A Letter from Chris Suarez
TAKE OFF YOUR BLINDFOLD
Remember those childhood backyard games of pin the tail on the donkey? Or those parties where someone brought the pinata? It was always a bit comical to watch your friends walk around in circles or swing aimlessly in the air while blindfolded - clearly without any spacial recognition or idea of where they might be.
As funny as that may have been (unless you were the one walking in circles or swinging the stick of course) as it turns out you didn’t have a fighting chance.
Researchers have established that it is humanly impossible to walk in a straight line while in complete darkness or while blindfolded. Blindfolded people will walk in a curved line, as tight as 55 feet in diameter, because they lack external reference points. Studies have shown that a time goes on, blindfolded walkers will begin to walk in tight and tighter circles. The more steps that are taken without an external reference point, the more deviation is added to the walker’s cognitive sense of what would be a straight line.
Enter the entrepreneurial blindfold. How often how you felt like you might be going in circles? You start the year with big goals, growth targets to hit, a new destination planned for your business. And yet at the end of the year, your business looks a lot like it did at the end of last year. You end up right where you ended up the previous year.
We tell ourselves we are hitting ceilings, but in fact we are not climbing a ladder at all. We are just walking blindfolded through our year. This can happen whether we work hard or not. Just working harder won’t move us closer to that goal or destination. If we charge through our year with our head down - in effect blindfolded to everything around us - we will likely find ourselves in the same spot from which we started. Best case scenario will have us way of course from our expected goal.
Just waking up and running won’t get you to your destination. Hard work alone won’t get you there. We have to have a clear picture of where we are going. We have to have external references along the way. Those references are daily agreed upon activities, weekly goals, monthly targets, quarterly expectations. A yearly planning day or retreat for your business just won’t be enough. But those external reference points take the form of people as well. Business partners, coaches, consultants, team members. Keeping our eyes on the environment around us while remaining focused on the finish line will allow us to walk in that straight line towards our end game. Our line may not be perfect, but it will be relatively straight. We will go further. It will get us there faster. It will get us there without pain. It will get us there without unintended consequences. Be clear on where you are going, how you are getting there, what steps you must take to arrive there, and why you want to be there.
Research tells us running blindfolded will cause us to run in circles.
Research also tells us that running a business blindfolded will cause us to run in circles.
So take off the blindfold. Set clear goals ahead. Check in on your reference points consistently.
You’ll pin the tail right on that donkey.
Chris