Priority is not Plural

Business brain, episode 570 for Casual Friday, August 2nd, International Beer Day. Cheers to that. 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take a few ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we analyze them, we discuss them so that we can each tune our business brains to be a little bit better every single episode. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out here in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man? Happy Friday.

Happy Friday. Happy International Beer Day. I don't know if that means you can't drink domestic beer today.

I was going to say I don't.

Know what the deal is.

Yeah, it's okay. I can handle either way. No problem.

Yeah, same, same.

Hard for me to find a beer I don't enjoy, so. Could be. Yeah, could be domestic. Yeah.

It is an interesting thing, beer being a, like, it's an acqu. Taste. Most people don't like it the first time they taste it.

It's interesting, correct? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I would just say, I joke around and say, well, if, if Coca Cola made you feel like beer does, more people would drink six pack of coke at a time. Right. But it doesn't.

It doesn't. You know, it used to, though. I mean, well, yes, it used to have cocaine in it, so it didn't make you feel like beer does. It made you feel different, but that's a different thing. Anyway.

That's crazy.

Parents. Ask your kids.

Yeah, I want to. I listened to this podcast, which I really like. It's called the Founders Podcast. I think it's David Sienna Senna or something like that. But it's great, great show. Highly recommend it. Basically, he breaks down books on founders and talks about, you know, lessons learned and that kind of thing. He's really good at it. And this episode I listened to this past weekend was about Sam Walton and Walmart. And one of the terms that really stuck out with me is when Sam was going around visiting stores that had opened up and he was trying to always try new things and do things. He came up with this phrase, what is your RC factor? To when he was talking to managers and employees. And that is what is their resistance to change factor.

Oh, yeah.

Which really struck me because we've talked about change a lot and how I, I always say the only constant is change. Nothing was, you know, what you're doing today not going to be the same a year from now, and so on and so forth. And so his, the, the reason he was pushing this when he would visit is because they were always trying to new ways to get people in the door. Whether it was, you know, a mule, a donkey in the parking lot when they first started out or free, free watermelon, whatever it is. He was like a, you know, a P.T. barnum type guy trying to get attention for his stores. And he found that people, you know, the more you pushed the often people just real, oh, I can't, you know, it's just too much change. We're not going to do it. And then especially as in this in the 70s when they started to, they made a half a billion dollar investment into computer systems.

Wow.

And once they started to have all this data, they found the same thing as people were very, their RC factor was very high. As they were.

It's the human condition, Right. It really is. We are, our minds are built to find shortcuts in things. And if you don't believe that, stop for a moment and think of all of the other things that are vying for your attention right now that you are able to ignore. Right. The wind across your skin, the. Any noise in the background, all of that stuff you've tuned out because you're listening to this. Right. That's. Our minds have to be able to do that stuff. But a byproduct of that, and sometimes a good one and sometimes a bad one, is that we get into patterns and we stay there and that causes us, among other things, to be change resistant.

Yeah, yeah. We're definitely pattern recognition robots, right?

Yes.

When I heard that, I immediately also thought about your concept where you get people to buy in by using the two week experiment framework.

Right, right, right.

And if you haven't heard that before on the show, basically it's Dave's concept that when he rolls something out that's new and he feels maybe people are going to resist a little bit, he'll say, hey, we want to try this two week experiment and see how everything works. Even if in his mind he goes, oh, this is the future, this is permanent. Yes, we are doing this. It eases folks in.

And if you don't think that that works on you, to bear with me and rewind yourself about four years and three and a half months. When we were told that we needed to lock down for two weeks.

Two weeks.

I knew when they said two weeks, I'm like, oh, this is a, this is going to be for a long time.

Yeah, yeah. It gets people. It's like the primrose path. We're just kind of winding you down. It's not going to be anything.

We're going to boil your frog.

Yep, exactly. The boiling frog thing. So, anyway, I thought that was kind of cool. And I'm going to definitely pick that RC factor up as part of my vocabulary because I think it's important.

I like that. I know. I, I, that's, it's a, it's a good thing to ask your team about, and it's a good thing to ask ourselves about, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely.

I was at, I mentioned. We told some stories about Max Stock, this conference I was at recently. Mike Schmitz, who is a fantastic podcaster, does a couple of great shows. He. Including one called Focused. He said something very interesting, and it was about the root of the word or the genesis, the origins of the word priority and the fact that it was never meant to be pluralized. Priority. The root of it means one. There is one thing. You get to pick a priority, and then nothing else can also be a priority. There's, there's only one top priority, and, and there is no secondary priority. Right. Like, it's not how that works.

It's not, what are your priorities?

Well, but that's the question we ask ourselves all the time. And when he said it, it was like, it blew my mind because I was like, a, he's right about the origin of the word, but B, he's also right about not. I certainly am incapable of having multiple priorities at once. There's always one thing that's more important than the others, and the distance, you know, the delta of importance between the first and second thing might be a huge gap at any given point in time, or it might be a very, very small gap, but it's there. And so this idea of not what are my priorities for the day, but what is my current priority? And asking that question every day or every month for your business, every quarter for your business. What, you know, this, this can be applied in, in ways and across different time spans. But being honest with ourselves and also honoring the root of that word, the basis of that word, the foundation of it. What's the priority? Right now? My priority is recording this show, and we're already in it. There is a topic that I know I came up with earlier today, and I did not write it down. And as this episode started, I was like, oh, my gosh, that was a great topic.

