How Good Are You At Juggling?

Have you ever counted how many balls you could juggle in the air?

When I was in junior high school I learned how to juggle during my physical education (PE) class.

First we started practicing juggling with scarfs.

Then I started juggling with two balls.

Then three balls.

After about an hour I could juggle three balls.

It was thrilling.

I was officially a juggler.

I then forgot about juggling.

Until I became a business owner.

The juggling I had learned during junior high school was small potatoes compared to the juggling I performed in the early years of business ownership.

Money was tight so I did everything.

Then I realized something new needed to be done.

So I added a new ball to the mix.  Now I had to juggle four balls.

Then my business grew a bit and I had to start juggling five balls.

Then I lost some business, so I had to add another ball to the mix so I could grow my business.

Now I was in the great place where I could juggle six balls.

I had become a master at juggling six balls.

I thought I was so skilled.  I thought I was so professional.

Here I was juggling to my little heart’s content.

That’s when I realized that the only people that should be good at juggling are clowns.

I knew I was not a clown and I had no desire to be a clown.

I knew I didn’t have the capacity to juggle seven balls.

If I tried to add one more ball to my juggling mastery, I would start to drop a ball here or there.

I realized that it was just a matter of time and I would start to drop balls even if I didn’t add one more ball to the mix.

Six balls was too many balls for me to juggle.

I realized the only sustainable solution was to reduce the amount of balls that I was juggling.

Yes, I had to juggle more than one ball in my effort to be a successful business owner.

However, I didn’t have to juggle five, six, seven or even God forbid ten balls.

Juggling more than three or four balls was lunacy.

I estimated that juggling four balls would require at least 50% more work than juggling three balls.

I knew eventually some balls were going to drop.

If balls were going to drop, I wanted to decide which ones were going to drop.

That’s when I decided to drop all the balls.

Then I would pick up at most three balls.

That way I would be super good at just the core three things that mattered most.

I knew that I could only focus on a few things.

It made sense that I should only focus on the few things that would be most impactful.

If you become good at juggling more than a few items you are a clown.

Don’t be a clown.