Overcoming EADD

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One of the biggest challenges to success as a faith venture entrepreneur is finding the right balance between focusing on your core business while enabling an environment the encourages creative freedom in search of the next venture opportunity.

By nature, entrepreneurs are super creative people that are prone to problems with focus. I have met very few successful entrepreneurs who didn't fit the criteria of attention deficit disorder. A fast mind that is prone to skip around allows for creativity. But it needs to be controlled and disciplined. And the first step is realizing that Entrepreneurial ADD is real and best handled by focused business planning.

Dr. Jeff Cornwall explores tips from Scott Belsky as preventive solutions for EADD in his blog post "An Antidote for Entrepreneurial ADD:"

Belsky's approach offers three key steps (more than that would overwhelm anyone with EADD):

   1. Hire killjoys.  One of our partners played this role for us.  He tended to worry about the downside.  At first we thought he was, well, a real killjoy.  But over time we realized that his caution balanced our enthusiasm in a very important way.  Hiring people who can and will say "No" to some of your ideas can also work.
   2. Work with bias toward action.  Focus on getting things ready for market and then focus even harder on building customers.  No matter how tempting that next idea might be, leave it alone until your current business is nicely cash flowing.
   3. Change your vocabulary.  Celebrate implementation and business milestones, not creative free-for-alls.  Over time it will alter your culture to one of action and not just ideas.
Read Cornwall's complete post here.

And the Entrepreneur article on Belsky's ideas is here.

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