the rules, part 1

Summary

anytime I’ve gotten my ass handed to me over the last decade I’ve journaled the lesson. I call them the rules. some are universal. some are personal to me. this is part one. five of them.

1. fail fast and get comfortable with it. I used to wait six months or a year before launching an idea. and when I finally did, it usually wasn’t as good as I thought it’d be. so I waited again. and burned another year. new rule, implement fast, because most ideas miss. you can’t shortcut success without shortcutting failure first.

2. quit thinking small. I set my sights too low for years. every time I expanded my vision and got there, I realized I could have thought even bigger. small goals on long timelines compound into a smaller life. challenge your own thinking on paper. you don’t have to share the vision with anyone, but stop thinking small.

3. get out of your own way and scale. I’m a doer. it’s a strength and it’s a wall. you can’t scale a company through your own pair of hands. you scale through high level humans, not helpers. you don’t have to be the genius. someone out there does this better than you and is more passionate about it. find them. get out of their way.

4. first up, last down. this one is personal. I want to be the first one to put my feet on the floor in the morning and the last one to lay down at night. for my family. that’s the example I want set. you’re with these people every day, easy to forget you’re the leader. you still are. lead.

5. get clear on what you want. not just goals. a crystal clear vision in every area. what does the relationship look like, the business, the body, the house, the day. when you’re clear you can say no to everything that isn’t on the line. when you’re not, you chase your tail in circles. there are a lot more rules. part two is coming. try harder.

Transcript

the journal that became the rules

And so what I realized is I had to speed up this cycle. If I had a new idea, I had to implement it as fast as possible because the chances of it just being a home run is very low, very, very low. Most of the ideas that I’ve had did not work. And I’ve just had to just keep going, keep trying, try another one, try harder.

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 over the last decade, I’ve been on a pretty serious personal development, personal growth journey as well as an entrepreneurial journey. And I’ve learned a lot and most of the things that I’ve learned have been the hard way.

And every time I kind of have gotten my ass handed to me, so to speak, I journaled it, I wrote it down. I have so many things, so many lessons learned that I’ve written down for myself to review and look over. I call them the rules and I have a note in my phone and every time I learn something and I’m like, damn it, you know, you repeated that mistake twice or you really should avoid this next time, I’ve written it down.

So if this podcast is going to be about documenting the journey and helping you shortcut success by avoiding some of the mistakes I’ve made, I think this is a great place to start. I’m gonna get through as many of these as I can while keeping the podcast relatively short as the format that I want to keep.

But this will be a recurring segment. I’ll go over periodically just different rules and I’ll get through as many as I can. Some will be applicable to you, some will not. They are very personal to me, but let’s get right into it. So the first one is fail fast and get comfortable with it. I’ve always felt like I’ve had more time.

fail fast and get comfortable

I’ve always felt like I could prepare a little bit more and make things a little bit more perfect before I launch something, before I do something. And what I’m learning is time goes fast. As cliche as that may sound, it is going so fast. And I think if you want to learn, grow, and get better, you need to embrace failure.

And again, it’s so cliche, but how much are you actually failing? And when we get down to the tactical level, like what have you done over the last month that just didn’t work? If that’s in business or life, if you’re trying to get better in a certain area, you should be trying something new frequently and failing.

My lesson was in business. I really would wait. I would wait too long to try something new. And so sometimes I would have this idea and it would take me like a year to get around to implementing it. And then I think it’s this amazing idea. And then when I actually do it, it didn’t work that great. This idea wasn’t as good as I thought it was.

And I kept doing that. And instead of waiting a year, I might wait six months the next time. Then I’m like, damn, now you’ve burned a year and a half. And so what I realized is I had to speed up this cycle. If I had a new idea, I had to implement it as fast as possible because the chances of it just being a home run is very low, very, very low.

Most of the ideas that I’ve had did not work. And I’ve just had to just keep going, keep trying, try another one, try harder. So that’s a big lesson for me. I wish I would have failed faster, tried more things faster. I probably would have shortcutted my success a lot more and just been comfortable with the fact that, hey, that doesn’t work.

Don’t get discouraged. Something else will work. Number two, quit thinking small. This might not be your problem, but it was a huge problem for me. I am probably still running into this issue right now and I don’t even realize it. Every time I try to expand my horizon for thinking big or having a bigger vision, once I actually get there, I realize I could have thought bigger.

quit thinking small

I often set my sights too low. I don’t really know what’s possible. And while I do feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at that, like I said, I could find out in the next year, two years, three years, man, you were thinking small again. When you think small, it means you have small goals. And when you have small goals and you’re okay achieving your goals over a long time period, like I am, I’m very patient.

