how I 10x'd my business through killing comfort

Summary

this is a recording of the favorite presentation I’ve ever given. private keynote at a PT Biz mastermind in 2020, called “how I 10x’d my business through killing comfort.” most of my podcast episodes are 5 to 10 minutes. this one is long. it’s worth it because there isn’t one secret in here. that’s the entire point.

1. the setup. ten years into online business I hit a three year revenue flatline at $10,000 a month. I would launch something, bump up briefly, fall back to $10K. I had no idea how to break through it. I was always looking for the next “secret.” the Facebook campaign that would crush it. the book that would unlock the room. the strategy nobody else knew. that thing does not exist. successful entrepreneurs cannot point to one thing because there isn’t one thing.

2. the real lesson came from a story you might have heard me tell. in college ROTC, I took the Air Force test of basic aviation skills. failed badly first time. they told me my chance of becoming a pilot was around 9%. you only get two attempts in your life. so I went home, rebuilt the test from memory, my dad helped me code the joystick portion on a computer, and I drilled it. second time I scored top 1% of all Air Force pilots and ended up at EuroNATO Joint Jet Pilot Training. that didn’t give me an ego. it scared me. I had to outwork everyone else at everything because what was natural for them was not natural for me. that’s not talent. that’s the only skill I think I was actually born with, doing stuff nobody else wants to do for very long periods of time.

3. content or complacent. go through every area of your life, business, family, marriage, fitness, spiritual, and ask which one you actually are. content means you’ve decided this area is where it should be and you’re at peace. complacent means you don’t have a plan and you’ve made peace with that. most of us are complacent in at least one area we tell ourselves we care about. complacency has no plan for moving forward. that’s the tell.

4. the obstacle is the way, with a caveat. stoicism says the obstacle becomes the way. true, if you’re working on the right obstacle. my biggest entrepreneurial fear was focusing on the wrong thing. obsessing over a homepage redesign while the business stalls. so after you find your complacent areas, identify the discomfort that would actually move the area forward. then ask whether that discomfort is a lever or a hamster wheel. levers move weight. hamster wheels burn calories and go nowhere. the discomfort has to be a lever.

5. embrace boring. success is brutally boring. quit trying to be extraordinary. just don’t miss. do the right actions every day for decades. all the swing for the fences entrepreneurship is mostly people setting themselves up to quit because they couldn’t sustain it.

6. the plan I followed. I decided to work on myself harder than I worked on the business. I read 60 plus books a year, joined paid masterminds, took courses, started journaling. early on the anxiety tripled because I was spending money I felt I didn’t have on things that didn’t immediately make money. one colleague in a mastermind told me to journal. I tried it. picked up Julia Cameron’s morning pages from a book I read. the third page of morning pages is where the real thoughts come out, the ones you didn’t know you had.

7. one morning page I wrote that I wanted to write a book. I had no idea why. I asked my mentor, who has multiple bestsellers, to talk me out of it because she’d always said don’t write a book to make money. she said write the book. not for the money. for the journey. so I started writing what became Killing Comfort.

8. while writing it I read every book I could find on self publishing, marketing, and launching. the marketing learning made me ask Doc and Jock, a podcast hosted by Danny Matta, if I could come on. Danny and I connected on a podcast interview. we kept talking. we shared a similar trajectory out of the military, similar improvement habits. that conversation became a working relationship, then a business partnership with Danny and Yves Gege. PT Biz exists because of that chain. so does this presentation.

9. trace the chain backwards. the keynote came from PT Biz, which came from a podcast with Danny, which came from marketing learning, which came from writing a book, which came from a morning page, which came from journaling, which came from a colleague’s recommendation, which came from a mastermind, which came from one decision to work on myself harder than the business. there is no Facebook campaign in that chain. there’s no funnel hack.

10. it’s the butterfly effect, not the ripple effect. ripples are linear. butterflies aren’t. you make one change in a complex system and a thousand other things shift. you cannot pre engineer which input becomes which output. but if you load the system with enough good data, the right outputs start showing up.

11. work on yourself harder than you do on your job. Jim Rohn. read it on a wall ten years ago, ignored it for too long. when I actually applied it, the eight month 10x window I’m talking about kicked off. the business breakthrough was a byproduct of the personal one.

12. the closing ask. stop one thing, start one thing. stop looking for the secret. it isn’t there. start working on yourself harder than you work on the business. it will feel like taking your foot off the gas because you’ll have less time for “money making activities.” that fear is the whole point. push through it. that is the blueprint to actually 10x. try harder.

Transcript

the three year plateau

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. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and today I’m doing something a little bit different than normal. I know that you’ve grown accustomed to my five to 10 minute episodes, and that’s what I will continue to do, but I really wanted to get this presentation published publicly.

So this is a presentation I gave in 2020. It was a private presentation to the PT Biz Mastermind, and the title of the presentation is How I 10X’d My Business Through Killing Comfort, and it’s probably my favorite presentation that I’ve ever given. I’ve given a lot of presentations. I’ve done a lot of speaking events, but this is by far my favorite one because it teaches the entrepreneur that, hey, there is no one secret that’s going to get you there.

It’s going to be a lot of little things, and I show you that through my journey and all the anxiety I dealt with and the things that I did to combat that and how the only real skill that I have is trying hard and how you absolutely can achieve all of the same things if not at a greater level than I have.

