the rules, part 2

Summary

part two of the rules. anytime I’ve journaled a lesson over the last decade, it lives in this list. five more.

1. be a marketer. you didn’t get into a better human business because you love marketing. you got in because you love your craft. if you never communicate the thing you do, no one finds it, and the impact stops at your laptop. remind yourself daily. always be a marketer.

2. never say maybe. maybe is almost always no. it just means you don’t feel like having the conversation. I make decisions fast now because indecision is the worst place to live. it bleeds into workouts, into showers, into sleep. sit down, get the info, run the pros and cons, decide, move on.

3. be a leader, not a savior. early on I thought I could cast a big enough vision to align someone whose goals didn’t actually match the company. doesn’t work that way. know what people want, foster what aligns, lead the team. don’t try to save them. that’s how the company drifts off track.

4. stop going wide, go deep. I felt so far behind on self development I read three books a week to catch up. that habit stopped serving me. now I try to master one to three books a year. 50 books a year is a vanity metric. what you implement is what counts.

5. expand your threshold for control. you can only personally control so much. if you want to grow you have to trust other people with real outcomes. not helpers. real operators who own a KPI. that’s uncomfortable, expand the threshold anyway. otherwise all you have is a roomful of helpers and that isn’t a company. try harder.

Transcript

be a marketer

I can cast the vision big enough. I can be a better leader and I can get them to go this direction, but it doesn’t always work that way. 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. All right. Part two of the rules. Anytime I’ve had a failure, run into an issue or just something lesson to learn over the last 10 years, I’ve written it down, journaled it to some degree, thought about it.

And I want to keep going with these again to, to shortcut the, the pain that it caused me. Hopefully you can avoid it. Maybe none of these rules apply. Maybe one does, but let’s get into it. The first one I have to continue from part one is to be a marketer. And this one sounds really simple, but this is something that you may struggle with.

If you are running a better human business, chances are, if you are running a better human business, you got into the business because you wanted to help people. You have a love for your craft, something along those lines. We did not get into the business that we’re in now because we love marketing and we want to geek out on marketing and advertising and the sales process.

Chances are most of you listening to this do not have a lot of interest in those things because you have an interest in your main thing, your profession, what actually makes you a professional. And just so you know, that’s all of us. If you are running a better human business, that’s all of us. None of us want to run ads.

None of us want to be a marketer. None of us want to have to have a sales conversation. If you love those things and you want to geek out on those things, that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just saying the chances are that’s not why you’re here. That’s not why you got into the profession that you’re in.

So that’s why I have to remind myself constantly to be a marketer. I have to market the things that I’m doing. One thing that I am for sure is a creator. I like to create. I like to write. I like to record podcasts. I like to think and tinker and do all of those things. But sometimes after you create the thing, you have to market the thing.

never say maybe

If you never communicate the thing that you’re doing, it will never get out to the world. You cannot help more people. You cannot impact more people. You cannot run a better human business. And so this is just a reminder for me all the time. Be a marketer. What aren’t you communicating? How do you communicate more?

How do you take what you’re doing and let more people know about it so you can have more of an impact? And a lot of times it’s not out of insecurity and it’s not out of lack of desire these days. Sometimes I straight up forget because I’m just not as interested in the marketing side of business as I am the creation side, the doing, the professional side of what I do.

And that’s just something I have to constantly remind myself on. You might be the same. So remember, always be a marketer. Don’t forget to communicate what you’re doing to other people so they can be a part of it. The next one is never say maybe. And really I put in parentheses, avoid indecision. I’ve found myself over the years, anytime I’m telling someone maybe that means no.

Most of the time. It means no, but I don’t feel like saying no because I feel like there’ll be more of a conversation I don’t currently want to have something along those lines. Now there are some times where it’s an actual maybe I have to go weigh the pros and cons. So I have to give you a maybe for now.

But a lot of times a maybe for me is a red flag that this is just going to be a no. So what I’ve gotten better at over the years is making faster decisions. So I don’t have indecision. Indecision is the worst for me. I sit around, I think about it constantly. It’ll keep me up at night. It’s what I’m thinking about when I’m working out or when I’m taking a shower.

If I have a really big decision to make, that will just run around in the back of my mind constantly. So I have to put an end to that. So I make decisions fast and I wasn’t always this way, but the more decisions you make, the more comfortable you are at making decisions quickly because you can weigh pros and cons very fast and make a decision and you’ll realize when you actually sit down to decide something as opposed to being proposed with something like someone has a proposal for you or there’s an opportunity or whatever it is, you might sit there and be like, okay, well, let me think about it.

Well, think about it for a lot of people means, you know, maybe you’ll talk to somebody, but you’re just going to kind of go around, go about your daily life and maybe it’ll come to you. You’ll put some thought in here and there. But if you were to sit down with a piece of paper after you’re presented with the opportunity and say, all right, you have, do you have all the information needed to be able to make this decision?

be a leader, not a savior

Yes or no? If it’s yes. Great. If it’s no, go get the information that you need. If the answer is yes, 30 minutes, sit there, do whatever you have to write pros and cons. Do all the things. All right, do all the things and then decide, make a decision. You’re done with it. Don’t say maybe just make a decision, move on, go through the thinking process, go through the decision making process, but make that an actual dedicated time.

