Warum du ständig die Richtung wechselst und wie du aufhörst

0:00Okay, how do you stop constantly pivoting before execution when each new idea seems more rational than the last? I'm stuck in analysis and can't commit to anything. Okay, so the reason each new idea feels more compelling than the last is that you're actually running on this lovely loop here, which is one of my favorites. Which is basically the the doom cycle. So, you start here and then you get really excited. This is called uninformed optimism.

0:30This is where you see the new idea and you're like, "Holy [ __ ] this looks awesome." Then you find out more about that idea and then you get into informed pessimism. "Oh no, this isn't as easy as I thought. I'm not going to become a millionaire overnight." And so then what you do is you go into the valley of despair, which is the sad face. And then at this point what you do is you find another shiny object. And so you just keep doing the cycle over and over again. The only way to get out of it is basically make it through the valley of despair so that you then get to informed optimism rather than uninformed optimism, which then leads you to achievement. All right? And so you're basically going through the same cycle over and over again of something that I'm doing sucks because I just found out about it. I found this new thing. I don't know much about it, but it sounds exciting. I found out more. It's not as exciting as I thought.

1:17Let me look for something else. I'll tell you a story that my CFO Suzanne Schiffler told me a long time ago. She said, "Alex, in all my years all I can tell you is everything's got shit." She's like, "I've been in this business, this business, this All businesses have problems. All All businesses have [ __ ] and the reason that the grass is so green on the other side is cuz it's fertilized with manure." All right? And so every single business that feels like it's easy is only a signal that you don't know enough yet. That is a promise that I can make to you. And I can say that last year, maybe it was 2024, was the first year in my whole career where I actually was like, "I don't think I have this whole shiny object thing as much as I used to." And I would say that for the first 13 years of my career it was like a huge problem for me. And the story that like when it became real for me was a friend of mine made like 50 million in crypto in a quarter and I was like, "Holy shit." And not once in my mind was I like, "I should get into this." I was like, "I have no idea how that works. I'm glad he spends all his time doing it. I've got my own thing going on." Because there's so much debt that you have to pay down to get good at anything that once you start really going down the path, it's like the thing that we have to think about is let's say this is year one, this is year two, this is year three with whatever business opportunity you're on, right?

2:39You want to at year three say, "I want to jump to this new opportunity because it looks more exciting." And it looks more exciting cuz you think the growth rate is more compelling. But what that really looks like is like, "Okay, maybe this is year one of the new thing." But the thing is is year one of new thing is still year four of the old thing. But then you're like, "Okay, but maybe my growth will be faster. So maybe I'll be at year three at year two on my new thing." Yeah, but then I have to compare it to year five of my old thing. And this is how compounding works over the long haul. Is that like I talk about Mr. Panda a lot who's my neighbor or was my neighbor.

3:18By the way, he owns Panda Express. If you were to talk to him 45 years ago and say, "Hey, what are you doing?" He's like, "Oh, I'm a China man and I'm going to make a Chinese chicken shitter." Chicken shack, I want to say chicken shack. Most people would say, "Hey, that's not a very good opportunity vehicle. Why are you going to do that?" Well, you know, 45 years later he's a deca billionaire. So how do how do you do that? He just kept selling chicken and made it the absolute best in the world. Raising Cane's has seven ingredients on the menu, right? They keep it so simple on purpose because they've tried to to eliminate all complexity in the business which allowed them to scale. And so you can only get that depth of knowledge with the with basically surface area of exposure to the opportunity. And so you have to see the ridges. You have to get into the texture and so you have to get past the point where you feel like it no longer makes sense because that's the point where everyone stops. And so if you see people who are successful, I'll give you a belief that I have that has served me well, which is that if someone else can do it, they're made from the same flesh and blood that I am. I can use the same hands and the same feet and the same mouth to do the same things that they're doing. There's nothing that makes them any better than me and I can do it. And so all I have to do is I have to model what they're doing and if I model exactly what they do, I should be able to get what they're doing. But if I'm me, I'm like, "Well, if I do twice as much or three times as much, then I should be on a long enough time horizon be able to beat them." And fundamentally, that is my viewpoint of the world and if you have this struggle, it's because you need to stick with it.

4:36If 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 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 into 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 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.

5:14And 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 deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll fly you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.