10 harsh truths I wish I knew when I started

Summary

ten years in, here are ten harsh truths I’d hand my younger self. these aren’t motivational. they’re the rules I keep coming back to.

1. fail fast. every week you stall on a decision is a week you didn’t learn. ship and find out.
2. think bigger. the goals you set are almost always too small. raise them, then raise them again.
3. get out of your own way. most of your ceiling is internal. it’s not the market.
4. become a marketer. being great at your craft is table stakes. selling it is the job.
5. stop spreading thin. depth beats breadth at every level. one thing, mastered, beats ten things attempted.
6. decisive leadership wins. slow decisions cost more than wrong ones, in almost every case.
7. build leverage early. time, content, capital. all three compound only if you start.
8. clear goals beat hard work. hard work toward fuzzy goals is just exhaustion.
9. expand your threshold for control. the more you can let team operate without you, the bigger you get to be.
10. most of business is just showing up consistently for a long time. the people who win are the ones still in the chair after everyone else quit.

none of this is new. all of it is hard to actually live.

Transcript

the rules that changed my entrepreneurial journey

What if the only thing keeping you from success is breaking a rule you didn’t even know you were breaking? So for the last 10 years, I’ve been making a list, like Santa Claus, but as an entrepreneur, and I check it multiple times throughout my journey. I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade. I’ve made tens of millions of dollars.

I’ve scaled a lot of brands. I’ve also built very large teams. So today, I’m gonna go over 10 of the most impactful lessons or rules I’ve written down, mistakes I want to avoid in the future. And this is not some tactical level BS, like, oh, be consistent on Instagram. No, I’m talking about high level strategic rules that have helped change the trajectory of who I am and where my businesses are at today.

rule #1 , fail fast

So let’s dive into it. The first rule is fail fast. You wanna fail as fast as you possibly can. Early on in entrepreneurship, I always thought I had this great idea, this idea kind of in my back pocket that was going to solve all my problems. It was very strategic. It was a great idea. And then when I would do that, the success would be marginal, like something I, let’s say I thought it was gonna make $10,000 and it made $1,000.

So I had to have a lot of $1,000 decisions made quickly to actually make progress. And I had to fail fast and get comfortable with that to be able to learn things faster. So if you’re pushing things to next quarter or next year or I’ll do that in six months and there’s not a really damn good reason for it, you need to speed up that loop.

rule #2 , quit thinking small

You need to fail faster so you can learn and progress faster. The second rule is going to be quit thinking small. This is something that I started and did for years when I was first entrepreneur. It was very small level stuff. I was like, oh, I wanna make just enough money to cover my car payment. I wanna make just enough money to cover my mortgage payment.

Now, while I love little micro goals to keep you in the game, it’s fine to set those as checkpoints along the way. But for me, the problem was they were kind of the end goal. Like, oh, I only wanna make an extra $300 a month or I only wanna make an extra $1,000 a month when I didn’t really sit down and think, what do you actually want?

rule #3 , get out of your own way

What’s the vision? How can you think bigger? How can this be 10 times bigger than what you could even imagine? Sit down and actually think about what living a bigger life looks like. Quit thinking small, think bigger. The third one is get out of your own way. We all are our biggest limiting factor.

I talk about self-development all the time and it’s for good reason. We are limiting our progress in business and in life. If you are not getting better, you’re not bettering yourself in one shape or form, you are in your own way and you need to get out of your own way and the only way to do that is to actually get better.

Focus on yourself. It’s not a selfish act. It is the only act that is going to move you forward. That means taking care of your nutrition, your fitness, your mindset, everything to help your business grow. The next rule is first up, last down and this is very personalized to me but I also think it says a lot about being a leader.

rule #4 , first up, last down

I’m married, I’ve been married for 15 years. I have three kids and I wanna be the first person up in the morning and I wanna be the last person down in the evening. I wanna set the standard, the tone for the family. I wanna be a leader and so it’s not actually just being the first person to wake up and the last person to go to sleep but it reminds me that rule is you can’t just coast here.

You have a job in your family and that job is to lead your family. Be the leader. Don’t forget, don’t ever forget, not even for a moment that you’re there to be a leader. Don’t get comfortable. You are there to lead your family and you need to do it well. All right, the fifth rule is get clear on what you want.

You have to get clear on what you want and don’t care what anyone else thinks about what you want. You need to sit down, think about it. It’s easy just to chase another dollar, chase another marketing campaign, chase another tactic but the second you get clear on what you want, whether it’s massive, whether it’s small, it’s really up to you but what you want is what you want.

rule #5 , get clear on what you want

Don’t let anybody talk you out of it. Don’t let somebody else’s goals or their aspirations influence what you want. Want what you want but get clear on it so you can chase it, you can reverse engineer it and you can go after it. The next rule is going to be a marketer. I struggled with this one for years.

