3 Ways Jon Acuff Has Helped My Business (and My Life)

Hi, I'm Don Downs from RV Business Coach,

I just want to make a quick video and give a quick shout out to Jon Acuff for three ways that Jon has helped me in my business and in my life.

So I’ll make a quick observation first. Jon uses a lot of humor in his writing, and I happen to like that. I find that a lot of times the use of humor can help engage you and draw you in. And also proper use of humor can help you realize the points that are being made better. You think about the joke and go “Oh, yeah, I remember that joke and Jon told that joke because he was making this point.” I think he does a great job of that.

So upfront, I'll just say I enjoy Jon's humor. Some people are a bit turned off by it, but I enjoy it a lot and it makes it a lot easier to digest some of his material. When I read his book Finish, I got through and I thought, "That was probably the most entertaining book on goal setting I've ever read."  It's that kind of thing.

All right. Enough about humor.

Let's talk about three ways that Jon has helped me.

Way number one is overcoming perfectionism.

And you've probably heard it said that perfect is the enemy of good.

Perfect is the enemy of done.

Done is better than perfect.

All of those are true.

And it's really easy for us to get tied up trying to be perfect. And then when we do, everything just grinds to a halt because it'll never be perfect.

So I'm modeling that here:  these videos are far from perfect, but I'm making them and they're better out there than not being out there.

Way number two is overcoming fear. Fear is probably the number one thing that crushes entrepreneurs. There's always that fear... Even perfectionism is kind of a fear of not being perfect, a fear of not being good enough. There's fear of failure crops up, fear of rejection. And so you just have to get past that fear.

in Jon's book Start, the subtitle starts "Punch Fear in the Face..." So he writes a lot about overcoming fear, and I find that very helpful.

And then the third way he's helped me is he's written a lot about taking really small steps.

For example, if I have a big goal I need to accomplish at the end of the month, I want to do such and such… A lot of times I miss that goal because it's, you know, it's just too big to think about doing. I talked about this the other day on procrastination, breaking it down.

So after reading some of Jon's stuff, I've started saying, hey, you know what, my goal this month is to work on this 10 minutes a day, or to do something on it every day.

And if you think about it, if you work on it 10 minutes a day for 30 days, that's 300 minutes. That's 5 hours of work that you got done. 5 whole hours! And you probably wouldn't have done any of it if you waited for a five hour block to do it.

So his goal of taking things into really small steps and very tiny bite sized chunks, I find to be very, very effective. One of the most effective techniques I found for moving projects along.

All right. So that's it.

I hope you enjoyed this. Hope you found it useful.

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All right, that's it. Take care.

Talk to you later.

[my son]: "You should have said Merry Christmas!"