Show Notes:

Check your blindspots. “Humans have a tendency to believe they’ll always be right. You gain this false sense of confidence because you’ve had a lot of wins — let’s say you’ve had a great year or a series of great years, and you think that will continue indefinitely. That’s not the way the world works. The unfortunate truth is it never ends.”

Two must-have traits. “I believe the most successful people have two common traits. Number one: they’re the most paranoid, constantly looking over their shoulder. Bill Gates was this way. He would always keep 12 months of payroll in the bank at all times during Microsoft’s history because even though he was very optimistic about the future, he never wanted to be in a situation where they couldn’t meet the payroll. The second one is pain tolerance. The most successful people can deal with extreme amounts of adversity and things not going their way. Every day you’re going to war. You’re going to battle every day. You’re dealing with all sorts of challenges, many times ones that you’ve never experienced in the past.”

Reinvent yourself. “Your business is perfectly designed to give you the results that you’re getting. So what your business looks like when you’re at $1M in revenue versus what it looks like at $5M versus what it looks like at $20M versus $50M or $100M or $250M — it’s completely different. It’s unrecognizable from the systems to the people to the capabilities to the competencies. The bottom line is that you have to constantly reinvent yourself and you must constantly keep pace with that growth. It’s kind of a never-ending battle because you can grow faster than you can scale up the system.”

Think ahead and move faster. “Sometimes the organization that exists today is not the organization that needs to exist into the future. If you try to do it a little bit at a time and try to piecemeal it, you’re just going to experience a lot of down years because you’re moving too slow. That is the nature of business.”

Be willing to fail. “You want to be able to get fresh ideas and get people thinking outside the box because you want to spur innovation. In order to do that, you have to listen to people and you actually have to create the type of environment where someone can throw out an idea and it can be absolutely horrible. If you really want true innovation, you have to have a high tolerance for failure. If you need everything to be a hit and everything to be a success, no one’s going to innovate because they’re only going to do safe things. But it’s recognizing that sometimes you don’t know what works until you try it.”

EPISODE RESOURCES & REFERENCES
Sears
Blockbuster
Blackberry
S&P 500
University of Alabama Football
New England Patriots
Only The Paranoid Survive (Book)
Bill Gates
Floyd Mayweather
Google LSAs
TikTok
Peter Principle
Formula 1
Elf (Movie)
Motel 6
The Four Seasons