How To Use Shiny Object Syndrome To Your Advantage

Lauren: Welcome to The Biz Doctor Podcast, my love letter to business owners the world over. I’m your host Lauren Goldstein, award-winning business consultant and advisor whose fondly nicknamed The Business Doctor by my clients. My clients call me The Business Doctor because I help business owners who are burning the candle at both ends, diagnose what is actually keeping them stuck in and buried under the day-to-day of their business, and then formulate a business treatment plan to help them adjust their business and team to fit them.

And most importantly, support them in having what I call true entrepreneurial freedom. If you’re ready to look at your business in a different lens and elevate yourself out of the business operator in the trenches 24 7 to visionary business owner and leader who can take a breath vacation and have more fun making an impact with your business, then grab your favorite beverage and your earbud.

And let’s dive into our latest episode.

Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode, I’m gonna share with you something that hopefully will break all of you amazing creative business owners free, and help your team support you better too. So, riddle me this. Have you ever been told to focus, but you just can’t seem to get it together or rather keep it together for more than a short interlude?

You’ve got just too many ideas swimming in your brain that you want to pursue. Or perhaps you’re really good at pointing out inefficiencies or areas of improvements, or maybe you just bounce from one thing to the next and your team is constantly on high alert for the next pivot. Sound familiar? Chances are that if you answered yes to any of [00:02:00] those above, somewhere in the, along the way, someone told you that you were being disruptive, distracting, or the worst sin of all would not amount to anything if you couldn’t figure out how to just sit still and follow through.

Heck, there’s even a famous marshmallow study that backs this claim up. If you can’t sit still and delay your gratification, then you’ll always be one step behind and never rate your true potential. Ugh. Talk about a Debbie Downer. Well, friend, take heart because I don’t believe that. But I do have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is this propensity to chase shiny objects, ideas, improvements, et cetera, is actually one of your greatest assets. And when harnessed properly, it can lead you to tremendous success. Now, for the bad news, your teachers and the marshmallow study were partially right. If you can’t learn to focus down on a few of those things, you will be running around in circles, and this could be your biggest roadblock to success and traction in your business.

So now that we got both of those out of the way, I’m sure you’re asking. Great. So how do I actually harness this new superpower for success and impact instead of getting blocked? Well, I’m glad you asked. Here’s how first create a system or place that will be your idea catch-all or idea backlog or what?

One of my clients deemed the idea think tank or my personal favorite. My one client named it the idea Ice Chest, where you can pull out a fresh, cold idea at any time. It’s simply a place where when a moment of inspiration strikes, you can jot your idea down and store it in your catchall. This might seem like something that is too simple, but stay with me.

This is important because first, it gives your squirrel some time to simmer down because you listened and got it outta your brain. But second, and most importantly, it allows you and your team to prioritize your ideas and make sure that they’re moving the ship forward, not distracting or delaying the team, which to be honest, I see happen a lot.

So listen close here for a second. Ideas are great. However, if you find your team is in a constant state of frenetic energy or disarray or stress, or you’re just hearing a lot of chatter about how they can’t keep projects straight, or things are falling off the rails, this could be your moment to reflect and see if.

It’s a system thing. If it’s a team thing, if it’s a business thing or if it’s a you thing. And the you thing is, I see business owners who are very creative and very smart sometimes pull their teams off of something that’s moving the ship forward in the business forward because they got this great idea.

Like, guys, I know how to fix this revenue thing. Let’s go do this. I see this happen a lot. Actually. Speaking of revenue, I most often, when this happens, it’s when you’re looking at the lagging metric of revenue and let’s see, revenues down, and then you have this great idea to get revenue up for the month.

Sometimes this works. That’s not what I’m saying, but most often what it does is it creates this reactive, frenetic. Oh no, all hands on deck. So you take people off of the stuff that there actually is moving the business forward, even if it doesn’t look like it and pulls them off, and then it takes, you know, a week or two for them to get back in the cadence.

And sometimes, most often, I actually see this happen where a week or two goes by and then the business owner’s like, just kidding. We don’t actually need to do that. And so you just lost two weeks of productivity and profitability in your business. Which leads me to point number two. Evernote, Asana, click up Monday and Trello are all excellent options to help you create your idea backlog.

Personally, I use teamwork. I also have used click up and Monday. Actually, I’ve used all of these, but teamwork’s one of my favorites. Try it out. See which one works best for you. When your teams flow, they feel different. They look different, they interact differently. But the most important thing is you have something that’s easily accessible for you to use to get your ideas out.

You know, heck sometimes, to be very honest with you, I just have a note in my iPhone that says Lauren’s ideas, and then you know, I’ll just go jot something in there. Hey, been have a waterproof pad in the shower that sometimes, you know, I get an idea and I jot it down there. My point is, ideas come to you for a reason.

