The Truth About Long-Term Success | Ep 916
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And so you have to limit it to the thing that if you did it, will get you the highest possible return. Which may just mean making your sandwiches awesome every single time. If we only did that, would our business grow? If the answer is yes, then stop worrying about everything else.

Hey guys, this has been top of mind for me for a minute now. I've had, I'd say over the last few weeks, I've probably talked to 20 or 30 business owners for extended periods of time that had this same problem. And the interesting thing about it is

It's not something that is only for big businesses. It also applies to smaller businesses. It just applies throughout your entire entrepreneurial journey. And I have to remind myself of this principle and how to apply it every single day. So I think you'll enjoy it. And I think if you actually follow the steps, I mean, I think you'll be very happy with the results. The reason you're busy but still broke isn't because you're not working hard enough. It's because you're working on too many things at once.

In other words, you're working the wrong way. And so back when I was running my first company, I was working 16 hours a day, basically just all the hours I was awake, but I couldn't get past $3 million a year. And it wasn't until I learned a different way to channel my effort that the business finally reached critical mass and then took off.

And so by the end of this video, I'll walk you through how you can figure out how to channel it into a specific opportunity vehicle, how to pick that vehicle, and then ultimately how to get past that point that snowballs where the business starts working faster and faster. And so before we dive in, I want to give you a little example of this.

So I'll give you a biological example and a social example. So biological example, let's say that you've got a magnifying glass and you want to burn a hole through a piece of paper, right? You've got this piece of paper here and you want to burn a hole through it.

If you don't get the magnifying glass at the right distance, you're just going to have a circle like this, but it's just not concentrated enough in order to burn through. You have to get that sweet spot so that you can get that tiny little hole and then all of a sudden it breaks through. But that's only when you can concentrate the light. To the same degree, let's say that you want to start a party on a Friday night. But instead of starting one party, you say, hey, I want to have four parties on a Friday night.

Now, if that were what you were going to do, you might be like, man, none of my parties worked out. But it would be obvious to you now when you thought like, why didn't my parties work out? It's because you never got enough critical mass. Because if you combined all of the people and all the people you're going to invite at one party, that party would then take off and then become a party in and of itself.

And so this idea is basically what you're spending all your time on. You only have a certain number of people in your network, only a certain number of people that you could potentially contact to leverage to do deals, to get your help from, to help work for you, all of those things. But you're trying to start four parties at once and wondering why none of them's working.

And so the reason this happens is because entrepreneurs get reinforced the first time they quit something and change stuff up. And because you got into the game of business by quitting something in order to be here and something worked. That's why you still keep doing it.

But the problem is you got reinforced for starting two parties. Your first party was maybe your job. The second one was like, you know what? I'm going to stop this party and I'm going to start my own. And then all of a sudden you're like, man, that was awesome. I'm going to start more parties rather than realizing that just going from one to the other, this became a better vehicle and starting parties on your own was the better vehicle rather than starting parties in general.

And so because strategy, if you're like, well, what does this all mean? So there's this really fancy term that people throw around in business and they say strategy a lot. And I always like to ask people, what do you mean by strategy? And then they just make up a bunch of words because they have no idea and it just sounds good.

Strategy is this. It's the prioritization of limited resources against unlimited options. It's how you choose what you're going to do and what you're not going to do. That's what strategy is. And so right now, if I say, hey, what's your list of priorities? If you say, okay, number one is, you know, I've got priority one, priority two, priority three, priority four. I can already tell you that you don't have priorities because you have more than one.