Because sometimes when I work with a new entrepreneur, I let them know the only difference between me and you is about 10 plus years, right? You’re doing all the right things. You’ve just only been doing all the right things for one to two years. I’ve been doing all the right things for 12, 13, 14 years, something like that.

I think once people realize that, it gives them more motivation that they can go do this too. It’s very possible for them. I know this is a longer presentation, but like I said, this is my favorite presentation I’ve ever given, and I’m not trying to be egocentric there. The speaking could be better.

I could have presented better, all those kind of things, but I just love the content because it really reveals what entrepreneurship was like and how it is just this zigzag pattern to ultimately becoming successful. So if you really enjoy my content and what I’m about and the things that I’m doing, absolutely listen to this entire presentation.

Maybe break it up over a couple of days if you have to, if you just wanted to put in 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. But I think this would be a great presentation for you if you’re struggling or if you want to know what it really takes to 10X a business because that’s ultimately what I actually did and I tell you all the secrets behind how I did that and it’s not going to be what you think.

I can promise you that. All right. So without any further ado, here is how I 10Xed my business through killing comfort. Now today, starting off, I’m going to zoom out like 30,000 feet, 50,000 feet on what you should be doing from a mindset perspective and I’m really going to try and challenge everybody.

You know, typically when I go to speak about my book or something like that, it’s really just rehashing the content of the book in hopes that the people in the audience will buy your book and hire you to speak or whatever. I obviously have none of that intent now. If you’ve been opening the emails, I already gave you my book for free and you guys are part of the mastermind.

So when Danny and Eve asked, you know, can I present something on killing comfort, I want to do something I’ve never done before and I wanted to specifically talk about killing comfort in business. So how I 10Xed my business revenue through killing comfort, I’ve never presented this information anywhere else.

I don’t know if I’ll present it anywhere else again, but I really want you guys to take something away from a big picture view of how you maybe can just start down a different path, different direction. Ultimately, I’m just going to ask you to try a little bit harder than you are right now. So let’s get into it.

All right, so big picture, I’m going to be talking about how I 10X my revenue in an eight month time period after basically a three year flatline. So this is, I’ve been in business a lot longer than some of you. Some of you haven’t, but I’ve been doing online business for 10 years now. And so I got to a point where I was just flatlined for three years.

So this is not like, oh, you start a business and it’s just grown ever since day one. That’s not what’s happened at all. I got it to a decent point, a point I was happy with, but then I flatlined for a long time and did not know how to earn any more money, couldn’t do anything that would get me there.

And that’s my big point, a real 10X, I’m like, yeah, I started earning $10 and then later I was making a hundred, a 10X my business. It was a legitimate 10X. I was already at a five figure amount and 10X it from there. Today I’m going to give you the exact blueprint that I followed to 10X my business, what I had to do to get to that, but I will challenge you during this process.

And I think if you follow the blueprint, the sky will be the limit for you. But I know some of you will not do it. You just won’t. You’ll hear this. It’s like a cool presentation or whatever, but ultimately you’re not going to take action. And I’m not trying to like, you know, speak badly of anybody.

You’re all great people, great entrepreneurs. You’re on the self-improvement journey. You kind of have to be if you want to be an entrepreneur, but some of you might not connect it or believe like what I’m telling you, you have to do is what you actually have to do to make more money. There’s only one reason you’re not going to do it.

It’s uncomfortable. What I’m going to push you to do today is something that you’re going to have to do every single day for decades for it to truly make the impact you’re going to want in your business. And I know you guys aren’t looking for a 2X, a 3X. You’re looking for something that’s going to make you better for the rest of your life, but it’s all uncomfortable.

Very, very uncomfortable. So what is this idea of comfort? Like I said, I don’t want to rehash a bunch of information in the book. If you haven’t gotten my book, we have the free audio book for you. All mastermind members can get it. Do read it because I’m not going to rehash a bunch of content that you’ve already heard.

But this is in the book. This idea of warning people about comfort is everywhere. It’s in stoicism. Marcus Aurelius talks about, hey, you know, you really you need to put yourself in hard or difficult situations to gain perspective on your life. It’s a major part of stoicism. So wearing crappy clothes, even if you don’t have to, like sleeping on the floor, all these things to make you a little bit more uncomfortable on a daily basis where you can gain that perspective.

In Sanskrit there, you know, people, people know a lot about yoga, but no one really talks about bhoga. And bhoga is this warning of overindulgence. And they talk about, you know, it’s just like a life sucking force that if you want to go too far down in the path of comfort in any direction, it will kill you.

This is what they warn of. And then in Christianity or Catholicism, slothfulness, it’s going to be the fall to man. You know, like it’s it’s warned everywhere. Every historical text, every religious text talks about not being a lazy piece of crap somehow some way. But we all want to. Right. It’s just a part of our innate nature.

But I feel like I was really only given one skill. Call it a talent. The only thing I was born with. And that was killing comfort. For some reason, I could do things that other people didn’t want to do for very, very long periods of time. And so that’s why I feel. Comfortable writing the book. That’s why I feel comfortable giving this presentation, because I don’t think I’m super smart.

I don’t think I’m super talented. I don’t think I’m super strong. I don’t think I’m super fast. I just think I know how to do shit that nobody else wants to do for very long periods of time. And so today, I’m going to basically walk you through a story. The whole presentation is going to kind of be the story of how I went from.

