The Mourning Dove Method

Don’t let your fear of making an imperfect nest keep you from laying golden eggs.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Mourning doves, the melodious cooing cousins of the far less glamorous common pigeon, might have a beautiful call and graceful wings, but there’s one area in which they are definitely underperforming. Apparently, though they are prolific egg-layers, their nest-building skills leave a lot to be desired.

Reports abound of mourning doves throwing two sticks together and calling it a day — or a nest, as it were. So how come these shoddy builders have managed to survive for millennia? It turns out what they lack in construction skills they make up for by laying many eggs per season. The moral of this nature story is that you don’t have to be good at everything it takes to run a business. This is all too common for small business owners who do many jobs and often can’t afford to hire employees to delegate to.

In this situation, too often we get stuck on things because we know we don’t have the time, skill, or motivation to do them perfectly. That could be anything from cleaning up your bookkeeping to starting a social media account for your business. Fear of imperfection paralyzes us into inaction. It’s time to accept that being just average at some things is ok, as long as you are really excellent at others. In other words, don’t let your fear of making an imperfect nest keep you from laying golden eggs.

So how do you move forward with tasks you know you won’t do well? I think you have four choices.

Skip it: Some things just don’t need to be done. Not every business needs a TikTok account, a company handbook, or a SWOT analysis. Identify what really needs to be done or will truly bring value to your business.

Delegate it: If it must be done and you really can’t do it or it’s not a good use of your time, find someone else to do it. It doesn’t have to be a full-time employee. You can find a professional, a contract employee, or an intern to take it off your plate.

Chip away at it: If the problem is you’re overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, then starting small and working at it consistently, even just a little bit every day is still better than doing nothing.

Just do it: Some things can’t be done by someone else. They require you and your unique expertise. Those are the tasks you should focus on. Even if you don’t like them, some things really do require your personal expertise.

Deciding which of these buckets your tasks fall into will help you focus on what truly reaps the biggest reward for your business — even if it’s not always perfect.

Thanks for reading this week’s SmallTLK. Here’s a link to a bonus post originally published on LinkedIn: Your New Job Title: Storyteller-in-Chief.