And so when we get back to like, what is a priority? So priority, like if you actually break the word down, it comes from priory, which means first, right? And or before others, which means that you can only have one first. That's how priority works. Now in the 20th century, people started saying priorities, which then basically neutered the term altogether. But if you go to the root of what it was supposed to mean, it means this comes first. This is the most important. And so right now you're,

struggling to focus your resources on one party, focus all of the people you know, focus all of your promotional effort to get everyone to do one thing because you're trying to promote four. Because you're trying to have four parties, four priorities, and because of that, you have none that actually work. And so I'll tell you a fun example of this. So I had a really lovely lady, Kira, came to one of our events here at headquarters, single mom of five,

had a publishing business. She had a TV show. She had an events business. And she had like a business coaching business for women. And she was doing pretty well. You know what I mean? A few million bucks a year. But the thing is, is that when you, when I see an entrepreneur like that, I just think, man,

you have, you know, three or four mediocre parties. What if you actually had all those people partying together? It'd be so much bigger because then that word of mouth effect would snowball far bigger than what you had before. And that's why sometimes it feels so hard because it's like when you're starting tiny parties, it's

all manual effort. It's all brute force to get those first people there, right? But then after that, at a certain point, the word of mouth starts growing and it starts to become a thing. You start to develop a brand. You start to develop a reputation. But when you start four parties at once, it never gets there. It's like, all right, well, how do I do that? In the micro, people are like, okay, I need to be more productive. But let me give you the biggest productivity hack in the world. Do nothing besides the task that you set to accomplish. That's it.

Anything that is not that sentence is not making you more productive. If it's not you doing the task, then you're not doing the task. And I think people have come up with productivity as creative ways to procrastinate while not feeling guilty about not doing the work they know they should be doing. And so focus means doing nothing besides that, that you're focusing on. Commitment is the elimination of alternatives.

deciding is dikidere means to cut off. And so if you're thinking about all these words, you're like, man, they almost all mean the same thing. Yes. So just because there's lots of words doesn't mean that the meaning is fundamentally different. It's just a way of different cultures that meld into our word lexicon. But a lot of people will try and make each of these sound nuanced. It's the same thing. You need to cut off what you're not going to do. And then what remains becomes your priority. The

Most important decision is what is that thing that remains because the people who move fastest in life don't actually move faster They get more for every move. They have higher leverage. I want you to go through this this this process with me So right now you have your priorities. I'm gonna put this in a little quotes here All right, and let's say it's like, you know increase, you know ads is one of them You know, the second one is like, you know add new product and then it's higher and

you know, salesmen, whatever. You've got these things that you want to do. Now, if I were to ask you of these things, if you just had 100% certainty that you could accomplish one of them one year from now, which of them

would get you the furthest. Now, when you look at all these, you might be like, well, honestly, even if I were to crack the new ads, I still need a salesman. And the new product is important, but if I don't have a salesman to sell it, then I can't do anything. It's like, okay. So then everything you have,

comes down to getting this done. And so this is now your priority. You can ignore everything else because until this happens, nothing else matters. Now, I gave two examples that were contingencies. What if there are things that you could do in parallel? Like, well, what if I start to develop an app so that by the time I have my salesman, then I'll have something to sell.

Well, the problem with this is, this is just in my experience, is that like the parties, there's limited resources. And so I find that people actually do things faster chronologically or linearly than in parallel, especially when it's when you're focusing all the resources of a company on one specific point. Because if you know that you can only do one thing with all of your resources, guess what? You get it done faster because you have so many other things you have to do.

Because every single person feels like they're holding the entire company back, which they are. But what happens when you pursue multiple things is that no one feels like they're holding the entire company back and then nothing gets done. And so this is why you feel so busy. You're trying to host all these parties at the same time. So let me explain why it's actually keeping you broke. What you have to realize is the real cost of change. So let's say that this line represents your normal revenue in the business, okay?

If you do a change in the business, then you're almost always going to incur the cost of change, right? The business is going to go down. My estimate is that whenever we do something new, we lose 20% right off the bat before we get to realize any potential, not guaranteed, upside from that change.

And so what's interesting, though, is that many entrepreneurs hear this and think, okay, well, I'm like, I'm willing to risk this 20% decrease because maybe I'll get a 10% increase on whatever, you know, on the other side of this. It's like, yeah, but for you to get, do you want to have a guaranteed 20 for a potential of 10?

it's not a trade i would make and so what ends up happening is that you end up realizing that the vast majority of tests you just shouldn't do it's like it might work and who cares it's not going to change the business it's not the constraint right like maybe we have some little cro hack we could do sure is it the thing that's stopping you from getting the three to ten million probably not and so what happens is these are just productive distractions

The amount of people that I know that, and I'm not saying split testing is necessarily bad. I'm saying that if you're trying to optimize your way to a 10X, you've got it wrong. You're focused on the wrong thing. So after the 20%, then it means that number one, if you're going to take a shot, it's got to get you at least 20% plus as your upside because you might not even get it. And so for me, this is my rule of thumb. I need at least a 20 on the top side so that I'm willing to take a guaranteed 20 on the downside. That's number one.