Air Force killing comfort to entrepreneur killing comfort and eventually how I got here today giving this presentation, business partner in PT biz working with Danny and Eve. But it starts with the Air Force test of basic aviation skills. Which was a massive failure for me. So let me explain the test a little bit for you guys.

When you’re when you want to be a pilot, you start off in, in my case, ROTC in college. And they basically the first week they throw you in front of a computer and you take this directional orientation test. There’s like 180 questions and what they do. You could probably barely see it, but that yellow arrow is pointed south.

And so you’re supposed to then orient yourself in your brain and said, basically, if I’m headed south, where’s north? So it says image of the north parking lot. And you have to be able to answer that. What they don’t tell you is the test is timed. And if you can’t answer that question in about half a second, you’re going to do really poorly on the test.

No one let me know that I took my time, massively failed that portion of the test. Then next, it gets harder. As soon as that’s over, you get to the actual test of basic aviation skills. This is like hand-eye coordination. And the best way I can explain it to you is driving a stick shift. It’s already pretty difficult for most people.

So imagine I teach you how to drive a stick shift. And then after you’re driving down the road, you’ve been you’ve been driving the stick shift for 10 minutes. So now like a skill that you developed, they’re like, okay, here’s a here’s a sandwich. And you’re like, oh, shit. Okay, I’m driving a stick shift.

t-bass and learning to outwork everyone

Now eat the sandwich. Drive the car. Like, okay, I got it, figuring it out. And then a test goes from all right, drive the stick shift, eat a sandwich. Here’s a cigarette, smoke cigarette. Oh, shit. Okay, well, I guess I’ll do all this shit. You know, I’ll try. I’ll try all of it. And they’re like, okay, drive the stick shift, eat the sandwich, smoke cigarette and find this specific radio station 96.7 on the radio and turn up the volume to this level.

And by the end, you’re just like, shit, you crash, right? And that’s what they’re doing. They’re testing how long. So what you actually do is you see the top airplane, you have to follow that with a joystick. The bottom one you have to follow with your feet with different pedals. And then things flash on the screen.

Before the test start, they gave you 10 codes that you had to memorize. They gave you like two minutes to memorize it. When these emergencies pop up, you have to enter the correct code on the keyboard while maintaining the your site picture on the aircraft at the top and with your feet on the bottom.

And they just see how long you can go. There’s no passing the test. It’s just how long can you do this before you fail? I lasted like 60 seconds. It was they give you they ramped you up. Like I said, they give you like a little indoctrination like, okay, yeah, you got that. You’re pretty good. They let you test the skills individually, and they throw it all in there and they’re like, good luck.

So I failed horribly. Just not good. They tell you how you did, did based on your peers. And it was it was pretty piss poor. So you can take this test two times your entire life. That’s it. They force you to take it like the first week you get there. So you have one more chance after that. I don’t know why they have that rule, but you’re not allowed to take it more than once.

After my first one, they give you a little report, and like your chances of becoming a pilot was scored about 9%. I was like, great. Like if you do, if you graduate with a 4.0, you’re number one on the commander’s list and you get 100% on all of your PT tests for four years, like we maybe will jump up to like 15%.

Like, all right, cool. So I’m not gonna be a pilot. Got it. That was what I heard. I went home and I completely recreated the test at home from memory. So I knew exactly what they were trying to do with that basic orientation test. So I wrote down all the questions that I could remember, then I figured out what they were doing and was like, oh, okay, they’re just trying every cardinal direction, every direction.

I recreated that portion of the test, just writing it all down. My dad, who happens to be a computer whiz, I told him about the test. He’s like, I could probably create that test on a computer because I told him how rudimentary the joystick stuff was. So I completely recreated the T-BASS in my dorm room in college.

And I just started training because I had to take it again. I went from 9% chance of becoming a pilot, not to like, oh yeah, you barely made it to being a pilot. I made it to top 1% of all Air Force pilots in the Air Force at EuroNATO Joint Jet Pilot Training from training. And you know, you’re like, oh yeah, top 1%, you might think that builds up an ego or anything like that.

I got the opposite of an ego by going down this path. I got scared as shit because I was like, I basically cheated. I recreated the test. There’s nothing saying you can’t. I guess if you have a good enough memory to do it, you can do it. But everyone else who was scoring, you know, 80% or whatever, I scored like a 99% the second time I took it and everyone else is just doing okay.

But they didn’t have the test recreated in their dorm room. And so I was like, well, shit, these guys are just naturally good at whatever they’re doing. All these other guys I’m competing with. So it didn’t give me an ego. It just made me realize that I was going to have to try harder than everyone else at everything through this entire process.

I was going to have to get really uncomfortable. I was gonna have to study a lot. I was gonna have to work a lot harder because a lot of the guys I went through pilot training with in college with a lot of the stuff was just natural for them. None of that was natural for me. So when they’re out partying, you know, having fun.

I was taking the recreated cloned T-Best test in my dorm room, making sure that I was going to be a pilot. I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t doing anything that was comfortable. I was doing a lot of things that put me in very uncomfortable positions. Eventually, Air Force career ends and entrepreneurship begins.

Again, killing comfort, probably my only skill. And I’ve only had one goal since I became an entrepreneur. And I just want to live on a small piece of land. I don’t want anybody to bother me. And I want work to be a choice. And I want to work out a lot. That’s about it. It’s about as far as my goals go.

