The Knowing Show with Adam Spector

we need to stop wasting our time, wasting our life, and actually living with and by intelligent design. And I am so privileged to be joined here by Adam Spector. Y'all, he is the CEO of Tour. He is also successful, uh, exit of many businesses. I believe it was 4, Adam. And then you're also an angel investor of over 200 startups. So y'all, he, he surely has mastered this himself, and I'm just so thrilled to have him here to talk about this. especially as we head into the holiday season. So often everyone else is running our life for us during this time. And so really this analyzation and audit of how are we spending every moment of every day over the holiday season heading into 2026. Let's take our life back. Adam, thank you for joining us.

Christine, it is great to be here. And I would say I'm definitely not an expert at this. I'm learning every single moment. So I have much further to go. But yes, and I appreciate it. Yeah. And I founded 4 different companies. I've invested in over 200 companies. I run my own podcast, as you know well, the Entrepreneurial Excellence Podcast. So just about what does it mean to be a great entrepreneur. And it's great to be here with you today.

So great to have you. Adam, the Excellence Entrepreneurial Podcast, you know, there's something around excellence. There's something around truly pursuing greatness. And you really, I think, the more that I've talked to you, the more that I've studied your bio and just the way that you talk and show up online, there is a higher level of expectation that you have for yourself, not just in what you pursue, but how you pursue it. I mean, it's reflected in your company and the way that you all serve startups is, hey, we'll handle everything on the back end to free the entrepreneur so that they can spend their time doing what it is that they're called to do, that they're best at, their zone of genius. So where and how did you really kind of stumble into freedom yourself? Oh,

that's a great question. I'm not even sure. I think it was a gradual evolution for me around the idea of saying like, hey, like my time— our life is so short, right? I mean, if you think about it, if you're lucky, you have 80 years on planet Earth, maybe 100 if you get really lucky. That's a teeny tiny short period of time. I mean, like in 100 years, how much will the world change? It will change a lot actually in 100 years. In the grand scheme of things, it's a teeny tiny amount. I mean, we are— have barely— 100 years ago, where was humanity and society, and where are we going to be in the future? Yeah. The amount you can do in that time period is relatively small. As I've grown, started having kids, started thinking through where I wanted to spend my time and what I wanted to do, I more and more started questioning, What was the best use of my time, and how do I want to make the most of it? And so what does that come out to be? What does it actually mean is that I constantly try to reevaluate where I'm spending that time. What am I doing with it? Like, am I doing only things that I love, only things that only I can do, only things that will have clear high ROI for the people I work with and for my family, friends, and everyone else? So I've kind of architected my life in a way that. Enables me to do the highest ROI activities and not let other people dictate what I do instead.

I love that. So effectively, in the evaluation of your life, those core questions: what are things only I can do? What are things that have the highest ROI? And when you say highest ROI, is it return on your time? Is that when you think of return on your investment? Is your investment time? Is that kind of how you

think Essentially, yes. The thing is, people think of ROI as an investment idea, where say, look, I invest $1 today, my hope is it's going to be worth $10 in the future. But people don't think of that with their time, which is stupid. It actually should be that way. You're always making this compounding investment with what you do. For me, if I spend every second more that I spend with my kids is compounding over time and hopefully making me a better father, a better parent, better spouse, all those other things. Same thing with my company, though. Every minute I spend working on my company doing things that are directly correlated to what we do at Chore, my company's name is Chore, we do back office work for founders. We run the entire operations so they can go back to doing what they do best. The whole idea there is when I spend time on Chore, I'm compounding my knowledge, making my company better, but I'm not doing that by doing the Things that don't kind of relate to Tor, and I can kind of explain that more. But like, I try to do things that only I can do. So being with you here today, only I can do. I can't delegate that. But that also helps me further my relationships and friendships, and hopefully we can build a relationship and help each other overall in time too, with, you know, in all these different ways. And so doing things that have a return on investment from a time perspective, um, lead to sort of financial returns too. But overall, It's a— it's all about where can I spend, where can I invest my time, energy in the best ways to have the longest life return?