Now, number two is let me show you what it looks like in reality. There's two scenarios. Scenario one is that, okay, maybe the thing that we have starts to work, right? So our performance starts to go up. But then right around here, we're like, you know what? Let's do another change. And so we have these changes that could work, but we're always mid another change. And so actually our performance is more here.

versus what it would be if we just changed nothing. Now, that's if this is under the assumption that all the changes you have are going to improve the business. But what if you're changing things and some of the changes you make actually

actually make the business worse. And so this is when I see these people who are stuck at a million dollars a year, $3 million a year, $10 million a year, and they've been stuck there for multiple years in a row. It's typically because they're changing too many things and because they're working on the wrong thing, right? And because they're changing so many things, they never have the bandwidth. They're starting too many parties at once to just focus on the one party that if they can crush it, they can get on the front page of the news, right? And so I had a business that came out here, really awesome lady, and she'd been stuck for a while.

And so the issue is that she was starting too many new things. Basically, she was always running new marketing promotions and starting new conversion mechanisms because that was the thing that she loved the most as an entrepreneur. She just loved selling. So she always wanted to innovate the sales process, but like,

The sales wasn't the constraint of the business. She's really good at sales. And so despite it being the thing that she enjoyed, it had nothing to do with the thing that was limiting the business. And when I talked about the thing that were clearly limiting the business, I could see her energy deflate because she was just like, oh, I'm not good at that. I have it outsourced. And I was like, yeah, it shows.

And I was like, said differently. And she was like, I paid this person $3,000 a month to manage my organic, manage my organic, right? I was like, okay, imagine you paid someone $3,000 a month to handle all of the pitching. Cause she does pitches like one to many. I said, do you think that it would work? And she was like, God, no. And I was like, right.

Right. There are people who are as good at you at making content as you are at pitching, and you need to be that good at also marketing on the front end. And so the issue was that she never had the bandwidth to even do this because every single month or two, she was changing the conversion process, right? Thinking that this is the thing that was limiting the business. But the

But the reality is she converted about the same amount every time. And she just had to keep working harder and harder because she was getting fewer leads. And so she was getting better and better, but she was focused on the wrong part of the funnel. Like the thing is, is you can only convert 100%. You can't get past 100 and you're never going to hit 100. And so the problem is we need to get more people in the bucket.

Right? And so for her, every time she did this, she would have to have her team would have to relearn new systems. Her customers might get confused about her positioning because it was a whole new wrapper around her sales process and even her product itself. She would start losing momentum because she had these constant changes that were happening. And so I'll tell you, for me, when I look at all of this stuff, and this is what I was talking to her, I said, you just have to accept that some stuff is good enough because it's not the constraint. This is counter to the perfectionist culture of like, everything has to be perfect. First off, nothing's going to be perfect.

And there are, and I love Jack Dorsey said this. He said, make the details perfect, limit the number of details. This conversion process was getting this conversion process perfect the thing that was going to lock the business? No, no, it's not.

Either you have to have a product that's so good that people talk about it endlessly and then that's what grows the business, or you have to have marketing that's so good that you let everybody know about your stuff. And many people obsess about the stuff in the middle. But on either ends, that's where the highest leverage exists. So what does this mean in practice? If the metrics that you have for the thing that you love are above or at your industry benchmark, leave it alone. It's not the thing that's limiting your business.

Because you need to free up all that bandwidth so that you can actually learn the new skills or focus on the thing that really is limiting your business, which is probably the thing you suck at and you don't like doing and you outsource. And so this is the cruel reality of small business is that small business owners tend to have the most ideas of things they can do. But small businesses in general have the lowest capacity to pursue new ideas. And so you are so resource constrained.