But entrepreneurship is not easy. It’s easy when you have a path. I can recreate the T-Best path and be like, OK, you want me to study and do well on this? Great. I’ll do that. And then I’ll I’ll take the test and things will be fine. Things are not so easy when you don’t have a path. And entrepreneurship.

There’s absolutely no path. At all. Like all of you have been to school, a lot of school. If I ask you about that journey, it’s going to be pretty similar. Some of you went to different schools. Some of you went to better or worse schools, whatever. But ultimately, you sat in class, you learned some stuff, you went, you know, you all went on similar paths.

If I ask you all about your entrepreneurship journey, that is not the explanation I would get. You all have a different story, a different reason why a different path, different time period. Some of you, it’s taken one year to get to six figures. Some people took you 10 years. You know, it’s just everyone has such a different journey in entrepreneurship.

There’s no syllabus. There’s no plan. There’s no performance report. There is no clear path in entrepreneurship. And that’s very hard for me, someone who’s always followed a plan or path. Take this test. Here’s your performance report in the Air Force. Do these things. You know, college, the same reason wasn’t that difficult because you just follow the syllabus.

You study there. There is there’s an exact equation to do well in these things. But things were getting a lot more challenging. I didn’t know what comfort to kill. I didn’t know. I knew I had this skill of like working on ship for really long periods of time that nobody wanted to do. But I didn’t know what that was when I started in entrepreneurship.

I was like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to like. I know I can probably outwork everyone, but I don’t know what work I’m supposed to be doing. And then life happens when you have a lot of time. These things are easy. You want to sit in my dorm room and recreate a test for 12 hours. No big deal. You have kids.

You end up, you know, you encounter a lot of death over time, bills, all these things. Life happens. Life gets hard. And everyone knows Newton’s first law. You know, emotion at rest stays at rest or, you know, and until something outside forces acted upon it. Well, in life, it’s a little bit different.

Here’s how I rewrote it. Life crap will always slow your momentum. Get used to it. There’s always going to be a broken water pipe in your basement or a kid screaming or some bill that shouldn’t have happened. All these all this shit’s going to happen to you all the time. You just need to get used to that stuff.

Something’s always going to be like Newton acted like it was like optional, like if an outside force is acted upon it. No, absolutely. Something’s going to act on you to slow you down, to make sure that you’re not headed towards your goal. Even Pressfield calls it resistance. I just call it crap’s going to happen in your life.

So my biggest fear, like I mentioned, is I would focus all of my efforts on the wrong tasks. Just think about that for a second. If you don’t know what you should be focusing, focusing your time on in entrepreneurship, you can actually end up in a very worse off situation. If you’re like, you know what, I’m going to spend the next two weeks making sure the homepage on my website is perfect.

That’s irrelevant work. You’re doing the wrong thing and you’re spending a lot of time on it. But who’s going to tell you that? So I did get stuck. Like I said, I got to around that $10,000 per month mark and I was stuck there for a long time. That was my three year flat line. I didn’t know how to get outside of that realm.

It was just impossible for me. I could do one little thing, a launch or whatever, bump up a little bit, come back down. I never knew how to get past it. And that’s when I just started to get more and more fearful. It’s like, I know I’m focusing on the wrong things or maybe this is just what is in store for me.

This is as big as I’m supposed to get, but I was always searching for the next secret in this. Let’s just say this three year gap, always looking for the next secret. And when I say secret, a lot of you are looking for it too. You’re looking for the Facebook campaign that’s going to crush it, right?

You’re looking for that book that’s just going to open all the doors. You’re looking for that one thing, something an entrepreneur figured out for you and it’s just going to blow you up. But the thing about secrets is they don’t exist. There is no secret. There’s no magic formula. There is no pill.

There is no action that you’re going to take that’s going to grow your business that you learned from one piece of information, one book, one course. It will not happen. It will not happen. Secrets, they’re not out there. Talk to any successful entrepreneur. They don’t have one thing to point towards.

content or complacent

There is no one thing that’s going to get you there. But I finally figured something out, luckily through a lot of mentorship at a very thick skull getting into entrepreneurship. A lot of you guys are more open minded, jealous of the open mindedness of some of the people in this group. So my mentor, I traveled around the world with my mentor all over the place and I’d always listen to her give presentations and people would kind of ask, you know, everyone was always looking for that secret.

And people would ask, like, you know, what is it? Why are you so much more so much more successful than everyone else? Like what is it? She’d always get that question eventually. Anytime they do Q&A, what is it like? Tell us like what she kale. She eats kale in the morning. Like what answer you get?

Like what are you looking for? But she would give a response. She always say my husband and I are very learning based. And I just kind of always discounted that. I was like, yeah, it’s like a cop out answer, I guess, just kind of copping out to like, you don’t know how to answer that person. So you’re just saying you’re learning based, get it, whatever.

But then my mentor also took me down the path of some self-help books, Jim Rohn. Big thing Jim Rohn says all the time. Work on yourself harder than you do on your job. Work on yourself harder than you do on your job. So I’m getting it from two places now, like a mentor. Hey, we like to learn a lot of things.

That takes us down a couple of different paths. Jim Rohn’s like, hey, maybe you should just start working on yourself a little bit. Maybe you don’t need to work so hard on the next Facebook campaign. Jerry told a version of this yesterday with butterflies, but the wolf put it all in perspective for me.

So that wolf story, if you’ve listened to my book or read my book, is not just like a cool like example that I was like, you know, this would be great to put in the book. It actually opened my eyes to how all this shit works. So in the book, I talk about a trophic cascade. So a trophic cascade is this phenomenon, basically, I’m going to get into it a little bit more, but it’s the butterfly effect, not the ripple effect.