Yes. Oh, I love that, life return. And that's something where you were talking about time with your children. You know, I just almost visually saw the compounding effect of when they're adults. You know, you're gonna have something so strong and so solid. And honestly, when we think about investing in our kids, it's also for our own end-of-life investment as well. Like, that's when we see the greatest return is when we need them the most. And if we've given to them when they need us the most, there's going to be something left in the bank for us at the end of our life. So I love like the longest life investment. That's so, so, so good. And when you think about it, where does vision come into that? Where does even having clarity of the legacy that you want to create— how, how does The decisions we make today relate to the kind of that end goal. When you think of your life investment, how, how much clarity do you actually need to have on the end of my life? I want to be here. How much does that drive the today?

Yeah, I mean, it drives it a decent amount in, in the sense that, like, I'll give you an example. It's going to— using the kid, my kids as an example, since it's very early here in the Pacific, um, uh, side of things, not quite Northwest. I mean, San Francisco, but it's early. And so my kids are downstairs. I hear them. But like, I work from home, right? So I've architected Shore, my company, to be a fully remote company. The reason I've done that is because— a bunch of reasons. One, I think it's actually by far the best way to build a company. We can have a discussion about that in general. But it also means like, I get to be— I work from home. I get to be here every morning with my kids. I'm here every night they come home. I don't travel very much for work, so I'm not letting other people dictate where I should be, when I should be there, what I need to do. I get to be here for them. And do that. Now, yes, sometimes I have to travel for work, but it's pretty rare. And so I literally get to be here for them on a regular basis, but it also means I can be efficient and here for my team, right? Instead of me being stuck in traffic every day, having to go into an office, all these things, I could instead be doing all my work for Chor. Like, it's all here in front of my screens right now. And that enables me to be available, be here to compound the value I'm providing to my team. By using my limited time in a smart way. And what I mean, maybe to reiterate that point a bit, the time that we're spending right now, Christine, I'm never gonna get that back. You're never gonna get that back. This is time that is disappearing from our lives. So there's a famous book called 4,000, I think 4,000, maybe not famous, but like 4,000 Weeks, I believe the name, right? We've about 4,000 weeks total in our lives.

Wow.

4,000 weeks. Not very much when you think of it that way. And so every minute that I spend, I need to think, is this a high leverage, high value thing that I'm doing? Because that time's never coming back. And so my hope is that my time with you is gonna compound and provide value to others out there. Yeah. And they can grow and change. And yes, I hope it helps Chor in a small way too and helps my company because people realize I don't wanna waste time in back office work, so they'll come use us. But in the end, like, These are all things that I think are really valuable. And then it helps me also say no to things that are not valuable. So in other words, the power of saying no, I'm not going to do that because it's not worthwhile, is just as critical.

How much time would you say, given all the startups that you are working with through Chor, how much time is being wasted by the average entrepreneur?

Oh my gosh, so much. I mean, so much in so many different ways. When it comes to specifics, like specifics that we deal with, back office work. So essentially Chor runs HR, finance, compliance, and equity, essentially all the back office tasks that you need to do to run your business. On average, we see a founder, essentially founders doing this work because we work with small businesses, wasting about 10 to 20 hours a month on that work. Right. So that's a huge amount of hours. So you're talking 200, 300, 400 hours a year doing that, which is like a few months of extra work time. And the crazy thing about that, I actually— one, think of all that extra time you could be using to build your business. Yes. But 2, what I actually view a lot of back office work as being like, it's a little bit like— and this ties into the larger message here. It's a little bit like using social media. TikTok provides zero life value for 99.9% of people. It provides value for the people who are creating content and making money off TikTok. Good for them. But for the large majority of people who are just watching things on social media, It's not providing any life value. You're essentially— it's like a small dopamine hit every time you flip to a new video or something. Right. Back office work is the same way. What I mean by that is, as a founder, you're like, oh, I paid this bill. I took care of this invoice. I helped pay my taxes. I did my own books. These are like mini business dopamine hits where you're like, oh, I did something good. But you actually didn't push your business forward. In other words, like, if I told you, Christine, I'd say, hey, Christine, you can spend an hour doing your books right now, and you're going to save $250 for a cheap bookkeeper. Bookkeeper's not expensive. And you'd be like, well, I could save $250 and spend an hour doing that myself. Or you could spend that same hour with your friends, with your family, or doing something that's going to push your business forward. Which would you choose?