You have so little time and so little effort and so few people and capital that you can actually do anything, especially if you want to do it right. The best hope you can possibly have if you really want to compete is to just do one thing well. I'll give you an example of one of my favorite chains, which is Raising Cane's. And if you want to really study business, study Raising Cane's.

The owner owns all of them. He has no franchisees. He owns them all. The guy's a deca billionaire and he's not that he's not old. He's I think he's in his 40s. He's a savage. And part of the reason that chain has been so successful is because he was so militant about the few things that they were going to do well. It's like we've got our fries. We've got Texas toast. We've got coleslaw. We've got tenders.

And they've got sauces and beverages. That's it. And if you want to have a sandwich, they just take the tenders and they put it between two pieces of Texas toast, right? Like they just take those few ingredients because they're like, if we just nail this, we don't need to do anything else. And I really want to hit on this really hard. If you can think to yourself, if all I did was this...

nothing else would matter, then why are you letting anything else matter? And the tough part is that many of your ideas are probably good. It's just that they will fail because of a lack of execution, not because of a lack of quality ideas. And they will all fail if you try and execute all of them. Yes, including the one that you love that you're thinking about right now as I'm saying this and you're thinking, oh, I wonder if he's talking about that. Yes, I'm talking about that.

And so I'll give you a couple of examples for me personally. Even at a micro level within a business, I had a shorts editor who was a good editor. And then we had him focused on two different platforms and both platforms suffered. When we focused him on just one platform, all of a sudden the views from that one platform got more than the views from both platforms that when he was working on them split. Think about how loud that is. He was able to get one, which he had already been working on to do more than both together

when he just focused on one. The second is we have, you know, every month we invite entrepreneurs out here to the headquarters who are doing big things. And that way we can meet more businesses. And when we have these events, my team always thinks about things that we could do better. And so we made this rule where we said, hey, what if we do nothing new? Zero new things. Just execute all the things that we know that make an event good. Nothing else. And we did that.

And then four times in a row, we had the best NPS, best everything score from the event. And I was like, right. Every time we change things, our NPS goes down. Don't change anything. Everyone loves it the way it is. The thing is, is that you will get tired of your business before your customers even know anything about it. Because remember, they have zero context. You might think, oh man, we did this one thing that one time and we didn't do it this time. No one knows. No one knows.

Real quick, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You guys are awesome. This podcast continues to grow. We had our highest month ever last month, which is huge. And we don't run ads to grow the show. It's just you guys. It's just you guys. And so if this podcast provided you value, if you could text it to a friend or you could send it on Slack or share it on your Instagram, that is how this podcast grows. And that is why I continue to make them. It's because of you guys. So thank you guys, first and foremost. And if you have it in your heart, there's somebody who could use this, then please send it. Lots of love. Enjoy the rest of the podcast.

And so hopefully now you understand how changing everything is limiting your ability to win. And so the question then is, okay, you know, following my own rules, don't just say stop doing this, say do this instead. So here's what to do instead. Have patience. Now that sounds super lame. So let me tell you what that actually means. So patience is just figuring out what to do in the meantime. And so I'll tell you for me personally, I make a big list of ideas.

And it is like, just name it something ridiculous so that you can remind yourself how ridiculous you are for always having these ideas, which is I have this mondo. And I'm talking like I probably have 200 plus items of ideas that I have of things that can make money or would be improvements to our existing business or process. And...

What's interesting is that whenever I think of these ideas, I'm like, it becomes the most important thing in my life. And I just want to stop everyone from doing what they're doing so they can hear my idea. But the thing is, is that every time I do that, I just end up breaking everything in the business and...

completely distracting my own team. And so I had to develop the system, which is I put the list together. And then what happens is every once in a while, I can notice that the team has some bandwidth. And then at that point, I go back to my gigantic list. And interestingly, many of the ideas that I was very sold on, I'm like, oh, that was a terrible idea. But in the moment, it felt like an amazing idea. But I'm like, oh, I can find five reasons why that's not going to work.

