why do I always tell you to try harder

Summary

every podcast I end with try harder. people ask why, and the answer isn’t what most people assume. it isn’t perfectionism. it’s a daily litmus test.

1. it started in consulting. people would describe their problem, and the solution they already knew, and then ask what to do. and I kept finding myself saying, you already know. you just need to try a little bit harder. so it stuck.

2. it’s not chasing perfect. the question at the end of the day isn’t could I have been perfect today. it’s where did I ease up. if your capacity today was a 6 because you slept poorly and life is busy, did you give a 6 or did you give a 4 and a 3 in some areas because you wanted to be done.

3. when business owners ask how I learned Facebook ads, the answer is nobody taught me. I bought the courses, watched the videos, listened to the podcasts, built my own curriculum. I hate Facebook ads. I learned them anyway because I knew the business needed it. that’s try harder.

4. effort beats intelligence at the entrepreneur level. the people I work with are smart. it’s not a thinking gap. it’s an effort gap.

5. don’t send one email newsletter, get no customers, and tell me email marketing doesn’t work. plan a quarter. write the sequence. test the offers. put your best foot forward across a real window. that’s try harder. one email is just trying.

reflect at the end of each day. find the area where you eased up. close that gap next time. that’s the entire system. try harder.

Transcript

the consulting conversations

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. Welcome to the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and today I’m talking about trying harder. So I’ve actually talked to talked about this with a few podcast listeners and recent history about the try harder mentality and why I say it.

So I thought I would take just a moment or two explaining that a little bit more considering that every single podcast I tell you to try harder at the end. I’ve done other podcast episodes talking about trying harder versus working smarter and how you working smarter isn’t always the answer, but I didn’t actually start telling people to try harder until I started to get more into business consulting and I never actually intended to get into business consulting.

It just happened. People start asking for your time. One thing leads to another. And now I talk to a lot of people about business. And once I started doing that, I would point out very obvious solutions, solutions that seemed incredibly obvious to me. It could be due to the fact that I just had more experience than the person, but ultimately it would seem that the person I was consulting with, they knew the solution too.

And so then I would be in this situation where I’m like, okay, sounds like you just need to try a little bit harder. And I don’t think like extreme effort and going all out is always the answer. It’s not what I mean when I try harder. For me, try harder is just a litmus test when I’m doing an activity.

Like I just had that with this week with myself and team members and staff were working on some projects where we are rebuilding a lot of backend processes, marketing pages, those kind of things. And we had finished it. It was definitely good enough. Like it was definitely good enough. It was going to be effective enough.

good enough vs the standard

And you keep hearing me say enough. It was good enough, but it wasn’t like a standard of excellence, right? It wasn’t, not every contingency had been planned for. There were still ways I could make it better. And I knew that, but I may have been the only person on the team, again, just because I’ve had more experience, I may have been the only person on the team who was like, who knew how this could improve.

Everyone else was like, hey, this is good. We’re happy. We’re signed off on it. Let’s go test it out. See if this is effective. But for me, it was in the back of my mind, I was like, you could try a little bit harder here and that just eats at me. I’m like, damn it. Okay. I need to go try a little bit harder.

There are a few more tweaks I can make and not to chase perfectionism or anything like that. There’s just a couple more things, maybe one more day’s worth of work that I could do to improve this product. I could have backed off and been like, you know what, it is good enough. I think that it’s fine.

Let’s just test it out. We’re good here. But I knew that I could try a little bit harder and that little voice is always in the back of my head when I’m going through things, when I’m having a conversation with an employee, when I’m trying to be a good leader, when I am trying to communicate with other people, when I’m working on projects.

I always know, at least by my own standard, if I gave it my best. Did I actually give it my best? Or could I try a little bit harder? And I see this happen over and over again. Like years ago, I’d have people ask me how to run Facebook ads, like business owners ask me how to run Facebook ads. And I’m not saying business owners paying me money to consult for them on Facebook ads.

That’s not what I’m saying. Because how this is going to come across is I have really bad customer service. But these are just other business owners asking me how to do Facebook ads really before I started consulting. And I just wanted to say to them, who the hell do you think taught me Facebook ads?

i taught myself facebook ads

The answer is nobody. I had to go learn that stuff. I had to watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts. I had to buy a bunch of different courses. So I guess technically the courses taught me. But I’m just saying I had to go buy all those things and learn and set up my own curriculum to learn it because I thought that it was going to help me grow my business.