They’re very different. And what it is, you know, they didn’t have wolves in Yellowstone National Park. In fact, they poisoned and killed them for a long time because they’re scary. Wolves are fricking scary animals. And so they killed them. They finally figured out that was a problem. There are too many elk in there in Yellowstone National Park, which was just like screwing up everything because it overgrazed the land and then other animals didn’t have anything to eat.

And eventually it changed the course of the rivers. Long story short on the tropic cascade, you get the full version in the book. But once I realized they put these wolves in Yellowstone National Park, and it wasn’t like, yeah, let’s do 200 wolves, see how things go. It’s like two packs of wolves. And it changed everything in just a few years.

The wolves weren’t there to be like, OK, they weren’t trained to go kill elk. And like, yeah, we have a major problem with the elk population, guys. So if you could go over there and start, you know, murdering some elk, that’d be great. Wolves are just like, you know what, I’m a wolf. I’m going to do what I do and see what happens.

And that’s exactly what the wolves did. The wolves took care of the entire park, changed the course of the rivers, and all they did was be an apex predator. That’s all they had to do to make a change, to make a significant change, is be themselves. And that really, like, struck a chord with me. Because a lot of times we’re out there trying to force change.

We do in our businesses, right, we’re like, I want revenue to grow. So I’m going to focus on revenue growth activity. You’ve heard stuff like that? Maybe that works. Didn’t work for me for three years. You try it in your family, your kids aren’t acting right. What’s the, what’s the hack? What’s the book you can read on that specific thing?

How can you influence their behavior? Is there a, is there a certain way you can ground them or remove their door from their room or, you know, a certain punishment technique that’s going to make them fall in line? Maybe try it in your marriage. You’re going to try real hard to do this one thing for your spouse.

Hopefully it changes everything. That’s not how any of this stuff works. You have to change yourself. The maestro hit on it a little bit yesterday. Eve loves the quote, fix your shit. You absolutely have to do that. You are the problem. If your business is not where you want it to be, you are the problem.

You haven’t learned enough. You don’t know enough. You’re not good enough. I really want that to sink in. If you haven’t put in the work, your business will never get where you want it to be. Work on yourself. Not anything else. And this is for business growth. Will it make you a better husband, a better father, a better mother?

Yes. Will it grow your business? Yes. Will it make you a better friend? Yes. Will it make you want to work out more? Yes. How does this translate to revenue though? So we’ll get to the plan. What I want you guys to really implement, you need to go through every area of your life and find out if you are content or complacent.

Now there’s not a ton of stuff I want you guys to write down, but this slide, most of it maybe write down, take a screenshot. But are you content or are you complacent? I think people should do this in their business life, spiritual life, family life, any area that you feel that you put your time, are you being content or are you complacent?

Now content needs an explanation. If you get on this hamster wheel of, I want more, everything has to be better. You will never find an end to that and it will drive you crazy. You’ll end up with anxiety, depression, anger. So at some point you will have to be content in certain areas of your life and be okay with that area of your life not moving forward.

But most of us are not anywhere close to that. Most of us are finding ourselves in complacency. We’re complacent in a lot of these areas. Maybe we’re crushing in business but we’re screwing up at home. Maybe you’re being too complacent at home. Yes, that affects your business. If I get in a fight with my wife, I don’t give a shit about business anymore.

So everything in my home life basically has to be perfect for me to go earn money. I’m sure a lot of you guys are the same way. Your relationships matter. But go through every area of your life and really think about it. Am I being content here or am I being complacent? Complacent looks like you don’t have a plan of action for moving forward.

Second part, the obstacle is the way. We all like stoicism here, but I say not really. And I say that specifically to entrepreneurship. So Marcus Aurelius puts it this way, he said, the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. But I think you have to be very, very careful here.

Going back to my biggest fear in entrepreneurship, what if you’re focusing on the wrong thing? If you’re not focusing on the right actions, the things that you think are an obstacle that you should put your time, effort, energy, and attention into are not the right things. So you’re working on an obstacle that’s not going to move you forward.

So after you find out whether you’re content or complacent in the different areas of your life, you have to look for the discomfort that you’re going to follow to improve that area. That is pursuing the obstacle. So if that’s getting on a plan, if that’s putting in the work, reading a book, whatever it is, you have to decide if that path is a lever or a hamster wheel.

So if you have a lever, you can move a lot more weight. Hamster wheel, you’re going nowhere. So you need to make sure you’re focusing on the right obstacles. So when I wrote Killing Comfort, I get all sorts of incorrect interpretations of my book. People are like, you know, they hit me up on Instagram or Twitter, send me emails like, dude, didn’t sleep last night, Killing Comfort, like, dude, I want you to go to sleep, go to sleep right now.

Please go get some sleep. Go ahead, dude, I read your book, did Murph nine times in a row. No, just one time is good. You don’t need to. You don’t need to do that. It’s the wrong thing. So you need to make sure that you’re not missing the point when Marcus Aurelius is talking about the impediment to action advances action or you’re talking about the obstacle is the way if you focus on the wrong obstacle.

You’re just in the hamster wheel. You’re not making any forward progress. So make sure the actions you are taking are lever and not a hamster wheel. The last part of the plan is embrace boring. Guys, success is brutally boring. You have to get used to doing a bunch of the same shit over and over again, not bouncing around and only focusing on the things that are going to move you forward.

