B U S I N E S S M AT T E R S
Let it go...
Know when you’re done
Dominic Watson on why learning to let go is essential to achieving your goals It is a surreal experience seeing thousands of hours of inspiration and perspiration laid out in front of you for the first time. A tangible, physical representation of hopes, dreams and aspiration. The product of hundreds of taxing early mornings and blurryeyed late nights laid out chapter by chapter across the editor’s desk. It is a firm reminder that setting yourself a big aspirational goal, like writing your first book, or starting, buying or growing your own optical practice, carries a big personal cost – especially when it is something that you are truly passionate about. Ultimately, for me, it proved to be a testing but highly rewarding and enriching experience. It also highlighted a little talked about but crucial aspect of goal setting and project management: the ability to let go. On face value, the concept that letting go is an essential part of successful project or goal accomplishment is somewhat counter intuitive. Most people assume that you just have to keep battering away at the task until it is done. For certain simple goals, this may be the case, but for more complex multi-stage tasks, learning to let go is an essential skill to master as part of the changemanagement process.
KILLING YOUR DARLINGS There are two aspects to letting go. The first is knowing when to ditch an idea or theme, a process William Faulkner famously termed, 'killing your darlings'.
26 Vision Now December 2021
Enlist trusted help to see the wood for the trees
During the editing process of my book, it took real guts to admit which sections of the manuscript worked well and which were superfluous or distracting from the core message. It was tough coming to terms with the fact that by the end of the editing session, hundreds of hours of work had been completely cut out of the book. For an optical practice owner, it may be letting go of an unprofitable product or service, or changing an ingrained habit or culture amongst your whole team that is no longer serving you well. The second is knowing when you are done and when it is time to let go, when the project is complete. When people are particularly passionate about an undertaking, it can be difficult to finally know when to let it go. There can be a desire to continually research and refine. The danger of letting yourself do this is two-fold: 1) you risk missing out on the optimal timing for your launch; and 2) in
a fast-changing world, your project can quickly become less relevant if you don’t launch and commit fast enough. In some cases, this can mean that people ultimately fail to launch at all. There may never quite be the perfect moment to implement Eyeplan, launch a dry eye clinic, or acquire that extra branch via Myers La Roche, but getting the timing 80 per cent right surely has to be better than not doing it at all? The other major danger is over-working or over-engineering in a desire for perfection. Sometimes less is more. This is a trait that many artists know too well – from rock stars to painters to authors – whose desire to perfect their creation can ultimately spoil something that at one stage may have been a masterpiece. In optics, this often manifests itself in a practice owner failing to change their mindset from being a one man band responsible