Right. The latter.

Right. Everyone would, but most people don't actually do it. It's the same sort of thing. Well, but then I would say the same thing with social media. Like, it's the same sort of thing. It was like the latter. But instead, but instead you end up going to social media instead of reading a good book or reading an article that'll help you learn and become better at your job. All those sorts of things. It's the same thing with businesses. They're saying, hey, I want to save— I saved $250, but I lost an hour. I should be reinvesting that hour into actually pushing my business forward. Like, what can I do to move my business forward? And this is where founders get misaligned and don't realize, like, a proper investment is building your business, doing what only you can do, what is your superpower. And instead they get distracted by all these small little things that they don't need to be doing and shouldn't be doing.

It's such a good point around, do we even have the proper definition of investment in and of itself? And do we even have a proper understanding of the role of CEO or owner? You know, and, and a lot, for a lot of startups, they have to be the operator, but operator does not mean bookkeeper. It doesn't mean doing all the back office stuff. And so to that point, you know, what are the core tenets of being a successful operator in a business?

Yeah, I mean, look, the core tenets of being a successful operator are essentially delegation is probably the number one thing. How quickly can you hand off work to other people so that you can get back to doing what you do best? And I'm not perfect, to be clear. Like, I say this, I'm not perfect at it, but I've done a pretty good job. Like, I just got back from a trip to India, and guess what? During that trip, Nothing broke in my business. Everything kept running. There were a few small things that popped up. Most of it said, I didn't need to go do it. I didn't need to deal with it. I've handed a lot of things to my EA. I have a lot of great teammates who I can hand things to. What most founders think is like, oh, I don't have time to do that, or I can't afford to do that, which is completely not true. The moment you essentially get past the fact you have 1 or 2 customers and you're making real revenue, You should find ways to start handing things off to other people on your team, because what you should be doing as a founder, what I do as a founder, is I focus deeply on our product at Shore, and I focus deeply on getting sales and new customers, which are 2 things that I'm good at. Everything else I hand to everyone else on my team. So another example, we decided to buy new computers for our team this year. The large majority of that work, I could have done it myself. It's kind of fun. I get to go shopping to go do that. I handed the large, large majority of that to my teammate who runs operations for Chor, and I said, you take care of it, get laptops to everybody, track it, make sure reimbursements happen, and deal with it.

Right

now the team gets new computers. I could have done that myself. It's kind of enjoyable, but like, why do it? It's not a good use of my time.

Well, and back to the very opening questions that you asked yourself as kind of a self-audit. Is this something only I can do? Because that should be one of the key drivers for the decisions we make of how to spend our time. It's almost like— so Viktor Frankl, he wrote the book Man's Search for Meaning while he was in the German concentration camp. And there's this infamous quote, between stimulus and response is choice. So it's almost when there's a stimulus of something needs to be done, that space, that choice that we make needs to have a filtering system, effectively a criteria To then inform our response. And so one of those questions should be, is this something only I can do? And then the second question that you posed is, is this actually going to have the highest return on investment in terms of my life's investment, like the actual place that I want to get to? And so what that does is that we need to be clear about what we want on every level of analysis. Financially, what do we want there? What do we want for our family? What kind of relationships do we want with our spouse? Where do we want to take the business? Because otherwise, if we don't have clarity on where we're headed, it's going to be really hard to define, is this worthy of the investment now?