So put it another way. Quit trying to be extraordinary. Just don’t miss. If you can do the right actions every single day for decades and you don’t miss, you will be as successful as you want to be. If you’re trying to be extraordinary, you’re trying to be amazing, swinging for the fences all time, probably not going to work out for you.

So you don’t need to be extraordinary. Just do not miss. Do the same actions daily over decades. So I started down that path. That kind of was my plan. I was like really looked at different areas of my life. If you’ve read the book, you realize I was being super complacent. I was waiting for someone else to make me successful.

So I found out, OK, you’re complacent. And then my biggest fear was, hey, I might be focusing on the wrong things. So what are the right things that I need to be focusing on? And then I realized that I need to do a few simple things to be on the right path to become successful. But I talk about exponential business growth in eight months because I felt like I had a lot of catching up to do to people who were already on this path.

So I really got after it. But making yourself better is very uncomfortable. And you’ve all been through it as an entrepreneur. You’re kind of forced into some of these decisions. You have to you have to make some of these choices, but working late. Because you couldn’t get your shit done, you’re not very time efficient during the day again.

the morning pages that became a book

That’s not killing comfort. That’s you. You’re doing it wrong. You need to become more efficient. You need to find a better system. So it can be as simple as it’s not a book, it’s a book instead of Netflix. It’s a workout instead of the couch. It’s a tough conversation instead of silence. Just think about that one for a second.

Is there any relationship in your life that could benefit from a tough conversation right now? It’s spending money to invest in yourself instead of hoarding it. You all are here. So you got that one checked. That one took me a long time to be OK with. I come from one of the most jacked up places in the brain financially.

That is not even funny. The fact that I even got here is impressive sometimes with how screwed up I was with money. We start focusing on those things. The results are pretty cool. So I started working on myself relentlessly. I started reading a lot, at least one to two books per week. I joined mastermind groups.

I was taking online courses like they’re going out of style. I was journaling, writing just last year. Just so you guys know, this isn’t something that like I did once and I feel like I’m good. I took biochemistry and physiology courses last year just to improve my knowledge of the human body where I could be a better coach.

So I went crazy. I didn’t know how hard I was supposed to go, but I finally realized that my biggest fear probably didn’t need to be. I didn’t need to be so afraid of working on the wrong thing because once I decided, you know what? I’m just going to work on myself as hard as I possibly can. I’m going to read every book that I’m recommended or that I find to be interesting.

I’m going to join groups that are going to push me. I’m going to take online courses that are going to make me smarter in a journal, right? and just continue this process over and over again. Like I said, I was like, this is not, these are not money making activities necessarily. How does a course in biochemistry help me grow my business?

So I started working on myself a lot. The biggest takeaway though, I implemented what I learned. If you get on this knowledge journey and all you’re doing is crushing books for the sake of some sort of number to say you read a lot of books, but you’re not implementing anything, then it’s all vanity.

There’s no reason in doing any of this stuff if you’re not going to implement the things that you learn. So every book that you read, every presentation that you hear, you need to think to yourself, what am I going to implement from this? Even in this presentation right now, what’s one thing, one small thing that you can implement today from having this presentation, Jerry’s presentation yesterday, our marketing presentation later today.

What’s the one thing you’re going to implement that you should put yourself on the hook for that every single time you encounter new knowledge? What am I going to implement? So there was no single Facebook campaign I contribute to a hockey stick, 10X growth in only eight months. There was no blog post idea, Instagram strategy that did it.

Now I do think some of the top tier members of our group understand this, but I don’t think everyone in the group understands it. There is nothing we can hand you that is going to get you to a seven or eight figure business in a year. I’ve done a lot of Facebook advertising. A lot of you know that, you know, I’ve spent a lot of money on Facebook.

They’re seriously, I could show you the graph, an eight month time period where my business exploded and it had nothing to do with one single Facebook campaign. Facebook was in there, but there was a lot of other stuff that was included. I didn’t get an Instagram strategy. It wasn’t one new hire. None of these things are what grew my business.

The only thing I did at the start of this eight months was decide I was going to read a ridiculous amount, join mastermind groups, take online courses, journal, write, and continue to improve myself and focus on myself more than I was my business, which was very uncomfortable thing to do because I felt like I was taking my foot off the gas and entrepreneurship to make myself a better human being.

That is a scary thing to do. Some of you might think that you’re already doing this and this is where I want to challenge or push you a little bit and just ask you, are you sure? Like are you hungry enough? Could you try a little bit harder? You can Google it. How many, how many books does the average American read each year?

Think it’s somewhere 10 to 12. How much are you outpacing the average American? How badly do you want to be average? So if your goal right now is one book a month, congratulations, you’re average. Maybe you could try a little bit harder. Maybe you could learn a little bit more. Maybe you could implement more of these fire hose knowledge sessions that you are a part of.

What are you implementing? That’s where the trying is really going to make a difference. Because a lot of you already are, like I said, you’re entrepreneurs, you’re in this group, you’ve invested in yourself, it’s all awesome stuff. But how much are you working on yourself? Because that’s what’s going to get you to the next level.

So if you feel like you’re stuck, plateaued, or your growth rate is not where you’d want it to be, probably has very little to do with the next Facebook campaign or strategy you’re going to learn in business and has everything to do with how hard you’re working on yourself to become a better human being.

