The EntreMD Podcast

3 Foolproof Ways to Overcome Shiny Object Syndrome as a Physician Entrepreneur

• Dr. Una • Episode 427

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Every good entrepreneur has thousands of new business ideas every time they shower... 

But the secret to a thriving business is to focus your energy on the things that will give you the biggest impact, not on every shiny object that distracts you along the way! 

I’ve noticed that many physician entrepreneurs struggle with shiny object syndrome. That’s why today, I will show you 3 foolproof ways to overcome it for good.

These tips will help you focus on the things that actually make a difference rather than on ideas that are better left in the shower. 

Tune in! 

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Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 01:18 What is shiny object syndrome? 
  • 03:53 How to identify shiny objects
  • 08:07 Innovate your business
  • 11:30 Immortalize your business
  • 15:26 Get comfortable being bored 
  • 17:33 Outro 

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Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

If you really, really, really want to live a life where the shiny object doesn't get you, you got to get comfortable being bored. There's nothing in life really that is worth a lot that you know keeps you in this excited state forever. That's not the way it works, hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Una. Well, hello, hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of the Entremdi podcast.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I've noticed that entrepreneurs struggle with a lot is shiny object syndrome. They are working in their business, things get a little challenging or things get a little boring and they start finding other things they could do, other businesses they can start, and every good entrepreneur has 72,000 new ideas every time they take a shower, and so we are very prone to shiny object syndrome. So what I want to do is today, I want to show you the antidote to the shiny object syndrome, so you can become this person who follows the yellow brick road, who builds the business of your dream. Don't get distracted, and it's going to be amazing, okay, so? So shiny object syndrome is something that I have not personally struggled a whole lot with, because I learned what I'm about to show you pretty early on, but I have watched it cripple so many amazing businesses. So an entrepreneur starts out. They're doing really well, they're bringing in the revenue, they're serving their patients at the highest level, serving their clients at the highest level, and then they get this brand new idea and they almost ignore the original business and make it like a stepchild and throw all their energy into this new thing. That is shiny, it's fun, it's something new, but it doesn't have anything to do with where they're going.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes people have a private practice and it gets hard and they pick up something, not because it's not a strategic decision, but they pick up something because it got hard right, and so they may decide I am going to start a course or I'm going to coach, and all of that, and again, not strategically, it's just to get rid of the pain that they would have to go through and when I say pain it's more like discomfort they would have to go to to take their practice to the next level, right. Or sometimes they figure you know, I want to be a speaker and all this stuff and all that stuff is good. Don't get me wrong, I do all of those things, but again, it's not strategic. The reason behind it is they know well, I have to build a team, I need to hold my team accountable so they can get bigger results. There's a critical hire I need to get, I need to work on my processes, and when they think about all that they're like forget it and they find something nice and shiny and new and they live in the energy of that and they don't focus on the primary business.

Speaker 1:

I remember a mentor of mine said you never kill the cash cow, right? Especially when you have a business that's already established. It's doing really well, it's funding other things that you want to do. It's funding your life. It's funding your dream life. It's funding maybe investing that you're doing and all of those things.

Speaker 1:

And all of a sudden you take away your attention to it and put it into something that is really a shiny object, right? So it is something that is dangerous. The ability to stay with something and see it through is a very powerful thing If you think about it. Think about professional athletes, right, like elite athletes, they're not going from sport to sport to sport. They're in a sport, they're mastering the sport, they're getting better at it, they're becoming the world class in it. Am I saying, do only one thing? I identify as a serial entrepreneur, of course, I'm not telling you that, but it needs to be a strategic decision, not something you do to get away because things are hard in your business or things are boring in your business.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so what is the overarching thing? What is the one thing that makes it really easy to identify shiny objects as what they are, which is just that shiny objects are distractions. And for me, what I find that is is leaning into your why right, your why is something that you want to be very aware of. You want it to be something that you think about all the time. You want it to be something that is at the forefront of your mind. And for me, I am so tuned into it, I'm so dialed in, I have it on my mind all the time.

Speaker 1:

I attend my 90th birthday party a lot and I'm like, okay, this is where I want to be at that time. These are the results I wanted to have created, these are the accomplishments I want to have had, these are the things I want my business to have done. And so, if that's the case, today I'm burning daylight. I'm 45. I have 45 more years until that is a reality, and if that's going to be reality or not, it's tied to what I do now. And so when I think about that, when I travel to my 90th birthday and I really think about where I would want to be at that time, it's very easy for me to see well, this is something that takes me there. This is something that takes me away from there. This is a complete distraction. It me there. This is something that takes me away from there. This is a complete distraction. It doesn't have anything to do with anything. It becomes a lot clearer. It becomes a lot clearer. This is taking me in the direction. This is not so. It really is this beautiful editing tool, knowing your why. It's a beautiful editing tool because it makes everything else make sense, right. And so you want to think about that, like what is your why? Right? What is your why?