Correct. I think a lot of people don't have a clear idea of where they're headed, even entrepreneurs. A lot of entrepreneurs, they start a company. I'm in Silicon Valley, so a lot of companies out here are venture-backed, they raise money. Even then, I find a huge number of founders who don't really know where they're headed and what they want to do. An example I like to use, unfortunately for this person, but it's impossible to figure out who they are. I met with the founder. They'd been building their business for 6 years. Startup business, they're trying to grow fast, everything else. This founder had worked at McKinsey, right? So they had been a very senior person at McKinsey, very successful, started this startup because they had this idea that they thought only they could do. All for it. Great. He then said to me, he's like, literally, I've been doing my own books for the past 6 years. I said to him, you're crazy. Then he was like, oh, and it was a conversation like, hey, do you think I can fundraise? In my business, we're getting to Series A metrics. I think I can go fundraise. I basically told him, I was like, there's zero chance you will fundraise because no one's going to back a 6-year-old company that took you 6 years to get to Series A metrics. The point being, he was wasting time. For 6 years. And he said— and I asked him, why are you doing your own books? He said, I know how to do my own book, so I did it. It's like,

yeah,

just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you should go do it. Like, I know how to— I'm trying to think of like some example. I know, you know, I know, I know how to dig a hole for like a new tree or something. That doesn't mean I should go do my own gardening every day. Like, sometimes it's fun. Yeah. There may be physical reasons why I want to relax because I want to go garden, but A lot of the time it doesn't make sense to go do that just because I know how to dig a hole. Like, there are other people who are better at digging holes than I am.

Right.

Or another example might be I could go build my own servers to run my software, which is what people used to do 15 years ago, right? You would go build your servers in your garage. But now I go outsource it to Amazon Web Services, right? AWS. Because guess what? Amazon is better. They have a comparative advantage. at running a server. I can go outsource my servers to Amazon and let them do that so I can get back to doing what I do best. This is what everyone should be thinking. It's like, what is my comparative advantage to other people and other businesses? That comparative advantage is how you will succeed. You should focus on that and nothing else. Once again, this guy who spent 6 years doing his own books, What did all that time that he missed out on building his business, getting more customers, having those customer conversations, or in his case, he had kids too, spending that extra hour that he spent probably every month— Right. With his kids, what would have been better? Would it be worth— to me, maybe this sounds rich, I'd pay $250 to have an extra hour with my kids every month. That's an easy, easy thing for me to do, especially when it comes to something that I'm not great at doing. I can do my own books. I'm not great at doing my own books. We have people on my team who are great at doing books.

Right. Well, and Adam, that's actually— that could be very costly down the road. I'm glad you're using books as an example because that is something where it's, it's easy to make that choice, but with potentially big ramifications on the other side. So it's not just the $250 you're saving, but could it actually end up costing you way more than the $250 you would spend monthly For improper tracking. So the actual cost of the risk could be huge as well.

Well, this is exactly right, Christine. It's the long-term cost of this compounding where you're wasting this time, where you could instead be spending this time on things that actually compound to value for your business or for your life or for your family. And those are always the questions that I want to be asking. It's sort of the same thing. It's like when I go decide to watch a TV show, Or something. Is that compounding in a positive way to my life? It might be like sometimes it's good to have a break and take a break and go watch a TV show or read a book or things like that. But I'm also saying like, hey, is that— is it— should I be looking at my phone right now instead of spending that time with my kids? Or should I be spending— there's all these ways you decide where do I want to spend my time that will compound to a valuable long-term future.

Mm-hmm.

And the large majority of things that many people decide to do actually Provide no long-term value. You're not going to remember it in 10, probably in a year, probably let alone a week later, let alone 10 years from now. Whereas I like to think the time I'm spending with my company and what we're building, I'm going to remember. And I don't want to have any regrets and look back and be like, oh, I didn't spend my time properly building the business.

This is so important, Adam. I want to ask you, you know, when I think about people having to choose to put this down, Obviously, this is addictive. Why are people having such a hard time knowing how to spend their time in terms of the business decisions?

