Entrepreneurship fundamentally involves taking strategic risks which solve problems and bring the entrepreneur financial rewards. While this concept may be very easy to understand, the processes involved in its execution is far from easy. Frankly, entrepreneurship is not for everybody as it is both tough and stressful. It is this stress and how to overcome it that this article is all about.
When it comes to dealing with the stress of entrepreneurship, many experts recommend different types of solutions which range from taking frequent yoga sessions to allocation of tasks to other people. In addition to the recommendations above, many entrepreneurs find themselves depending heavily on drugs or similar stuff to stay in mental shape. But what if there were hacks other than the usual, which could help business owners catch their breaths while going at it every day? There are many such hacks out there, actually. However, Matthias Mazur’s mindset for combating the entrepreneurship related stress appears to be pretty interesting especially for highly creative entrepreneurs.
Beat Stress Through Laser Sharp Focus
Having been an entrepreneur for two decades – building multiple multimillion-dollar businesses across various industries in the process – Matthias Mazur clearly understands how much stress hyper-creative entrepreneurs often face. Many entrepreneurs constantly juggle several business ideas and concepts at every point in time. As a result they spread their energy, resources and time across far too many ventures or activities than they can handle. The unfortunate result of this is work stress, waste of resources and a plunge in overall productivity.
In the words of Matthias Mazur himself “Focus exclusively on one project at a time and ignore other attractive distractions that will keep coming your way”. To further reinforce his point, the serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in Europe illustrates with sprinting and baseball. “Even if you can do well at baseball and sprinting, you cannot do both at the same time as one will be a distraction to the other. Distractions will come disguised as business opportunity but the ability to identify and ignore or postpone them will be very instrumental in avoiding both stress and losses in your business”.
He is not alone on that. Experts at Harvard Medical School recommend the same thing in one of their recent publications titled “Focus More to Ease Stress”. From people struggling with depression to entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking their companies to the next level, mindful focus remains critical in the management of stress. There are special DIY therapies and exercise routines out there that anyone can follow to improve their mindfulness game but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
What Can Entrepreneurs Do to Remain Focused?
The first step in the journey of combating entrepreneurial stress is taken when entrepreneurs come to the realization that they are multitasking too much. Forget pills and potions, doing just one thing at a time will give you way more peace than all the tablets in the world can give you when you don’t trying to be a jack of all trades. Every entrepreneur should keep in mind that they cannot do it all. Even if they have the skills to do it all, they certainly do not have the time to do it all at the same time.
Entrepreneurs need teams.
This could be some one hundred people skilled in every aspect of the entrepreneurs’ businesses or just two parties – entrepreneurs and a personal assistant. As an entrepreneur, even if your personal assistant is your only staff, you get the feeling that you are not alone. You may be able to get general support from family and friends who chip in advice or some other sort of support from time to time. But then, none of those beats having a personal assistant who would be to you what Robin is to Batman. If you can afford a team, it gets better as each team member can focus on a specific task. At this point, you will be able to focus sharply on one goal and follow through.
On building a team or anything similar, Matthias Mazur advises that entrepreneurs surround themselves with “amazing people”. These amazing people may be friends, associates or mentors but essentially wise and “trustworthy people you can confide in”. For Mr Mazur’s personal experience, building Zuramedia into an 8-figure digital advertising and social media portfolio business, was not something he could achieve by chasing after every new shiny business in town or trying to do it all by himself. A team which consists of people who have the entrepreneur’s interest at heart is very critical to his success.