D.R.E.A.M., how I fell in love with business

Summary

I never wanted to be a business guy. I wanted to coach, program, help people get fitter. business felt like the boring necessary evil. then I realized the thing I love most, data, runs straight through every part of business too. that’s when I fell in love.

1. CREAM by Wu-Tang is “cash rules everything around me.” mine is D.R.E.A.M., data rules everything around me. that’s the thread. fitness data, business data, personal finance data, habit tracking data. all the same skill set, different domain.

2. find your thread. what do you actually love about your craft? for me it was decoding data and changing the variable that moves the outcome. for you it might be relationships, or storytelling, or design, or solving puzzles. whatever it is.

3. then look for the convergence. where does that thread show up in the business side too? leadership through people. content through storytelling. brand through design. sales through puzzle solving. that’s your area of genius.

4. most owners get bad at business because they keep narrow on the craft. they think learning marketing will dilute their coaching. it doesn’t. it makes the whole thing scale. you don’t lose your craft, you give it more reach.

find the thread, find the convergence, apply your superpower across every area. if you can’t be bothered, try harder.

Transcript

data rules everything around me

You might be wondering why on earth is there a new intro from the song Cream Cash Rules Everything Around Me by Wu-Tang. Don’t worry, it’s not sticking around, but I will explain that. I actually want to talk more about how I fell in love with business, and how this has happened on accident, and maybe how you can too. I’m Jerred Moon and this is the Better Human Business Podcast.

So let’s start with the song Cream. So that’s a song from Wu-Tang. It played the intro there, and Cream stands for Cash Rules Everything Around Me. And something happened in our meeting this week with my team at PT Biz. We were talking, and at the end we catch up on updating kind of personal lives, like what we’re reading, how many times we worked out. It’s all part of our like better humanness update that we hold each other accountable to. And Kate on my team said, we were actually going over my run dynamics more or less, and how a lot of my run dynamics have helped me fix my back and get better. And just being on the team in general, we’re very data centric with everything we do. How we track, how we scale, how we report. Everything is just so data driven.

And she was like, data is awesome. And I couldn’t agree more. Data is awesome.

from fitness data to business data

But she was saying that specific to how we were looking at just some basic data on a watch, and how a coach helped me decipher what was wrong and how I could run better, and ultimately have my back not hurt when I’m running. And that’s all from data. And it’s the same with business, right? We can look at the data and make different decisions and scale based off of things that are working. We can see what’s not working. The data always has the answer if you know how to collect it properly, if you know how to make sure that your data sources are very clean and it’s reporting properly. You can make a lot of decisions very fast if you have the right data. And so that’s where Cream comes in, as I changed it to Dream. So Data Rules Everything Around Me.

And that is how I fell in love with business.

Quick backstory. If you’ve ever seen one of those older Disney movies or something like that, where the basic script is, there’s a dude, he wants to get with this very attractive female, ends up in the friend zone with this other female. And they’re just friends, and he’s working, maybe she’s helping him to some degree to become more attractive to the other female that he’s trying to get with. I’m sure you’ve seen one of these movies. And how it goes is the girl that he’s working with is also very attractive, but they try to make her not look attractive. She’s obviously an attractive actress, but they put glasses on her and they put her hair in a weird way or something. Maybe they do something with their hair.

finding your thread

And then all of a sudden one day she takes off her glasses and she straightens her hair, whatever, and then boom, all of a sudden she’s amazing. So it would have been hard to tell that she was attractive in the first place, but now she’s taking off the glasses. It’s, you know, such a ridiculous line. It’s, oh no, I was actually in love with you the whole time, not trying to chase this person who I’m not really compatible with or whatever.

Anyway, I feel like that’s exactly what’s happened to me in business. I never really wanted to be all about business. I never wanted to dive in and do the numbers and all the data and learn how to scale companies. But that’s ultimately what happened. And what I realized was, it’s just because I love data. And the data I’ve loved over, let’s say, the last decade and a half has been all around fitness. Helping people decipher fitness data, creating new programs based off of data, collecting data, making new programs better based off of data, everything, building strength programs off of data. I’ve always been in love with the data. That’s been everything. Data rules everything around me. And then once I realized how to take that skill set to business, I have actually fallen in love with the doing of business.