Speaker 1:

With my private practice, my why was really giving patients the experience of not the black and white and cold experience in healthcare, right For me. I was like I wanted them to come to a place that was warm and it was friendly and they felt like these were their family members and cousins and friends, who just happened to be medical professionals, right, and I didn't want them to be a number. I wanted them to have that experience right, and I also wanted my team to have the experience where they're like this is the absolute best place where I've ever worked. I want them to identify my practice as a place where they grew the most professionally. And then I wanted to build a practice that beat the odds. That was a profitable practice and we were able to. It was a sustainable practice and it's a practice that could work without me, right. So it was a model practice, if you will. So those were the things that drove me. And then, when it got to Entremd, the driver is I want to help a hundred thousand doctors build profitable businesses.

Speaker 1:

I want to rewrite the narrative for physician communities, for the physician community, because now the narrative is you know, private practice doesn't work. Doctors suck as entrepreneurs. If you're a coach, you can't replace your physician salary with coaching. You know, woe is us and all of those things. Our healthcare system is completely messed up and all of that, which a lot of those things you know like, especially with the challenges in the healthcare space, like it's true, but the thing is this we're not going to run away. The healthcare space needs Calvary, needs saviors. It needs a leader, not leaders that are going to emerge and say, okay, this is what we're going to do for that. And I've decided we need empowered physicians, and so I'm going to empower physicians and they're going to turn the system right side up, and so that's my why.

Speaker 1:

And when I think about it, and so there are many shiny things that come my way and I'm like, if it's not taking me there, I'm like, no, it becomes very easy because this is where I'm going right. And so reconnect with your why, tune into it. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you have it. What is it? Why are you doing what you do? Right, you really want to lean into that? Okay, so, but this is the thing. We're humans, and humans, we like new things. You know like, we love that honeymoon period of the new things and we're not just going to sit and do the same old boring thing in, you know, day in and day out, and all of these things. So, practically you know like, okay, I'm tuning in with my wife, but I'm still susceptible to this whole, you know, shiny object syndrome thing. And so what can I do? What can I do to save myself from the shiny object syndrome?

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I'll give you a few things. Number one. Number one is you want to do something new. You can do something new, but do it within your old business, right? And so let me break that down. You know what that could look like. So, say, you own a private practice or you could be a coach it could be any business at all, really and you have this itch I want to go try this new thing. Right, you can build that new thing within your practice. I'll give you an example with EntreeMD right, I may want to innovate. Right, and I want to try new things, and all of that.

Speaker 1:

I have so many opportunities to try new things within the business that I already have. Right, I have the opportunity to completely revamp the way that we market. It's a new thing, right, I can completely revamp the way the business is administered with the type of team that I have. You know, like, if I only had admin people, what about marketing people? What about sales people? What about operations people? What about executive level leadership. I have ways I market. What if I try new ways of marketing? So maybe I've done workshops. What if I start doing frequent live events and that becomes the way I promote it? Or whether I do a speaking tour and I start going to associations and all these places to speak about what I do.

Speaker 1:

Like I can do so many new and exciting things within the business that I already have. Right, if you're somebody who's in private practice like we've done all kinds of fun new things. Right, like we've brought email marketing in. Like the same way, an online business will do it and we try that out in the practice. We had the challenges with the great resignation and we built our own system to train medical assistants for the practice. Right, and that's a whole thing that we built and it's almost like building a new business. So it brings all that fun and excitement and something new and all those kinds of things. Right now, we're in the middle of considering, like a new model, right, as far as bringing in new physicians and things like that, and so we get to innovate and we get to do all these fun things, but we're doing them within the business. Some of you have verticals or you have verticals that are so congruent with your practice. Right, you bring those verticals in. It's something new, but we're trying to keep it all within and direct all our energy into the one big thing that will give us the biggest impact, the biggest financial returns, the biggest time returns, and we truly spend the time building it as an asset so that we can walk away from if we choose.

Speaker 1:

And so think about it. You want to do something new. How can you take something old that's already in your business and do it in a new way? How can you take something you haven't really paid attention to and do it like you mean it, right? How could you do that? We call our patients coming in door to door. We call that the assembly line, and we don't call it to be cold, but we call it so that we can measure efficiencies and all of that and so-. And. So the assembly line you can bring that that becomes a project Like how can we make this more efficient? How can we make it a better experience? How can we drastically reduce the wait times? How can we do all of those things? That's innovation, that's something new within something old. So all that energy that you want to use for new things, use it within the business that you already have, right. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, if you're looking for something new and shiny and different, all of this stuff immortalize your business. Immortalize your business, and I'll tell you what I mean by that.

