15 Brutally Honest Truths You Have To Understand To Succeed | Ep 855
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Hey guys, a lot of the business game comes down to what is between your ears. Because if you cannot stay in the game, you cannot win the game. Because in an infant game, the only way you win is by continuing to play. And so over the last few weeks, I've done a handful of podcasts and I've had a couple of hard conversations with friends that made this top of mind. And so these are 15 rules of engagement that make the hard life a little bit less hard and at least better.

get me through the difficulties I am going through that may be valuable for you. Enjoy. These are brutally honest truths you should know before it's too late. I'm Alex Ramosi, I own acquisition.com, a portfolio of companies that makes all the dollars, so many dollars, in fact, that I have these very fancy screens behind me that do nothing but show my logo. Right. Anyways, let's start with number one. Pain is the price of progress. Man, I wrote that real fast.

The fastest growth periods are often the most miserable. If you want to progress, get used to pain.

And so if you think about what actually occurs when you grow, you stretch past your point of comfort. So even if you're growing a muscle, like you stretch, you break it down, it's painful. If you have growing pains, like as a kid, it's like you grew too fast and your joints are in a lot of pain. If you're a company and you expand, this is technically supposed to be good stuff, but it doesn't make it any less painful. And so elite athletes don't get stronger during easy workouts. And so if we want...

Progress, we must accept the price of pain that's attached to it. You cannot both want progress and live an easy life. These two things conflict.

Number two, happy but not satisfied. So let me explain this. So you're allowed to be happy before you hit your goal, just not satisfied. And so there's a very big difference between being content with your life, content with your work and complacent, meaning you're not going to take any more action. There's this great Haitian proverb, which is behind mountains are more mountains.

It's kind of like after every peak, you can just see more peaks ahead of you, right? And so the work works on you more than you work on it. And so for me, I remember I had a year that I basically went into retirement trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And the thesis that I came out with was that hard work is the goal. And so the fact that there's something that happens as a result of hard work is really just a secondary effect. It's a consequence.

But the goal is the work itself. And so I had a friend this morning who messaged me and they're like, why do you still work? And I was like, because it's the thing that I enjoy doing most. And when I looked back on my life, when I didn't work, I was bored and felt depressed. And when I do work,

I am stressed, but I do have moments that I really enjoy as well. And so basically, I took this as a kind of a foundational truth for me, not for everyone, that there is misery on both sides. So I might as well be productive and useful. And the only way to be productive and useful is to be happy about the process, but not satisfied so you can continue to provide value to the world. Now, number three, ignore critics. Now, this is probably easy to say,

Hard to do. So let me let me break this down a little bit more. So friendly reminder that most people are fat, poor pansies, and don't listen to them when they try to deter you from doing whatever it takes to succeed. So the average person will always try to keep you average. It makes sense that if you want to be extraordinary, you will do things that an ordinary person would see as extra.

Right. And so a lot of people and this is this is the really hard part that I had to come to terms with is that a lot of people want to see you fail because it justifies the risk they chose not to take. And so we always have to think about listening to people who are closest to our goals, not closest to us. And if you want a more violent version of this, your critics are going to eventually die.

And their opinion isn't going to matter then, which means it probably also doesn't matter now. So might as well do what you wanted to do originally. Number four, selective productivity. Productivity comes from all the things that you choose not to do. So I'm going to define two more terms for you because I think it's important.

I see commitment as the elimination of alternatives. So if I get married, then I eliminate all alternatives to the person that I'm married to, right? That is commitment, right? Which is very similar to focus, right?

right? And so focus, if you think of the hypothetical extreme of focus is that somebody does literally nothing but one thing. So they don't eat, they don't sleep, they would eventually die, but they would be a hundred percent focused during the time that they were alive. Right? And so obviously we have to put a couple of things in, you have to eat food, you have to sleep, right? But the most focused person does the fewest things outside of the thing they're focused on. And so focus is about the number of things that you say no to. And having this framework is

is, in my opinion, more powerful for productivity than just about anything else. People are always trying to figure out productivity hacks, but they want to add things to their lives to become more productive, which is completely counter to what focus even means. It's getting rid of everything that's not the thing is how you focus.

