Professional development Archives - Page 36 of 91

The BIG FAT workaholic lie

By Jim Connolly | December 5, 2021

Workaholics are never really workaholics.

It’s not work, which the so-called workaholic is addicted to. Instead, they’re hooked on the feelings that come from doing something they love. That passion and joy is what inspires them all day, every day.

When you do something you love, it’s natural to want to keep doing it.

It’s why Nile Rodgers still creates and performs.
It’s why Arnold Schwarzenegger is still making movies.
It’s why Bill Gates is still making a difference.

Nile was 69 in September. Bill is 66 and Arnie is 74. None of them need the money. What they do need, is the pleasure associated with their “work”.

Conversely, someone who finds their work frustrating, boring or stressful, pays to go on vacation… to get away from work! They spend a tiny amount of time each year, doing what they truly want to do. They have the equation completely the wrong way round.

No one is ever a workaholic

If you get paid for doing what you love, you may be a passion-aholic. You could be a joy-aholic or even a pleasure-aholic. But you’re not a workaholic. No one is addicted to working just for the sake of work.

Work without meaning is a way to pay the bills.
Work without meaning is stressful.
Work without meaning saps your energy.
Work without meaning leaves you doing things you don’t want to do, for the majority of your life. That’s just wrong!

If work feels like work for too many days in a row, take action. Transform your business from something you work in, to something that fills you with joy, passion and pleasure.

Can you do it?

Yes. Of course you can.

How do I know?

I know, because since 1995 I’ve helped business owners worldwide make this happen and I experience it in my own life, every day. Every. Single. Day.

Let your expertise delight your clients

By Jim Connolly | November 21, 2021

Joel is a good friend. A good friend with a really ugly website. Man, it’s horrible. He knows it too. But thankfully, he’s finally figured out why his site, (and his previous 2 sites) have all looked like crap.

There are 2 widely applicable, valuable lessons here. Lessons that I’m going to share with you, at Joel’s request.

Let’s get started.

Joel hired talented experts

Previously, he’s hired high-end website developers and graphic designers… only to stop them from designing the site he needs. He’d insist on changes and additions to their designs. He’d even take advice from friends with zero design experience and insist on the designer implementing those changes. The end result was always terrible.

But not this time.

This time he took the advice I gave him, before his new site was created.

This time he let the designer do the designing. He let the expert apply her expertise.

Over coffee yesterday, he showed me the final draft of his new website. And it’s stunning. Something to behold. A work of art. It’s a work of art because Joel got out the way and gave the designer the freedom required, to delight him.

Blocking experts happens more than you think

Joel’s former approach to hiring experts and then blocking their expertise, is pretty common. And it’s always been there. I first wrote about this exact problem, almost exactly 10 years ago!

Ask any service provider; from wedding planners, to nutritionists and accountants, from architects to photographers and investment consultants, and they’ll have examples they can share.

I think there are two lessons here.

One for you as a service provider. This is by far the most important.

One for when you’re hiring an expert.

Service providers

When someone hires you, they do so because they need your expertise. They’re relying on you.

If you allow your expertise to be derailed, resulting in a low quality end product, or a lower quality end product than it should have been, you’ve let your client down.

Your client deserves (and pays you for) your very best work. Period. On every possible level, you can’t afford to deliver low quality work. No one needs that kind of reputation.

Whilst Joel admits he was wrong to ask for those design changes to the work of his previous 3 web designers, the designers were even more responsible.

As professionals, they should have educated their client and explained why his input was taking the design in the wrong direction. That’s exactly what I did, when Joel showed me his previous website. He then got out of the designer’s way with the development of his amazing new site.

Had the very first designer given Joel the same advice that I gave him, all the nonsense that followed could have been avoided.

When we’re hiring an expert

When we hire an expert, we need to remember that we do so because they have an expertise we need. An expertise we don’t possess. Once we hire them, our job is to get out of their way. For example, I let my web design guy know what I want, then give him the freedom to deliver it. And I get a great result every time.

Joel’s new site goes live on Friday and launches on Monday 22nd. And for the first time, he’s really excited about it. Also for the first time, the designer has asked him if she can include his new site in her portfolio. She loves it too.

That’s what happens when an expert is proud of their work, and their client is delighted with the end result.

Energy. Excitement. Success. Time to claim all three!

By Jim Connolly | November 14, 2021

get excited, get energized, business success

This article has been fully updated for 2026

I have a question for you today. An important question.

The question is this. Does your business energize you and excite you?

Well, it should do.

In fact, it HAS to!

Seriously.

Here’s why energy and excitement are essential

It’s impossible to build a truly successful business, unless that business fills you with energy and excitement.

Think about it.

The energy is what keeps you moving forward. It’s the essential fuel that powers every successful business owner.
The excitement is what brings that energy. It’s also what the marketplace needs to feel, whenever they have an encounter with you or your business. It’s highly infectious. It inspires people to hire you, buy from you and recommend you.

And that energy can be yours. If you want it.

Choose energy. Choose success!

You can choose to either create an inspirational business, or carry on like 99% of small and medium-sized business owners, in a business you love, which doesn’t love you back.

Small business owners suffer more stress, work longer hours and work harder, than they would do if they were an employee. They work themselves harder than any boss would, with none of the perks of being a salaried employee.

And that’s nuts!

New clients often tell me they would see other business owners, who were brimming with energy, enthusiasm and ideas, and wonder how those other business owners managed to be so motivated.

Usually, they blame themselves for not being a very self-motivated type of person.

Thankfully, they discover they’re 100% incorrect.

Any business owner can become highly-motivated and energized. However, it isn’t going to happen while they’re working in a business that’s zapping their energy or failing to inspire them.

