In this monologue, the speaker wrestles with the common advice to focus solely on personal strengths and ignore weaknesses. Using NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo as a sports analogy, he illustrates how an athlete can deliberately improve specific weak points (adding muscle, developing a three‑point shot) without trying to become a specialist in those areas. He then translates that insight to business, arguing that a company must be balanced across its core functions—sales, marketing, team development, and cash management. While personal strengths should be leveraged, any glaring weakness that threatens the business should be addressed by bringing in the right expertise, not by the founder trying to master it themselves. He introduces the “who, not how” principle (from Dan Sullivan, echoed by Alex Hormozi) and recommends practical solutions such as hiring A‑players, engaging recruiting firms like Autopilot Recruiting, or outsourcing to specialists like Club Capital for cash management. The overall message is that businesses thrive when strengths are maximized and critical weaknesses are filled by the appropriate talent, ensuring a well‑rounded organization.
Chapters
You know how everybody talks about focus on your strengths, do more of just that thing, and don't do any of the other things, the weaknesses that you have? I really struggled for a long time personally about reconciling strengths and weaknesses for me. And then I would look at sports, love basketball, and would look at someone like Giannis Antetokounmpo who MVP of the NBA a couple years ago, won a championship, really was— he did two things. Number one, he physically was not very big, and so he put on a tremendous amount of muscle. And then secondly, he was not a good three-point shooter, and he worked really hard on his three-point shooting. Now, is he going to be, you know, a Steph Curry or JJ Redick or somebody like that? No, but it's definitely become an asset to his game. And so I would see that in sports and I would think, this is what these athletes are doing to get better so they can get better for their careers and make more money and have a longer career, etc. Why would that not be the case? What if my weaknesses in the business are actually the things that are holding us back? And then I would constantly hear people talk about, you know, just figure out what you're really good at, double down on that, triple down on that. I remember somebody on the podcast actually saying, find out what it is that you're great at and triple down on that. Don't double down on it. Now I think, yeah, that sounds great, but what if I don't know marketing? What if I'm not really good at hiring people? What if that's actually the thing that's holding the business back, but I'm only going to focus on my strengths? And finally, I heard something that absolutely made sense to me. And it wasn't contrarian. It was something that I was like, that's it. That is actually, that's actually the answer. And that was, whatever your strengths are, indeed, you're going to get more out of being able to focus on those things. Sure, I think that there are, if there are some very glaring things that are holding you back, then certainly there's a, there's a time and effort to improve those for sure. But for the business itself, and I do look at the business as its own entity, its own thing, the business needs to be balanced. And so if you're a salesperson and you love to talk about sales and you read sales books all of the time, you may be at 80% or 85% knowledgeable in sales. And so you could be better and work from 85 to 90%. But what if marketing is really the weakness of the business? But you say, I'm just not a marketing person. And so this goes back to the weakness part, and where it comes in is to find someone that does and knows that thing, and you can bring them into the organization. Effectively, this is the who, not how concept. So basically, I'm merging two ideas together, and this is how I have to try to make sense of business, and so hopefully this idea resonates with all of you, is that you have your strengths, the things that are your naturally already just God-given ability, things that you're interested in, things that you've grown and developed, you've been exposed to more often. But then if there's a clear weakness in the business, like you just can't, you're not a very good trainer, you're not a very good developer of people, you don't like to coach people, you are terrible at hiring the wrong people, you can find a who even if that person is outsourced. So if you can go to a recruiting company like an Autopilot Recruiting or many, many others out there, and you can work with someone like that that is going to be able to take maybe not all of it, but some of that load off of you and help you to be able to buy back your time. But also, more importantly, they're excellent at that and you're not. Or maybe you could actually hire a true A-player to come in and just take over the marketing. They can just handle the marketing because that is their strength. And so instead of you trying to work on your weakness, you can actually bring somebody in. You can hire someone. Now I know that that's easier said than done. And at the end of the day, the purpose of this video is really to be able to help you to kind of see. And for me, reconcile these two ideas of strengths and weaknesses is that at the end of the day, the business needs to be balanced. It needs to be balanced in its— in all of the different functional areas of the business: sales, marketing, team development, cash management. And we have several members that are just not great at managing the cash. Well, you can work with a company like Club Capital to be able to help balance those kind of things out. Or if you're just not really good at developing people, you can go and work with someone who can help you to develop in your team, specifically in the industry that you're a part of, whether that's insurance or recruiting itself or a marketing agency or an exterior remodeling company, etc. And so there's a lot of different avenues, whether they're outsourced or whether you actually bring somebody in on your team, and they can be excellent. The business does need to be balanced, and so if there's a clear weakness in business, that's maybe the thing, the actual obstacle that's holding you back. But instead of maybe you having to be the one, if that's holding the business back and that's also your weakness, that to me is where the idea from Dan Sullivan came in, which is who, not how. And so for me, when I heard that, I believe specifically that was a Hormozy comment that I heard him to be able to make. And that was an incredible insight into trying to reconcile these ideas of strengths versus weaknesses, etc. So hopefully that was helpful. Lead well.
