A few weeks ago, I shared with you an experience one of our coaches, Clint, had with his barbecue. If you didn’t have a chance to check it out, you can find it here.

In the video with Clint, I mentioned that I would share a similar story with you about my experience hiking with my kids.

A few weeks ago I took my kids hiking. We went to this awesome place about 20 minutes from my house that we had never been to before.

Now, this hike wasn’t super quick and easy. It was a trail that would take us a while to get to the top.

So, we get going and about twenty minutes into the hike, my seven-year-old son, Braden, turned to me and said:

“I wish there was a shortcut.”

And, I turned to him and said:

“There are no shortcuts.”

The only real shortcut is learning and doing things the right way instead of goofing off and letting things take you away from what actually needs to be done.

If something’s taking too long, you’re not doing it right.

In business, there are many times when we tend to think things are too difficult…or we think there’s an easier way for things to be done.

We often blame everything but ourselves for our inability to reach our goals, when in reality, it has nothing to do with the obstacles in our way.

Braden got frustrated because it was taking too long for him to see what he was working towards…the goal of reaching the top of the mountain and enjoying the view.

He was blaming the mountain and trail for taking too long for him to accomplish his goal.

In your business, you may become frustrated with Infusionsoft because you can’t get it to work the way you want it to.

But guess what?

It’s not Infusionsoft’s fault.

Most likely what’s happening is that the frustration stems from the fact that you don’t have a defined and outlined process for what you want Infusionsoft to do, prior to actually implementing.

It’s okay. We’ve all done it.

We see the capabilities of Infusionsoft, and all we want to do is dive right in and build campaigns.

We’re inclined to take the shortcut.

But more often than not, it’s the shortcut that gets us in trouble. It’s the shortcut that eventually leads us to wasting time or money because we didn’t do it the way we should have the first time around.

Oftentimes, it’s not until we reach our goal do we see things that we weren’t able to see when we’re working our way towards the goal.

If we reach our goal of building a successful campaign, we may not see that until we actually go through the process properly. We need to focus on blueprinting everything first, so when it comes time to implement, we have a clear picture.

On our hike, there were some really cool things we saw at the top of the mountain that we would never be able to see from the ground. The reward itself was worth the effort and the work we put in to actually get there.

When we got down to the bottom, I looked back up to my kids and said, “it doesn’t look that far, does it?”

It never does. Funny how that works.

Would love to hear your thoughts about similar experiences where taking the shortcut just didn’t cut it. Feel free to drop your comments below.