Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Jim Schleckser

When we think of CEOs of companies, our initial assumption is that they are very busy people with no time available for socializing. Sometimes, we even wonder how they manage to spend time with their families, friends, and hobbies. But what if I told you that if you want to be a CEO, there is a way to avoid that lifestyle and still have a life outside of this endeavor? In this episode, I have Dr. Jim Schleckser, founder of the CEO Project. We discuss how to achieve work-life balance and effective leadership. He emphasizes the Theory of Constraints, time delegation, schedule control, and workplace autonomy. Tune in and optimize your time now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Jim Schleckser Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Perhaps you’re out there thinking, “Okay, I want something more, maybe I wanna try to move up some levels at my organization or I wanna start something on my own and be the CEO of my own company,” but then you’re looking at other people who are high level CEOs or even other C-level and director-level executives and thinking, “I don’t wanna be this busy. I don’t want this lifestyle. I don’t want the lifestyle where I don’t have any time for my family, I don’t have any time for my hobbies, I don’t have any time to just relax and chill and enjoy myself,” and that can be a real daunting possibility here because you’re thinking yourself, “Okay, I still want to be in charge of my own destiny a little bit or I still want to be something more than just a cog in a machine so how do I get there without giving up my entire life and not having a life outside of this particular endeavor?” And that’s where my guest today, Jim Schleckser, who is the founder of The CEO Project, also a podcast host as well as a bestselling author who wrote the book Great CEOs Are Lazy comes into play here. --- Jim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it. Well, thanks for hopping on because I’m sure this is on a lot of people’s minds, right? You know, an important person, whether it be rising to the top of the company you’re already a part of or starting your own company and once you get somewhere, you’re going to have a lot on your plate. What inspired you to start The CEO Project? A number of years ago, I was doing acquisitions. I worked for a corporate entity and one of our strategies for growth was to buy companies. And I remember these two founders that I was about to buy their company for, I think it was $6 million, I’m like, man, oh man, these guys are not as smart as me, they don’t work as hard, they’ve got four weeks of vacation every summer. I’m like, my gosh, I’m so much smarter than them, I go, wait a minute, I’m about to give them 6 million bucks and they get four weeks of vacation every year. I go, what’s wrong with this picture? And at that moment, I said, look, really, for the same level of talent, you get a very different, meaning better outcome in terms of lifestyle control, economic outcome, and so forth, by running your own business. And at that point, I said, okay, that is the path I’m on. That was a decade at least before I jumped out and started my own business. So you observed these guys start their own business and have way more autonomy over their lives and decided you want that. What did you experience when you first made that observation? Because you said there was some time of a gap between the two. Was there that similar anxiety of like, okay, how am I going to get there, that type of thing? I had a plan, maybe just there was another element that drove it. I was a member of CEO peer groups for a long time as I ran various companies so this is a mastermind group that helps you think through your problems. So I was a member of one and I saw that people that were founder, entrepreneurs and same profile, better time control, more economic output, more freedom of action, and I said, I need to do this. And so my goal in the corporate environment was to learn everything I possibly could to increase the probability of success when I jumped out on my own. And so whenever there was a, “Hey, we need somebody to do this,” I go, “I’ll do it,” because I would learn. And so my first, really, couple of decades of work were all about learn, learn, learn, learn everything that I possibly could to become a really, really good business person so when I went out and I was risking my own money instead of somebody else’s money, I’d have a really good shot at being successful. So that was like how am I going to get there? The epiphany was these guys have a better lifestyle. The plan was learn, learn, learn, learn and then jump out and do it on my own at some point.Share on X Now, when you talk about volunteering, “I’ll do this,” was there some level of judiciousness around, okay, is this thing going to help me learn or not? Because there might be some tasks out there where it’s like, okay, I’m not really going to learn much from this. No, I would do scut work, just pay my dues, but generally speaking, the primary factor of should I do it or not is am I going to learn something and if the answer was yes, then I’m in, I’m going to go do that. It wasn’t about money, it was about learning, first and foremost, for a long, long time. So you basically made your job and your lifestyle, you said, “My priority is learning,” and so most people, their priority is either, one, seeming important enough to not get fired, or, two, moving up the ladder. You said yourself, “Okay, I’m gonna be here but I’m gonna have this mindset and then keep in my mind that my top priority at this point is gonna be learning.” Yeah. Now, clearly, you have to have an impact, right? You have to do a decent job. You have to have good outcomes. And, by the way, the money and all that jazz, promotions followed because I was trying to do a good job, but in the doing the good job, the meta work, if you will, was learn enough so I can do this on my own someday. So, yeah, you can’t punt on doing a good job. That still has to happen no matter what. And as you were trying to learn as much as you can, was there any other aspect of your lifestyle that you reoriented around learning, whether it be like reading a lot of books on certain subjects or not watching a lot of junk TV or anything like that? Yeah, I am a voracious reader and I’ve probably read a thousand books on business. I mean, I would read anything, and if I got three or four decent ideas out of a book, it was considered a win. You accumulate 24 books a year, every year on business, you build a huge knowledge. I also went and got more education on business. On the flip side, when I was in the corporate environment, I really didn’t have schedule control and that was a problem because my life balance in terms of spending time at home with my kids and things I like to do, it was just upside down bad and that was one of the real drivers to say I don’t want to keep doing this, it’s time to do something different, because that lack of schedule control is just painful. It’s really painful. Yeah, and the schedule control is a really big deal for a lot of people, and I believe that’s even part of the popularity of what people are referring to now is like the gig economy, probably like the easiest way to get schedule control is to become a freelancer or somehow join the gig economy. The problem is you have to be pretty special, earn good amount of money on some of that, at least how it stands now, I’m not going to comment on the future because the future might be quite different on that. First thing is, as a consultant, gig economy, you’re a consultant effectively, you’ve got to plan on being about 50 percent busy, half the time finding new work and admin and half the time actually doing things that make you money. To make $100,000 a year, which is good money, but you have costs against that, you’d need to be charging $100 an hour. So you have to do something that merits that or better or you’re just not going to – the pieces won’t work for you, right? And these people, they go, “I’m gonna go out on my own and make a half a million bucks a year,” I go, okay, what do you know how to do that’s worth $1,000 an hour? That’s got to be super special stuff. So when it came to all this reading of business books, first of all, is there any specific books right now that are on your mind at this point that you would recommend anyone listening? Well, besides my own, of course, I just had Kim Scott on my podcast who wrote Radical Candor. Oh, yeah. I think that’s a really excellent book. She also has a new book called Radical Respect, which is more about how you culturally build an organization that has respect for the people in it. Those are quite good. The problem is I’m so eclectic in what I read, I don’t have anything on my desk at the moment that I just finished that’s relevant but, yeah. When you’ve read that many books, it’s almost like, so this is, I think episode number 135 of this podcast, and so you get to a number where people say, “Well, what’s your best episode?” and I’m trying to think, like, okay, well, there are a few that have more downloads, a few that emotionally impacted me more, and then, of course, there are some categories, like I’ve interviewed a lot of people who are life coaches, business coaches type of people and they’ve been well received but it’s hard for me to just point to one. I usually point people to the website with the search function, drop down and you can try to find everything. And that that’s kind of the book answer, right? Tell me what you’re trying to figure out, I’ll tell you a book that will help you figure it out, because that’s probably a better way to think about it....