I mean, I think because people— it's easier to be distracted by everything else. So using this guy as an example from McKinsey, it's easier for him to be distracted by doing his books than have a hard conversation with himself about whether his business is the right business to even be building. Right. You can say, I want to spend— I'm going to keep my business alive a little bit longer because I save $250 every month on bookkeeping. But not spend that time saying, should I even be building this business in the first place? It's a distraction. Just like, why do people go on social media? Why do they drink too much and have a hangover the next day? Yes. All these sorts of things, because you want to distract yourself from the hard decisions and hard choices and push those off. And that's why people do it. That's why people get distracted by their phones and everything else that comes up is because You don't want to have that tough decision in discussion with yourself.

I really— that's so good. And there's something about the avoidance of just even discomfort of sitting with all of a sudden it's like, okay, I'm sitting, I don't know what to do right now. Well, there's a really long to-do list that you could tackle, but it's easy to just do the thing that's right ahead of you. And like, right, it's almost easier to just I'm just trying to think of kind of the analogy of this because I know for every single one of us, we have a really long to-do list, you know, so it's like, well, why do we do the bookkeeping when there's all these other things that are of more value of your time? And so it's a distraction, yes, and I wonder if it's almost the instant dopamine hit rather than going to that thing where you kind of have the discomfort of I don't really know how to go about it exactly, but only I can do it. It's effectively like when you have to call the IRS, you know, only you can do that, but it could take a while and you don't really know what it's going to be like, but you know how to do this other thing that is not— anybody can do it, but it's reliable. And I think that there's comfort and certainty. So if you have the comfort of, let me just do this really quickly, and it is that distraction and quick dopamine hit rather than the uncertainty of other tasks that truly only you can do. And, you know, there's even uncertainty when we engage with our family. Is our kid going to be in a bad mood? Is our partner going to be having a bad day? So there's even an element of comfort in staying in the office longer. And so if we can learn how to sit with the discomfort of not exactly knowing what will happen or what will unfold once we actually start going down this road and drop the distraction, I wonder how much— have you seen that much with With entrepreneurs you've worked with, where it's almost choosing the road that's more traveled because there's comfort in certainty?

Yeah, always. I mean, this is, I think, why a lot of companies fail is because they are— the founders are— look, we are animals. And so we're, in many cases, we're fear-based in that sense. Like, we are making decisions based on fear. And it's scary to make the tough decisions. It's scary to say my company might be failing. It's scary to say I might be failing and making the wrong decisions and not moving fast enough with the decisions that I'm making. That's scary. And so people are fearful and they don't make the tough decisions and they end up failing. And they blame, of course, lots of other people. We can talk about what that looks like too, but those things all happen. So yeah.

That's so good. I was talking with the former president of Jiffy Lube and asked him, what's the number one thing you did to get the company to be a national brand? And he said, I dedicate 8 hours every week, 2 weeks to just be, to look at my business, analyze it, take a top-down approach. And that's really uncomfortable for those of us who don't know how to be and because our worth is predicated in what we do. So there's almost this deep subconscious value system that we hold that really can prevent us from allowing the space in our schedule to to do the only thing that we can do and also create. You know, there's real value in creation. Brand equity is probably one of the greatest investments we can make in 2026, but that's predicated in you actually going and doing the work to create and also creating something of origin to you, something authentic to who you are. But you actually have to have something interesting to say, and that requires going inward and doing that, that work.