Now, part of that also means environmentally, right? So if you like have a window that you look outside of and you've got people who walk past your office and people can knock on the door and you've got Slack notifications, of course you're not focused because all of those things are not the work.

So I'm going to give you an analogy here. So imagine there's a wall that you have to get over, all right? In order to, you have to get a critical mass to get above this wall, right? And so you start putting up, you know, these ladders against the wall to try and climb over the wall. All right, this should make some sense. But as you try to build up the little rungs of the ladder, you only have enough time to put, let's say, five rungs on the ladder, or rather four rungs, so, because I only have four ladders on this thing. All right, so you put four rungs up. Well,

Well, you're not going to get the critical mass required to get over the hump to actually get the success you want. But the idea, the fallacy is that, oh, I'll just do all three or four of these things and I'll see which one works. When the reality is that any of them work, but none of them will work unless you work on one.

And so we have to take these four rungs that we're able to build and say, you know what? We're not going to do that. We're going to put that rung here because I'm going to take that time that I'm putting for my second opportunity to put it here. I'm going to take this rung and put it right here. And then I'm going to take this rung. And what do you know? I can get over this hump on top and I can get to the other side of the wall, which of course is where all the money and all the happiness and all the, you know, the girls with, you know, beautiful, beautiful hair. Look at this beautiful hair, right? This beautiful hair. Now she looks like a bug. Anyways, I'm going to take this rung and put it right here.

There you go. And so you have to hit critical mass. And so right now, if you are... And what's crazy is that this literally happens at all levels of business. Like people who are starting out, trying to start five things, people who are like their second or fifth year. I talked to a guy last night who has a really good business, really good margin, 50% margins, has great revenue retention. He was in cyber security. And so people stay with him, people pay. He has no problem getting customers. He has no problem delivering to them. I was like, what's the problem? He's like, me. He said, I just...

I get bored. He's like, I just want to start more things. And I'm like, yeah, you got to stop that. Like, it's like, the thing is, is think about how much more successful you'd be. So zoom all the way out. Think of somebody who gets better every single year and works on the same project for 20 years.

you'd be like, my God, that guy's probably really fucking good. And what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter what project the person works on. You do 20 years of reps and you do nothing else, you're going to be good. And so if you know that that's a fact, that's a certainty, that you're going to be good with 20 years of practice,

Then the objective is to just get 20 years of practice in one thing and stick with it. So like your plans aren't working because the plans are wrong. The plans aren't working because you're not working on the plan. The hard part about the plan is not creating the plan or even following the plan. It's sticking with the plan. That's the hard part.

All right, number five, fear versus regret. Let me get some wild, let me get some stuff, all right? So change is scary, but so is regret. And so the life you live depends on the one you fear most. And so the thing is, is that the people who, the more successful version of yourself also has fear.

It's that your fear of regret is greater than your fear of rejection. Think about that for a second. I'm going to say it one more time. Your fear of regret must supersede, must be bigger, must be greater than your fear of rejection.

And so I remember when I quit my management consulting job, which took me six months. So I'm not saying this from a pedestal. It took me six months. I decided I wanted to quit. It took me six months before I actually quit. By the way, you can measure how powerful someone is by the distance between when they make a decision and what happens in reality. So if you want to feel impotent, then take as long as you possibly can between when you make a decision and when you act on that decision.

All right. Now for me, it was six months. And all I did was I called my friends up every night. I was like, I'm going to quit my job. I'm going to start a business. And then, you know, we talk every night, literally every night. And I would be pacing in my condo. I'm like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. And I wouldn't do it. I was too afraid. I was too much of a scaredy cat. But the thing that got me over the hump was this. Number one, I knew that when I looked back on my life, if I never took the jump, I would have been ashamed of myself. And I would have felt like I was a pansy. And I was like, I can't die a pansy. I have to be able to make a jump.