But if I have an idea that just I can't shake for months on end, that is when I say, okay, this is an idea worth pursuing as maybe the next on this list when we have bandwidth. So this is actually my list. So I have AI stuff we can do, traffic stuff we can do, conversion rate stuff we can do, LTV stuff we can do. These are all tests that we can consider. These are a

Ascension ideas. These are renewal ideas. I see them and I'm like, man, these are such good ideas. And right now we're not doing any of them. And the last time I grabbed something from that list, you guys want to know what it was? I think I've grabbed...

In 18 months, I've grabbed three things from that list. Just, and I probably have more resources, capital, and talent than the vast majority of businesses have. And I say this to demonstrate how incredibly hard it is. Because if you just made one sandwich and it was the best sandwich in the entire world, then all you would need to do is just keep making that sandwich. And as much as you'd be like, I'm so sick of making this sandwich. It's like, but the world isn't.

Think about how much has Chipotle changed their menu in 20 years? They've maybe changed two things, three things in 20 years. Years. Years. Two or three things. Now, how many times do you think people have been like, hey, have you guys considered putting queso? Right? Like, have you guys considered? It's like, yeah, they thought about it. They thought about it.

But they didn't because they know that we could also just not. And so one of my big running jokes that I have with my closest friend, Dr. Kashi, is we call it the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, which is doing nothing. It's like, or we could, you know, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, do nothing. And so I will get through these things. I'll beef up this whole idea and I'll be like...

or we could just keep making money doing what we're doing. And I have been so rewarded for that, that it has almost become a running joke for me. And so I'm trying to transfer this to you as fast as I can, because if you want to take a little season, let me give you a little fun tactic. You have seasons of no externally, right? Which is, you know what? I'm not doing anything social. I just got to lock in and work. Cool. You can also have seasons of no change. That means no new tests, no new ideas. You're just going to execute.

And what's really crazy, and this is nuts, you will feel so much relief because you will realize that much of your anxiety and your stress comes from this list that you have created for yourself that you have not done. And so all you do is you basically take your entire to-do list and say, this is no longer my to-do list anymore.

I'm just going to take the things we're already doing and we're going to do them well. And I promise you, you will make more money and that will depress you because you will realize that the biggest problem in your business is lack of execution, not lack of new ideas. This is a lesson that has taken me way too long to learn.

And I'm trying to pass it on to you now. And most of you don't have the discipline to be able to do it. But the few of you who do will honestly, it will depress you by how simple it can be. It doesn't mean it's easy because you'll have to fight your internal nature every day. And so change nothing for four weeks.

And if you make it through four weeks, give yourself an extension. Give yourself another four weeks. And if you keep making more money, you know what you can do? Give yourself another four weeks. And then you'll realize, you're like, I can really only do like one new thing a year. Yeah. Because if you keep doing nothing new, all that happens, you keep getting better at the thing you're doing. And then basically through continuing to tighten the machine, tighten the machine, tighten the machine, that is where you actually start opening up capacity for a true, actual new idea that you can execute well.

Otherwise, you're just trying to add stuff to a cup that's already full. And then that means that something else is going to drop. And then that's why you feel like you're playing whack-a-mole all the time is you keep adding new ideas in and then execution on the stuff you know you should be doing is falling. And then you always complain to like, man, my team drops the ball unless I'm focused. It's like, no, the team doesn't drop the ball unless you're there. It's just that when you're there, you get them to focus on one thing. And then you have new ideas and you tell them to do something when you leave. And then all of a sudden it breaks the machine. And so you're basically, you're the problem.

Like it's your fault. And if you cannot prioritize, then how can you expect your team to do it for you? You have to be the one who's willing to make trade-offs because fundamentally you have limited resources. And so if you think you can do everything, you are wrong.

You can't. In fact, you can barely do anything. And so you have to limit it to the thing that if you did it, will get you the highest possible return, which may just mean making your sandwiches awesome every single time. If we only did that, would our business grow? If the answer is yes, then stop worrying about everything else. Just think about the big obvious.