Correct. And actually, that's a great example with the Jiffy Lube president, in a sense that so many founders are so deeply embedded in every aspect of their companies, they don't have time to actually get out and think through how they can build it. So I'm sure you have lots of friends who are like this, where they're like, I'm so busy. I have so many— I have huge email inbox. It's filled with emails. And I have a million messages on Slack. And I have nonstop meetings. And I don't have time for anything. And it's like, well, actually, to me, that sounds like you're a founder who hasn't planned anything at all. You're the center of— you were the massive breakpoint in the center of everything at your company. You have not been able to delegate to anyone. You don't trust anyone. You need to make every decision, and you are holding your company back. It's like, if you were the center of every decision, why are you hiring all these people who are theoretically smart and great at what they do if you cannot trust them to do their jobs? And that's why, once again, companies fail. It's like, I shouldn't be. I was gone in India for almost 12 days. I shouldn't be a blocker to anything. And I wasn't. It was great. Yeah, I checked once a day. I checked what was going on and my phone was on. I could see what's happening. No one needed to ping me for any major decisions. It was great. It was such a relief to have that time and ability because I wasn't the center of the business. I'm here to make smart strategic decisions to grow us. And then it gives me the time and space to do what that Jiffy Lube president does. Like, hey, what's our strategic vision for next year? Where are we going? What are the big decisions that only I can make? And I need time to think through those.

And it really requires a long amount of time because there's something about the almost the disassociating from the chaos. and kind of slowing our literal minds down enough to get to that point of being able to be creative and really dream. It's almost like, okay, let me disconnect from all the problems and the distraction there. So I really, really appreciate that. And I think for every single person listening, if we have not taken that time, or it's not scheduled through the end of the year, and I would even say through the first 2 weeks of January, you know, I'm hosting a Knowing Retreat January 8th through 11th. So it's not too late to still do it then where it's like, okay, that's are 4 days for founders who are coming, and we're just dedicating that time to visioning for 2026 and also identifying who do we need to be to get to that next level of our business. You know, I was speaking with a gentleman, he's got, you know, a couple million dollar business, and, and when he got from the point of, okay, I want to move from 5 employees to 50 employees, what needs to break in my business and actually die in order to then create something So there— so that's where, man, we actually really need that space to observe what needs to have the death come in. And what does it look like to have it die? What's the actual process of that? Because to break it open and then instill something new, there's habits that need to change, mindsets that need to change, systems that need to change. And so to that point, Adam, when you're really helping people get to that next level— level, you know, I'm thinking about the core system that is kind of coming first. You said almost the mindset and the skill that they need is delegation. That's number one for every owner-operator. But then number 2, what's the system, the number one system that they need to put in place?

I mean, number one system, let me think about that for a second. I would say sort of number one system in a sense is like, Being— once again, going back to delegation to a large extent, but, but trusting the people that you have. And then if you need to, putting in place reports. So saying, hey, look, I want like a weekly report on what you're doing, right? If you have trouble with trust, be like, I want a report on what you're up to, what's happening, when it's happening, what's your timeframe. And then put in a repeatable action plan for that sort of work they're doing. So at Chore, we have tons of standard operating procedures, so SOPs. Almost everything we have is an SOP prebuilt when it's due, what's happening, when it needs to occur. And we track that on a regular basis. So we really try to systematize our own business so that hopefully we can systematize things for our customers as well. Right. We kind of feel like we need to start with our own work. We need to be— it's sort of to use a personal one, like I need to be good. I need to figure my own self out. Right? If I don't know who I am as an individual, I'm not going to be a good founder or leader for my team. If I can't show up every day being great for them as an individual, then I can't be a great leader either. And it's kind of the same thing. So I have a lot of systems in place for my life and how I want to run it and what I want to do. Yeah. And that's just, I think, leads to better health, better sleep, better energy, all the key things you need to have to be great In every aspect of your life.

I love being great in every aspect of your life. Harkening back to your podcast, um, excellent. What's the Entrepreneurial Excellence?

Entrepreneurial Excellence. Yes. Every day trying to be a great entrepreneur. And what does it take to be a great entrepreneur? What does that entail? And that's the question that I keep asking myself. Like, I'm, I'm a good entrepreneur. I don't know if I'm great yet. Um, and I have a long way to go to become great. But once again, the really great ones out there are the ones that are relentless in their delegation. An example that I use a lot on that front, forget his politics for a minute, but Elon Musk, when it comes to being an entrepreneur, is really such an impressive figure, right? When you talked, if you imagine having a conversation with Elon Musk, what do you think he would say if his head of HR came into him for Tesla and was like, hey, do you think we should use payroll system A or payroll system B? Now, to be clear, most small businesses, that's a question your head of HR would probably come ask you. Elon Musk would probably fire that person, would literally say, get out of my office. I'm trying to get to Mars, and I'm trying to replace gasoline so we don't destroy our planet. Why are you asking me which payroll? I don't have any idea which payroll system is better. Why are you wasting my time and trying to cover your ass doing that? Like, pardon my English.

Yeah.

That's what he would do, right? He's like, I'm running 5 companies. Why are you wasting my time? It should be exactly the same with every founder. You should be the same way. Is it relevant for me to figure out the best payroll provider and make a decision? I don't have the knowledge. I don't have the information. I have delegated that to my head of HR, and they will go figure it out. I don't care. Just get it done. Yes. I need to build my business.

Adam, I'm curious your thoughts on this. You know, I think that we hear a lot around delegation to, you know, lower junior staff folks, even offshore folks. However, it's hard to trust apart from extensive training. And what you just said, it's— he's, you know, you're delegating to your head of HR or whoever, whoever that head is. And man, how much more powerful is it to hire laterally, perhaps early on in your startup. It might be more expensive, but you can also do fractional. I'm curious about your perspective there because, man, then you really can do a true handoff. You're done. You're not touching that thing.

So, so I, I would say that people need to be far more open to delegating things, sort of trust but verify. And really quickly. Yeah. Basically, what I found is people globally, doesn't matter what country or where in the world, are really smart. If you give them the opportunity to work hard and do well and the trust to say, hey, look, you have to be clear, my goal, I want you to accomplish X. Give them the opportunity to do X, most people will step up and do it. Now, sure, you start small, and then as they do X and do successful with X, you move them to Y, and so on and so forth, and you keep growing it. But if you don't give people the opportunity to step up and be great at what they do and trust them, they're— you're never going to get to a point where they actually can do that work. And in fact, you will hobble their ability to do great work. You actually hurt them because they will get to a point where, like that hypothetical head of HR that I just mentioned, They will think, I need to run every decision by Christine, run it by Adam, or run it by Elon Musk, because they will think, I'm not allowed to make a decision. I don't have that trust of this person to make it a smart decision. So then once again, you as the CEO become the bottleneck instead of getting stuff out of your way.

Good. So start small with the delegation. It doesn't matter their rank or title necessarily. It's all about whether They have effectively proven that you can trust them. And I think with proving trust— yeah, go ahead, please.

I was gonna say, theoretically, you've hired someone smart, right? Like, I'm gonna just make a simple statement, I hope. If you've hired someone, you think they're smart and good at what they do.

Yeah,

right. Like, that's just a baseline assumption when you hire someone, is either they theoretically know how to do that job, right? Okay, let them do the job. Like, go, go figure this out. I've hired you to do my, my human resources work for me. Go do it. And yeah, if you mess up, like that's going to be a problem, but there are lots of ways to mitigate that. Hopefully you come back and say, I've learned here's where I made the error. Here's what I should have done differently. Okay, great. But like I hired you because you're smart. So go do your job and I'm going to trust you as a professional to get that done. So I can, I've hired you so I don't have to go do that anymore.

Trust is so important, Adam. And even as you're talking, I just had this thought, you know, we're not. If you're running, wanting to run your business, you have to run the people. Like, if you want to do a startup, like you mentioned your friend from McKinsey, maybe you're actually, maybe you're a solopreneur. Maybe you, you know, if you want to have a full-fledged big business, we have to learn how to trust people. We have to know how to hire people. You know, the people game is a real one that we really don't spend a lot of time discussing and much less cultivating. You know, if we can't— you said this— if the quality of who we are internally is a reflection in the quality of how we show up with our team and our ability to lead. And so, if we ourselves have not done the work to really establish emotional intelligence internally, it's going to be very hard to engage with the intelligence on the emotional side with other people. And that emotional intelligence gives us insight into whether we're hiring the right people to begin with. So that cultivation is really key to establish the type of leadership styles necessary for 2026.