An exciting example

Last year, I wanted to pump even more excitement, and fun, into my creative thinking work.

So, I created a £15,000 bounty offering. If an artist or large company in the creative industries has an expensive problem, I’ll eliminate the problem fast, for £15,000.

I don’t pitch the service to anyone. It’s here on my creative thinking website, which attracts artists and senior people in the creative industries every day. A reader sees the service, fills in the form and sends it to me. If I know I can solve it in a day or so, and they are credible, I solve it.

So, every morning when I check my email, I have the excitement of knowing I might have another, very quick £15,000 project. It doesn’t happen every week or every month. But that buzz of excitement is there every day.

Clarity is the key

All that energy only comes, when you are clear about what you want from your business AND how to achieve it. This massively improves the way you think and feel about your business. That’s because you know what you want, know how to get it and can see progress toward it. I see the impact this has on business owners all the time. I’m telling you, it’s transformational!

The challenge you need to overcome, if you want to access that energy and excitement, can be summed-up in one word.

Settling.

Settling: the destroyer of dreams

Most small business owners have spent so long with their daily grind, that they unconsciously start to settle for things the way they are. Sure, they hope things will improve. Occasionally, they’ll try something new. But they find themselves with the same core problem. So they wrongly blame themselves for lacking the motivation or energy.

To turn this around, you must refuse to settle.

Stop LOWERING your lifestyle goals, so that they fit around the limitations of your under-performing business.
Start INCREASING your effectiveness, so your business provides everything you need, and more.

Here’s the best part.

You are in control

You don’t need to settle for anything.

You are the boss.

You get to build whatever kind of business you want. You choose how enjoyable your work is. You get to decide what you earn, where you work, where you live, the number of hours you work and the quality of your clients. You get to choose how interesting and fulfilling your work is.

Next steps: make the decision to stop settling. Then, do something about it.

Years spent in an industry does NOT equal experience. Here’s why!

By Jim Connolly | November 6, 2021

Recently, I’ve been mindful of the title of the classic Jimi Hendrix album, Are You Experienced?

That’s because over the past couple of weeks, I’ve encountered lots of examples where people have incorrectly been labelled as experienced or inexperienced.

I think it’s time someone called out the automatic assumption, that experience can be measured by age. Or that experience can be measured by how long someone has been in a particular line of work.

As no one seems to have stepped up, I thought I would.

Time absolutely does not equal experience

In business, experience isn’t magically acquired with each passing day.

That’s to say, if someone spends 5 years repeating the same old mistakes from year 1, learning nothing new, they don’t have 5 year’s worth of experience. They have 1 year of experience, repeated 5 times.

Commercially valuable experience, (the kind this post is about), is gained through the acquisition of relevant knowledge and feedback, which the person then works with, in order to be better informed and make better decisions.

They’ve increased the depth and width of their relevant knowledge.

They’ve increased their commercial value to their marketplace and their business.

They’ve become commercially experienced.

Young and highly experienced

Here’s a great example of someone who’s young, but very experienced. I work regularly with a young guy who’s the CEO of an amazing technology company. He’s eager to learn. He loves to test and measure ideas. And he applies what he has learned in order to improve.

He’s VERY successful.

And despite his age, he’s very experienced.

The exact opposite

Conversely, I hear regularly from business owners, who’ve been in business 20 years longer than my client, but have a fraction of his experience. They have a few years worth of experience, repeated 10 times.

They’re still repeating rookie errors, really basic mistakes, which have lost them and cost them a fortune.

In summery

There are many amazing, relatively young business owners out there. Great providers, who care about what they do and who deliver as promised.

The same is true of many older business owners. (I am one of them, after all).

If we attribute someone’s commercial experience to their age or their time in business, we’re likely to make some lousy decisions. And the same holds true if we erroneously attribute experience to ourselves.

Publish the process: A quick note about notes

By Jim Connolly | November 4, 2021

Here’s one of those publish the process posts I promised. The photo above is an example of how I take notes at my desk, when using pen and paper. I thought I’d share it today, along with some tips, and a look at how I take notes.

Some notes on note taking

You may notice it’s written in capitals. I do that deliberately. I write extremely fast in cursive, but it can be really hard for me to accurately read what I’ve written afterwards. Writing in capitals slows me a little, which also seems to result in better notes.

Although I used a fountain pen for this note, I use ballpoint pens the majority of the time. Also, when I use ballpoints, I tend to use different pigments in the note. I always have a BIC 4-in-1 (red, green, black, blue) ballpoint pen at my desk and in my bag.

I only write the main points down to begin with. This lets me get the big picture on the page, while it’s still vivid in my memory. And I peg the detail onto the main points afterwards. It works for me.

If you’re wondering, those particular notes were for a blog post. I added the detail to them later, then typed it up into WordPress for the blog.

That notebook was really cheap. I only use cheap notebooks now. I used to invest in expensive, branded notebooks ones, but found zero additional value. I find some people treat their notes like works of art. Not the content of the note. Just the overall design! Many of my best notes were scribbled onto a napkin or a scrap of paper. And some of those scribbles are still perfectly readable, 30 years later!

Almost all the handwritten notes on my client sessions are written into an iPad Pro, using the Apple Notes app. I have my pre-session notes typed up into the app. Then, notes from the session are quickly jotted down onto the same document. I switched to this approach around a year ago. It’s been a huge productivity win.

I’ve found that the key piece of advice regarding note taking, is to find what works best for you, and not to follow every so-called breakthrough in note taking. It’s the value of what you capture that matters. Not the tools. Not the design.

I hope you found something useful there.