Speaker 1:

I was listening to somebody, and I was listening to him talking about I don't know something about purpose or I don't remember what it was, but I was so. It was a YouTube video. I was so moved by it. It felt like he was talking to me. I was like this is wild. And then I thought about it. I was like this man has been dead for 10 years. This man has been dead for 10 years and his life is still changing my life, like completely blowing my mind, even though he's been dead for a decade. And it dawned on me that day that you can actually live forever. You can live forever if you will download you into something else that will be here when you're gone, okay, and so when I talk about immortalizing your business, there's the big part of it, which is, you know, building a business that can work without you, so that, even after you're gone whether that's you, you know, walking away and retiring, or you know you're gone. Either way it's still here, right, you build it that way.

Speaker 1:

But then you know, think about, you know, like I have a client, dr Karen Kaufman, who's an allergist and she's a phenomenal allergist and she's built it. She's building a really amazing, you know, like business practice and she's doing so well. But imagine she launches a podcast and she's talking about those core things, about allergy and what the parents need to do for their kids in the spring and what you know, like what the. You know what they need to do in the fall and what they need to do if they're in sports and what kind of equipment to get all of those kinds of things. And she does an episode a week for five years. That's over 250 episodes. But that's something that will be there after she's gone. It will be there for a really long time and it can continue changing. It can have such demand that it's a national thing, like she's known as the voice of allergy and immunology. And after she's gone I mean when I say after she's gone, we don't even have to go that far but it establishes her as an authority.

Speaker 1:

It will open so many other doors and the truth of the matter is, if you want something shiny, that's something shiny that will work perfectly for you. It could be that it could be a YouTube channel, it could be books, you know, it could be all of those kinds of things you do that really just immortalize. It could be processes that you've built, you know, like that, you know can make your business like a business asset, but it could also help other businesses and things like that. So you're looking for where to innovate, or you're looking for where to put all this energy that you would give the shiny object. You can put the energy there and it will make all the difference in the world, right? So that's the second thing. So the first thing is you can innovate within your business. The second thing is you can immortalize your business, right, and so this is the reason I write books. This is the reason I have the podcast that I have. This is the reason that I am working so hard to fine tune the content of EntreeMD so it becomes this formalized curriculum. This is the reason why I do all of those things right, because I know I can do that. So this is my shiny object, but it was within my business and it's working for me because guess what my podcast is doing? It's attracting new people that I can impact and some of them will eventually go on to work with me. Guess what my books are doing? Changing lives everywhere. A number of people have come and they're like oh my goodness, I started to practice because of what you said. I started hiring people because of what you said, like all of these things. So it's changing so many lives. It's like massively increasing my impact, attracting new clients for me to work with and all of those things creating opportunities for me. So this is the deal right, like it's working for me now. It worked for me then. And that's shining object energy. I can use it here.

Speaker 1:

And then the third thing if you really, really really want to live a life where the shiny object doesn't get you, you got to get comfortable being bored. There's nothing in life really that is worth a lot that keeps you in this excited state forever. That's not the way it works. There are many marriages where that's the problem. They want like a high, high, high, high high the entire time, but there's sometimes you're really just cooking or taking care of kids or whatever, and so there ebbs and flows and there's a rhythm and all of that stuff, but you got to be okay, just sitting with your spouse and just sitting. You know what I mean. Boredom is not bad. It's not bad. It's like raising kids. It's not always high, high, it's not always like that, but that doesn't make it bad. There's some boredom, that's okay.

Speaker 1:

I actually read an article and a guy was making a case for allowing kids to be bored. The constant stimulation dampens their creativity and all that Give them space to be bored and to think and to come up with stuff and have downtime, right, and so boredom is not bad. You want to sit and be okay with it. Like, sometimes things can be quote unquote boring, but this is not a problem. This is not a problem that needs to be fixed right. And the more you can tolerate boredom, the less at risk you'll be, the less of a victim you'll be right when it comes to the shiny object syndrome.

Speaker 1:

And so why is this important, is so critical? Because there's so many businesses that could have become big entities, that could have helped a lot of people, that created a lot of time freedom and financial freedom for the owners, but shiny object syndrome kept getting the better of them. Really, my only job is just to help them stick to one thing. Every time they tell me and I thought I would do this, I just say no, no, you can't do it. And if all I did was told them no, they'll be so successful. That's all they need is no, don't do it.

Speaker 1:

But I want to invite you to not be a victim, not be a victim of shiny object syndrome.

Speaker 1:

The business you have deserves the attention that you can give it. So I want you to embrace these things. I want you to start playing around with innovating your business. I want you to start playing with immortalizing your business as you create the bandwidth, and I want you to play around with just being comfortable, being bored, because it's not a bad thing, okay. So imagine that. I want you to imagine that, yes, you get your fix because you're doing all these new things, but you're doing them in the context of your primary business or the business you're working on at the time, and you build something that really has the potential to have a lot of impact, to change a lot of lives, to create a lot of financial freedom for you and time freedom, and you are able to avoid the distraction that is the shiny object syndrome. Okay, so go practice this, share this with the doctors in your life, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Entree of your Practice.