reflect and rally, the year-end review that fuels next year

Summary

how much progress have you actually made? not how it feels. what the data says. most of the time you’ve moved way further than you give yourself credit for.

1. focus on the gain, not the gap. Dan Sullivan wrote a whole book on this, The Gap and the Gain. the gap is the distance between where you are and where you want to be. the gain is the distance between where you started and where you are now. one fuels you, the other crushes you.

2. write an annual review. best three things in business, best three things personally. don’t get into the minutiae. just write down what actually moved. you’ll be surprised how much.

3. it doesn’t have to be revenue. fired the wrong employee, made less but kept more profit, took more days off, got fitter. progress comes in a lot of shapes. count all of them.

4. do this before you set next year’s goals. if you only look forward, you ignore the proof that you’re capable of the next thing. looking back is what gives looking forward any weight.

becoming a better human is painfully boring. small habits, done over years. it compounds annually and over decades, not daily. that’s why you have to look back, otherwise you’ll quit. try harder.

Transcript

the question that started this

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. How much progress have you made either financially, professionally, personally in self-development relationships, whatever, how much progress have you made since you became an entrepreneur? Have you made any progress?

Does it matter? This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And recently I’ve been doing a lot of running. I’m training for a 50 K towards the beginning of next year. And I’ve been doing this kind of low aerobic zone to training for five or six months now. And honestly, if you just asked me how much progress have you made, my response without looking at any data would be, I’ve made almost no progress.

the gap and the gain

And the reason I would feel that way is because I am not where I want to be. That’s the real reason. I have to look back at these things, but the real reason I would respond that way is because I’m not where I want. And since I’m not where I want, I feel like I just haven’t made any progress at all.

But that’s not what the data says at all. When I look back, even though it’s a painfully slow process to get better at endurance and get better at running, I’ve made a lot of progress when I look at the data. When I go back and actually look, everything’s better. Everything’s better. My mile times are faster, more consistent.

Just everything is better. But again, that’s not how I feel. It’s not how I feel. And there’s a great book written by Dan Sullivan that talks about this topic. It’s called The Gap in the Gain. I highly recommend it to anyone, anything by Dan Sullivan, really. But this book is great. He also wrote 10X is Better Than 2X, another phenomenal book.

looking back as an entrepreneur

But in The Gap in the Gain, just real briefly, and I’ve covered this on the podcast before, is oftentimes as entrepreneurs, we focus on the gap. We focus on where we’re not. What’s the gap between where we are and where we want to be? And when I just did this with my running, because I was actually texting a buddy, this is how it happened.

I was like, he’s doing some of the training too, and I was like, dude, I feel like I’ve made no progress. And when I said that to him, I was like, how do you train consistently for six months and actually make no progress? Is that a true statement? So I went back and looked, and I found out I had made a ton of progress.

But again, that’s not how I felt. And we often do this as entrepreneurs too, right? We’re not where we want to be financially, or we haven’t made the impact that we want yet. We haven’t achieved the goals that we’re after. So we often focus on the gap, the gap between where we are and where we want to be.

how to do an annual review

Dan Sullivan, in his book, The Gap and the Gain, says we should focus on the gain. How much we’ve gained, how far we have come. And so I started to do this, not just in the last six months of training, but I started to look back as an entrepreneur. How far I’ve come over the last 10 plus years of doing what I’ve been doing as an online entrepreneur, and it’s just crazy.

Everything is crazy. I remember when I didn’t think that it would actually be possible for me to hire another human being, let alone pay myself a salary big enough to support my family. I didn’t think that those were realistic things. I thought I would be a side hustler forever. And fast forward to today, and that’s not the case at all.

I have a lot of employees across several different companies. I can support my family through my entrepreneurial efforts. It’s just crazy how much things can change and you don’t realize it. And even as an entrepreneur, I’m thankful for those things, but I still have a lot I want to achieve, so sometimes I get stuck in the gap.

what it does to your mindset

And that’s not good, right? We don’t want to get stuck in this negative place where we’re always comparing ourselves to the ideal and not how much progress we’ve actually made. What do we do? What do we do with this information? Well, we’re nearing the end of the year, and this is something I like to do.

I started it a few years ago. I wish I had always done this. I typically write and publish an annual review, and it’s like the best three things that happened in business, best three things that happened personally. That way we don’t get into the minutiae, go too far, and even if you just did this in your head or a note in your phone, looking back from the start of the year to now, how much progress have you made?

And it’s not always financial progress. A lot of times it is. It can be, but there are a lot of other things. Maybe you got rid of an employee who shouldn’t have been there, and that’s freed up a lot of mental space. That might seem like a negative to some, but maybe you shouldn’t have had that person, and they were just slowing you down.

Maybe you’re moving faster now. Maybe you made some decisions that didn’t necessarily lead to more revenue, but they led to more profit, right, or made more free time or more impact. There are a lot of different ways you can measure your progress, but you should look back as we near the end of the year and look at how much you’ve actually accomplished.

Do this both personally and professionally. It’s something I love to do because I can look back, and it helps me remember, oh, yeah, this is what you were thinking at the beginning of the year, and yeah, there were a lot of twists and turns and challenges and fires and all these other things, but ultimately we made progress.

We’re not where I want to be, but we made progress, and that puts me in a better mental state to operate and to push forward, so I just highly recommend at some point between now and the end of the year, do your annual review. I love doing this annual review. I will probably publish it and email it out if you are on the newsletter for Better Human Business so you can see what this looks like and what I feel like my biggest wins are both personally and professionally, but I highly encourage you to look back at your progress even if you have to look back if you want to do what I did earlier and just, hey, I’ve been an entrepreneur for this long.

How much progress have I really made? Look back at those things. It will really motivate you to keep pushing forward because the truth of the matter is getting better, becoming a better human is painfully boring. If you first get into the self-development stuff and you’re trying to make yourself better, you’re trying to improve yourself in every capacity, mentally, physically, in your relationships, everywhere, in business, you just want to improve, right?

I am that person. I’ve been that person, but at some point I realized that it’s really freaking boring and that’s the truth. It just clicked with me one day. I was like, oh, this is just it. You’re just always going to have to be reading a new book and consistently doing the workouts and challenging your mind and trying to become a better leader and focusing.

It’s all about these small improvement rights, like not to sound cliche, but that’s all it is. It’s just habits done consistently over time. That’s what builds you into a better human. That’s what builds your better human business. It’s all these small things done repeatedly over long periods of time.

And then once you realize that, it makes it super boring. But don’t get lost in the fact that all your consistency compounds. It doesn’t compound daily. It compounds annually and over decades, daily over decades, as I like to say. So look back from time to time. Don’t get so focused on what’s next.

A lot of people are spending their time at the end of the year only looking forward. What are my goals for 2024? What’s next? What am I going to accomplish? How much more will we grow? Do those things, but before you do them, maybe look back. See what you’ve accomplished. How far you’ve come as a person in business, and it will motivate you to keep moving forward.

Now, I know this is a different take on annual goals, end of year, all that kind of stuff, and it is going to take you trying a little bit harder, adding a little work to look backwards and really assess yourself. If that’s too much work for you, you know what I’m going to say, try harder.