do the hard things, kids, dogs, businesses

Summary

we just brought home a German short-haired pointer puppy. great breed. high drive. lots of potential. and absolutely useless if I don’t put in the patient, consistent, daily reps to train her.

the dog is the metaphor. so are the kids. so is the business. the people who get great results are not doing more things. they are doing fewer things, harder, with no exceptions for years.

the ruthless pursuit of elimination is the move:

1. you can effectively focus on three to four major priorities in a day. not ten. not twenty. three to four. anything beyond that gets attention but not the kind that produces real outcomes.

2. to actually focus on three to four, you have to make the others less important. not equally important. less. prioritizing only works if it includes deprioritizing.

3. commitment is not what you say. it is what you cut. the people who tell me family is the most important thing in the world while their calendar is 90 percent business meetings are not committed. they are wishing.

good kids, good dogs, good businesses. all of them are built by the same boring repeated act of doing the hard thing today and again tomorrow.

Transcript

introduction to the importance of doing hard things in various aspects of life

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. So how do you have a good business? How do you have good kids? How do you have a good marriage? How do you have a good dog? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I recently got a new dog.

I already have one small dog. It’s like an eight, nine pound chihuahua. Doesn’t do much. It’s a very cuddly, small dog, and that’s all it wants to do is be pet and be cuddled. That’s what my family does with this dog. But we just got a new dog, which is basically the polar opposite of that dog. It’s a German short-haired pointer.

personal anecdote about training a new, energetic dog

It’s a hunting dog. They have an extreme amount of energy, and the big reason I got the dog is because I want to run with the dog. I’m not a big hunter, but I like to do things outdoors, and I like to run outdoors, and I wanted a dog I could go running with, and all my research pointed me to this dog.

Now with this dog comes a huge responsibility on me and my wife to train the dog. We have a lot of work to do. We have to train this animal. We have to set aside time every single day to train it, to have actual training sessions with the dog. And I’m actually amazed with how smart this dog is. Maybe that’s because my previous experience right now has been with chihuahuas, but how quickly it can learn and pick up things.

But it’s already learning things really fast, and it’s turning into a good dog, a well-trained dog. And hopefully in several months or a year, I will have a really well-trained dog that can do all the things that I want. But the point of saying any of that is this will not be easy. Like having a well-trained dog will not be easy.

the link between effort and outcome in personal and professional contexts

If I want a dog that’s not going to jump up on you when you walk into my house or bite people or it comes back when I call it, it sits when I say to sit, it stays when I tell it to stay. If I really want that dog and it stays next to me when I run, all those things, if I want that dog, it’s not going to be easy.

I’m talking about the hard things like setting aside the time to train the dog. That’s the hard thing. Not ever really getting upset with the dog, trying to only do positive reinforcement with the dog because that’s how these dogs respond to training. I have to be incredibly patient. I have to rearrange my schedule a little bit.

I have to give up a few things that maybe I would prefer to do in the evening or the middle of the day. But guess what I know as someone who’s done a lot of hard things? One, it’s completely worth it. Like I have no regrets. I thought about all these things before I got the dog. All these things went through my mind.

strategies for embracing and prioritizing hard things

I’m like, okay, what’s the new schedule going to look like? How am I going to train it? Do I need to buy a training course? Do I need to get a trainer? How much of this can I do on my own? What things do I really want it to know? All of these thoughts and ideas happened before I got the dog. And now that I have the dog, I’m setting aside the time.

I’m sticking to the schedule. We’re doing all the things. We’re training it and we’re doing the best that we can. Are we perfect? Absolutely not. We have crazy lives, you know, live just like anyone else. So it’s hard to stick to all the things, but we’re doing our best. We’re trying really hard to train this dog to have a good dog.

But I know a lot of people who don’t have well-trained dogs and the reason they don’t have a well-trained dog is because they just didn’t do the hard things. They like the idea of getting the dog that they wanted, but then when it came down to like, oh man, you got to, you got to do this every day.

practical tips for integrating hard tasks into daily routines

You got to work on the reps and when it’s not listening, you just have to be patient. Try a little bit harder. Like, I mean, I don’t know if I have time for that. I don’t know if I want to do it. What if I have a bad day? If I have a bad day that I’m not going to be in the mood to train the dog. This is how people work and we can step outside of dogs for a minute.

This happens in your business. This happens with your parenting. This happens in your marriage, your relationships. This happens everywhere. And I’m not going to sit here and act like I have every single thing figured out, but I love my kids. I think I have amazing kids. I have a great marriage with my wife.

My dog is going to be well-trained and I enjoy my business and I think they’re run pretty well and it’s not because I’m an amazing human being who can do all these things that you can’t do. That’s 100% not the truth at all and if you know me personally, you know that’s the truth. But what I’m willing to do over and over again are the hard things.

closing thoughts on the long-term benefits of embracing hard challenges

That’s the only thing. If you read my book, Killing Comfort, I say in the book, I don’t think I’m special. There’s only one thing that I’m good at. Only one thing and that’s the willingness to just put my head down and do the work once I know what the work is. I will do all the hard things. I will do every single thing I need to make sure I have good kids.

I will do everything I need to make sure my businesses are running well. I will do everything I need to make sure my wife feels loved and taken care of and I’m going to do everything I need to do to train this dog because I want a well-trained dog. Now, how do we do this? How do you do that? How do you make sure that you do all those hard things?

It’s one thing that you need to master and it’s the ruthless pursuit of elimination. How much can you eliminate from your life? Once I start stacking up my priorities and I’m like, okay, wife, kids, first, business, second, just keeping in line with the conversation, then I’m like, okay, dog, right?

So these, I’m like, wow, that filled up the schedule, right? If I’m like eight hours towards business here, I’ve got a few hours in the morning, hours in the evening to family, okay, where’s the dog fit in here? Now my day’s full. My day is full. I don’t have room for anything else. I said these are the things I wanted, right?

I wanted good kids, good relationships, good marriage, good business, good dog, all those things. So what do I have to eliminate? Anybody who’s asking me for more of my time, I’m going to have to say no. I might have to remove things from my life like, oh, maybe I can’t do this thing anymore. Like for instance, I used to get in the sauna every single night, every single night because that’s when my kids went to bed.

That was just kind of my routine. But now I’m doing things with the dog again. This is temporary. I’m not trying to give up self-development or improving myself, but I’m like, ah, you know what? I’m doing all the other things for, you know, working out, diet, like all these other things. I’m going to skip the sauna for probably a few weeks so I can fit training this dog into my schedule.

Again, I know it’s temporary. These things come in and out, but it’s something that had to go. I had to make time. I had to eliminate something to fit something else. I can’t have it all. And when you try to have it all, that’s where people start to stumble. That’s where they start to fall. They’re like trying to prioritize too many things.

You get three, maybe four things that you can honestly focus on in your life across a 24-hour day, and that’s with the assumption that you’re going to sleep enough. And so you have to have the ruthless pursuit of elimination. Prioritize what you want. If you say, hey, these are the things that I want, then you’re going to have to actually prioritize them, not just pretend like they’re important or say they’re important.

You’re going to have to actually prioritize them. Like you have to, and to actually prioritize something means it’s more important than something else. So you’re going to have to eliminate a lot of things in your life to have the things that you really want. And once you can get comfortable with that, maybe I can’t watch TV.

Maybe I can’t spend four hours on my phone every day. These are simple things, but once you start to eliminate the things that aren’t truly important, but they’re eating up your time, you can start to really prioritize the things that you say you want or that you actually want. But to do any of this, you have to try harder.