The challenges of being a business owner are many, regardless of whether you are successful. If you are failing at business, then your immediate challenges are obvious. You need to improve the financials, streamline the processes, and find a way to solve the problems of your customers, not necessarily in that order.
As a successful business owner, you may not see your challenges as obvious. Sure, increasing margins and expanding your company’s footprint are low-hanging fruit, but in good times most people focus on keeping things steady and sustaining the business.
Real growth of a business, however, is typically precipitated by innovation. That growth can apply to the business owner’s skills and abilities, too, which is why you should consider doing a misogi.
Today’s Misogi
A misogi (mee-so-gee) has its roots in Japanese culture and folklore, but the term has been co-opted into a decidedly driven pursuit of self-betterment. A misogi of today’s world, especially in Western cultures, is designed to break out of a rhythm. To challenge your comfort zone and grit by committing to a challenge with at least a 50% chance of failure, even when you do your best, and one that is relatively assured not to end in your own demise. Jesse Itzler is a famous figure who has adopted the practice of committing to a misogi every year, which has ranged from cycling across America to running 2025 miles in 2025. They are defining acts of his year that make him immediately recall what was going on in his life at that time, and the challenges he stared down and overcame. Really inspiring undertakings that help him grow in self-discipline and self-knowledge of who he is and who he aspires to be.
But what if you could apply that same model to your life as a business owner? Could a business misogi make your business a better company?
How A Business Owner Can Benefit
A business owner is usually the one who makes the decisions. They are expected to know what to do in all aspects of the business. The reality is that most business owners are winging it, especially new owners who may have bought into an existing business. Sure, they may have specific knowledge about the industry or market they work within, but ultimately they are Googling and leaning on their network just as much as everyone else does in their daily lives. That means that they are most likely to stick to what they know and what has been proven in the past.
The beauty of challenging yourself as a business owner to your own misogi is that you are essentially forcing yourself to think differently, outside the box, and bring a fresh pair of eyes to how you approach future business challenges. The business misogi makes you commit to learning new skills that you might not take on outside of a challenge that can bring out the competition and drive within you. Those skills could be the catalyst that helps you think strategically and overcome the hurdle of improving or surviving your business. To help narrow down opportunities to improve as a business owner through a self-assigned misogi, let’s first look at a few challenges most new business owners may face.
Managing Finances
Managing your business’s finances is an important task as a business owner, but the terminology and know-how may not be in your wheelhouse. So why not start a misogi challenge to think like a CFO? Commit to 90 days of improving your financial knowledge by focusing on all the aspects a true CFO at a Fortune 500 company would handle. Debt obligations, tax obligations, P&L sheets, and so on. The passing grade for this challenge is to sit with your accountant or bookkeeper at the end of 90 days and discuss your company’s financial position without depending on them (or Google) for interpretation. The challenge is finding info you may not hope to find, but knowing is half the battle.
Managing People
Perhaps you have bought into a business with an existing workforce that has its own way of doing things. They may not respond well to you, no matter how you try to ease into ownership. So why not use misogi to improve your people management? To start, you will need to build relationships with key players and improve trust and openness. Second, you will need to learn how to delegate. A manager should be big-picture focused, so taking on the challenge of delegating 10 tasks you currently feel you have to do to others is the misogi. A passing grade is having those 10 tasks successfully offloaded to someone else, and being good with not taking them back for yourself after the challenge.
Managing Yourself
The Stoic philosophy matches well with the idea of a misogi. Accepting that you cannot control how others act, only how you respond to them or problems as they come up. Part of managing yourself is controlling your own emotions and reactions, so a misogi to strengthen this could prove very beneficial. Managing yourself is as important as any other aspect of your business. Not only will self-discipline improve your own habits, but it will set a positive example for your employees, customers, and partners.
Perhaps your misogi for self-mastery would be to approach each problem encountered at work and in your life as an opportunity to improve. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin have built a business consulting empire on this exact ideal. Log your reactions over 90 days, with a review at the end of each day and a plan to put in motion to improve. Miss zero days, and you win the misogi.
As a business owner, you are probably already challenged with a lack of time, so thinking about taking on something new is probably low on the list. But you must realize that a misogi is not about a trophy to place on the shelf. The purpose is to test yourself to your perceived limits, then push past them to move the waypoint forward toward what you think you can accomplish.
You will need all of your resolve and grit to run a successful business. A misogi with the purpose to strengthen your business fortitude will do just that. You will recognize the benefits of completing your own 50/50 challenge every time you face the question of whether you can do what needs to be done.
Looking to buy a business to put your newly found grit to use? Contact us to see if we can find the perfect business for you to be a part of.