Years ago, I took a course by Dan Sullivan called “Strategic Coach.” In the course, they taught us about something they called “Unique Ability.”
My “Unique Ability” turned out to be that I use quick, intuitive ideas to help entrepreneurs reverse engineer their dreams.
In a perfect world, I would outsource, delegate, or stop doing anything except for those tasks that utilize my Unique Ability.
Here’s how Dan Sullivan defines “Unique Ability” in his Strategic Coach program:
“First, it is a superior ability that other people notice and value; second, we love doing it and want to do it as much as possible; third, it is energizing both for us and others around us; and, fourth, we keep getting better, never running out of possibilities for further improvement.”
In order to truly focus, use this simple exercise to help you start working only on items that are close to your Unique Ability:
1) Make a list of everything you do daily and weekly. I like to pretend someone took a video of me working all day for a month and I write down everything in the movie.
2) Put all of those items in column one of a spreadsheet.
3) In column two, put one of these four letters describing your skill level related to the task:
a. I = Incompetent – meaning you’re terrible at it
b. C = Competent – meaning you’re OK at it
c. E = Excellent – meaning you’re awesome at it (but you don’t love it)
d. U = Unique Ability – follow Dan’s definition above.
4) In column three, put the hourly wage you’d be willing to pay someone to do that task as a full time job.
5) Then begin quickly delegating, stopping or outsourcing the lowest paying tasks and the tasks where I have only a C or I.
This simple system will help you quickly become more focused on doing exactly what you need to grow your company and love doing it. Imagine if you had everyone in your company only working on areas that warranted the wage you were paying them or were at least items where you and they would rank them as E or U.
I work very hard to coach entrepreneurs on doing this every two weeks, you get the lesson for free. Try it.
