What is the best time to start towards our goal? How should we judge the right timing? When is the best time to act?

It is no surprise that the ‘when’ question in The Right Questions refers to time. Timing is critical, as time is the one truly limited resource, but selecting the right time to do something is not straightforward. Good timing makes the difference between success and failure but ideal timing is hard to achieve. It takes an equal measure of planning and wisdom to know when to implement strategies, to go for goals and ultimately achieve a mission.

Therefore we have to answer:

• What are we going to invest our time in?
• How much of our time should we invest?
• When is the best time to do so?

Knowing when to move and how much time to invest in something is the secret of perfect timing.

“You may delay, but time will not.”

Benjamin Franklin

What should you spend your time doing?

Knowing what to spend your time on is a matter of prioritisation. You have to know what is the most important thing to do. To do that you have to understand why you even want to do something in the first place. If you are unsure then I recommend you read the following post on finding your values.

Once that you know why you are wanting to do something you can confirm what is the best thing to do. It may be that you already have a goal in mind.

Application of time: the discipline of practice

We would all like quick success but our biggest dreams will take considerable time and a lot of hard work to achieve. One wise person once told me that people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in five or ten years. I have found this to be true.

Don’t underestimate the cumulative effect of applied time. Investors understand the power of compound interest when it comes to money. The same applies to the time we invest in something, including our personal development. If we continue to invest our time wisely and with focus then we can achieve great things.

Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success did a study that explored the lives of many of the world’s most successful people and looked at the patterns behind their achievements.  One large theme prevails: that it takes a concerted application of time to achieve anything truly great.  Gladwell estimates that it requires 10,000 hours of quality practice to become an expert at one given thing or become world-class in a particular field.  The key point here is not so much the 10,000 hours but the idea of effective or deliberate practice, something explained in detail by Robert Pool and Anders Ericsson in Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise.

Deliberate practice:

• Develops skills using a proven training techniques
• Stretches the comfort zone; being just on the verge of one’s ability
• Is based on specific, well-defined goals (both overall and for each practice)
• Is purposeful and specifically focuses on those specific goals
• Is a learning cycle reflective of Kolb’s model, where the concrete experience of practice leads to reflective observation, new abstract conceptualisation (mental representations) of what is being learned, followed by modification and active experimentation to get further feedback, and so the cycle continues.

So we not only make good habits and routines, but we then, through deliberate practice, make sure that the time we put in has the maximum impact and effect.

The Quest

Understand your values, unlock your purpose, set your priorities, achieve success. Click here to sign up and get the 1st stage for free!

Counting the opportunity cost

If we are going to be that focused and invest our resources in one particular way we are going to have to count the cost.  For every outlay of time or money there is an opportunity cost; the cost of not investing our resources somewhere else.  In other words when we choose to do one thing, by default we choose to not do various other things.

You can become good at almost anything, but you cannot be good at everything.

We watch sports stars, standing on a podium receiving their gold medal at the moment of glory.  What we don’t see is the years of training, the sweat and tears spent hour after hour, day after day, invested in the dream of that moment, in the winning of the prize.  How many days and evenings out with friends were sacrificed?  What number of holidays were foregone?  Which alternative careers were declined?  You can be sure that the opportunity cost was high.

There is no easy or quick win but through the right application of time, we can create our own perfect timing.  The fulfilment of a vision is going to take time and hard work.  That is why we need a dream to compel us, a mission to focus upon, and a passion to spur us forward, no matter what the obstacles are that lie in the way.  If we have that level of compulsion we can make the investment of time that is needed to succeed.

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”

Tim Notke

Choosing the right time

Our time is finite; once spent we cannot claim it back.  Therefore we need to be careful about how we spend it and when we spend it.  Application is needed over the course of time to achieve success, but also there is often also a key moment to play the high stakes if you want to win big.

“I am building a fire, and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.” 

Mia Hamm, Olympic gold-medal soccer player

You can invest the same amount of money in the stock market for a given amount of time, but when you choose to invest, re-invest or spend that money will make a big difference to whether you gain or lose money.

A marathon may take hours to run, so for an athlete, choosing the correct moment in the race to dig deep and close down the front runner could make the difference to between winning and losing.

Picking the ideal time is vital in maximising our effect and fulfilling our potential.

Creating the conditions for perfect timing

What a casual observer might call serendipity or synchronicity, those involved in a successful venture would call the careful aligning of positive factors – however seemingly unrelated – to bring about a positive outcome. Successful people create conditions for perfect timing.

Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, was a master of this. It would seem that he was fortunate to launch products just when people needed them.  The iPod, the iPhone and the iPad have all helped redefine the market for gadgets and made Apple a world leader in mobile technology.  But it was no chance.  Steve Jobs knew that you made your own luck, your own perfect timing. He produced a quality product but he also stirred people’s perceived need for his creations.  The genius of Steve Jobs was that he did not do what his customers wanted; he did what they were going to want.  Purchasers never quite knew what they needed until they had one, but upon owning an Apple product they were left unsure how they managed without one before.