Number two, I played out plan B, which is, okay, let's say I actually completely fail. What happens? I was like, well, I'm not really going to be homeless. I know enough people that I can get food, right? I was like, okay, so I'll probably just couch surf. I'd have a little bit of shame. But at the end of the day, what would I really do? Well, I could always apply to get the job that I had back.

Or I could just go to another place with an experience or a story that would set me up for something cooler later. Right. And so all of a sudden I was like, wait, so my plan B is that I just have a cool experience that I could talk about at a job interview or to go to business school.

Okay, that's that doesn't actually sound that bad. And so there's just this this this this huge amorphous fear But I've just noticed in my life that fear only exists in the vague It doesn't exist in the specific and so if you're afraid of something Try and break it into pieces and spell it out play out the next two or three steps because all of a sudden if you're in the developed Western world the downside risk is not really real like

Like the only real downside risk is the opinions of other people who will say that you failed who you don't care about anyways. You think you're going to die, but you're not. You're just going to learn some stuff and you'll be like, oh, maybe next time I'm not going to make that mistake. And that's it. And I say this and it's easy for me to say, but it took me six months to figure this out. But I do remember that my final straw was the realization that I had at the time, no girlfriend, no kids, and I had no real financial responsibilities besides like eating and having a place to live.

And I said, if I can't make the decision now because it feels too risky, I will never be able to make the decision. Because if other people rely on me, now some of you are in a position where people do rely on you and you're like, well, Alex, you know, I've got people who rely on me. Yeah, I would say that it makes it harder. And what now? Harder and so what? But for me, that was the thing that got me over the hump. It was like, if I don't do it now, I'm never going to do it. I'm never going to have fewer responsibilities.

And to play this out a little bit more, if you have people depend on you, they're probably gonna keep depending on you for a while or they might, their dependencies on you might increase. And so if you can't do it now, you still might as well do it, right? 'Cause it's only gonna go one way. Number six, persistence creates timing. So you can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop.

I want to say this one more time. You can time everything perfectly if your intention is to never stop. So think about this visually. So let's imagine that this line right here is your lifeline. It's life as time passes. Let's say that you have some special thing that's going to happen here and some special opportunity that happens here and some special opportunity that happens here. What most people try and do is they don't want to take, they don't want to work at all. And then they're like, oh, I'm just going to work here. And then I'm going to work here. And then I'm going to work here.

But the likelihood that you're there in these three moments is very low if you're trying to time it. But if you work the whole time, then the timing will always be perfect because you will be ready. And so perfect timing is a complete myth, but perfect preparation isn't. And that on a long enough time horizon, your opportunity will come.

And so people think that they need perfect conditions to start when in reality, starting is the perfect condition. It creates the perfect condition for opportunity to be capitalized on. And I can tell you this from firsthand experience with me, like the more you do, the more you see you can do. And so opportunities multiply with skill. And so the better you get at doing stuff, the more things you know you would be able to do and win at. And

And so the goal is to gain as many skills as possible so that you have access to the maximum number of potential opportunities. So a lot of people were thinking that, oh, I'm gonna wait for the right moment. But when you have unlimited skills, like Elon can go do whatever he wants. He can go build a floating spaceship if you like, I mean, he literally does that. So like, I was gonna be my extreme example, but he literally does that.

So he could build a city in the middle of the ocean. There you go. All right. And so he could do that. He has the skills because the world of opportunity is open to him. And so the idea, and he also spent all of his younger years just developing all these different skills and becoming a polymath across these different things. Independence, put a little stuff, put it away. The point is the guy's good. All right. And so the goal is to get good. And then you will never have a shortage of opportunities. No.

Number seven, envy versus effort. All right, let me write this down. If people worked for their goals as hard as they envy others for achieving them, they would already have achieved them themselves. So think about the amount of mental effort that goes into the hate that people spew out, the envy, the jealousy, right? That people, to be fair, jealousy is different, but the envy that people have for wanting other people's stuff. I'll give you a couple of hard truths about this. Number one, no one is doing as well as you think they are.

So by comparison, you're actually better off than you think. Number two, you don't win by beating people. You win by growing into your potential and then allowing them to shrink into irrelevance by consequence.

Three, and guess what? Your biggest threat is not your competition. It's a mediocre version of you that never realized what you could become. And as pithy as that may sound, it's also true. A lot of people think it's like, "Oh, that guy's doing really well." It's like his doing well changes nothing about your reality.

And something really ironic that I noticed is that the people who get copied the most by their competition are the people who ignore the competition who are copying them. And so fundamentally, you start by focusing on the customer. And if you always put the customer first, everyone will copy you because you're actually doing the thing that will work, which is focusing on the customer. And there's a lot of weird things in life like that where like,

It's the opposite is what you think. Like, oh, I'm going to look at what everyone else is doing. It's like, no, just do what matters most. And then people who don't know how to think will just copy you. But the biggest real threat is that no one copies you at all because you're doing nothing. And so if you take all this effort that you look, that you put into comparing yourself to other people, that you look to kind of like tearing them down sometimes, even in your mind, let's be real. Maybe you don't say it to other people, but in your mind, you're like, meh.

that, whatever that is, whatever that feeling is, that, just do that towards you not being good enough. And what happens is that when you do that, all of that effort, all that energy goes into improving yourself rather than tearing down somebody else. And only one of those things will help you. Number eight, hard conversations create opportunities. Hard truth. Everything you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations that you have been putting off.

So people either grow into their potential or they keep living the same six months of their life over and over again. And the difference is how many hard conversations you're willing to have and how fast you have them once you realize you need to. And so if you shirk away from this, and I get it, I'm somebody who like for a very long time had a hard time having hard conversations. I literally traveled across the country before I told my dad that I left. All right, like I get it. So if you think having uncomfortable conversations is hard, just wait until you see the result of not having them.

it will be harder. And so you're going to basically, the struggle is that you have short-term pain versus long-term pain. And long-term pain, I call regret. Comfort is short gain. Regret is long pain.

Fear is short pain. Fulfillment is long gain. You want to trade short pains for long gains, not short gains for long pains. It's not the safe bet. It's a guaranteed loss just later. All right, so I'm going to spell this out. This is short pain.

pain, this is long pain, this is short gain, this is long gain. You want to trade short pain for long gain. That's the goal. It's the best trade.

All right, number nine, endure. There's a reason that when I gave instructions to some of the new business owners who were going to start putting a community on school, one of the sole instructions I gave them was learn to endure. And so the fastest way to become the person you want to be is to put yourself in a situation where you have no choice but to become them. You'd be amazed at what you can endure when you have no choice. And so for me, when I signed my lease for my gym,

I had $5,000 in my bank account. The rent was $5,000. I had never really made money before. And so I was like, oh, wow, how does this work? And so if I made 100% of the money that I had made in my job, I would have been able to pay rent and have no food or anything else. But one of my favorite flavor texts on Magic Cards is necessity is the mother of invention.

It's the constraints that create the innovation that is required to get you out of the constraint, to get you out of the hard time. And so when I think back on human history, sometimes we think that things that we're going through are hard, but they're certainly much easier than the things that other humans have endured. And how did they endure them? Well, when the only choice they had was die or endure, you tend to endure.

If you know someone who's going through a hard time and needs to hear this, please share this with them. No matter whether they're a business owner, their employee, they're your friend, they're your kid, they're your spouse. I make this for you because a lot of the business game is about what's happening between your ears. And if you can't survive your head game, you're never going to win in the real game.

All right, number 10, results, excuses. This is not going to be a big surprise here. The thing with excuses that's interesting is that they may be valid. And I think that's the part that people struggle with is that they're like, yeah, obviously results matter more excuses, but insert special snowflake.

The thing is, is that you might be right. And I just like this quote from Layla. She says, it's not your fault, but it is still your problem. And so you still have to do something about it. Or you can just wait and say, you know what? I'm going to continue to not live the life that I want until I die. And everyone will be like, oh, yeah, he had an excuse. Is that what you really want? Is that people were like, yeah, it's a weird thing to want a permission slip for mediocrity.

which is fundamentally what excuses are. You just want permission from everyone else to still get respect without the outcome because of your extenuating circumstances. And the thing is, is there's a ton of allure, but the only person who actually believes that is you. And so people might nod along. The people who love you might say, yeah, you know what? You are special. You are a special snowflake. Your mama might still love you. You're not going to earn anyone's respect. And I think you certainly won't earn the respect of the person that matters most, which is

which is you, because you'll always know that you could have done more, that you could have done better. And I think that's the one that keeps me up. And so I have a saying that I tell myself a lot when I'm doing something that I don't want to do. And it's, I will do what is required. And so it's not about doing your best. It's about doing what's required, because what's required might be better than your best is right now. The good news is that your best can get better. So number 11, and this one's real, all right? The hard way is the easy way. You're like, how...

Does that work? The hard way is the easy way because the easy way never gets you there. So think about it. People always are looking for the shortcut, but you have to accept a very simple truth, which is that the shortcut never actually takes you to the place that you're trying to go. And it's because it's rarely one big thing.

And I would postulate, fancy word, that there are a lot of shortcuts that exist in life and everyone already uses those. And so whenever an actual shortcut gets found, all humans immediately do it and it no longer becomes a shortcut. It's just a thing that everyone does and it's not really a thing anymore.

Like we learned how to tie knots. That was a big breakthrough. And then everyone ties their shoes and they're like, oh my God, let me show you the shortcut to this. It's like, oh, you tie, like, oh my God, everyone does it. And it's like not a thing anymore. And so all the things that you want to have that most people don't have, don't have shortcuts. But the thing is, is so many people waste so much time. They literally waste longer than it would have taken the hard way or the only way to get there in search of the easy way that doesn't exist.

And so the reality of this is that it's usually 100 small things that make days, weeks, and months hard. It's the never-ending onslaught of shit. And then you remember, after going through that onslaught of shit, that you signed up for this.

But then again, you figured that it would be hard. And then you're reminded that this is what hard feels like. And so you keep going because it's the only choice you have. And so I want to remind you that a lot of times what we imagine hard to be is different than how we experience hard because the nature of hard changes too.

And it's more of a limitation in how we describe hardship. And I actually think there's a big problem with this. So just kind of like Eskimos have like seven different words for snow. I feel like I should have like 25 different words for heart, right? Like the amount of things that you go through, there's like lifestyle heart. Like, okay, so there's sacrifice heart of like you're giving up things that you enjoy. There's also like effort heart of like starting to do things that you hate doing that you're

not good at. There's risk hard of the fact that you could lose something that you currently have, that you have the chance of losing what you currently have. You have the uncertainty hard of the fact that you might be doing all of the sacrifice for nothing. There's lots of different flavors of hard and each one of them presents at different times. And for some reason, when it gets a new kind of hard, it's a new seventh type of snowflake hard.

Then you're like, oh, this is different. But it's not. It's just that the thing that you grow comfortable with, then you conquer, and then you're exposed to a new level. And so I love this quote from Paul Graham. He said, if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars worth of pain. Fundamentally, in my opinion, the people who end up building, building, not inheriting, building tremendous wealth, just have massive concentrations of pain.

So don't go looking for the easy way because it will never get you there. Number 12, don't, this is a big one, they're all so big, right? Don't give away your power. Now, this sounds very like, you know, girl power or a little like rah-rah, but I will break this down in a little bit less rah-rah way. So what offends you controls you. Whatever you point your finger of blame towards is what also you point your power towards. Meaning, if we had, we talked about excuses earlier,

I can't do it because insert X. Insert X is the thing that has power over your life. And I remember when I realized this was that I had this belief that I would never be able to be in a long-term committed relationship because my mother had hurt me as a child. I didn't get enough hugs. Who gives a shit? Whatever. But I realized...

that by using that excuse and by saying it's her fault, I'm broken. It's her fault. I can't trust people. It's her fault. I can't love anybody. By saying that over and over again, all I did was I said, my mother controls how my love life will go. And so then I was like, well, I don't want her to have control over how I choose to love or not love or how content I get in a relationship or anything like that. And so I actively had to say,

Maybe all these things happened. Maybe they didn't. Also, who cares? Me. I care. I'm the one who's affected by this. And what's crazy about this, it's kind of a weird thing with parents, is that you think by hurting yourself, you get back at them for hurting you. And you do hurt them when you hurt yourself, but you hurt you more. Right?

And so at some point, and this is like, this is like super real. Let's say that you were parented tough, whatever that means for you, right? You had lots of bad things happen. Okay. And it was probably because you were a child trying to deal with the world without the skills of dealing with the world as an adult. But you had these things happen, right? And on some level, you might believe that you becoming successful, you making it work

Validates the way that you were parented and so you have this conflict where you're like well I don't want them to think that they did a good job by me being successful and so then you want to keep not being successful to prove to them and to hurt them for hurting you and You stay there as long as you want them to control you and so the day that you choose to control yourself is the day that you choose to divorce or

your results from the very viable reasons that you have to not win. You are right, and so what? Number 13, rejection versus regret. At some point, everyone needs to choose whether they'd rather risk rejection now or guarantee regret later, right? And so losers fear rejection, winners fear regret. And most attempts fail of anything. Failure is literally a prerequisite for success. And one of my favorite quotes of mine is,

is greatness rejects all first-time applicants. So let me say that again. Greatness rejects all first-time applicants. And so it's kind of like that person that's just like, oh, I can't get a job. And you're like, well, what have you done? They're like, well, I applied somewhere. And you're like, what do you mean? They're like, I applied somewhere and I didn't get the job. They didn't even call me. You're like, you went to one place? And they're like, yeah. So actually, this is going to be a really good analogy for somebody who's listening to this.

only for people who don't have a business yet. A lot of starting a business is the number of reach outs that you had to do in order to get the path, the job, the career that you want right now. So think about the amount of interviews. Think about the amount of outreach. Think about the amount of job ads. Think about the amount of resumes that you sent out. Think about all of that

And all of that work got you what I would consider one sale. You got one person to say yes to you, and they would give you money for work. All right? Now, obviously, within the context of an employee relationship, but fundamentally, it actually works the same way.

And so all you do in a business is the same thing. And so if you can handle that level of rejection, then you can handle the same level of rejection in a business. It's not actually that different. The question is whether you can handle that level of regret years later for not doing it. One of the things that I've noticed between champions and everyone else is that people, everyone else, is so excited when they win. They're so excited by the idea of them getting first place. But there's a reason that they never get first place. It's because they're excited about it.

The people who always and very consistently hit first place and win the championships are relieved because they tend to hate losing more than they love winning. And they expected to win because of the level of preparation they had compared to everyone else. Which brings me very magically to number 14, consistency beats shorter effort. Like how does that... Oh shit.

Consistency beats talent. I didn't read my own notes. Okay, so you can beat most people at anything if you just stick with it for a year. So you can learn, you can become competent at just about any skill in 20 hours.

It's just that people wait 10 years to get the first 20 hours logged. Right? Like if you want to learn how to play the first few notes of a guitar, you can learn about 20 hours. Now, are you going to be Jimi Hendrix? Which Gen Z, he was a guitarist, Purple Haze, you can look it up. Anyways, the point is, is that people have this huge delay before they begin. And what makes things hard isn't complexity. It's consistency.

And so as boring as it is, you just have to keep doing it before you get anything back. So one of my favorite quotes from myself is, "The world belongs to those who can keep doing without seeing the result of their doing." I've been told that I'm decent at presenting and talking on stage in front of people. And what a lot of people don't see is that for years, I spoke at the microphone in front of a group of people, and I did it like multiple times a day. And I did that in the form of a fitness session.

And so I had to literally stand on a box and shout around and tell people what they had to do. And I had to do that for years. And I remember when I had to get on stage for the first time and I had in high school been very nervous to public speak. And as I was about to get up on stage, I was like, why am I not nervous about this? Like, this is weird. Like I should, I was like, I should be nervous. Like, why am I not nervous? And I was like, oh, I've done this so many times, like so many times.

And I'm not talking about, you know, Civil War history and Abraham Lincoln. I'm talking about stuff I know. And so you outwork your self-doubt through repetition, not affirmations. You don't do it through belief. You do it through stimuli habituation. All right, which is just fancy words for saying you expose yourself to the bad things so many times they get used to, and it's no longer a bad thing anymore. It's just life.

And so like, if you want to get over a fear, the way they do it is habituation. So if I wanted to get over, you know, being afraid of spiders, I'm not afraid of spiders, but some people are afraid of spiders, right? If you want to get over that fear, you literally lock yourself in a room with a bunch of spiders. And all you do is you just have panic attack after panic attack, and you pass out and you wake up again, the spiders are there, you pass out, you keep doing eventually, eventually your nervous system adjusts. And five hours later, eight hours later, you walk out of the room, unafraid.

because you have habituated. And so the point of practice for all of these things is to habituate as fast as you can. And so we're trying to microwave that period of time. And the thing is, let's say it takes this many reps. You can have this many reps take you a year, or you can have it take you a month, depending on how dedicated you are to it. All right, number 15, have no shame. All right, now I have told this before, but my plan B was that I would drive Uber and strip. Now, I think part of that was because I wanted to, you know,

thumb my, whatever the Shakespearean saying, I bite my thumb at you, to bite my thumb at my very respectable parents and say like, I would take off my clothes for money. Now, of course, they would be horrified by that. But I think part of the reason I was okay with it was I was like, I'm going to do it my way, right? And so I want to be crystal clear here. If you have no money and you want to make money, you should have no shame,

Knock, call, email, text, DM, ask. Life-changing doors do not open themselves. And sometimes I feel like shame was invented by people who have to prevent people who have not from taking action. Because all of this is just an illusion. What are you ashamed of? Trying? Like, let's play it out. Remember I said fear only happens in the abstract, not in the specific. So if you reach out to a stranger,

No matter what happens, you always come out better than before because you either have a sale or you have an experience. Oath make you better.

And so the crazy thing about trying is that it has an asymmetric risk-reward return. So worst case is you get a no and you learn from it. You get better. Life gives you unlimited shots while you're alive. And so if you have nothing, like you're just basically cashing in lottery tickets and saying, oh my God, I lost, but what you're paying with is time. Fine. Pay more time, get more tickets, keep scratching. So do you know the difference between shame and guilt? Guilt is when you break your own rules. Shame is when you break other people's rules.

