week 65: are you acting or playing?

the difference is subtle but obvious in results

thank you to over 11,000 of you who read this weekly and share with your friends and family for behind the scenes on building a million dollar business from scratch and beyond.

i also include a personal note in the end so i am grateful that you let me do that without judgement.

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it’s easy to get into the day to day motion of work and start thinking we are doing hard work.

it could be just busy work and burning mental calories with no real tangible outcome.

i have learned the hard way, that all hard work is not good work.

I have to pull myself out from time to time to analyze if I am doing hard work or smart work.

Two ways I am testing this:

- i regularly check my calendar is made up what type of meetings (given my focus on driving top line revenue it needs to be at least 70% of my time)

- i was getting tired a lot towards the end of the day and i realized that was happening because i stopped exercising. From last week, i am just waking up, praying and getting out early morning for a walk. Just that has made me more productive and healthy.

in this season of my business, if i spent too much time other than sales and team alignment, i know i am acting not playing.

same is true if i get too tired then i won’t have the energy to give to my family and team and eventually burn out.

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On a persona note, i went to watch a practice match of Krish with a much higher level kid.

i love that Krish simply challenges a higher level kid for a match and they give him a shot. 

well, as he was playing i saw that because he is physically smaller and has less power he was staying too far behind the baseline giving the opponent all the chances to hit a winner.

those winners were killing his confidence.

during a change over, he said,  “i don’t know what to do.”

i said to him, stop acting and start paying. he got flustered and said what do you mean?

i said - look, you can beat this guy 6-0, I don’t care what’s his ranking is. I can see you are a better player. All you need is to believe, play like you play in practice, step in the court and don’t worry about results.

i asked him to do that for one game and if it doesn’t work, do what you feel like.

next game, he stepped in  and won the game in straight points.

they went toe to toe all the way to set tie breaker and then he lost with a point.

he was so happy! 

all Krish needed to do was to:

1. believe he can do it

2. step in the court to play like a champion

3. not just react to every ball that comes to him but rather have a strategy and go for it.

in business, sports, or life, at one point or another, we have to stop acting (going with the motions) and start playing (doing the best work of our lives).

How do you determine if you are acting or playing day to day?