And I did want to take a second to kind of talk about how I think these things work. Reading 60, 70 books a year, how on earth would that be helpful? You can’t implement everything that you’re going to get from those books. But it’s what all the really successful people do. I think Zuckerberg hits at least 40 books a year.

Warren Buffett reads 500 pages a day, Bill Gates 50 books a year minimum. These people are computers and all of our brains operate the same way. We have really advanced computers and all you need to do is fill it with as much good data as you possibly can. I also didn’t get this. I come up with ideas and shit that from books I read two years ago just randomly happens to be the perfect little bit of information I needed for some problem I was working on.

But you have to continually fill your brain with good data. So good data, books, courses, classes, those kinds of things. Stop filling your brain with bad data. Almost anything on the news at this point, Facebook feeds, most of the time pretty bad data, politics, bad data. If you’re into that stuff, that’s fine.

But is it working you towards the goal you actually have? You need to be putting as much good data in your brain where your brain can start working for you better. So let’s go over the butterfly effect. So we’ve all heard of the ripple effect and they seem very similar, but the ripple effect is very linear.

The ripple effect is, hey, I dropped this water into the pond. The ripples go out. Yeah, makes sense. Butterfly effect is more what we actually experience in life. We make a change in a complex system and the system changes. But there’s so many changes we can barely keep track of it. That’s the butterfly effect.

It’s not linear. There’s nothing in life that’s linear. You make one little change in yourself and it’s going to change a thousand things around you. So I wanted to give you some visual representations of what I feel like, how people are operating let’s say in life. This is what an average person sees when they’re working through life.

They’re connecting some basic patterns that, you know, okay, if I save some money, I’ll have some money later and all these really basic things. None of you are average. I wouldn’t put any of you in this category. This would be trying. You are starting to see a little bit more of the patterns. You’ve collected a lot of good information.

You’re very well educated. You are trying. You’re putting in the effort. You’re doing, you’re doing 15 books a year. You’re above average. You’re starting to make, you’re starting to connect a lot of the dots, but when you start trying harder, things get very different. You start seeing patterns across everything.

Everything is interconnected and it becomes very clear what you need to focus on, what you should be doing. Your emotional intelligence improves, like everything gets better once you start trying harder to the level I’m trying to push you all to start trying at today. Things just become different. So patterns get recognized and your solutions get created.

So it’s funny about the growth time period I had over those eight months. Like I said, it wasn’t a single Facebook campaign. I’d already been doing Facebook advertising at that point, but I was taking ideas from three or four different sources and conversations and books and able to implement them in very creative ways to gain solutions to problems I was having in business.

We go all the way back to the beginning of this presentation. I’m not smarter than any of you. I just know how to work really hard at shit people don’t want to do for very long periods of time. So this whole I can see through the matrix shit is not what I’m trying to sell you on. What I’m trying to sell you on is this happens anytime you start loading your brain with a significant amount of information.

I know all of you have done that. It’s the aggregate of tiny ideas. So sometimes I’ll read an entire book, I get one idea from it, one little thing from spending six hours reading a book, but that idea might be really helpful later. But if you’re only reading a couple of books per year, or you only take a couple of courses per year, or you’re only filling your brain with a little bit of information, you’re not going to have enough ideas to ever move yourself forward.

Some people call this the law of attraction. If you’ve never heard of the law of attraction, you can read Think and Grow Rich. You could really dive down some woo-woo rabbit holes if you want to on the law of attraction. And it’s basically the more you think about something, the more you focus your attention somewhere, the more it’ll be attracted towards you.

work on yourself harder than your business

So if you want some money, just think about money a lot and the money will come towards you. And that’s not how it works. I call it becoming a better human. So it’s not mystical, it’s logical. There’s no secret here. It’s not it’s not a spiritual thing. It’s just logical. You start filling a computer with a lot of good data points and eventually it will come up with better solutions.

Now the best example I could give you is how I got here to this presentation today. What were all the little data points? I had to go back and see how did Danny and I meet to where I’m giving a presentation at a virtual event to this entire group of business owners. And so I sat down for a long time and I had to think about everything that got me to this point.

So at the beginning of that journey of self-improvement, I got a lot of anxiety. I decided I was going to make myself better, but I got scared. Remember, I didn’t know if this is what I needed to be focusing on. It gave me a ton of anxiety. So to deal with the anxiety, I just spent a lot more money, joined mastermind groups, bought courses.

That probably tripled my anxiety, but this is the plan that I had put myself on. But in one of these mastermind groups, I was talking to a colleague and just telling him about my problem. I’m like, dude, I don’t, to be honest, I don’t know if this entrepreneurship thing is for me. Like I think I’ll be dead in like two years and my wife will probably divorce me and all these things.

Cause it was super stressful when I first started. And he’s like, why don’t you start journaling? He’s like, it really helped me alleviate some of that stuff. I was like, okay, I’ll try it out. This is basically, you’ve seen like Yes Man, the Jim Carrey. That’s how I was when I started down this path.

Anytime an entrepreneur who’s more successful told me to do something like, all right, I’m doing that thing. So I started journaling, started journaling, started reading books a lot more than I had previously. And one of the things I picked up from these books was from Julia Cameron. It’s called Morning Pages.

You guys can look it up, but essentially it’s a strategy for journaling. It gives a little bit more structure. You really just brain dump for a long time, for several pages. That’s why it’s called that in the morning and just brain dump everything in your head. I mean, it could be, you could talk about the goals you have, whether or not you need to take out the trash.