So if you are gay and you're in a religious community, you would probably feel shame. If you also share that religious community's rule set, you would also feel guilt. If, let's say, you were in a very liberal, progressive environment, you might feel neither shame nor guilt. And so the question is, whose rules are you following? And so if you have this feeling, this fear of being ashamed,

Then the question is, who's the one who wrote the rules that you're choosing to follow? And I can promise you, it's not the people who are successful. Because they're the ones shouting on the rooftops telling you that it's totally different once you get in the pool. It's very different. It's kind of like you have the lights of the world turn on. And like, you're living in this mirage of

when you're not succeeding, where there's all this uncertainty, there's all this ambiguity, there's this fog of the unknown in front of you. But as soon as you start taking action, things become very crystal clear. I think there's this, I'm sure some stoic analogy that said this, but basically like if you've ever walked through very dense fog, you can only see a couple spots in front of you, a couple steps in front of you. And so the only thing that you can do in fog is just start walking. And as you walk,

more steps become available to you. And so there's this misconception that you're going to be able to see the entire path ahead of you, but it has two fundamental fallacies in front of it. Number one is that you have the right vision to be able to see that far with your current skill set and resources, which you don't. Because

Imagine today all of your conditions change. You had more skills, which is hard to imagine because you can't imagine what it's like to have the skill. But maybe let's say you have resources that you didn't have before. Well, that would probably change the way you play the game. So trying to play out and try and play 17 steps in advance when the game itself is going to change and you as a player are going to change. And so the only thing that you can boil all of this down to is

is to take the steps that you can see in front of you, one at a time. And I would write this down of like, what are the things that are stopping me? And more specifically, whose voice do I hear? Whose voice or judgment am I afraid of? Because usually it's people, it's society is what we say, but it's usually like two people. And I remember when I had this big decision that I had to make. So when I was considering selling Jim Lynch, I thought that $46 million was not a lot of money.

for the business. Now, some of you may hear this and be like, oh my God, that's amazing. But believe it or not, before COVID happened, Jim Owens was valued at 150 million. And so for me going from 150 to 50 or 46, it felt small, right? It felt like a really small number.

And I remember there was a particular person, we'll call it a frenemy, if you will, that I thought would think that they were better than me if I sold for this small number. When I was able to narrow it down to just that one person's voice, I thought to myself, am I going to give that person power over my entire life, which is literally what it was. I was choosing not to make a decision because of someone else. That person has complete power over me.

And I was like, "Well, that's a terrible reason not to do this." The crazier part is that even if you're right and that person does say that you suck, so what? Most people don't want you to win. And even if you do win, they will try and do a reverse excuse, which is called a justification for why you should be excused of the respect that you should earn for having won.

He just has good genetics. He has great parents. He inherited his wealth. He had good connections. He was born in America. He speaks English. He's a man. He's white. He's whatever you want. But giving the person justifications in no way helps you. You might be right, and so what?

and not living your life because you might have some justifications that help you. Like it's so funny, it's like, let's say you have some advantage, whatever it is, right? Whatever advantage you're born with, right? You might have one. It's kind of the same thing as the parent thing. It's like, well, I don't wanna be successful 'cause I don't wanna prove that I had this advantage. It's like, would you prefer to prove everyone wrong by saying I had this advantage and I also wasted it? I remember, I'll tell you a story, and I think it'll probably, that'll round this off well. So when I was younger, I didn't wanna be a doctor, but that was pretty much the path that was laid out in front of me.

And so my father's a successful doctor.

And I was like, it's cheating, you know, to just assume your practice and just like immediately have a practice that makes a lot of money. And he said, do you think Shaq, when he was seven feet tall, was like, it wouldn't be fair for me to play basketball. Other people aren't as tall as me. And I always remembered that. He's like, you play the cards you're dealt. These are the cards you have, play them. And I remember thinking that as, now obviously I didn't decide to be a doctor, but the reason that I didn't want to do it was because I thought other people would say that I would, they would,

Disqualify away my success as not earned by me. When the reality is that they're all gonna disqualify your sex no matter what, because it makes them feel bad. And so fuck them, right? But if you have some cards, for the love of God, play 'em. Real quick guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale

and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, R-O-A-D, roadmap.