Again, it goes back to almost like rule number one is like, okay, you achieved that goal, but you put it on a three-year horizon and you probably could have done this in six months if you just were thinking a little bit bigger, this step would have come so much faster. And so you need to quit thinking small.

And I’m saying that to myself, not to you. You need a journal, you need to see what’s actually possible and challenge your own line of thinking. Think as big as you possibly can. And you don’t have to share that with anyone, keep it to yourself if you have to, but quit thinking small. Number three is get out of your own way and scale.

So this is very specifically about scaling and growing companies. And when I say get out of your own way and scale, for me, I am a doer. I want to do the things, I want to do the work. It’s very hard for me to delegate things, even though I’ve gotten a lot better at that over the years. You cannot scale if you do not get out of your own way.

You have to be okay not being in control. You have to give responsibility to other people. The real way to scale a company is through human beings. And they have to be good, quality, high-achieving human beings, not just helpers who can help offload some tasks that you have. That’s like a level one employee.

You need to get to different levels of employees to really help you scale. And the only way to do that is to realize you’re not the genius, you’re not the person who has it all figured out. You can go learn things. For me, I feel like I can learn anything. Give me some time, give me a course, give me whatever.

get out of your own way and scale

I will learn it and I will do it, but it’s not what I should be doing. So a lot of times I just need to get out of my own way, realize that someone out there can do this better and they’re more passionate about doing it. And this is where killing comfort, that idea from what I live by can kind of bite you in the ass.

Because if I want to go learn something, sometimes I feel like, okay, well, I can get really uncomfortable. I can learn this thing I don’t wanna learn. I can kill the comfort and do it. But that goes into that realm of stupidity where it’s not even really something that you should be focusing on. Someone else can do this better.

So oftentimes I have to remind myself to get out of my own way and that’s how I’m gonna scale the company. Number four, this one’s a lot more personal, but I just wrote down, first up, last down. And this just goes to the type of person I wanna be in my family. So I wanna be the first to have my feet hit the floor in the morning and I wanna be the last one to lay down to go to sleep at night.

And like I said, this is very personal to me. It’s just the way I want my family to see me. It’s how I want them to remember me. It’s the amount of work I wanna put in. But I wanna be awake before all of them, ready to take care of them, taking action on either bettering myself or bettering our situation.

And I wanna be the last person to lay down and take it easy for the day. One thing that I often can overlook is that I am a leader in my family. You’re with these people every single day, so you need to be comfortable, right? And we all are. We’re all comfortable. We’re most comfortable with the people that we’re around every single day.

But that doesn’t mean you should forget that you’re a leader. And there’s still actions for you to take. You need to lead. You need to lead your team. And for me, that’s my family. Now, this’ll probably be the last one I cover today. Like I said, keeping the podcast in a shorter format. But the fifth one is get clear on what you want.

first up last down, and get clear on what you want

And this happens to me over and over and over again. This isn’t just simply saying set goals. It’s having a crystal clear vision of everything that you want in your life. What do you want your relationships to look like? You can’t have better relationships if you don’t know what better relationships look like in your life.

What do you want your business to look like? What is the vision for it? How big is it? What’s the team look like? What’s your role? Get very clear on what that looks like. Not just some monetary goal. Not some goal about impact. We all want those things. But what does it actually look like? In training, what can you do?

What can you lift? How fast can you run? What do you look like? You have to have the vision for that. In your personal life, what is success? What does your house look like? What does your car look like? What does everything look like? It doesn’t mean these things have to be bigger and better, but you have to be very clear on what it is and what it does look like.

Because if you’re not clear, for me, when I’m not clear, I find myself frustrated. I’m still chasing, but it’s more like a dog chasing its tail in a circle, really unclear about what it’s actually doing. It’s just chasing something. So for me, I need to be very clear on what I want. And when I’m really super crystal clear on what I want, it enables me to say no to so many things.

Because if financial freedom is a goal, and I know what that looks like, and someone comes to me with some sort of investment opportunity or the new hot thing, I can just be like, hey, I know I can easily say no to that. There’s no FOMO. When you’re crystal clear on what you want and you know you’re taking the actions each and every single day to get closer to what you want.

So get clear on what you want and be able to say no to more stuff. All right, a lot more rules to cover. Hopefully you guys like part one here. Give me some feedback when you get a chance. Would love a five-star review, a positive comment. If you could, take the couple moments to do that. It would really help the show out as we are getting going again.

All right, that’s it for this one. Remember to try harder in all things.