So make sure you get them in a place that you can preserve them, but just because they came to you does not mean that they need to be done now, which leads me to point number two, appoint someone in your team, master of ideas, or whether I like to call top squirrel Wrangler. Now all joking aside, this is actually critical.

Again, I’ve worked with a lot of brilliant creative business owners over the past 11 years, and one thing I know for certain is if you don’t have someone in this role, your business is gonna be bumpy. Here’s why. Creative business owners are notorious for being reactive and in the moment, which generally wreaks havoc on the team because just as they hit their stride, they’re pulled in another direction, which creates a lot of stress in the team and not a lot of forward progress, momentum or profitability.

Second, if you’re thinking to yourself, gosh, that actually really sounds like a drag. Like, I’m gonna have to have my creative fire snuffed out. Let me add some sooth, think of it, not like an anchor, but rather a weight on the end of a balloon that keeps it from flying away. The reason I love this analogy is because balloons, like if you see a balloon in a windstorm, it’s going around like crazy, but it’s not flying away because it’s tethered.

Right. So having someone in this role, it just tethers you to the vision and the mission of the business and what your KPIs and your goals are for this portion of time. So it allows you to still have your creative ideas still be creative, but it also creates a little bit of a buffer to make sure that you’re not inadvertently impacting the business in a way that doesn’t work.

It really creates a win-win. You get to share your ideas and find the right term to put them in the business, or maybe not. Maybe they just need to get outta your head and now you’re good. The bottom line is, we all know this, whether our egos agree or not, not every idea is a good idea, and more so than not every idea’s time is not now.

So this allows you to take a beat and really do what is best for everyone and give the team a fighting chance. So now back to your idea Wrangler. This person should excel at helping you corral and prioritize ideas. And then once you’ve narrowed them down, creating a follow up plan with the right people and process in place to see the ideas come to life.

Now, why say creating a fault plan with the right people and process is this? A lot of times I see great ideas fail because we didn’t think about how it fit into the business and how it was going to impact personnel impact resources, impact timelines, and so if you have a plan where you know the people that are going to bring it to life and how it’s gonna impact the business.

Then you’re gonna have a much better chance of actually making the idea a success. So now here’s some best practices for making this idea prioritization work. Let sorting your ideas become a type of game. Ideally, you and your idea masters should start by sorting your ideas into three categories, green, yellow, and red ideas that you and your team can do quickly.

And that will have a big impact on your business. Go in the green category. So these are things that generally do not impact the majority of the team. Do not impact resources, do not create time lags like it’s something that’s very simple that is not gonna create an impact through the business. Well, rather, it’s gonna create an impact moving it forward, but it’s not gonna create a negative impact on the team.

Second ideas that need a bit more noodling or more people than you have, or team or resources that go into the yellow category. Ideas requiring even more extensive planning with more moving parts and need more resources go into the red category. So once you’ve sorted them, triaged your thoughts and decided what the priority level is, my favorite tool is to use the Eisenhower Matrix.

Before we dive into the next bit, I wanna take a second to share with you something that I’ve seen drastically change businesses and teams for the better. Imagine waking up every morning with a team that knows exactly what is expected of them and how to achieve success without you having to micromanage them.

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It’s as easy as filling out a form. If you wanna get out from under your business, shifting from business operator to business owner and take your business to the next level while reclaiming your time, then our golden key scorecard is just the ticket. Our scorecard provides the time tested framework and process to get you and your team out of the weeds and into a well-oiled machine that can scale without you.

It’s time for you to run your business instead of the other way around. Become an expert in this critical piece of the foundation to creating a high performing team. Download the Golden Key Scorecard for free at goldenkeypartnership.com/scorecard/. Now back to the show.

So if you’re not familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix, let me explain. It’s a very simple but profound way to prioritize. Essentially, it’s a square that is broken up into four boxes by a vertical line and a horizontal line. On the left side of the box, the top row is important. The bottom row is not important.

The first column is urgent. The second column is not urgent. So the way we break this down is do defer, delegate, and delete. Do is something that is important and urgent. Defer is something that is important but not urgent. Delegate is something that is not important but urgent. So asking who else can do it and something that is not urgent and not important, delete that.

What is great about this is it really makes you ask the question of. Is this idea really important to the business? Is it gonna move us closer to our vision and our goals in some way and have a positive impact? The answer is yes. Then asking yourself, is it important? Is it not important? Is it urgent? Is it not urgent?

And really figuring out the timing. The key here is to have someone objective, who’s not emotionally tied to any of your ideas that can triage, sort, and prioritize them, and again, make sure that they truly align with the current goals and trajectory of the business. Because I can tell you firsthand cuz I made this mistake in my early years, is that chasing shiny objects or not being focused on where you’re going and being a laser instead of a flashlight, is going to make success much harder and take much longer.

