In today’s over-communicated world, here’s how entrepreneurs can achieve clarity and get noticed
By Jim James, Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Jamie Smart is a best-selling Sunday Times author, and he has a new book out: the 10th anniversary and second edition of “Clarity.” In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he talked about why having a big hairy ass goal, taking massive action, and self-belief aren't necessarily the secrets to success and getting noticed.
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Why is Clarity Important?
It’s counterintuitive, but for Jamie, the most important person entrepreneurs need to notice is themselves.
Living in this over-communicated world, people are looking outside themselves for what to do. Whilst there are great things in the world they can learn from, the fact is each person has a unique essence. There’s something unique that they can bring to the world — their own authenticity.
People are now faced with this delusion of information. Many are trying to sell stuff and all that sort of thing. But what the audience is going to tune into is that authenticity.
Each person has something to offer, and they can imbue their personal and business brands within their communication. As Simon Sinek said, an entrepreneur’s goal isn’t to do business with everyone; it’s to do business with people who resonate with them — people whose values and beliefs are aligned with theirs.
The first step for any entrepreneur who wants to get noticed is to notice what is in them that’s seeking expression in the world, what is their way of doing it, and what makes sense to them.
Most people are trying to be like everyone else, but that's not going to make entrepreneurs stand out.
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Getting to Clarity
When it comes to helping entrepreneurs be smart with clarity so that not only can they find what they believe in but also have confidence in it, Jamie’s fundamental assertion is that everyone has within them an innate sense of confidence, clarity, creativity, well-being, purpose, and direction. It’s there in everyone.
When someone hires him to work one-on-one, he and his client will spend literally a few days together to settle down and find out what's that thing within them. What’s the sense of direction?
If entrepreneurs will stop and think about it for a moment, every business is effectively a relationship business. Of course, they will want validation for their ideas. But all too often, people who are trying to get noticed and want to be more visible don’t know who they want to be visible to — and, more importantly, who do they want to make themselves visible to them?
For instance, when Jamie was on Sky News and was getting interviewed for 12 to 13 minutes before 5.5 million people, he was massively visible. However, none of those people whom he was visible to, was visible to him. Hence, he can’t do business with them.
In the same month, he was invited to do a talk to a group of 40 entrepreneurs, and he could see all of them. At the end of the session, he shared what he was up to and, eight of them ended up signing up as clients.
There are advantages to going out live to 5.5 million people but he actually got more business from his talk to 40 people. It shows that it’s indeed about who entrepreneurs want to make themselves visible to them. For what purpose? It’s so that they can build relationships with them.
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Overcoming the Overwhelming Entrepreneurial Diet
Jim Collins has the concept of Big Hair Audacious Goal (BHAG), Tony Robbins has a principle of taking massive action, and Dean Grazioso has this idea of complete self-belief. It’s quite an overwhelming diet for entrepreneurs, and Jamie is one of those who have been fed that.
He then came across a book called “Strategic Intuition,” written by William Duggan who teaches at Columbia Business School. And what Duncan did was investigate people who were amazing at strategy — from the Netflix folks to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Napoleon Bonaparte — and found that they had a very different model for creating success. It was three very different steps.
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Prepare for opportunities. The people Duggan featured were people who would all prepare for opportunities. They were following their curiosities, what inspired them, and, what they wanted to learn about.
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Notice when opportunities show up. Most people are so busy looking around trying to figure out what to do. Yet, they don't notice the opportunities that are staring them right in the face.
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Act on opportunities when they show up. Because these people had been preparing for an opportunity, as soon as it shows up, they will be on it.
Jamie works with entrepreneurs to clear the noise, the pressure, and the deck so they can prepare for opportunities in a way that makes sense to them. He helps them to notice when an opportunity shows up and have the courage to act on it. He helps them to have faith in what they know to be true, take action on it, and go all in.
Finding Things From Within
He had his business about 14 years ago, and was running it on autopilot, four-hour workweek style. He was having his first mini-retirement, skiiing in Whistler; after about eight weeks, he felt miserable. And that feeling didn’t make sense because, according to the rules of the industry, he should be delighted.
He went back to the drawing board and started exploring what he considers the best-kept secret in psychology. He began having insights into it, and the first insight was that everything entrepreneurs are looking for outside of them is already there within them. That realisation immediately reorganised his goals.
Before, he had this idea that once he has his business running on autopilot, once he sells the business, and once he exits, he will be happy, fulfilled, and feel successful. But it doesn’t work that way. And that’s what sent him back to the drawing board.
When he says “everything entrepreneurs are looking for,” it doesn’t mean clothes, shoes, wristwatches, and cars. He means the feelings of success, fulfilment, well-being, and purpose. It’s about finding comfort in one’s own skin. These things aren’t found on the outside; they only ever come from within.
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People know all this instinctively.
