How can being overweight improve your business and your life?

I’ll admit I’ve got a few pounds to lose.
The extra inches around my middle speak to days, weeks and months of indulgence. And getting rid of them is going to take weeks and months of deliberate effort. Of exercise and thinking about what I eat. Of resisting the urge to go back to ways of acting and thinking that have contributed to my weight today.

In fact, I’m going to have to go overweight in order to stop being overweight.
That sounds odd, I know. But the answer is the fund managers’ definition of overweight, not the health practitioners’. In order to get returns superior to the market I need to allocate my resources (capital, time, energy) in the most attractive areas (activities).

I need to eat better and exercise more. I need to invest in activities and ways of thinking that will get me the results that I want, whether they come tomorrow or months from now.

Getting results in business is no different.
If you’re dissatisfied with the results you’re getting in business you may also need to go overweight. To be “out of balance” for a period of time in order to generate the returns you’re after.

Perhaps your customer service isn’t what it could be. Perhaps your marketing could do with an overhaul. Perhaps your cost structure or business model or suppliers need more time and attention than you’ve been giving them in order to generate the returns you want. Or, perhaps they simply need more money spent on them.

Whatever the result you’re chasing, going overweight on the key drivers and contributors to that result is how you’ll succeed.

And that means being overweight is how we achieve superior returns in life, too.
It’s easy to talk about work life balance and to imagine some perfectly balanced day or week, when your boss, spouse, dog, cat, children, or psychotherapist is just as happy with your day as you are. The reality of life is quite different.

In order to get ahead at work you may need to spend more time at the office. You may need to spend time doing the activities that you don’t particularly like in order to develop your skills. You may have to communicate more or less, stand up in front of an audience or stretch yourself by doing a course.

In order to improve your home life, you may need to spend more time there. It might be time to give more attention to your children, to take a holiday together or to create rituals and traditions for generations to come.

There are at least two ways to be overweight in life.
As much as success in life depends on where you allocate your time, which is often the measure for work life balance, there is another factor we can draw upon, the factor of intensity.

Intensity (both intellectual and emotional) can help you succeed even where time is short. The way you acquire skills, the amount of preparation, effort or zeal you put into a task or conversation can help you generate returns where others cannot.

Balance is meaningless until you know what you want to achieve.
For the fund manager it’s easy: they want to outperform the market. They will allocate their capital in whatever classes of investment or particular stocks they believe will deliver superior returns.

For businesses it’s pretty straightforward, too. Having a benchmark or current standard can help you identify where you need to improve.

Having goals makes going overweight worthwhile.
Whilst some fund managers may be content with beating an index or a model portfolio, others will nominate the amount by which they want to beat the index.

In your business or in your home life there’s not an index to beat. Instead you need to create your own benchmark for what you want to achieve. Whether it’s income, or relationships, or even losing weight, deciding what time and intensity you give to tasks and activities in your life will, in a very explicit way, determine where you are overweight.

Get started in going overweight.
Here’s the simple plan:

• Pick an area of your business or life you want to change
• Set a goal that inspires you and will make a real difference (ie its a Priority 1 or 2)
• Break that goal down into tasks/activities you need to complete
• Look at your ‘portfolio’ of current activities and prioritise your Time and Intensity “budgets” against those activities
• Monitor and reassess over time

Where do you need to go overweight in order to get results?