So if you can narrow things down, keep yourself in. In the lane have those navigational beacons. You’re gonna get where you want a whole lot faster. Third ship that shit. This is the part that gets most entrepreneurs. Trust me. You can ask my business coach Hillery Weiss, because, hi, my name is Lauren and I’m a secret launcher.

Are you a secret launcher too? Um, maybe we should start a support group. Anyway, what that looks like is you have an idea, you build out the idea, and then it just sits on a shelf collecting dust. Or in my case, what I used to do was post it on Facebook once, tell a few people and then think it was a failure cuz nobody I.

Like only one person bought it when in reality no one flippant knew about it unless it couldn’t get any real data to see if it was a legit idea or service that would ultimately be successful or not. Well, to quote the Bob Newhart skit, stop it. Seriously. I know sometimes it’s hard to get our babies into the harsh light of day, having the anxiety of a fit falls on its face, or if someone doesn’t like it, et cetera, et cetera.

I get it. Trust me as a recovering secret launcher. I get it. But guess what? The worst case scenario here is that it just flops. And then you know what? I love flops and you should too. They’re like the first pancake. You can see why it didn’t get fully cooked, just didn’t learn and have the most perfect, yummy second pancake.

I mean, really, truly, that’s all businesses is launching and learning. It’s really driving home. I’m gonna leave you with one of my favorite analogies that I use with my clients about this very subject. When you’re building a house and you put in the plumbing and the electrical, when do you test it to make sure everything is as it should be, and working?

Do you do it after you’ve drywalled painted and moved in? Of course not. You do it when the walls are open and you can see the leaks, or God forbid the sparks. The same is true for your business. I said it before, I’m gonna say it again. Launch and learn. So often we get stuck getting ready to get ready, to get ready, to get ready, that we never actually get on the horse and ride.

Or we try to perfect it before we actually know if the ideal holds up. So let’s embrace the imperfect and take a page out of the tech playbook and start launching MVPs, which in case you didn’t know, this is very funny, when I was working on, um, a development project for one of my other businesses, and he said, all right, the MVP’s almost ready.

And I’m like, the most valuable player. That’s weird. Like why would it? It took me a while to realize that this means minimum viable product. The tech guys got it right because a minimum viable product allows you to see where the wind takes it to test your idea without spending and investing a lot of time and energy.

Here’s the thing that I do know. If you build something in a vacuum, it does not matter if it’s a service, an idea, a framework. It could succeed. It could. But the chances are not as good because you don’t have any aggregate data or responses or feedback or anything to go off of because you’ve built it in this vacuum where you have this idea, but you don’t know if your customers want that.

And one of my favorite things to, um, to say to my clients is, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Have you asked your clients? And they’ll sometimes say yes, sometimes say no. I’m like, well, I think you should ask your clients because they do have this problem. But the question is, do they know that they have the problem and do they wanna pay for the problem?

When you can take a moment and really be comfortable and trust me, guys, this is a stretch for me. When you can be comfortable putting something out there that’s not really ready in your mind. You know, some might call it half baked to just get it out there and see how it lands. Think of how much time, energy, money, investment, etcetera, you can save because you can see like, oh, well we put this workshop out there, nobody registered.

Well shoot. Maybe we’re not talking about the problem. Right. Or maybe. They don’t see the value. I mean, any number of things. Or maybe you put the workshop out there and it sells like hot cakes, and then you do more of that. So it’s about doing more of what’s working, doing less of what’s not, and you only find that out when you launch and learn.

Hopefully now you can see that your shiny object syndrome is a blessing, not a curse, but get yourself a squirrel wrangler. Trust me, if you don’t have somebody that’s gonna help you. Stay tethered to the mission and the vision and the goals, and make sure that you just don’t run off in the opposite direction.

You’re gonna be in trouble. So now go forth, corral your ideas and let’s ship some epic shit. What do you say? Can’t wait to see what you guys create. All right. That’s it for this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening in. If anything I shared sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you. So let’s connect.

Tag me or DM me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the interwebs. Also, don’t forget to subscribe, so you’re the first to get notified when our next episode drops and it’s ready for your ears. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, thank you for listening to The Biz Doctor Podcast.

Now, I like to say that friends don’t let friends WebMD your business. So if you’re wondering what your next steps could be, here are some options for you no matter what. Head to the show notes or to my website, goldenkeypartnership.com for some impactful resources to support you getting out from under your business.

That’s also where you’ll find the links to learn more about our services and how we support business owners just like you. Who are ready to make the successful jump from business operator in the trenches to visionary business owner with more freedom and flexibility. All that info is on our website, so pop on over to learn more or get in touch.

Goldenkeypartnership.com. Finally, if you love The Biz Doctor podcast, I’d be so grateful if you would share it with your friends and network and give us a five star rating or review wherever you listen to your podcast.

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