Practice, patience and poise

It needs to be the right moment as even a good idea can fail because of bad timing. For example, there are good and bad times to change one’s career or launch a business.  Everything has its season.

Equally some visions are ahead of their time.  Leonardo de Vinci designed the revolving flying machine that preceded the invention of the helicopter by 400 years.  We just have to hope that our dreams do not take so long to come to fulfilment!

It takes discipline as well as wisdom to seize the moment.  Like a vigilant soldier, we need practice, patience and poise; practice to ensure we have all the preparation we need, patience to wait and poise in order to strike at the right moment.

How do you know when the time is right?

To have the best chance of creating the right conditions and picking the ideal time we have to be sure of where we are ultimately headed, of what we are doing and why. That is the reason that the ‘why, where and what’ questions of The Right Questions approach create the strategic framework within which we make our plans.

So what is the perfect timing for achieving your goal?

“Life is all about timing… the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable… attainable. Have the patience, wait it out. It’s all about timing.”

Stacey Charter

The 5th October 2019 marked eight years since we lost Steve Jobs but his impact and wisdom lives on.  Last week I was reminded of the key to decision making and setting priorities.

What Steve Jobs did was actually really simple, and seemingly common sense.  He would work out the one most important thing he could be doing on any day, and then he would do that.

In his own words:

“Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can’t rationalize the answer, and you can’t attach the one thing to some other things. It’s just the one thing.”

Steve Jobs

It was last week, listening to Rachel Carrell, founder of Koru Kids that I was reminded of this lesson to ‘be more Steve’ when it comes to prioritisation and decision making.

And guess what? Steve Jobs learnt this from Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo. So to ‘be more Steve’ is not just to set good priorities, it is also to learn from other leaders as every interaction and exposure to another leader is a chance to grow.

You can read the full interview in the New York Times here:

The Quest

Understand your values, unlock your purpose, set your priorities, achieve success. Click here to sign up and get the 1st stage for free!

So is a business case just about money or not? There are differing views:

“Business, that’s easily defined, it’s other people’s money.”  Peter Drucker

Disneyland is a work of love.  We didn’t go into Disneyland just with the idea of making money.”  Walt Disney

There is something of a paradox at work here.  If people are fulfilled in their jobs then they would say that they are not working just for the money. But equally, a business will go under unless it can turn a profit.

The bottom line is cash

Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, and Alan Sugar are men who have made a lot of money. They all know the importance of being profitable. But, even after they made enough money to retire comfortably, they worked on; why? It is obvious that these men (who all know the importance of a good business case) have another drive. There is a greater vision and mission. These go beyond just cash flow and profit.

A business case has to look at the bottom line, the money. But in general, it is primarily a formal way of expressing the vision, values and mission of an organisation.  Developing a business case can seem like a daunting process at times. Particularly so, as there are so many different templates and examples available. But the core of the business case is very simple; it is just answering some basic questions, questions that are covered in The Right Questions framework.

At some point for a business plan, you will have to prove the figures. This means examining the detail of profit and cash flow. But for now, we are just going to concentrate on the top-level questions. These are the strategic framing of the business; seeing where what we are passionate about intersects with an opportunity to create revenue.  In this way, we can help identify our vocation.

What makes you and your product or service different?

A business case is generally focused on the need to make money; if a business proposition doesn’t demonstrate the ability to make money it has to be adapted or discarded. But, the ability to make money is driven by the fact that something you do or make should be attractive enough to make someone buy that service or product.  You need to stand out, make yourself different from the competition, to give you that competitive advantage. This is your unique selling proposition (USP).

Working out what makes us different is not always obvious.  Not many of us launch a completely new idea or industry.  In fact, it is a fallacy that you need a completely new concept to be an entrepreneur or successful business person.  It may not be a completely new idea or product but you certainly need to do something different in order to stand out.

For example, you might offer better customer service or better value for money than the competition. Or you may pursue a particular under-exploited section of an existing market. If you are just starting up you need to make the offering attractive enough for people to buy your product or service, rather than those of the competition. You also need to overcome the buyer’s concern that purchasing from a new business might be risky. But, if you solve the customers’ problems sufficiently, they should need and want what you sell. That is the best incentive for getting people to buy anything.

The Quest

Understand your values, unlock your purpose, set your priorities, achieve success. Click here to sign up and get the 1st stage for free!

Finding your USP

We find that it is primarily our character and abilities that make us stand out from other businesses.  Therefore to identify what makes us different we can start by looking at ourselves and look at where our values, our skills and a need in a market all intersect.  From this, we can see what makes us unique.

After that we can look at the broader marketing narrative and answer the sort of questions we find more commonly in a business case.  By going through this process we get a good overview of why the business exists, what it is going to do and indicate how it is going to make money.

Therefore as we continue to ask ‘The Right Questions’ you will find that you will naturally find the answers you need to build a business case. If you want to go through the process of writing a business case then read How to Write a Business Case: