Episode 368: The Stonecutter's Credo

Hey everyone. So I like, maybe it's the way that I need to be able to process things in business or in life, but I try to use a lot of analogies and metaphors and pull things from different industries and different businesses and even things that don't have nothing to do with business and apply it back in my life. I think it just helps me to be able to kind of organize my own thoughts. And so I was with my small group, which we get together every Wednesday, and this was shared. And I don't think he, he actually called it a 100 strikes of marble. And I ended up— I loved it so much that I did some research on it, and I found this thing called the Stonecutter's Credo. When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps 100 times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, it will split in two. And I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. Jacob Riis, I believe, is how you pronounce that. I absolutely love, love that. And it is such a helpful thing because those 100 times that you're pounding away at that rock, you're pounding away in the business, trying to get the thing to move, trying to get it to go, trying to get it to go. And then finally things ultimately begin to come together. And when they do, everybody comes to you and says, wow, how did you do it? What were the things that you did? And you look back and know how much work that it actually took. This is one of the things that I really— I don't always love all of the things that he says. I think that his perspective, you have to kind of understand where he is at in his life. He has incredible content. And that's Hormozi, Alex Hormozi, and he talks about volume negates luck. And I also think that the— he has also discussed the resetting of expectations of what it actually takes to be able to grow a business. I think that there are times, and it sells a lot of books, and I really love like Donald Miller's books, Business Made Simple. I think the, the challenge with that though is that we equate simple to easy, that it's going to happen fast. And you may have heard the video that I did where it's going to take longer, it's going to cost more, and it's going to look different. And this is kind of builds upon that. And it really is that you continue to hammer away and nothing is happening. And the challenge of that is, is we as entrepreneurs want to see progress. We need momentum to keep us going. And sometimes that is dang hard to find. There have been weeks, even recently as I record this, that when I look back and I do Sunday Night Planning, it is a— it is very difficult because my mind is so shrouded in all the things that did not go well. Fortunately, I do believe it is now a skill that you can develop to begin to try to find the wins from the previous week. This is why we actually say the most important thing you can do for yourself is to protect your confidence. Sounds good, but what does that actually mean? It means having a certain discipline and a routine in place, really a habit, habit and routine in place to look back on the past week, look back on the previous quarter, look back on the previous year and finding what are all the wins that you had. Because I think we have the tendency— at least I do, and the people that I am around tend to only see the things that did not go well in the business. Ads are not working, sales are down, customer return is up, I had another team member leave, um, my inbox is overflowing. One of my best customers just left, so on and so on and so forth. And we can fixate only on those. And so it takes— it's almost like you're having to work against inertia. You know, you're not going to default to thinking all only on the wins. We're going to default as the entrepreneur to only think about the things that are not going the way that we want them to. And that's okay. That's fine. That's who we are. We're always going to be pushing, but we need the mechanism in place to go back and find the wins. And so when we're hammering on that, the 100 times we're hammering on the rock, 100 times we're hammering on the marble, 100 times that we're hammering on the granite, the 100 times, the week over week over week that we do the sales training and it just doesn't seem to be making a difference. Yet then one day we look up and it did make a difference. The team gets it. And then somebody says, what have you been doing? Well, I've been doing sales training. For how long? Every week for 18 months. That's how long we've been doing it. I'll give you a very specific example. We last year— I'll give an example kind of openly of one that we did well and then one we didn't It's actually in the context of the very same thing, but my mindset was not where it needed to be initially. And then now it's changed over the last 6 months or so, and it's fundamentally changed, um, really everything. And so it's this idea of running a, um, like a workshop. Okay. So we started running these workshops. I got into the idea of running either twice a month or at least once a month, but a couple of times a month. Online workshop, basically to introduce people to the idea of what it is we do, the problem we solve, who we help, how we help them, so on and so forth. Okay, our whole thing is build an operating system so the business is less dependent upon you, and so you can get, you know, have a life back again and still be able to grow the company. So anyway, um, the name of that workshop— we now call it a web class— has evolved. Like 4 times. Well, being in 2023— I'm filming this in 2024— but in 2023, we were doing this, and I think we ran like 4 or 5, and attendance was meh, uh, registrations were meh. And so guess what happened? I started to lose confidence. And so when I started to lose confidence, what do you think ended up happening? I started to doubt myself, and I started to doubt the strategy. And so once that happened, all bets were off. How long do you think it took me before I finally said, you know what, we're going to scrap that? Uh, about 4 or 5 of them. So not very many tests did I run. Fast forward 6 to 9 months or so, and I kind of come full circle on it. But this time I said, I don't care. Yes, we— these are our targets for registrations, for attendance, for booked calls on the back side, the whole thing. But at the end of the day, I'm committing to doing this. This is fundamentally a strategy that we are absolutely going to employ. I believe this, and I believe we will get better every time in the way we— the way I show up on the actual web class, the way we do registrations, the way we do attendance, the way we do post-web class follow-up, all of it. But I'm fully committing, no matter what, we're going to do this. And so I committed to doing it. Twice a month. So roughly, we started this in around February or so. I was going to run about 20 of these in 2024. Fast forward to now, and I'm actually going to end up running, I think, 36. So I've added in— later in the year, we're adding to starting to do them weekly. Think about how big of a shift that was. I do— I did 4 or 5 of them. I gave up on it, lost a little bit of confidence. And so I shut it down, only to come back to it 9 months later with a completely refreshed, different frame of mind, more of one like the stonecutter's credo. Credo: when nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps 100 times without as much of a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, It will split into two. And I know it was not that blow, but all that had gone before. The first times that I did the web class, 25 slides, 26 slides. It's now 95 slides, I believe. And not that slide count is indicative of quality, but it is indicative. It gets better, it gets better, it gets better every single time I do it. And so now I look at that And so when we have one, we think, here's our target, here's our numbers, this is what we're going to do. This is the thing that we're going to continue to hammer away at without a loss in confidence. Even if there are times that we run the web class and I don't see a crack in the stone. Sometimes we do. In fact, oftentimes now we do. But there were so many other times before Nothing. Crickets. No one showed up. In fact, early in 2023, I had times where nobody showed up. And so what did I do? I did it. I actually did it anyway to try to get myself better. But was I committed, really committed to it? No. But I've tried to do it. I tried to do it, went through it, wasn't as good. And then, but really it came until, you know, it took 9 months later for me to come back with it with a much different frame of reference to say, no, this is the way and we're going to continue to do this no matter what, for as long as it takes for it to become there. And so I just give that as an example, both again, one that I wasn't doing really well with and in the way that I thought about it, and then one that has made ultimately all the difference in the world for us. And it is one of the main ways. Matter of fact, Many of you have maybe even attended one of the web classes that we had. If you have attended, we've had people who attend some of the web classes a couple times, and if you do, you'll see that they're always slightly different because I do them live. And my hope is that they get better every single time. As David, a friend and client and coach, says, you know, you make a click forward. Well, you do 37 of them in a year as opposed to doing 20 of them a year. That's 37 more opportunities to have a click forward. And again, as Hormozi says, volume negates luck. So let me read this to you one more time, because maybe there's something that you're struggling with that you're losing a little bit of your confidence on. You're getting tired of hitting the marble, hitting the rock. And hopefully this gives you a little bit of wind in your sails, a little wind at your back, so to speak, to continue forward and to not give in. When nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps 100 times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the 101st blow, it will split in two. And I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. Jacob Reese. One last one. As I was reading that, I just had something pop in my head. It's similar to the flywheel concept that we got from Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. And you push on the flywheel and you push on the flywheel and you push on the flywheel and you can barely get the thing to move. In fact, probably even should have had that pull it up here to kind of read that section of the book. But if you've not read that book, it's obviously an all-time great— matter of fact, I might even go back and reread that book because it's been a while since I've completed it. Neither here nor there. He then says, if somebody walks up and says, what was the one big push that you made? And the reality is, you know, as well as anyone else, or you, you know, inside, they don't know. That it was not one big push. It was all of the small pushes compounded upon one another that ultimately got the job done. Hope that served you well. Till next time, lead well.