What was that?

What was it? What was it? And I had to stop myself and say, now is not the time for me to focus on trying to figure out what that was. I was trying to, okay, where Was I, when I thought of it, what was I doing? You know, all of those things that you kind of contextualize to try and jar my memory. It's like, wait, now that I'm doing this, that has become my priority, whether I wanted it to or not. And by the way, I didn't want it to. So I've forgotten about that now. I mean, clearly I haven't. But this is the priority. It has to be. Yeah.

It shows to also, you know, your actions express what that priority is, Right?

Totally.

So you could say one thing, but if you go, I mean, I have the total squirrel problem where I'm like, oh, today my priority is this. And then all of a sudden I go, you know, and I go sideways and I get involved in another project that's interesting to me. So I've learned that my priorities is, are to keep. Now, like I said, my priority at any one time is to keep my interest level as high as possible. I'm always looking for the thing that interests me the most. Always. I'm driven by it.

That's interesting. It's interesting that you, the way you framed that was that you are choosing for that to be your priority. But I think it could also be argued that you are simply recognizing that that will be your priority or whether you want it to be or not.

Yeah, right.

I mean, like, you know this about yourself, so you embrace it and you make sure that you've organized things so that you're not letting other things. You may hire people. Right. You know, you delegate systems, you develop.

Systems that offset that, that weakness that when, if I start to get bored, I know I'm going to go do something else.

Something else is going to find you. Yes.

It just happens. I just see it and I've done it for years and years. So having other people around you and, and starting companies, having employees, having people work for you, it gives you. In my life, it's given me the luxury of being able to do that and pop around to things that.

Yeah.

Interest me and that are entertaining to me or fun, if you will. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to do it any other way.

That's a really. I didn't expect this conversation to go here, which is why I love having these conversations this way. Obviously, there are certain things that may not capture our interest that do need to be a priority at any given point in time.

Oh yeah, of course.

But also sitting back and just observing, you know, focusing on that self awareness. What, what would be your default priority if you. At any given point in time and you've identified yours. That which, you know, captures your interest. Okay, great. Like now, you know, but now, you know, and you get to. You get to control that, hopefully, or at least control your life around that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, sometimes you're better at it than others.

Of course. Of course.

And. And it's. You have to have, like I said, those systems and resources around you to be able to, you know, have that luxury of doing most of the things, spending most of your time on things that interest you and that are challenging or you're learning more. And for me, you know, maybe they have a little bit of monetary reward attached to it.

Well, that. I think that interests you. I. And I know it's very much. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but there are some people that are not as motivated by, you know, making a business turn, a pot turn, positive cash flow. Right. Like, there are other. And there's nothing wrong with one or the other. It's just. It's just how we're wired. Right. And I'm the same way. If I, If I can have a business that's turning positive cash flow, that captures my attention. It's like, oh, yeah, how do we. How do we do this? Let's do more of this. What. What are. And like, all of those things. And when a business starts to sort of falter in that regard, if there's not something else very captivating about it. And I have experienced.

We've done it.

You and I have done it.

We did it with. Yeah.

But when that cash flow starts to kind of fall by the wayside, I get attracted to whatever else I've created that winds up pulling the cash in. And oftentimes, if I really want to be objective about it, I can say, well, business A started generating less cash flow because I was. I was focused on business B. Yeah, okay.

That's certainly. Yeah, certainly that's part of the process. And whether. I mean, it's easy to second guess it. I mean, I think for both of us, it worked out okay. But you.

Here we are.

Yeah, here we are. And it's just a different way to do it and a different framework to look at how you break down your day, what your priority at any one time is, and. And what your. Like I said, what's your actions? It's. It's all about what you do. I love the rubric of making money. It doesn't have to be a lot. I mean, Sunday night I got a alert on my phone. Somebody had just bought, you know, $69. They bought my Costco liquidation guide that I created up on Gumroad, and I was like, this is awesome. It's a huge victory for me. Right?

Yeah.

And, yeah, it's only $69, but I think, okay, now we're going to get 100 more people to buy that.

Yeah, you did it once. Now just figure out how to do it again. That's it.

How to scale it and all that stuff. So it's cool. I agree with you that priority is not plural, but you can rapidly deploy what the priority is.

Yeah. You can have a list of, okay, what's my current priority? And then what will my next three priorities be when I am able to, you know, finish with this one? What's the next one? Nothing wrong with that. Oh, no, yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah, if you it, you know, let us know what you think about this concept and priorities. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. We'd love to hear from you, share your thoughts, share your ideas or topics or questions that you'd like us to talk about on the show. Thanks for listening.

Yeah, thanks so much. Like he said, feedback at Business Brief Brain Show. Thanks for everything. Thanks for sharing the show with your favorite entrepreneur friend and keep living that charmed life. We will see you next week.