And the thing is, is that the big obvious is typically also the hardest thing to do. And so instead you distract yourself with these tiny, less obvious things that are nuanced, that just distract your team and give them things to do rather than doing the one thing that you all know you have to do that you have always been putting off as the most important thing that is low urgency. So when you make the most important thing, high urgency by eliminating everything else, that's higher than seeing low importance. You create time and space to do the thing that matters most.

And so before I get to the third strategy here, at AgWizards.com, we talk a lot about more, better, new. And so most people don't have an effort or an ideas problem. They have a focus problem, right? They have a focus problem, which actually translates into a leverage issue. They don't get enough leverage on the work they do. And so as a result, they don't move as fast as they want. And so it's one of the things, it's probably the highest leverage skill that we have is looking at a business and say, okay,

The thing that's limiting you is not your sales process. It's actually not even this. It's actually that you need to hire these two salespeople, or you need to hire this head of marketing, or you need to reallocate your time so that this becomes the one objective that if we only did that, our business would hit and surpass all of your goals. So then why do anything else? And so getting laser focused on what that one thing is and really carefully thinking about it. Warren Buffett has this example where he says,

If you only had a punch card that had 20 punches on it for the stocks you could buy for the rest of your life, and once you used up those 20, you can never use them again, you'd be a significantly better investor. Well, the same is true for you as an entrepreneur. So if you were an entrepreneur and you only got one punch per year of something that you were going to optimize towards, just one, just one, you would look real hard at that list and be like, okay, which of these one things, if I only did this, would get us the most?

And what happens is that when you put that kind of constraint on, you do end up realizing that, well, you know what? If we did solve this one thing, it would basically change everything for us. Right. Then why are we wasting our time with these bullshit, not hard side quests? So if you'd like our help to identify the highest leverage point, you can go to acq.com forward slash Vegas. We hold an event every month. Love to meet you in person and have you out.

So number one, you made a big list. Number two, you gave yourself four weeks or more to wait and see if those things improve by just doing the work and changing nothing. And so now number three is let your ADD run wild, comma, in the areas of your business where there is no cost of change. All right. So let's think about this creatively. Where in the business does having ADD benefit you?

Well, I'll tell you. Marketing benefits from variety and fresh perspective. While within operations and product, it often kills things. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't innovate your product. You should, but probably significantly less than you're going to be innovating your marketing by orders of magnitude. And so,

Content creation, for example, you have new angles, you have new hooks, you have new stories, you have new examples, right? New variations of your content and or your ads. All of these things require novelty because customers will get banner blindness. Formats change. Algorithms change. All of these things are constantly changing. And so if you have ADD, put it and attack the monster that requires ADD to solve it.

To the same degree, the front ends that you bring a customer in on like lead magnets, so tiny little things, tiny little bite-sized value that you can give away to people to solve specific problems. Solving lots of tiny problems for your audience is super valuable. You having new little problems solved for them in no way hurts your business. In fact, it just brings more people into your world. And so you doing that is amazing.

So I'll give you one that most people would think is in this category and probably isn't, which is conversion optimization or split tests. Typically, you can really only run like one split test a week at most, sometimes every other week to get enough statistical data to actually prove that one thing is better than another. And so the thing is, is that a lot of people will just take directional data when it's way too early. And if you like, and I'll prove it to you.

If you are somebody who split tests, how many times have you given yourself a 20% improvement over a year, but yet your business is the same revenue? If you were getting all these 20% improvements, wouldn't your business be bigger? So it probably isn't working as much as you think it is. And so yes, zero is a good thing, but I think people, they overestimate its importance and they overestimate how many tests you can truly do with statistical significance.

And also, you usually can't run too many tests at the same time, especially if it's in the same sales process, because if you change something up front, it's going to change something on the back, which dirties the data. And so you really have to just test one thing at a time. So it's like, okay, you've got 24 tests that you can do for the year. 24. Now think about that. You know, you're like, oh, that's a lot of tests. It's like, well, if you change the headline, there's one.