Business can seem very monotonous and unfun because it can be slow to scale a business, it can be slow to go through a process, it can be very difficult. And if I just had to sit there without looking at any data, to be honest, I don’t think I would be that into it. I really like to look at the numbers and see, okay, here’s my hypothesis, how can we change this? How can we influence these metrics? How can we get these numbers to change and go in a different direction? And ultimately you do it, and it becomes a little bit more exciting.

your superpower across every domain

Now this is all nerd speak, I get it. I’m a huge nerd when it comes to data in general. I like data everywhere. I track so much stuff, it makes most people uncomfortable. But for me, I love it. I do habit tracking that has charts and graphs and all this kind of stuff, so I can quantify my life, so I know what my life looks like. I just track everything. And again, this would stress other people out. There’s no way they could do it. They wouldn’t want to be able to track everything in your personal life, and fitness, and business in every area. And I get that. That’s not for everyone.

But my takeaway for you is, can you find that convergence somewhere? Can you find that convergence somewhere? Because if you’re running a better human business, chances are you’re looking to help other people in some way. And that might be the only thing that you care about right now. But does that skill set hand itself over well to something else in business? And it could be. If you’re a huge people person, and you just love talking to people, you love interacting with people, and you feel like that’s your true thing, like, going back to the podcast on competitive advantage, it’s why people come back. How could you now relate that into scaling a business? How could you do that? That’s probably through leadership. That’s probably through team development. It’s probably through setting up relationships that will scale the business.

So now can you turn that into a system?

stop hiding from business

Now, you don’t have to go all data crazy. That’s my specific thing. I love data. Data rules everything around me, personally. And I found out that’s the center point, that’s the thread that connects me everywhere. And I didn’t know this for a long time, until I started to realize over the last two years how much I actually really enjoy working on business. Just trying to grow business, so long as it’s a business that aligns with my mission and my values and everything. But once those boxes are checked, I’m super motivated to do it. And it’s this data thread that connects me to how I want to improve in fitness, how I want to improve my personal life, how I want business to improve, how I want my personal finance to improve. Everything is so data driven and tracked.

I found the thread that gets me motivated and gets me going.

And now I want you to do the same thing. Because how you can be a really bad business owner, and I see this happen more often than I would like to admit, is that people will only ever try and focus on the thing that they’re doing. Like making the widget, right? Like providing the service. That’s the only thing that they want to get good at, because they feel like they can’t also get good at business, because it would water down their skill set or whatever they’re offering. Like, does getting better at data in my business make me a worse coach? Is that something that I’ve had to deal with? That’s something I struggled with in the past. I’m like, I’m not spending my time getting better at coaching or programming, then I’m getting worse at my craft. So how do I reconcile this?

That was something I struggled with a lot for a long time.

But then once I found that thread, like I said, is data. I am building a skill set that serves me across every area of my life. That’s how to quantify things. That’s how to look at data and make decisions. It’s how to get in front of data. And I can do that in every area of my life. That skill set applies everywhere. In growing a business, in getting fitter, in coaching people, in my personal life, and in my personal finances. That’s the thread.

Now, can you find that in what you love to do? Can you find that thing? What is it that you love to do more than anything else in this world in what you are currently doing? What is it that you actually love in your business right now, and what’s the thread? How can you find a convergence where they meet, where they overlap a little bit? And then how can you start to realize that’s the true skill set that you need to get better at, that you need to improve? And for some of you this might be going way over your head, and I understand that. But for some of you this is the message you needed to hear right now. Because I struggled with this forever. Took me forever to realize, what the hell are you actually good at?

What is it that you are trying to do? What are you getting better at? I struggled with that for a long time. And I figured out what it was, and I feel great now. I know what my mission is, and I know what my purpose is. I know what I want to work on. I know how to do that. And I understand how this thread connects every area of my life, and I’m okay with it. I love it.

Can you find that same thing? Can you find this theme, this thread that connects you? I know it’s there. It’s absolutely there. Because you wouldn’t be running a business if you didn’t have it. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on other areas. You can take your personal superpowers and apply them to all these other areas of your life. And then you’ll realize that was actually your area of genius, and that’s what you need to focus on, and that’s what you need to improve. And once you do, a lot of doors are going to open up for you, both personally and professionally.

So work on that. Look, I know it’s difficult. It’s very hard to focus on, this is a bigger picture concept. But go look for that thread. If you’re not willing to look for the thread and find it, well, try harder.