39. Necessary Entrepreneurial Boredom

If you're an entrepreneur or somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur, I want you to think about, what two things do you want most out of your business? If you're like most entrepreneurs, you want some creative excitement. You want some situation where you feel like you're in control of your destiny, but also creating something, making something happen that hasn't been done before that's very exciting. At the same time, you want some income that gives you the freedom to be creative, so something that's rather automatic. Now, if you look at these two things, they're almost exact opposites. This is why we're going to need to have some perhaps intentional or necessary boredom in the work we do. Let me show you why. Creative excitement comes from doing new things, things we've never done before, things that are exciting. Automatic income comes from doing something that we've done before and we know it works. So anybody who started a new business before or started multiple either projects within a business or launched different products knows that your old reliable product might get boring after a while, but it might be what pays the bills and keeps the lights on.

Meanwhile, that new product that could hit a home run might or might not be as steady. It's exciting. It's a great ride, but it might turn into nothing and it might even lose you money. Creative excitement usually increases your risk, whereas automatic income sources, working with clients you've worked before, working with products or projects you've worked before, doing things you've done before, reduces risk. Creative excitement usually reduces your free time because you've got to invest all this energy to create this new thing. And again, this can be very fun. The automatic income on the other side usually increases your income, excuse me, your free time, because as you get better at it, it requires less time to get the same result. Creative excitement is pure creation. And again, that can be really fun. Automatic income is more about optimizing what's already been created, taking something from good to great. Creative excitement is exciting, and yes, automatic income in and of itself can be extremely boring. It can make you want to poke your eyes out unless you understand what it affords and why it's so necessary. With creative excitement, big losses are extremely possible, whereas with automatic income, a steady income is much more likely.

You might have steady growth. Maybe it's not explosive growth, but it's a lot more likely to be steady for you. And again, this can be a platform. This can be a stabilizing piece that allows you to go into new ventures because you have that. Necessary entrepreneurial boredom, it sounds like a disease. What do you have, doctor? I have NEB. I have Necessary entrepreneurial boredom. They have a pill for that? Well, they got plenty of pills for that. You might not want to take them. Yes, it's the purple pill. So necessary entrepreneurial boredom. And for most, the ability to manage and tolerate some sense of boredom without losing focus is a critical skill. Again, that's part of having a business and repeating it. If you own a restaurant and people come back and last week they had a certain dish, they bring their friends and say, Wow, this dish was so awesome. Let's have it again. They want the similar result. That's what they're actually paying for. They don't want it to be so creative that it's changing every moment. They want some predictability. And so very often today's creation is tomorrow's repeat sailors, repeat product, and tomorrow's automatic income.

So predictability can be boring, but it helps us build high dollar and high impact businesses and careers. And it becomes the foundations upon which, again, we create, we do awesome things. Those that work, if you will, become part of our automatic income. Those that perhaps don't work, we might need to toss out or do something different. But it's the interplay of the two that allows us to be successful in the long run as an entrepreneur. Very often you'll hear people say, What do you do? I'm a serial entrepreneur. And that's always an interesting conversation because sometimes what they mean is, I've tried a lot of things and they keep failing. So I just keep jumping from thing to thing, either taking people's money as startup capital or whatever it is, and then it doesn't work out. Now I got to try something else. Or they might mean they start multiple businesses, but usually they'll say they're an entrepreneur, they'll say something different. So that concept of just jumping from thing to thing without having anything that works sticks here all the time. At some point, you want to have something that works and just creates that automatic income, that steadiness that allows you to have the balance, to still be able to go on vacation for a month at a time or two months at a time and have the bills paid and also have the time to do creative projects while you're paying for income.

So in my business right now, I have businesses I've been involved in for 20 years that are some of my more automatic income. I constantly do my best to infuse my passion, my enthusiasm in these businesses as much as I can. They're are a sacred work for me and that they, again, help afford me doing some of my newer projects. And yet at the same time, they're just as important. My clients over here, ridiculously important. I do everything I can to make sure I'm serving them as I'm also building this new thing. I hope you find this distinction helpful and I hope it helps you in your business, whether you're starting a business or whether you're continuing to grow your business. Very often one of the biggest mistakes of long term business owners is neglecting the repeat business and getting too excited over the new business. Again, balance is key. I hope you find this helpful. If you have any questions or comments on this, please put them in the comments section below. If you want to go deeper into this and you want to start looking at how you can create your four day game plan, go to 4day gameplan.

Com and look at how you can start creating a plan to balance making the income you want and affording the lifestyle and the time off in order to enjoy it. So whether you're an entrepreneur, an employee, somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur, a student in school. Just being able to understand these nuances is critical. As I've mentioned before, it took me 22 years to do this. Having a game plan certainly would have shortened my curve by at least 5 to 10 to 15 years. I've got that game plan for you there as an outline and a structure for you to start with. Hope you find this helpful as well. As always, look forward to helping you make more money in less time, doing what you do best so you can enjoy your friends, your family, and your life. Thank you.