Show Notes:

Stop distractions. “As soon as something gets hard, something new looks easy. When things get difficult, rather than sticking with the thing that you should be doing, you’ll abandon ship and go do something else. So how do you stick to things and avoid being distracted? Think about why you were distracted in the first place. Typically this happens because you’re not really clear on what your focus or priority should be — because if you’re clear on those things, it’s much easier to make decisions through the lens of being clear on what your focus is. If you have no idea exactly what you’re trying to do or where you’re going, there’s no focus had, let alone kept.”

Stay focused. “When you continue to say yes to more things that will potentially deviate your focus off of what the main thing is. You have to be like a horse with blinders with that main thing. You have to be able to be so isolated and dig in and say, ‘I’m going to focus all my time and energy and resources on solving what I believe is the number one challenge or the number one problem’ — and again, if you do enough discovery on the front end and if you actually really set the time to figure out what are the single biggest challenges in the firm that are standing in the way of your growth, then you can start prioritizing those things and plan and act accordingly. If you’re clear on your objectives, it’s much easier to say no to everything else.”

Indecisiveness is weakness. “The speed and rate at which you can make decisions is extremely important. If you operate through the framework of overanalysis and try to collect every piece of information you need to make a decision, you’re going to fail. You’re never going to have 100 percent of the information for anything that has any sort of potentially high upside or variable upside. If you know everything for sure, there’s no decision — it’s just a task. The decision involves some degree of uncertainty, and if you can’t navigate said uncertainty, then maybe you shouldn’t run a business. If you’re so worried about being wrong and have to avoid failing to some degree, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s just part of the process. Every successful entrepreneur has made bad decisions, and they’ve also made good ones. They only made good ones because they had the experience of making bad ones. You live and learn.”

Stick with it. “When things get tough, you’re tempted to quit. That’s the case for most human beings. That’s what tough does. If you were quitting when it gets easy, that’d be odd. So, how do you build up resilience? You have to strengthen that resilience muscle. It’s not like somebody comes out of the womb and they’re immediately resilient and they just can stick with hard things. They’ve developed that muscle over time by sticking with things that were difficult and challenging and not giving up when they got bored or when they got frustrated. It’s about being able to lead yourself in a way where you’re able to develop a level of discipline to see things through to completion.”

Build resilience. “Mike Tyson once said discipline is doing what you hate to do, but doing it like you love it. You build up that resilience by being committed to the plan that you set out. It doesn’t mean that you’re only going to be committed so long as you enjoy it or it’s fun. You’re going to do it when it’s fun and when it’s not fun, when you enjoy it and when you don’t enjoy it, and when it’s easy and when it’s hard. You’re just going to fucking do it. Then when you get to the end, guess what? You built up a muscle and a skill to where you stick with things. When you do this enough times and this just becomes your normal, now you’ve built up some confidence because you’ve honored your promises to yourself. Now you start to do even more challenging things which require even more resilience.”

RESOURCES & REFERENCES

LASIK Eye Surgery
Crisp Coach
Google Ads
Amazon
The RFP Process
Indecisiveness Is Weakness
GCA Podcast Episode #183 — AMMA: How Great Leaders Make Decisions
Mike Tyson