Thomas Edison once said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” How true! In my work with over 150 early-stage growth companies in the Greenville/Upstate area, I have noticed one common characteristic of successful entrepreneurs regardless of their industry or background – they work very, very hard.
The hours that startup CEOs put into their ventures is quite astounding, especially when you add in the long hours they spend outside the office including the time they spend traveling, dealing with work matters from the home office, or even time thinking through strategic business matters regardless of the time of day or where they are physically located. The time successful entrepreneurs spend on their companies represents a huge percentage of their waking hours, often for years on end. Being an entrepreneur is not as sexy as it appears on the surface. As most successful entrepreneurs can attest, it is long, hard work.
Yet there’s another important principle that I’ve noted in many successful entrepreneurs that, on the surface, seems to fly in the face of hard work but in actuality is complementary to it – the importance of rest and rejuvenation away from the business.
If you’ve ever taken an entry-level business operations or organizational behavior class, then you’ve likely heard of Frederick Winslow Taylor and his time and motion studies. A key takeaway from Taylor’s studies was that manual laborers actually produce more work when they don’t toil continuously at their task but instead are given regular breaks to rest. By inserting periods of rest throughout the otherwise difficult workday, workers actually became more productive and get more work done by the end of the day than when they worked continuously.
Though Taylor’s findings related directly to physical labor, at its core is the overarching principle of balancing effort with rest in order to achieve maximum results, which I believe hold true for entrepreneurs of all types today.
In his iconic book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen Covey emphasizes the important habit of regularly taking time away from the task at hand to “Sharpen the Saw.” Covey’s terminology arises from the illustration he uses of a lumberjack who is instructed to cut down a large number of trees. He makes the point that that in order for the lumberjack to achieve his objective in the most effective and efficient manner, he should not saw continuously tree after tree. But instead, he should take time away from cutting on a regular basis to sharpen his saw and thus improve his productivity. By doing so, the lumberjack actually improves his sawing performance though he spends less time actually sawing. Today, entrepreneurs can benefit from taking this same perspective and realize that working continuously may actually hurt their overall performance.
The best reflection I see in my personal life of the importance of balancing work and rest for maximum performance is with backpacking – something my family and I love to do. It’s so refreshing to get away into the woods, hike most of the day along mountain streams and hills, spend two or three nights in the wilderness and escape the rigors of work and everyday life. We don’t do go backpacking often enough, but when we do, we’re always glad we took time to get away and we all come home energized to face the weeks ahead.
Within backpacking, it’s important to strike the right balance between the hard work of hiking to your destination and pausing occasionally to rest and take in the amazing scenery along the way. These important pauses not only provide the periodic rest our physical bodies need to achieve maximum hiking performance, they also provide us an opportunity to celebrate the progress we’ve made toward camp and to take in the beautiful scenery along the way that we would have missed otherwise.
For entrepreneurs, these same principles hold true in their efforts to grow globally competitive companies. To toil continuously day and night for weeks and months on end may feel like the right thing to do and may be admirable and draw praise from others. But rarely is it best for your company’s performance or for you as a person.
Yes, there are periods that require many, many hours of nose-to-the-grindstone, unglamorous effort in order to make a venture successful. That is a given. But only the wisest and most successful startup CEOs I know build intentional pauses into the plan, periods of rest and rejuvenation, to “sharpen the saw,” to celebrate progress, and to enjoy the journey and its beautiful sights along the way.
Though it may seem counterintuitive at first, there is perhaps nothing more important for the long-term success of your venture and for you as an entrepreneur than to occasionally take time away from the business, shutting off the phone and email, so you can retool the most important asset your company has – you.
