In today’s day and age, we are busier than ever before. Our lifestyles are inflated with obligations involving our professional and personal lives. On any given day, most people check their schedules to find that they are booked to the point where they don’t even have the time to take a brief pause to eat or call their loved ones.
Or worse, they’re busy with no schedule at all.
Researches have crafted several hypotheses for why we are so busy. These theories explain that a large reason why we, as a society, are so infatuated with busyness is that we view busyness as:
- A badge of honor and trendy status symbol
- Job security
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out
- A byproduct of the digital age
- A time filler
- Necessity
- Escapism
All of these reasons have kept our schedules booked to the brim. Nevertheless, although busyness is a phrase that categorizes the lives of many people worldwide, how effective is it.
Ask yourself, are you working just to work or are you strategically allocating your time to accomplish your goals.
Are you working smarter or harder?
Author of The Entrepreneurial Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Business Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber notes that each of us has three sides. The varying dimensions of our personality include an entrepreneur, manager, and technician. Throughout his work, Gerber emphasizes that it is only by having a uniform balance of all three that we are able to exchange mindless work for efficient productivity.
To explain this theory, let’s take a deeper look into the ins and out of each personality trait.
The Entrepreneur
The entrepreneur can be viewed as the visionary. This part of your makeup is the one that is constantly looking to innovate and grow. Typically, the entrepreneurial section of our personality is future driven and always cultivating new directions to take our lives. The pros of having a healthy entrepreneurial facet of your personality include being able to work for the future, as opposed to the present. Each day the entrepreneur arranges their time strategically to work towards their ideal vision or future. Without the entrepreneur within us, we all would not have the vision necessary to accomplish our goals.
On the other hand, only focusing on our entrepreneur side while neglecting the manager and technician within us can be detrimental. While the entrepreneur’s vision is admirable, without the organizing skills of the manager or productivity of the technician, the likelihood of the entrepreneur’s vision coming to fruition is less probable. It must be understood that the entrepreneur within us is not necessarily the “doer” part of our personality. Rather, it is the inventive part of us from which ideas first begin to establish roots.
The role of the manager is synonymous with order. They are the part of your personality that keeps things in accordance to how they should operate. The great part about the manger is that they understand the value of time and resources. Their sole goal is to take the innovative ideas of the entrepreneur and create a plan that will best work to fulfill them. Their moment-by-moment planning considers both the short and long term future to establish a reasonable timeline for your aspirations. When you think of your managerial side, think about the times when you can be found scheduling events, breaking down how you are going to write a paper, or even planning a vacation.
While the manager within all of us helps us formulate a plan to reach our end objectives, without our entrepreneurial side the manager has nothing to actually manage. On that note, if one doesn’t have a healthy technician characteristic nothing gets done. The manager may come up with the plan, but it is the entrepreneur and technician that breathes life into it.
The technician gets down to business. This part of yourself attempts to allocate your time to focus on the present moment and what can be done today. The technician knows that progress is an everyday process. While the entrepreneur creates the vision and the manager crafts a plan to get that vision accomplished, the technician is the workhorse that sees it through. The technician’s main goal is to be as productive as possible because they understand that the more they get accomplished during any given day, the more they can increase their profit for the day. Technicians are in a constant state of improving their crafts so that they can maintain their steady value in the marketplace.
However, while technicians are significant producers without the ideas of the entrepreneur and the thought out plan of the manager, their work will be done in vain. While we are on this topic, it is important to point out that many individuals are great technicians. As previously mentioned, we are members of one of the busiest generations of all time. But, while many people are excellent technicians, oftentimes they lack the spirit of the entrepreneur and manager to effectively accomplish the goals they truly desire.
What does all of this mean?
Is one part of our personality more important than the other?
No.
Michael E. Gerber argues that creating and maintaining a successful life requires having a balance of all three traits. Inclusively, the entrepreneur, manager, and technician provide the versatility we need to actualize our dreams. To help you further understand the importance of all three roles in your life, here’s a real-world example:
Let’s say you want to have a six-pack. Here is how all three parts of your personality should work together to help you accomplish this goal
- The entrepreneur will envision a future of you having a six plan and plant the seed.
- Following this, the manager will create a plan and research an efficient work-out plan based on your schedule and dietary restrictions.
- Finally, the technician is the part of you that is going to get you working out every day and following your meal prep plan.
Do you see?
All three are important.
Ask yourself, “Do I have systems in place to where my business and life would function even if I stopped working or went on vacation?”
Are you living a strategic life where you are allowing each important aspect of your personality to guide you towards your ideal future?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, challenge yourself to awaken the entrepreneur, manager, and technician within you. Observe which aspect you are lacking in and focusing on improving it so that you can live a more productive life.
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