And it did. But I just had to go learn all those things. I had to try hard because I believed that was going to be the thing. So I had to try hard to go learn it and implement it. Did I want to do those things? Absolutely not. I can still tell every single person who asked me to this day if I like Facebook ads.

I hate Facebook ads. I hate marketing. Like I hate all of those kind of things. I hate split testing, landing pages. But you know what? I know those are the things that drive the company forward. So I have to try a little bit harder. Now eventually you can delegate some of those things and other people can try harder for you but there will always be something you’re working on, something that you’re doing where you could try a little bit harder.

So when I would have people ask me how do you do that, I’m like you’re just not trying hard enough because if you really wanted to do it, you would go learn it. You would figure it out. You wouldn’t need to ask me how to do it. Now you can hire people to shortcut that process. But if you really wanted it, you would just try a little bit harder.

And that’s why I end every single podcast with that try harder statement because you need to have a high standard for yourself. So if you could just detach from whatever you’re working on at the end of the day and say could I have been any better? Could I have tried a little bit harder in any areas today?

your max capacity for the day

And I’m not saying you need to be perfect. Again, we’re not chasing perfectionism. The question at the end of the day is not how could I have been perfect today? It’s just where did you ease up? What was within your capacity for the day? Let me put it that way. That might be a better explanation. Say your capacity today, say you didn’t sleep well and you’re super busy and all this crap.

So your capacity is about a six out of ten. I only have the capacity for a six out of ten today just because for whatever life is thrown at you. You can’t operate at a ten today. You can operate at a six. But six still is your max capacity for that day. Where were you putting in fours and fives even though your capacity was a six that day?

Where were you putting in threes? Where was that three at? Those are the things that I’m always looking at and trying to push myself a little bit harder. It’s not this perfectionism standard. It’s just I know what I have to bring to the table today and if I just want to be done for the day and sign off, I can be.

But I have to live with the fact that there were some areas where I knew how I could have tried a little bit harder and I just didn’t do it. And that happens to me all the time. Again, no perfection on my end. None at all. Every week I can look back and be like, damn it, I could have tried harder in this area or that area.

But it’s that reflection of looking back and realizing, hey, I could have tried harder there. Next time I will. And the next time I run into that similar situation, I’m like, oh yeah, last time you didn’t try as hard as you could. Try a little bit harder. And it’s always the effort. It’s always trying a little bit harder that seems to be the solution in entrepreneurship.

send one email is not effort

I’m sure that you could work a lot smarter in many different areas, but most of the time it’s just you need to try a little bit harder. And you probably already know because most of the entrepreneurs I work with are incredibly smart people. They’re very intelligent. And so it’s not a lack of intelligence that’s stopping us from moving forward.

It’s just maybe a lack of effort. Maybe we didn’t try hard enough in these different areas. Don’t send one email newsletter and get no customers and then tell me you tried email marketing and it didn’t work. You know what I mean? Those are the kind of efforts I see sometimes. Try harder. Be like, let’s craft an amazing email.

Let’s plan a quarter of email sequences that are going to go out with different offers, calls to action. We’re going to try more conversational campaigns, all these. That’s trying hard in email marketing, giving it a quarter, planning things out, putting your best foot forward. Sending one email newsletter and not getting any results is not an effort.

That’s trying, but it’s not trying hard. Same with Facebook advertising. Don’t go do one ad for seven days and tell me it didn’t work and you wasted a bunch of money. Go study. Go do your due diligence. Get the best images and copy and creative and then tell me you tried. Put in all the effort. Try again.

A quarter. Try six months. Try running it with a purpose in mind, a little bit more strategic on the Facebook ads. Then tell me it didn’t work after you’ve tried hard. But the chances are if you put that level of effort in and you’re trying that hard, most of these things will work. You won’t be coming to anybody and saying, Hey, I tried this.

It didn’t work. Most likely it’s going to work because you kept trying hard and you kept refining the process and what’s coming, what’s coming. If all of that sounds like too much work for you and you’re comfortable just trying, maybe you should try a little bit harder.