Earlier in the NHL season the hockey writers were asking Paul MacLean, the new head coach of the Ottawa Senators why the team was playing so well, and what his coaching philosophy was.
My beloved Sens were picked by all the hockey writers to finish dead last, they lost in game 7 of the first round to the New York Rangers – it was a good season for the boys, and I thank them for the effort.
Coach MacLean said something so brilliant that I scribbled it down, and since then I have been waiting for the inspiration to use it.
He said that rather than trying to win the game, they just try to win each shift. Each line is on the ice for a shift that lasts about 30 seconds, and then they change lines. Just win the face off, don’t worry about the final score.
Win the race to the puck. Win the next 20 seconds of the power play, or the penalty kill.
Essentially what Coach MacLean did was break the ultimate goal of winning the game down into measurable, achievable steps.
It’s so simple it’s brilliant. Just keep winning little battles, and if you win enough of them you should win the game.
How do you break down your success as an entrepreneur?
I know a lot of incredibly successful entrepreneurs, and I know a lot of other people who want to be successful entrepreneurs but they mostly just talk about their ideas. Those who are incredibly successful keep score. They track progress. They win their shifts, and their own race to the puck.
Learning to keep score is part of achieving The Great Leap Forward. There should be some internal tension or pressure that you feel, an invisible force that is pulling you from where you are to where you want to be.
You might read “tension” and think that you don’t want to feel that, but you are mistaken. You are going to feel tension; the question is what tension do you want to feel? The tension from measuring your progress, or the tension that you feel when you can’t say for sure just how well you are actually doing? It’s your choice.
Keeping score helps to ensure that you are actually getting closer to your achievement. So much of your success is going to be a direct result of what happens inside your own head.
When you get on a roll, you are eager to get to work, to win the shift, to make the call, to finish the proposal, to reach out to another decision maker and move everything along.
When you don’t keep score, then everything is just an idea, and when the achievement of goals is spoken of, it’s in vague terms “So I will probably pick up a client there, do some consulting here …” Or my personal favorite “I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire.” I don’t even know what that means.
When you are unclear, it becomes a little too easy to sit back and wait. You can get afraid to find out the score – to admit that your irons in the fire are just conversations and nothing more.
Here at DMWSC, we keep score on everything. We started the year by laying out our goals for various initiatives. For example, how many days of speaking will Dennis do? How many private consulting clients will we bring on? How many workshops will we host this year? How many new corporate relationships will we engage in this year?
We have our score card meeting once a week – because of my travel the day may change, but we try to have it weekly. I have learned to love it.
When you are an entrepreneur, you learn to trust the magic, or your gut feeling, or yourself. I would be willing to bet that one of the most commonly muttered phrases by an entrepreneur is “It’ll work out.” I know that Seth Godin made me realize that it was not only acceptable to not have a Plan B; it was detrimental to have a Plan B.
“It’ll work out.” And sometimes it does.
However, when you keep score, it always does. You see that you have booked 66% of your speaking goal, and you are 50% through the year. Or that in Q1 you didn’t bring on as many Private Consulting clients, but you can also measure that when you a adjusted your process, you brought on a bunch, so you can then track that through Q2. If you are unhappy with the results, you can identify a constraint and tweak your process, it isn’t even a big deal.
You might realize that you are not achieving your goal – which the distance between you and your desire is increasing not decreasing, and you risk falling into the gulf between you and your goals.
So what? Get a new goal.
You know you can do that right? Scrap it. Start over. Admitting that “this idea isn’t going to work” isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. Spending time, money, and energy on bad ideas that you haven’t figured out are bad ideas is a crime. You are robbing from yourself and those you care for, and are responsible for.
Begin, as we all do by dreaming and creating an inspiring vision of success.
Then get real.
Get some targets written down.
What has to happen, right now, to move the ball down the field a little?