5 Steps To Speed Up Your Major Projects Without Risking Everything

“We go on vacation, and we stay.”

It was an important but risky project for my parents.

My sister and I were already in middle school.

On the windows of our camper, we could read:

“Family with 2 children, looking for an apartment to rent as soon as possible”.

Off to the beach😀

Professionally, my parents didn’t know what they would do.

All in good time 😀

Housing first, then work.

To make up for it all.

• Very low level of savings.
• We’d returned the keys to our apartment, and my father had given up his business.

So there’s no easy way back…

So, if you ask me, I’d say “too risky.”

But what I often see is exaggeration in the other direction with…

The quest for “zero risk.”

With far more resources than my parents had at the time, we don’t dare do anything for fear of the risk:

• In the corporate world, I’ve seen talent refused opportunities because everything wasn’t safe.
• In financial independence projects. I talk to people who dream of stopping what they’re doing, who have the financial security to quit, downsize, or change their job, and who don’t dare.
• In entrepreneurship. Ambitious people with exciting projects who don’t dare take the plunge…

We put off our desires as if we had our whole lives to make them come true.

In his book“Die with Zero“, Bill Perkins discusses the feasibility of projects compared to age.

Even if you have the finances, you’re less likely to climb Everest at 70 than at 40.

Between starting again on a whim and (never) attempting anything, there’s a lot of room for maneuver.

5 steps to speed up your major projects without risking everything

1/ What do I really want?

It’s a question we don’t ask ourselves enough.

We often think about what we want to avoid but rarely about what we want.

When you do, it’s the equivalent of a superpower.

“What are all the experiences and problems that I have to learn about and master so that what comes out at the other end is somebody who is ready and capable of becoming a successful CEO?” – Nolan Archibald became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company

2/ Assessing risks: The cost of action and inaction

Our little voice keeps telling us what we’re losing.

It’s reassuring. “My job’s not so bad”.

But it doesn’t remind us of the cost of doing nothing.

• I’ll never know if it would have worked.
• I lost 20 years.
• It cost me my happiness.

Let’s not allow our little voice to control our decisions. It’s biased.

Instead, let’s take 30 minutes with pencil and paper to ask ourselves these 2 questions.

• What do I risk if I do?
• What does it cost me if I don’t do it?

What would be the worst situation?

Let go. Write down the worst-case scenario.

In 99.9% of cases, it won’t happen.

But even if that did happen, you’ve just written a few options.

And the truth is, they’re not so insurmountable.

By the way, for the curious. Just before the start of the school year, a Belgian couple passing our campsite every day on their way to the beach offered to rent their apartment. My sister and I were able to return to school on time. My father opened a shoe store in the center of Nice, and everything fell into place. However, this didn’t extinguish my parents’ desire for change. A year later, we moved again for a new adventure…

3/ Major projects: Boost them with consistency

If your plan, like Nolan Archibald’s, is to make a career in the corporate world and reach the C-suite, you can’t shy away from opportunities just because they’re uncertain.

The greater the uncertainties, the faster your progress.

If you can’t overcome the risk. Maybe you just don’t have the desire for this adventure.

So back to square 1 with the question, what do I really want?

The process is dynamic.

Don’t get stuck at one stage. The lack of congruence between our intentions and our actions frustrates us. The creation of a new project motivates us.

4/ I’m an inexhaustible source of ideas…

Even if it’s debatable, it’s certainly useful.

That’s the title of Derek Sivers’ forthcoming book “Useful Not True”, which I heard about on this podcast with Mark Manson .

Everything can be discussed. So we might as well choose to believe in something useful to us.

Clients who tell me they have no ideas often surprise me with their creativity during a coaching session.

Block out 60 minutes of distraction-free thinking and you’ll be amazed at what you’ll create. How do you (finally) focus on things that really matter?

5/ Don’t dive from 10 metres straight away, start by jumping from 1 metre with both feet.

You want to quit your job and start a training course for adults who want to eat healthily.

You’ve built up a financial cushion for the next 5 years.

Theoretically, you could dive from the 10-meters platform and quit your job immediately.

Any doubts? I understand, I’ll be scared too (I explain here how I train myself to overcome my fears).

Why not go down to 1 meter?

• Keep your job and block off one hour a day for the next 6 months.
• Create the first 5 modules of your training course.
• Contact your network and offer them your services free of charge
• Launch your first cohort with 5 students.
• At the end, ask your students to recommend 3 people who might be interested.
• Offer these people training at 50% of the price
• Keep going until you have a business model that works.

That’s what Alex Hormozi has done and recounts in his book $100M Leads. He now has a company worth several hundred million.

But don’t think it’s easy.

It’s going to be more complicated than expected. You’re going to run into a lot of pitfalls. And chances are, it won’t work.

Speed up your major projects without risking everything. Is it worth it?

I’ll let you answer 😀

For me, that’s a big yes. Adventure is in the process.

This allows me to see if I want to climb the 3, 5 or 10-meter platform or just stop because I don’t like diving.

In that case, I’ll go back to square 1. What do I really want to achieve?

Conclusion

It’s too risky to bet everything on a whim or to wait and never take the plunge.

In the first case, we risk losing everything. In the second, to regret everything.

Whether we can bear risks or not, knowing where we want to go and testing our plan helps us live life fully.

What will you do today to make your next dream come true?

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