It gets really interesting because when you start on the, like, say you’re like, I’m going to do three pages this morning. The first page will be a lot of the things that just, you know, bounce around in your head all day. Like, yeah, I need to pick up my kid from school. I need to do this for work.

I need to do this, do the dishes, all this stuff. But the second and third page get really interesting because you run out of those things to journal about. And what you really get into is what you actually want. It’s a really awesome process. And I ended up in this process of morning pages writing down that I wanted to write a book.

And I was like, you know what, that sounds like a good goal. I had no idea why I wanted to write a book. And so I talked to my mentor about that. I was like, I, you know, I was doing the journaling thing, just kind of helping with my anxiety that I learned about from this book that I read. I know that you’ve written a book.

She had written a book that was a New York Times bestseller, Wall Street bestseller. She’d always told me when we were together, like, don’t write a book to make money. They don’t make money. And when I heard that from her and she has a Wall Street Journal bestseller on all these things, New York Times bestseller, I’m like, I don’t think I should write a book.

I’m trying to make money. She’s, she’s incredibly successful in saying don’t do it to write money. And so I really want her to talk me out of that goal. I was like, can you like just tell me it’s a bad idea to write a book? And she was like, I absolutely think you should write a book. I was like, oh, okay.

And she’s like, I don’t think you should write a book for the money. Should I think you should, you should write a book for the journey it will take you on. I didn’t even know what the hell that meant, but I was like, all right, cool. An entrepreneur more successful than me. I am going to now write a book because she told me to.

So I start writing the book. So we have one mastermind group, a simple decision to work on myself a little bit better. Join a mastermind group. Someone in there tells me I should start journaling where I’m not such an anxious asshole. I started doing that. I read another book. I started doing morning pages.

Talk to a mentor. Mentor tells me I should write a book after I get a goal from this journaling process. Okay. I write the book. The book was a huge pain in the ass. Everybody’s been through it. Books suck. They just, they’re not that fun to do. I don’t even know why I did a second one. But they’re just a painful process.

You do learn a lot about yourself in the process and I think it was an awesome journey. So I go through the book. I’m reading all these books on self-publishing now because I’m going to self-publish my own book. And I’m getting a lot more information. I’m gathering all this data. I’m just crushing as much as I can.

And then I finish the book and I finally get to this point where, all right, I’ll start pushing it. I start marketing the book because I’ve taken a bunch of courses on marketing and selling and advertising. And this, I don’t even know how we ultimately connected. But this podcast reached out to me to interview me about my book, The Garage Gym Athlete.

The podcast was called Doc & Jock. And the host, Danny Matei. And so we get together and Danny was on a very similar journey to me. We’re just in different, you know, we both left military at similar times. He was on a huge self-improvement journey, entrepreneurship path. And so we started working together.

And just, you know, one thing led to another to like go through that quickly. But ultimately, we started working together and we knew we liked working together and we got to this point where we could do business together. And we had ideas that are complementary to each other to grow a business and we’ve grown this business.

And, you know, Eve was a part of the process as well. But when I go all the way back to I was trying not to be such an anxious asshole and I started journaling, which ultimately led to a book, which ultimately led to a conversation on a podcast with Danny that led to a business partnership, you know, that means a lot for me personally, my family and the relationships I’ve formed with Danny and then all of you as well.

It all started from a simple little decision to improve myself a little bit more. And to take a leap of faith in a lot of areas that made me very, very, very uncomfortable financially. I mean, the things I did, you know, with breathing practices and the woowoo stuff I went into all this crap, but it got me here giving this presentation.

I’ve grown businesses even larger. I’ve written another book. Just a lot has happened on this journey. And so there is no ripple effect. It’s a butterfly effect. What if I was okay with 10 grand a month? What if that was all right? If my family was doing fine, I could have just kept, stayed there, not gone on the self-improvement path and I could have just seen what happened.

I could have done the, you know, 5 to 10, maybe 12 books a year, could have stayed on that path. But I know in those eight months to publish a book and get to a conversation that eventually got me here today, I probably had to read 50 books in less than 12 months to learn enough to be able to do those things.

It’s funny how it all works out, but it’s a very simple decision to start improving myself that got me here today and that connects to my business. So the blueprint I give you, I want you to stop doing one thing and start doing one thing. That’s it. I want you to stop looking for or even asking for the secret.

It does not exist. It’s not out there. There’s nothing that’s going to get your business to the next level. One singular idea that’s just going to unlock everything for you and help you be a master of entrepreneurship. So stop looking for that secret. I was so thrilled to hear Jerry’s information yesterday when he’s like talking about Facebook campaigns and like how they’re not going to work if your business sucks on the back end.

You have to make everything better for your business to grow. His message yesterday and my message today are very similar. He’s saying you need to have an awesome business for people to stick around, to call you and ask if they can give you money when a pandemic hits. You have to have a very awesome business to be able to do that is no different for you as a human being.

You need to start looking at yourself the same way. People call you when they’re in tough situations. You’re the person that can help. You’re the person who knows what to do. Now I want you to start working on yourself harder than you do anything else and that can be scary because that might be time and attention away from certain business activities, but it’s the only thing that’s going to get you to the next level.

Start working on yourself harder than you do anything else and that will be the blueprint that you have to follow to get your business to 10x. That’s all I got.