That’s something I have to do, uh, you know, almost weekly at this point with all the things that are going on in business. I have to sit down, actually make a decision, write things out, but it happens very fast. Next is be a late, uh, be a leader, not a savior. Uh, so these, this is a reminder for me, uh, when I bring people onto the team or I am interacting with a team members that I am a leader.

I’m not a savior. I’m not here to fulfill every wish of someone on the team and to do, you know, I’ll make all their dreams come true, right? What you want is an alignment between the vision of your business and the personal goals that they have. You want to have those conversations with employees and make sure that you are aware of what they want to do and where they want to go and try and foster that, but never let that drive the business off track.

And I haven’t necessarily done that, but I have known early on with employees that there is a mismatch in their future goals, in the vision of the company. And I think in my head, basically I can save them. I can cast the vision big enough. I can be a better leader and I can get them to go this direction, but it doesn’t always work that way.

So you need to be a leader. You need to do your job. You need to bring energy, you need to foster talent, and you need to bring results and own them. And that’s your job. You need to be a leader. So try and save your people, know what they want, where they are, what their goals are, make sure there’s an alignment there.

But then after that, you need to lead. Next stop going wide, go deep. You know, for a long time, and you know, there’s a little caveat here. I feel like when I first started down kind of the self-development path, I went really, really wide. I mean, I was reading one, two, three books per week, just crushing them.

Because I honestly felt like I was so far behind on this information that I was just absolutely crushing it and going through as many books as possible. But then that became the habit is going through as many books as possible. And at a certain point, it’s no longer valuable. You’re not getting anything else out of future books, and it almost doesn’t matter what you’re reading because if you’re reading a book a week even, you’re not able to fully apply that information.

stop going wide, go deep

And so now I’m much bigger on going deep. So going much deeper on information, maybe trying to master the information in one to three books per year, making sure that the book is a really good fit for what I need, when I need it. And if I want to spend a lot of time here, is it worth my time? Is it worth the team’s time?

Is this something that we need to learn? So going really, really deep on one book per year, two books per year, it doesn’t mean I won’t read other things or entertain other things, but I’ll be quick to dismiss things. Like if I’m getting into a book, I used to finish a book no matter what. If I started it, I finished it, and that just had to do with me wanting to check the box that I read the book and it’s done.

If I get into a book and it’s whatever, you know, 400 pages and I get 50 pages in and it’s just like, I don’t think this is going the right direction, I won’t necessarily finish it because I’m very aware of what I need most of the time, what I need to learn. And I’ll try and go that direction, but if I find out the book’s not a good fit, I’m going to try and kill it pretty fast because I only want information at this point that I can go deep on.

So going wide might be okay sometimes. This is for any of you listening who maybe, you know, like me, I felt like I was so far behind and going through a lot of books was actually very beneficial, but then at some point going through the books is not the goal. 50 books per year is a vanity metric. It doesn’t really matter.

What can you learn? What can you do with the information is way more important. All right, the next one is expand your threshold for control. Now I think I got this from an event I went to, I think it may have been Tony Robbins. And he was the one who said that and it really clicked with me because if you want to grow personally or in your business, you have to start trusting other people and you’re going to have to get uncomfortable.

You’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone and expand your threshold for what you control because you can only control a small amount as one person. Now you get other people underneath you and you let them control other things, but you might not be able to control it all, right? If you had five people working underneath you and they all had 20 responsibilities each, well, you can’t take all 100 of those responsibilities.

expand your threshold for control

You have to be comfortable with the fact that you are slightly out of control when it comes to the personal level of your business. There’s a lot of trust. There are other people who have to do things and you have to be comfortable with that. And I wasn’t comfortable with that when I first started delegating tasks and hiring people and team has gotten bigger and all those things.

I was not comfortable with things getting outside of my control, but I’ve expanded that threshold to where there are things going on in my businesses that I’m completely unaware of. And I don’t mean that in a, in a, in a, I’m completely oblivious to things that are going on. It’s just, there might be a conversation between two team members to solve a problem that I was never involved in.

I didn’t even know about, and I find out after the fact that this problem has been solved and they took care of it. And that’s awesome. You know, that’s where I want to be, but I have, I had to expand my threshold for control. And so I would challenge anyone listening to this who is an entrepreneur and who has a team to really question whether or not you’re doing this because a lot of us have small teams.

So we might have three, four or five people and you might think, you know, I got the, I got the team. I don’t really have that problem, but how much are you still controlling? Are you able to actually give legitimate responsibility to your employees to where they own something? They own a KPI. They own something that you are not responsible for the results.

You’re responsible for the person, but not the results. You are there to foster, lead, encourage, and grow. Are you comfortable with that? Are you comfortable with not being the driver, the leader, the one doing it all in that specific area? Is it okay if someone else heads up your marketing? Is it okay if someone else does something else and you fully trust them to do that?

Because if you don’t, what you actually have is just a bunch of helpers and you don’t want a bunch of helpers in your business. You want a bunch of badasses who can do things. You don’t want just a bunch of task managers. You want legit human beings who can get shit done. I think I’ll end it there with the rules part two.