This past Friday, I had the opportunity to visit TopGolf with my son.
We had planned to go for a while and we were both excited to go.
When I woke up the day before on Thursday, I got out of bed and had a sharp pain in the back of my left knee. Knee pain isn’t much fun, and when it does happen to me, it feels like my knee is broken.
Granted, that’s not the actual case, but stepping down and having shooting pain in your knee for no apparent reason makes it feel “broken” in my experience.
I’ve had this pain a few times before, and so I’ve learned that it’s just something that gets pulled and needs to be stretched out and sometimes iced or heated.
So that’s what I did on Thursday, I took it easy and nursed my knee and debated about going golfing the next day.
Since my son and I had planned this for some time, I wanted to try and go, so I was glad to wake up on Friday to find that my knee was in a lot less pain. I still had to be careful walking and twisting around, but I decided it would be safe to go.
When we got to our bay to start golfing, I let my son go first. After he had golfed a round, it was my turn and I stepped up to give it a shot.
The first ball I hit caused some pain and I started to question my choice of coming, but I figured I’d give it another try…
The second time when I got up to hit, I decided to stop moving my front leg (the one that hurt) and to really slow down my swing. I figured the point of going was to spend quality time with my son, so I wasn’t going to complain or ruin it for him.
So I stepped up, set my feet firmly, and gently swung the club without twisting hardly at all.
To my surprise, I hit the ball way farther than my first shot and it was incredibly straight and accurate.
In case you haven’t realized already, i’m not a professional golfer and I really just do it for fun. I’ve never had official golf lessons. I was just taught by a friend of mine years ago over the course of a few weeks.
(So don’t take any of this as golfing advice, it’s not! lol)
What shocked me about my new technique is that I was hitting much farther and with much more accuracy, with half the effort.
After golfing my round, I looked at the score and I had scored more than double any previous scores I’ve had.
While I’ve always known in my head that swinging harder doesn’t actually work, on this day I had to actually put into practice what I knew in my head.
I think business is like that too.
Sometimes we think we can do it all on our own.
Sometimes we think pushing harder, working longer and doing more will get us results.
The reality is that to grow and scale a business, we have to slow down, delegate and work smarter not harder.
That’s a common phrase that we’ve all heard before, but in reality, I know we don’t always practice what we know to be true.
What would happen to you if you couldn’t do your primary function in your business for a month, would the business survive?
If the answer is no (like it has been for me many times in the past) then I would encourage you to start building a “broken knee” plan.
Create a plan that would allow you and your team to be effective even if you were taken out of the action temporarily.
Pre-planning for these kinds of things is way more effective than trying to make it up on the fly when it happens.
And as much as I wish I didn’t have to say this, it’s true:
You will end up sidelined at some point in some unexpected way, so preparing ahead of time is always best in my experience.
Getting more help internally (with more team members and support) and externally (in the form of advisors and other vendors) is often the best way to insure your future success.
So today, slow down and find a way to be more effective.
Stop pushing so hard, because all that’s going to do is break you or your team.
When we slow down, we can be more accurate and we can often go way farther with the results we’re aiming towards.
To your success,
Gabe