember, the path of least resistance feels like what? It feels like satisfaction. It feels like following little positive impulses, feeling the pleasure of saying, ooh, I followed that bit of inspiration that already paid off. Ooh, I followed that next bit of inspiration. There was some benefit there. And so not doing things you don't want to do, it doesn't mean that you've got a list of all the stuff you hate and you're going to push against it and you're going to protest against it and you're going to write a book about how it sucks and tell your mentor how you refuse to do stuff. Right? That's not what it means. It's not about pushing against what you don't want. That actually would be counterproductive. Because then all of a sudden, you're inviting all of those things into your life more. Because law of attraction doesn't exclude the things you hate. It includes everything that you put your focus on. So not doing things you don't want to do for me means saying that feels like a point of high resistance. I'm going to move my focus somewhere else. Now, I know what you might be thinking, because some of your egos just flared up and it said, hold on a second. I can't not do some of these business activities that I hate because then my business would fall apart. Right? You might hate prospecting. Maybe you hate closing the sale. Maybe you don't like doing videos or live broadcasts of whatever sort. You don't like recording a podcast episode. Maybe you don't like copywriting. We all have things that we don't like to do in our businesses. So how on earth could this principle of don't do anything you don't want to do ring true all of the time? Now, let me clarify for me, it does ring true all of the time. Because here's what I do in Team Donovan, at Donovan Enterprises, in the companies that I own, we have a number of staff members that do different things. We have a rule, companies wide in all the. Everything that I run. Our rule is don't do anything you don't want to do. And you might be thinking, what? You tell your employees this. I totally do. We literally have company training meetings about this principle. Don't do anything you don't want to do. And the reason why is I tell my staff this. I say, I don't want you to do something that you have high resistance to, because then the result's not going to be great. It's going to be haphazard, or you'll just delay our timeline and you'll stretch things out forever or longer than necessary. If you don't want to do things, here's what I recommend you do. Do number one, back off it. Okay? If you've got a task and it feels heavy or clouded or confusing, back off it. Go meditate, go for a walk, go to a yoga, Pilates class, whatever. Clear your mind, reset emotionally, energetically, and then come back to it and see if you can come at it from a fresh space. Okay, That's. That's option one. Option two, if you don't want to do it, question. If it's something you should be doing, should you be delegating it to someone else? Can you go to your superior and say, I don't know if this is the. The right thing for me, if I'm the right person for this, it doesn't feel right for me. And number three, maybe you could find a different way of doing it. Maybe the way that you've been doing it isn't the only way to do it. So do you see between those three options? Number one, backing off, coming back after you've cleared your head and your heart space. Number two, asking if you're the right person to do it. Okay, maybe you're not the right person at all and someone else should be doing it. Or number three, questioning if it's the only way that it can be done. Maybe there's a different way to do it that does feel easier. Between those three things, you should never have to do anything you don't want to do. Do you see how that works? Okay, so if you know anything about me, you know that I believe more than anything else in the power of alignment. I believe that at a soul level, I know what I'm here to do. At a soul level, I know my divine infinite worth. At a soul level, I know my path of least resistance, to go from point A to point B. At a soul level, I know my true purpose and how to have maximum impact and how to live the life that I want to live. I know that I'm worth all the money that I want. I'm worth all the influence that I desire. I'm worth all the connections that I want. All of that exists for me at a soul level, right? So when I talk about alignment, I'm talking about aligning with the soul self. I'm talking about aligning with the whole of who I really am. And when I focus on my alignment, that's when I tune into ease, when I tune into flow, when I tune into joy, when I tune into inspiration, when I prioritize my alignment, first and foremost, how much time do you think I spend doing shit that I don't want to do? 0. Because it doesn't even come into my space. There's no room for it. When I'm tuned into alignment, and I'm tuned into satisfaction and ease and fun and excitement and joy and enthusiasm and invigoration and passion, there is no room in my energetic surroundings for hideous, ugly, unpleasant things to come. It's. It's a total mismatch. Do you get what I'm saying? So that's why I tell my staff members. I tell them, don't do anything you don't want to do. I tell them, go do one of those three other things and find an alternative. Find the path of least resistance. So let's come back to you and your business. You're the executive of your business. You're the CEO. You are the the person running the show, right? You're the creator, you're the conscious creator. And there are things that need to get done, right? At the end of the day, your business needs revenue, your business needs sales, your business needs marketing so that it can get sales. Your business needs prospects to fuel the machine of your business. It needs followers, it needs traffic, it needs leads, it needs human beings to come into your business ecosphere that you can then turn into sales and revenue, right? Without traffic and a business marketing on some kind of business or machine and then sales and revenue. Without those three things, there's no business. It's probably safe to say again that there are bits of all of that that you don't want to do. So what do you do? Most of the people watching this episode are likely one man shows. That's how most entrepreneurs out we're a one man show and consequently we wear several hats, right? When I first started my online, my very first online business, I wore all the hats. I was a literal one man show. I designed the graphics myself. Luckily, I was clever enough to watch YouTube videos about how to work Photoshop. And I figured it out. I was the video editor because I would film my own videos and just film them on my, on my smartphone and edit the videos. I was the web developer, I built my website, I built the sales pages, I figured out how to program in all the automations, I closed my own sales, I did the webinars, the sales presentations, I did the customer service because I was a one man show. So I responded to emails, I did the branding and aesthetics, I did all of it. And that's usually how an entrepreneur starts their first business. And if you're a one man show, you might be