Ohne genug Leidensdruck ändert sich nichts

0:00What does it take to want to do something potentially for years so that you can get good at it? Because you know there's going to be people thinking, well, I want to be a great DJ, but I just can't find the motivation to spend every day three hours practicing. Alex. Yeah. Like, you probably won't be a good DJ. But I would be I would be like, you like your current state enough that you like the pain of change thing, right? Like you're not in enough pain. I've said that to plenty of people. We go speak and someone's like, "How do I get motivated?" I'm like, "You're not going to get motivated." Like, "You have to hate." For me, like it I automatically go there. I'm like, "You have to hate something." Like, for me, I just hated my current existence. And so, for me, that was powerful enough to get me out.

0:43There's got to be another way, though. You know, I was thinking to you that moment where you took the leap, >> you know, there's I feel I often feel like most people that listen to this podcast often are at a point in their life where they're considering a leap. >> Yeah. >> Feel like we drag those type of people in. We kind of like we're a magnet to those people. So if they if they're in a situation that they don't like but it's not that painful, you know, it's comfortable. Well, that's the worst. It's comfortable but a little bit miserable. >> Yeah.

1:09>> How do you get them to take the leap when it's so comfortable? My boss is promising me a promotion. I think about death all the time. It's like I'm going to die. And I think you have to agitate the pain for yourself. Like you have to stoke the pain like if you can't get through through because like it would be it it would be odd that you would be motivated by some weird passion like not everyone's Mozart and just like I love music and I've been I see in you know see numbers and colors you know whatever like some people are like that but most people aren't and so if you're not that then you only start really liking stuff when you get good at it in my opinion and you only get good at it by doing it a lot of times before you're good at it.

1:55[laughter] And so if you this is why I'm a big big believer in this is that when you are starting out I think you got to find the thing that's the pain and like pain motivates significantly faster and stronger than pleasure does. Like people are like no passion is the right way. It's like point a gun at a family member all of a sudden 10 out of 10 motivation pain. And so like I think people should use their pain more. And if they don't have enough pain, then one maybe that's fine and you're a dreamer and that's okay. But I will tell you that a word that I can I read in my like six-month journey between when I wanted to quit and when I actually quit, there was this word that just like pissed me off and it was this in this self-help or entrepreneur book and it said there are entrepreneurs and there are entrepreneurs.

2:41And I was like and it was likerepreneurs are people who read these books and don't do anything blah blah. And I was just like, I don't want to be. I was like, I am one of these right now. And I just it just like felt so powerless. And I think that my entire life has been a lot of trying to have power. And I mean that in the true sense of just being able to direct influence and events. Um, I've wanted to have more power to protect myself, protect the people I care about, etc.

3:07Um, and I felt very powerless. And I think that I was in that comfortable like my dad approved of my current situation. I had a job that when I told people they were like, "Oh, that's fancy." But I felt powerless and I I hated that more than anything. And so I think I think if I want to say this to anyone who's listening, if there's anything you listen to, all the stuff that I described that was really tough that I went through was not as hard as me quitting my job.

3:35By far the hardest decision of my entire life, bar none. Because the things that I was actually caught up with were the opinions of other people, opinions of my father and the opinions of the people that I went to school with who I thought would judge me for leaving this good job to probably become a failed gym owner. And how lame that would sound compared to consultant going to Harvard and blah blah.

3:58I was going to go from peak white collar to a very blue collar, you know, profession making significantly less because I quote loved it. And like it I I'll say this again, but like sometimes you have to let other people's dreams for your life die, for yours to live. And for me, it was like when I when I continued to every day not want to wake up, that was my wake up call where I was like either I continue to live this way and not want to be alive or I just risk the fact that I'll die to everybody else. And I think that that like it was the hardest decision of my entire life by far. All this all the hard stuff we went through still the hardest decision of my life.

4:40>> How much was money on your mind when you made that decision? the desire to be financially free to the point where you had millions. >> It's weird. Money um Caleb wouldn't know this. Money doesn't really motivate me. Uh I would say that it I mean I love the game for sure. Um but I love playing the game and the tokens are there. Um but for me it was it was it was it was beating my dad. You know what I mean? I didn't want him to be right. Like that's what it was. Like I didn't want him to be right. I just I just I remember like I I'd be sleeping on the floor. I'd be miserable. I had, you know, when I had my gym and I had no trainers, I was teaching all the classes. And so I'd wake up, I'd do 4 am, 5 a.m., 6 a.m., 7, 8 a.m. sessions. And then I would then uh work out for myself. And then I would uh do uh I'd do all the marketing and the ads and the stuff that I have to do in the middle day. Then I would teach the four the 4 p.m., the 5 p.m., the skip between the 7 p.m. And then I would do sales consults at 8, 9, 10, 11. And then I would do the billing for all the all the contracts from 11 to like 12 12:30 and then I'd wake up again. And I did that for like 6 months. And like I started to like lose my mind because I wasn't sleeping. Um but even during like those times I just literally I would envision going back to Baltimore to my father and have and knowing that he would give me the false modesty of like I know you tried. Don't worry about it.

6:03now let's get you back on this thing and I knew that from that moment on he would own me and I just couldn't I I couldn't I couldn't do it I was like I will do anything but go back to that and for me that was my I I would do anything and so whatever that maybe you need to agitate some pain in your life you know to get out of your current circumstance um and just as a total side note play it out what if you just never do anything is like maybe some people just need to stop dreaming.

6:36Maybe they need to accept their current reality and actually enjoy it. Because there's a lot of people when they're 70 and 80 and they didn't do their dreams and if they went back like they didn't do anything but that whole time they were dissatisfied because they didn't try. But what if they were just like I have a good life. I have a wife who loves me. I've got some kids. I have a job that I you know like I don't mind it. Pays the bills. I mean if you go back 500 years it wasn't people were like man this is my passion. He's like, "Dude, I'm just rowing rowing a boat across a ferry and that's what I do and that's what my dad did and his dad did.

7:05Like this is how we eat." And so like we have these these um idealized versions of purpose that I think Instagram and all this stuff kind of make terrible. But like I think there's a lot of honor in work period. And I think a lot of people uh fool themselves by thinking that what they do for some reason is not honorable. And I think a lot of it is like the internal versus external scorecard of like I was saying what I said earlier about like I believe these things to be true about the universe or like the world.

7:31But a lot of those are like what do I believe about myself which is like I can choose to do work in this way which then I can derive joy from. So, like if I'm shoveling I can choose to be like, I will be the best shoveler because I believe that I will figure out how to do this more efficiently and I will, you know, I will I will get better and I will have calluses on my hands and I'll have a better back and whatever. Um, but I will do this well. And I think you can find joy in work if you decide to do it well. So, on one hand, if you are if if you are if your dream causes you so much pain, then you will quit what you're doing and do it. And if it doesn't cause you enough pain that you're not pursuing it or that you don't like if you don't feel like you're in a cage right now, then maybe you're not in a cage and maybe you just need to like the life you have. And that's cool, too.

8:19>> Real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of the functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look into the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.