"Why Can't I Say No to Bigger Opportunities?"

0:00Most distractions come dressed as easy opportunities. >> Oh, yeah. >> This is interesting because as people begin to accumulate the success that they say that they want, this becomes an increasingly big problem. >> Yeah. Um, I think it was Andy Grove who said this. Probably Churchill. Um >> Yes, [laughter] there we are. Chalk another one up for Winston. >> It might have been Packard. I think it might have been Hewlett-Packard. It might have been one of those guys. Um, he said that businesses die of indigestion not starvation.

0:32And so they overeat, they're not starving. It's the entrepreneur that and this is like you go back to human behavior, which almost all roads lead back to it, but the entrepreneurs get reinforced for changing direction because nothing worked, nothing worked, nothing worked. You change direction, something clicks. And so what happens is you learn a lesson from that. You're like, oh, so if I change direction, good things happen. But that's not the right lesson, which is one of the my favorite things about entrepreneurship is making sure that we learn the right lesson from the from the from the instance or the circumstance.

1:01It's like, I hired a sales guy, he did a bad job, all sales guys suck. Not the right lesson, right? But that's actually something that it is pervasive in even the internet community of like lessons that people they'll tell the story and then they'll say the lesson, but sometimes the lesson All we know is the facts of what happened, not necessarily the thing you took from it. Anyways, um I was making a point. Churchill, starvation. >> easy opportunities.

1:25>> So the the the higher up in business you get, the more attractive the opportunities that you have to learn to say no to. And this has been really hard for me because at every level, like I thought, great, I have I can check the box on distractions. I've learned to say no to $10,000 opportunities. But then when you're when you're making $100,000, then you have to be able to say no to $100,000 opportunities. And the thing is is I call it the woman in the red dress, but the woman in the red dress, have you heard this like this little analogy I have? No. Okay. This is like one of my favorite analogies. So, in the Matrix Morpheus takes him through a training program to teach him one thing about agents. And so, they're walking down the street and there's all these people going going and he says, "Were you listening to me or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?" And he says, "Look again." He looks back and the woman in the red dress he walked by is an agent pointing a gun in his head.

2:15And I see distractions the same way, which is that the better you become, the more attractive the woman in the red dress is. And so, you can say no to a six, but what about a seven? >> What about a 12? >> Exactly. What about a hypothetical thousand, right? Like, that's that's really what it becomes because there is no limit on the upside. And so, that's why having like some of the soft stuff of like, "This is the vision. This is what we're trying to do." And there's a hundred other things I could do, but each of the cost of those things is the one thing that matters most. And I think that one of the things that Leila's been so good at helping me with and I think a lot of my success earlier on was propelled by the fact that like when I met Leila, I had a chiropractor agency, I had a dental agency, I had five gym locations.

3:02I had a gym launch business where we did turnarounds. I had all of those things going on and there was no CEO besides me. I CEO of all of them cuz I didn't understand how this stuff worked. And and I also made no actual I mean, I made money from all of them, but no income. >> [laughter] >> Like, everything was just enough to break even and it was nine spinning plates and it was cuz like I was so opportunistic and it's very classic new entrepreneur to just say yes to everything. And Warren Buffett said that the difference between really successful people and the most successful people, this is me paraphrasing, is that the most successful people say no to almost everything.

3:38And I've tried to take that because it's so hard. And I think that a lot of the you know, it's so simple and so hard, which a lot of success habits are, which is like if you do the same thing for a very long period of time. I think this is Neil uh Shusterman. I can't remember the name, but I'll I'll I'll say the Yeah, it's Churchill again. Um he said success comes down to doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without convincing yourself you're smarter than you are.

4:04And I just love that quote. >> Why do you not need to convince yourself that you're smarter than you are if you're doing the same thing? >> I think it's because you think you can handle both, and so you're like, "Oh, I got this." >> Oh, okay, because if you did think that you were smarter than you are, you would then start to take on more stuff. There's a quote from John Maxwell which I absolutely adore that says, "You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything." >> [laughter] >> Which is just [ __ ] perfect. And it's the quote It was So Greg McKeown's Essentialism is one of my top five books of all time, and it's for this precise reason that it's an antidote to the type A fallout, right? I can do it all, I will do it all, watch me suffer and bear this burden. And you go like, "Look, you can do the hard work thing, right? You can You can do that.

4:46But the working hard and being spread thin are two different dynamics. And one of the one of the like interesting idea I've been playing around with a little bit recently is periodizing uh work. So in the same way as your weightlifting coach will have the guys doing his submax for 90 days, he has building up for 90 days, he has comp prep, he has blah blah blah blah blah, whatever it is, mobility.

5:11Um that's a much easier way to um blend what we're talking about here. It's maybe a little bit earlier. I think you need to specialize more as you get bigger and bigger because the distractions are going to be even greater. >> Specialize How so? >> So if you are uh the CEO of your company, and then someone comes in with You've got so much more downstream from you that if you get distracted, the repercussions, the ramifications of you becoming distracted are magnified even more. What do you think about that? Do you agree?

5:38>> I I I think the the specialist piece is the piece that threw me because I always feel like the the higher up you go, the more generalist you become. >> In terms of skill set, but not in terms of project or in terms of projects. Specialized in projects, generalized in skills. There we go. >> Yeah. >> If you like this video and you're a business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling roadmap that I've used to go from zero to one, zero to 10, and zero to 100 plus. And so you can click here and you can check it out.

6:16Again, absolutely free. And since you're a business owner, I appreciate you and enjoy.