How to think big

Every Friday at 7am, the Decusatio Group of Companies team get together for our “How To Take Over The World Sessions”. We launched these under COVID as a way to share what we were working on and to learn a bit more about the talent and skills on our team.?

Each week, 2 team members get the opportunity to present and this week I spoke about “How To Think Big” …. Which is ironic in many ways because I’m definitely not a blue sky thinker.?

While I like to think of myself as “entrepreneurial”, I’m somebody who looks for a formula and tries to repeat it rather than some radical, big, industry-changing idea. For this reason, I often am fascinated by people who innovate and think about big ideas.

I started off by asking the team 4 questions:?

1. There are 21 days left in the month. If you could increase your earnings by an amount in those 21 days – what’s the Rand value you wish you could earn??
2. What is a professional achievement you aspire to achieve??
3. Will you make it??
4. ?If no …. Why not?

In most cases, the answer to the first question was between R4000 and R10?000 and the answers to the second question was very operational in nature.??

This gave me pause for thought on a couple of fronts.

1.?????We run a bonus pool which is distributed either monthly or quarterly depending on operational performances and we try and reward team members for bringing in new projects. It feels like team members are too inward focused rather than looking for big deals for us

2.?????The second thing – based on the feedback – was that the time constraint of 21 days was what limited the big idea thinking?

If you look at traditional goal-setting, a couple of things happen. The moment you apply a timeframe, the goal becomes “more realistic” (IE you scale back your expectations).On top of that, the moment you fail to meet your goal then you become less and less ambitious. At the same time, as you get older – and you accumulate bumps and bruises – you are also tempted to think smaller and more about “What could go wrong” rather than “What could go right”.?

[As a complete aside, Allon Raiz used to run this brilliant workshop called Shift Questions and they used to ask some fun questions like “What would happen if you could only run your business at night?” or “What would you day look like if you couldn’t use a computer in your day-to-day activities?” or “Why is a day 24 hours?” – I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance to attend it]?

I did quite a lot of reading on the subject and the departure point for thinking big is that you have to start from a position where you believe you are successful and you can clearly define success.?

I found this article from Ashley Stahl entitled “5 Signs you’re successful (Even if you don’t realise you are)” quite interesting but the main takeaways are you’re successful if:?

-???????You make big decisions with conviction?

-???????You build practices that live in the present

-???????You aren’t afraid to dream bigger

-???????You embrace failure because your standards are high

-???????The world doesn’t revolve around you?

This was an interesting check-list for me to conduct mentally and that then I started to put together a checklist around the actual habit of “Thinking Big” and these were the common themes that seemed to come out:?

1.?????You have to give yourself dedicated time in your schedule to think big – you can’t just do the day-to-day tasks

2.?????Don’t surround yourself with pessimists

3.?????People gravitate toward big thinkers and OPPORTUNIITES – constantly assuming things won’t work won’t attract people who can be catalysts for big projects

4.?????Become that person that people actually want to help – my friend York Zucchi is the perfect example of this – some of his ideas are crazy but because he constantly invests in his network, people WANT him to succeed

5.?????Thinking big actually requires as much effort as thinking small – this was a bit of an eye-opener for me but when you unpack this, it actually makes sense

6.?????Set achievable goals and deadlines?

Remember how we said right up-front that the more often you fail to achieve your goals, the smaller you start to think??

The below is a quote from this article from Wanda Thibodeaux and I thought it was a great way to end this post.

Hope you enjoyed and would love your input!???