thinking, okay, well this is easy for Andrew Donovan to say. He's got all these employees that he can delegate stuff to. But it wasn't always that way. And I really had to practice a lot of what I'm talking about here. I had to practice a lot of backing off, meditating, refreshing, resetting myself energetically, and coming back to my business from a fresh, clear space. I had to ask myself, am I the right person to do this? And I'll tell you, because I like to be so strategic. I also like to know what other people's strategies are. That means that I get exposed to a lot of other people's really good ideas and sometimes I'll see people doing things that I think maybe I should be doing that I Could have a lot more success if I did that. And I've run into a lot of other things that I thought I should be doing that felt heavy. And thankfully I learned this concept pretty early on in my entrepreneurial journey. And so I was able to save myself a lot of pain by learning to say, no, I'm not the right person for that. Early on. There are a lot of ways that people are marketing online that I haven't ventured into. Like, I see people running chatbots, Facebook messenger, chatbots, and I actually have a many chat list of thousands and thousands of subscribers. But I've never built a chatbot. Why? Because it's something that I've seen people doing. And I set up an automation to build my many chat lists, but I've never built the chatbots because it hasn't felt light and easy and inspired yet. Are people making millions of dollars with chatbots? Yeah. But for me, I haven't wanted to do it yet. But you know how I've grown my success to this point by doing things that I did want to do and then asking how can I leverage that passion and inspiration to create more profit for my business. Also, I'm not afraid to say, maybe someone else could help with this, which is how I started to grow my teams. So I don't know. I have to be careful of what I say here. But I'll tell you very plainly, I suck at customer service. I just freaking hate customer service. I am the worst at customer support because I get impatient with people. I get impatient with certain kinds of questions. When people don't read the instructions and they said a customer support email, I get frustrated so quickly. So what was the first thing that I outsourced customer support? I found a virtual assistant who was overseas, was looking for a United States based company to work for. We paid her a a very generous wage. That was a large amount of income for her and very affordable for my young business. And I outsourced customer support really early on because I didn't want to do it. Not because I don't care about customers, but because I know that I'm just too impatient to be good at customer support. And that was very pleasurable to me. I felt so satisfied watching my customers send emails saying, thanks so much for your help. You guys have amazing customer support. And I thought, oh, thank goodness that I didn't answer their email because then they would have messaged back and said, who is this guy? He fucking sucks. He's so impatient. And we have a very happy customer base in the Businesses that I own thanks to my willingness to not do what I don't want to do. Okay? So if you're a one man show wearing many hats, know that you bearing the burden, you telling yourself the story that you're the only person who can do it. That's not true. Okay. That's a story that it would behoove you to let go of. And how do you let go of it? By asking, is there someone else that could help me with this? Could I partner with someone? Could I hire a virtual assistant to help me with this? Could I hire a freelancer on fiverr.com, f I v r r.com to help me build the website or write the email copy or edit the video? If there's stuff that I don't want to do, could I outsource it? For inexpensive, probably yes, because you usually can. Or could I back off and come back from a fresh space? Or could I find a different way that it could be done? All right, because again, the point of this is you want to go from point A, where you are now, to point B, where you want to be. And there are unlimited ways. The way that you're looking for is not the right way. It's your path of least resistance. How do you know when you're on the path? By following the feelings of satisfaction, by following the little positive impulses. If something feels big and heavy and intimidating and ugly and like drudgery, probably not your path of least resistance. Okay? There's probably a different route that you could take, a different route that you could take. And that is what I invite you to take away so from this conversation. So, my friend, this is actually less about not doing what you don't want to do, and it's more about doing what feels inspired, what feels like a positive impulse, what feels like satisfaction. I call it the cookie crumb trail, the path of least resistance. Because I love cookies. My favorite food group is a trail of little crumbs of cookies, hopefully big chunks, big crumbs. And. And every time you find one, it feels like a little bling of satisfaction. It feels like a little bit of inspiration because, well, it's a cookie crumb, so it tastes good, right? So you're following the path of least resistance. You're following the cookie crumb trail. And that is the quickest way to get to where you want to go. That's why I said at the beginning of this conversation, this is going to sound ironic to you because you hear that idea, don't do anything you don't want to do. And you think my business is going to fall apart. Everything's going to go to shit, my friend. If you tend to your alignment, if you're committed to following the satisfaction, your business is going to flourish. Because if you're practicing the energy of satisfaction, the energy of flow, well, dollars will flow, customers will flow to you. If you're practicing the energy of least resistance, that's. That's the least resistant way. That's the easiest, flowiest, quickest, smoothest, most enjoyable way to get to where you want to go. That's what you're looking for, right? Unless you practice a lot of resistance and that's what you're used to, then this will be a new concept for you. And I'm excited for you to start playing with it over the next few days, okay? So I suggest you make a simple game of this. I suggest that you don't be too serious about it. You don't have any bad habits. You've got to tweak really fast, okay? We're just looking for an easy way to start following those little impulses. If something feels heavy, back off it. Ask if you're the right person, or ask if there's another way that it can be done. All right? And as you implement this commitment to tending to how you feel, to tending to your sense of satisfaction, you'll find your path to least resistance unfolding right before your eyes. And you will find yourself engaged in a business where you love doing what you do. And I know that you don't just want a really profitable business. I know that you want a business where you really like being there. Correct? So, my friends, let's do more of what we do want to do in the most satisfying, inspired way possible. And with that, I will see you on another episode.