That's it. Two weeks go by. And then you're like, you know what? I kind of want to change the way we do the hook in this VSL or video sales letter, the video that's on the page. Well, there's another one. All right. I also, you know what? I think I want to change the layout and change this from a video to an image and split test that. Well, there's another two weeks. It's like, it's not hard.

to come up with 24 when it's just like when each change tiny change like that still counts like that to me does not satisfy my add creativity in the least every two weeks one tiny change like i'd kill myself right so i actually still put all my effort into how do i create more lead magnets how to create more content how to create more ads because those things i can just completely unleash all my creativity and so much so that leila who's the true day-to-day operator of acquisition.com encourages me to do that because

Basically, the more I'm front-facing and the more I do promotion, the better the business runs. Because...

Like the business only needs me for like a couple hours a year for big creative ideas And then the rest of the year all I do is just fuck shit up now Hopefully I've equipped you some of the skills at least the ones that have worked for me to fight this urge But successful entrepreneurs realize that staying focused is kind of like beating addiction, right? It's not a one-time victory. You have to fight it all the time every day and so

Number four, realize that this process is a never ending battle. When you're starting out, the distractions are obvious, right? They're easy to ignore. But as you get better, you'll get opportunities that will be better. And so let me give you an example. So if you're only good at math, right? Then maybe you're not good at math.

maybe you would be able to have the job of being a bookkeeper or maybe an accountant, right? If you get good at math and taxes, then all of a sudden you become, you know, a tax strategist. And if you're good at that and you're also good at investing, all of a sudden you become maybe a CFO, right? Or somebody who's in charge of M&A, right? And so when that happens, mergers and acquisitions, when that happens, all of a sudden there's so many more opportunities because you get the individual opportunities of each skill set

and you unlock all of the opportunities that require multiple skill sets. And so let's say that this is skill one and this is skill two, right? So skill one only gives you the things on this side of the circle here, right? Skill two only gives you the things on this side of the circle. But when you have both

both of them together, you also unlock this third part. But the thing is, is that when you have another circle, now the thing is, is that if we really wanted to do this, this would, they'd unlock between these two and these two. And you kind of get the idea, which is that the more of these skills you lap together, the more of these parts of the circle you're able to unlock. So

So what do you do now? Number one, you pick one priority, just one. And if you haven't been able to decide that one thing is more important, then you still need to go back, lock yourself in the room, drink more coffee and stare at it until you can actually decide to make the trade-off saying, this is more important than everything else. And if we only accomplish this, then it will have the highest likelihood of unlocking the most growth for us as a business. If

All this, all we accomplished for this by the end of the year, that would be an amazing win. And if that's true, then why accomplish anything else? Now, in order to do that, you'll then, number two, need to go no change. You'll unlock no change mode, which is, I'm saying for four weeks because you're probably an addict for change right now. So I'll take a little bit of, you know, change sobriety just for a little bit. But ideally, I want you to change nothing besides the work that you're doing on that one priority.

kind of going forward. And that's because the thing is, everything will just get better if you change nothing. That's what's crazy. Like if you look at GDP, from my perspective, like gross domestic product of a country, just in aggregate is that businesses in general get a few percentage points better every single year doing nothing. Now, like we've had that GDP growth with more or less stagnant population, which means we have actually unleashed more and more revenue.

per business. And I think it's just improvements. Now, part of that's going to be training, which is again, people getting better or new technology comes out, which is they get more for what they do. But at the end of the day, there's only two things that improve in a business. And you can keep that as a constant with no change for now. So you'll pick your one priority. You'll decide to change nothing else besides that. Number three, you'll make your big list of ideas. When they come, you'll be like, thank you, Idea Fairy. It's very kind of you to just gift me with this amazing idea. And I'm just going to add it to this list. And when we have bandwidth, I'll revisit it. And so

And so a great tactical example is that what you can do is that if someone else gives you an idea, you can say, that's an amazing idea. It's not a priority right now, but I will add it to our big list of ideas. Thank you for sharing that. And so that way you can tell your team, listen, I'm not immune to this either. I got my big list of ideas here too. And we can just keep adding to this. But at the end of the day right now, we just need to keep focusing on what is most important.

And if you do those things, I think that you will have a phenomenally more profitable business and you will actually unlock the growth that you've been wanting. And finally, your busyness will translate into business.