I haven't yet met an entrepreneur who wasn't….well…a little crazy.
It comes with the territory. To go out on your own and risk everything because you just KNOW you are going to be successful takes a boatload of guts and a rock-solid conviction of your own awesomeness. It also takes a personality that can look in the face of defeat over and over and still be positive. It isn't for everyone.
But, this crazy is necessary. It is what drives an entrepreneur. It is what makes them keep climbing up the cliff and jumping off with a smile on their face.
So, why can't we all just accept and even embrace our own special sauce of craziness and instead of feeling bad about it, put it to work for us?
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Transcript
Today, we’re going to talk about “Are you my kinda crazy?” Yeah, that’s right! Are you my kinda crazy? Because guess what? If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably a little bit crazy. It’s okay.
I’m crazy. It’s all good, right? You know, I’m the fun crazy, not the scary crazy.
Embrace Your Crazy
I want to really encourage you to talk to your potential hires about what you’re really like. Don’t have the shiny “Look at me! I’m the best boss ever” persona in the interview if that’s not who’s going to show up for their second, third, and fourth day of work.
Just like you don’t want a candidate in an interview that is this really polished, put-together perfectionist person who then shows up and is really pretty casual, you don’t want to do the same thing to them. You want to bring your real self and your whole self to the interview because if they love you, they’re going to love you next Thursday and 17 Thursdays down the road.
They’re going to love you on a bad day, and we want to make sure that we’re getting people on our team who get us.
One of the things that I say is:
“You know, here’s the thing. There are a lot of reasons that I’m not a great boss for people. Some people love to work for me and other people hate it.
If you want someone to constantly check your work and make sure it’s going okay, give you a very clear system and process of everything you need to do, one after another, I may be a very terrible boss for you because I really expect my team to do a lot of independent thinking.
I’m going to tell you where we want to go, but I’m not going to tell you how to get there necessarily. I’m going to have you figure that out. Certainly, I’ll coach you, train you and give you insight, but I’m not going to hold your hand through the entire process, because frankly, I could just do it myself at that point if I had to be that involved.”
That startles some people.
Then I say, “Here’s the deal. I talk fast. I think fast, and I change my mind a lot. It can be very exhausting to work for someone like that . So I just want to be upfront about it, and certainly, you can tell me ‘I’m getting a little exhausted because you’ve changed your mind three times in the last two weeks.’
I give you space and the permission, and I hope you have the courage to do that, but this is part of who I am. I talk fast, I think fast – and those two are definitely never changing – and I change my mind a lot. I’m working on improving that, but at the end of the day, it’s probably going to be part of the reason I will irritate you as a boss.”
That’s how you can share your crazy.
If you know you’re a control freak – sign me up, right? I've got things I’m a crazy control freak about – I’m going to own that, and I’m going to say, “Hey, here’s the deal. It’s my name, it’s my brand, it’s my face on everything. I do not want typos. I don’t want broken links, and I’m really picky about that stuff because it looks bad, and it bugs me.”
I’m working on letting that go because I’m working with a coach that says “You know, people want it. They will forgive you for a typo or a spelling error or a broken link because you’re giving so much value and you’re letting them have it, versus keeping it locked up in your Dropbox, right?” Please forgive me for any typos or broken links, and please let me know if they’re out there because I do want to fix them because that part of me is still a work in progress.
Anyway, you have to share it and embrace it because your crazy might be their kind of crazy and you guys are going to have be an awesome team. Or, your crazy is completely irritating to them and it would be so much better not to hire them than to have them actually quit or for you to have to fire them two months down the road!
Embrace who you are at your core, your authentic self, and share it because a lot of people are going to love it and they’re going to want a boss who expects them to think outside the box and do it without having their hand held, and they’re going to rise to the occasion.
So I encourage you, embrace your crazy!
Talk about your crazy and find people who want to be crazy with you.
I hope this helps!
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