Think about a little kid who has a teddy bear and believes that their feelings of comfort and security come from that teddy bear. As adults, humans have those old teddy bears. Though their feelings of comfort, security, and well-being may seem to be coming from those — whether it’s a business, a turnover, a pension pot, or a partner — it's only a trick of the mind. It comes from within 100% of the time. No exceptions.
Veering Away from Distractions
In the book “Clarity,” Jamie talked about distractions. But how does he help entrepreneurs to move away from those distractions and get clarity?
Most people have a lot on their minds these days more than ever, especially things that pertain to physical information. What Jamie does is teach a simple understanding that takes things off the mind automatically. His goal is to let people have the freedom, confidence, and well-being, to do whatever it is that makes sense to them and to enjoy their lives.
His assertion, as readers will find out in his book, is that there’s something people can learn and understand that as they understand it, it will take things off their minds automatically. They won’t have to do anything.
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Jamie has asked thousands of people — ranging from prison inmates to people at the NATO Defense College to entrepreneurs and business leaders — the question, When do they get their best ideas? The answers were always the same: at the gym, in the shower, out for a walk, dropping off to sleep, or waking up in the morning. It's when they are not thinking about it; when they have a relatively open and clear mind.
This is also what Duggan found in his book. When people had insights, it was when they weren't thinking about their strategy and when they weren't trying to figure it out. It was when they were allowing their mind to do what it's actually designed to do.
Everyone will find this in their own experience. And there's something they can learn that makes that more and more reliable, predictable, and inevitable.
There’s something within each person that is just as reliable as their wound-healing capacity. If they got a scratch on their hand, they don't worry about whether it will get better. They will rely on their body's immune system.
In that regard, the mind has the same immune system.
Jamie compares it to a snow globe. If someone shakes it off, it gets all cloudy. If they shake it more, it will just get more cloudy. But if they let the snow settle, clarity emerges because clarity is the water’s natural state. And clarity is the mind’s natural state.
People’s minds get so distracted and overwhelmed because they believe their moment-to-moment experience is coming from somewhere other than from within. It may seem like those feelings of stress, tension, and pressure come from deadlines or the speech they got to give or the things they did. But the truth is they are always an internally generated experience.
When entrepreneurs wake up to the truth of that, life just becomes a lot less threatening.
The Case of Steve Jobs
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One of Jamie’s favourite examples of entrepreneurs who wait until they know something — rather than feeling urgently driven to do the next thing — is Steve Jobs.
When he came back to Apple, he created this incredible success. At the time, he was interviewed by a reporter who asked what’s he going to do next; to which Jobs replied, “I don’t know.” The reporter was flabbergasted.
Jobs further added that he was going to wait another six months until he knows it, and when that time comes, he will be doing it. For the next six months, there was no sign of anything new. But when he moved next, it was when he introduced iPod and iTunes, which literally transformed the music industry and made Apple the biggest and most profitable company in the world.
Enthusiasm as a Guide
Entrepreneurs can prepare for opportunities by following their own intuition, wisdom, and enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm will be a guide to things.
Often, it won't be apparent why they’re enthusiastic about a thing, but as they trust and follow it, it falls into place later on. It makes sense later on. So there should be this willingness to trust that enthusiasm and to trust that there's something within them that's guiding them.
Jobs once said, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what they truly want to become.” And for Jamie, it’s all about opening to that. It sounds esoteric but there’s a sort of guidance, wisdom, and intelligence within entrepreneurs that can position them beautifully for what they’re going to do.
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Jamie had a sales intake conversation with the head of a very large household-name brand, and it was about doing training within the entire organisation.
It was his first conversation and he still hadn’t got that rate. When he talked to one of his mentors about it, that mentor said that he was trying to compete with McKinsey, Bain, and all those businesses with a multimillion-dollar marketing and sales budget. If he tries and competes using their tactics, they'll win. His mentor’s advice is that he needs to bring what only he has to that conversation.
During Jamie’s second conversation, he just spoke right to the issue based on what he knows to be true. He said the things that none of those other companies will say. And it was a game-changer.
Why are Relationships Essential?
The way that Jamie has always done it in terms of creating a scalable business and getting noticed when he’s trusting his intuition is through relationships.
The internet has allowed unprecedented opportunities to build multiple relationships at scale (e.g., through podcasts, books, and newsletters). These are ways entrepreneurs can build those relationships with the people who resonate with them and tune into them.
He has people who have been in a relationship with him and have been consuming his offerings for six to seven years now. The first thing he’ll know about such people is they signed up for a £10,000 or £50,000 programme with him and they already know his whole story. It’s interesting because there’s this sort of asynchronous relationship building where his audience knows a lot about him but he doesn’t know much about them until they’re ready to take the next step.
It shows how the internet has been levelling the playing field. Smaller brands can now do just as much heavy lifting as large brands because of the relationships they created.
To find out more about Jamie, visit www.jamiesmart.com. His books are also available on Amazon and in local bookshops. He also has podcasts called “Get Clarity” and “The Thriving Coaches.” He’s also on social media spaces such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Laurenz Kleinheider on Unsplash