Totally. Well, look, it's the 2 key things I would say. If there's a goal for 2026, it's sort of trust, number one, and trust the people you hire. But number 2 is focus. And once again, it goes back to that idea of like, you should be laser focused on what is actually going to move your business forward, delegate and outsource everything else. And that should be the 2 key things that people spend time on is what are you going to do that's going to drive the business forward? Once again, so many businesses fail and they say, oh, I failed because of X, Y, and Z. They probably failed because they didn't actually spend enough time working on the business. Maybe they spent time in the business and getting distracted by things, or they just got distracted by a million other things in their lives. And they said, oh, I spent too much time watching TV instead of being focused on learning how to use AI the right way. And yeah, how does it— like, you know, speaking of hiring, it's like maybe you don't need to hire these people because you can go use AI to go do it. But like, you didn't spend time focusing on that. You instead got distracted by TikTok or, or whatever your dopamine choice is.

Whatever your dopamine choice is. Isn't that the truth? And your dopamine choice could be the tasks that you need to delegate.

You know, they probably are. I mean, like, it pisses— every day I'm thinking, I mean, you know, and part of this sort of holiday special that you and I are doing right now, um, is, you know, we talked originally about the idea of, you know, like Black Friday and all the shopping people were doing this holiday. Mm-hmm. Um, and I found myself thinking a lot about this where I'm like, I bought very little this holiday season, um, because I was like, I don't— one, I don't need a lot. So I feel very privileged in that sense. Like, there's just not— I don't feel the urge anymore to buy a lot of things. But even more than that, um, the amount savings that I'd get by getting a deal and searching for that deal and tracking it and waiting to get this deal and then trying to find the best one. I was like, why am I wasting my time doing this instead of once again spending with my kids or helping to build my business? Does that $20 I saved on that deal— yeah, $20 is $20 and I get it and that's important, but is it better than spending that time building my business where instead of that 20 minutes I spent to save $20, I can spend those 20 minutes in my business, which is going to make me more money actually long-term than the $20 I saved. Yeah. I kept saying, what am I wasting my time? Why am I doing this? Who cares? Sure, I'll go buy that thing in 6 months when I actually need it. Yeah, it's going to be $20 more, but one, I saved the money instead of getting it at some deal today, but two, Like, I don't— I can wait until I need it immediately and go get it

and

be done and then move on. Because like, I don't need to play this game of wasting my time shopping for things when I should be spending time building things.

So good, Adam. I, I'm so glad you brought that up because I— with us leaving, kind of bringing this to a conclusion, asking why, why am I doing this? It just having that be a constant barometer and like a temperature check. Like, am I in alignment? Come back. Why am I doing this? Nope, come back. Why am I doing— come back. And so getting clear on what we want for our business, for ultimately our lives and our relationships, and then asking why of how we're spending our time. A calendar audit was encouraged to me 2 years ago, and that was really, really helpful. And frankly, I realized how much— and Google Meeting actually, or Google Calendar rather, will say How many, on average, how many hours of our time we spend in meetings each week. And that's a good, that's a good mirror.

I didn't know that. That's actually really cool. And yeah, no, I've done, I've done a calendar audit myself. And at Shore, by the way, one of the things we do is we have very few meetings. So like we literally, internal meetings at Shore, I think we have about 2 hours on average a week of internal meetings total.

Really? Wow. Good for you.

Yeah. It's not, it's pointless. I love it. Like, because what is people's time worth and are we spending it the right way? And so we've cut essentially all these meetings. I don't wanna be there for these meetings. I, if I don't wanna be there, I'm sure other people don't wanna be there. Um, we require very few. So like cut them out. Just stop going to these meetings. Stop wasting your time in them. Once again, only do the things that only you can do.

Mm-hmm.

And same thing with your teammates. Have them focus.

Only do the things you can do. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. So, so, so grateful for you, my friend, and Merry Christmas.

You too, Christine.

Y'all, thank you so much for joining us on The Knowing Show. I will see you next time.