THE CUSTOMER IS COMPLAINING. That employee didn’t show up for work. It’s getting near tax time and you’re not sure what that’s going to look like. And the dog needs to go to the vet.

And that’s just in the first 15 minutes this morning.

Running a successful business is a challenge every minute of every day. Guess what? The buck stops with the business owner, so it seems like you’re sucked into EVERYthing.

There’s a way to deal with this, and I’m not talking drugs.

This can be an indication that you haven’t helped your employees and management team to properly run their parts of the business, and that you haven’t put some key processes in place.

Your primary job is to look ahead further than anyone else, and to set the Big Direction.

When you watch surfers, they simultaneously adjust to the randomness of the waves while keeping their body going in an overall direction. It’s the same with most sports; this is one of the key skills that applies to most of them. Even chess, or auto racing, or ice skating.

What makes something like ice skating or surfing so beautiful to watch? It’s because the athlete has internalized those micro-adaptations to such an extent that all you see is the big picture of their (seemingly) effortless movement.

In business, the equivalent is to empower your team to properly deal with the hour-to-hour and day-to-day variations, so you can keep your eyes on the long term direction. This is the kind of planning and delegation I work on with my clients. We put key processes in place so that issues are avoided or automatically addressed.

The primary result? A dramatic reduction in stress.

Because constantly adapting to the random world is indeed stressful. Over time, it’ll put you in the hospital.

You don’t want that, right?