172- When Entrepreneurs cannot see outside the grooves

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In this episode of The Struggling Biz podcast show, we describe an overview of the content of a book by podcaster and small business owner, Todd Henry (who is also an author) which is called Daily Creative: A Practical Guide for Staying Prolific, Brilliant and Healthy.

Now, I have just received this book in hardcopy a couple of days ago. I am waiting for the audio book version, as well. After seeing the title, I noticed that the book was signed by Todd Henry, himself. Now, having known Todd since 2005 when he had started a podcast show called The Accidental Creative, I did interview him on a prior podcast that I had called The Struggling Entrepreneur in 2013.

Todd has inspired me in a few ways of becoming a better entrepreneur. He challenges us to be prolific (that is, doing a lot of great work all the time without burning out), as well as Brilliant (which means that your quality of work and creating deliverables is outstanding), and most of all, Healthy (which means you do not burn out and you can keep creating great work continuously by taking care of your health).

Now, as I stated in an earlier podcast episode, this book reminds me of a prior book by John Jantsch called The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. In this latter book, Mr. Jantsch gives us 366 simple singular ideas — one for every day of the year — as it relates to small business success. Thus, too, Todd gives us a single thought that should empower us every day of the year, although the main focus is that of creativity (especially if you are a content creator or creative in New Media).

Todd also gives an excerpt from the book in his episode of The Accidental Creative in August, 2022, For my own exercise to do a bit of recon on the book, I went to the date of 30 August 2022, and I saw the words used: “…we overlook key assumptions because we are so deep into the work that we can’t see outside the grooves….”

Thus, I chose this single theme for this podcast episode. And in the next paragraph, he gives us a simple solution: “A way to avoid this trap is to routinely challenge assumptions, even if they are likely to prove true….”

I feel that most entrepreneurs have many assumptions that hold us back from taking the first steps to what could be the breakout of our doldrums and inertia into taking action and setting ourselves on the correct path toward some sort of success — be it financial, planning, emotional success, positive growth and steering ourselves on the right path (or just plain discovering that it was a “good try” but not to be pursued any longer).

For myself as an entrepreneur, I was recently caught up in this quagmire of inertia, but I considered what the daily dose of positive reinforcement that Todd gave to me when I read the page of his book for that day: “Don’t allow assumptions to limit where you look for ideas. Challenge them.”

Well, for myself, that was a jolt in the arm that I needed to plan a different approach and then proceed to pursue the answer to my question and to remove the inertia.

Now, I know that this may seem to be too simplistic, but sometimes even the most simple of thoughts and ideas could lead to a positive outcome for an entrepreneur trapped into the routine where he cannot “see outside the grooves.”

Hopefully, you, too can benefit from this type of nudging every day in one aspect or another to help you go past any negativism that you may currently have, and then you can proceed on your path to improving yourself with productivity on your way to entrepreneur success, albeit as small as it may seem at the time.

So we recommend that you review the contents of the episode mentioned above, so that you can get a feel for the ideas from Todd’s book of Daily Creative, and that it may have a positive impact for you as an entrepreneur.

Thank you for attention.