Started as a strength and conditioning coach. I really just wanna be a good strength and conditioning coach. I didn’t wanna have to market my product or service. I didn’t wanna have to sell anything. I just wanted to be the best at my job and then if I was the best, people would just come and I’d have a successful business.

rule #6 , be a marketer

Unfortunately, that maybe worked at one point in time. It doesn’t work anymore. You really have to be a marketer. So be really good at what you do but also have the ability to market your products and services to some degree. You could be sitting around on your social media platforms, email, whatever and if you’re not marketing your product, people don’t even really know that you have something to sell.

People don’t think about you all that much. They really don’t. They have their own lives. They have their own jobs. They have their own problems. They don’t really care about your product or service. It’s not something they’re thinking about. So if you’re not actually out there influencing, being the marketer and talking about your products or services, no one’s gonna care.

No one’s gonna buy. No one’s going to be a part of your business. The next rule is never say maybe. The reason I say don’t say maybe is because indecision is a killer. It ricochets in your mind like a bullet just all over the place tearing things up as it goes. You need to very quickly decide if a opportunity is a yes or no, if a new relationship is a yes or no and not maybe, maybe I’ll do that, maybe I’ll do this.

rule #7 , never say maybe

You don’t have time for that. Going back to failing fast, you need to move fast. Maybes are gonna slow you down. So if you’re kind of on the fence about something, you can’t make a decision, you need to realize that you are at a point of indecision and then you need to sit down, schedule an hour, two hours to sit down, do a pros and cons list.

Sit there and just think about the decision that has to be made but make the decision and then stick with it because that’s what good leaders do. So the next one is be a leader, not a savior. This is something I’ve learned as a military officer, developing teams as an entrepreneur, developing high performance teams.

rule #8 , be a leader, not a savior

You need to be a leader, not a savior. And what do I mean by that? You need to lead people, you need to help them, guide them, make them more proficient but you do not need to be their savior, okay? That’s not your job as a leader. You’re not there to fix all their problems. You’re not there to take a broken person and make them whole again.

That is not your job as a leader, as an entrepreneur. And you will be surprised if you are into this game or you haven’t had a lot of employees, how often that stuff comes up. And you might be an empathetic person who wants to help but I’m telling you, it will only slow you down. So I’m not saying don’t help your employees.

I’m not saying don’t have empathy. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying you have to realize at some point, you’re not there to fix somebody. Unless you’re a licensed therapist, why are you even trying? It’s not actually your job. Your job is to lead, guide, influence, help make performance changes in the business.

rule #9 , go deep instead of wide

It’s not to fix a broken person. And if you don’t feel like that lesson resonates, just give it time and come back and listen to this. The ninth lesson, go deep instead of wide. It’s very easy these days to go very wide with what you’re learning. So thinking about a little Instagram reel here, a little YouTube short there, thinking that you’ve learned something when in reality, you haven’t learned anything.

Going deep on a subject like email marketing or developing a newsletter, marketing in general, sales, all of these things are very important to the growth of your business, but you need to go deep. Try to become a master in your subjects and you will actually start to make more progress. If you’re going wide for a really long period of time, you’ll actually make no progress anywhere.

It’s like the jack of all trades, master of none, but way worse when you’re just consuming a whole bunch of content, you’re not implementing anything and you’re not learning anything at a deep level. And the last and final rule is expand your threshold for control. Okay, we all want to control things to some degree as an entrepreneur.

rule #10 , expand your threshold for control

If you can let go of that, you can give your team a little bit more autonomy. You don’t have to micromanage every single little thing. You realize that some things are just going to be outside of your control, whether it’s market forces or other human capital, whatever the case is, you have to expand your threshold for control.

Don’t try to control every single thing. Give people responsibility, let them go make mistakes, correct the mistakes, let them try again. You have to expand your threshold for control. If you are a micromanager, like I had some of those tendencies early on, you will not be able to make any progress and you will always be head down in your business, not able to make any progress, no real freedom, no real freedom of any kind if you can’t expand your threshold, whether that’s financial freedom or time freedom.

So be able to expand your threshold for control. All right, so here are 10 of the rules I have followed in over a decade of entrepreneurship. Implement one, implement three, implement 10. Just think about your journey right now and how you can implement these and you will be making more progress faster in your journey.