1 Question To Overcome Analysis Paralysis When Building A 7-Figure Brand

Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Great to have you. Thanks for hanging out with me. Hey, is this your first podcast of mine you've ever heard? If so, drop me a line. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran on Instagram. Just let me know. I'd like to hear from you. Thank you to all of you who have been listening for years. Today I'm going to chat with you about something that happened on a recent call inside the capitalism incubator. This is of course where I help entrepreneurs get clear on their vision, have a profitable launch and then build the foundation of a seven figure brand that they can sell. And there was a call in which I was talking about thinking about your exit. Now most of the entrepreneurs who are in the incubator are still moving toward their first million. There's a couple people who have crossed their million that million dollar mark. But most of the students are still working their way towards the first million. So it was early to talk about having an exit, it was early to be thinking about that. But I want the students who are in there to be thinking in this way because if you start to structure and think about and work towards the big payday you're going to have, and our goal is for all of our students to have an eight figure exit, have that be the target. Well, if you keeping that as the goal, you're going to make decisions and move forward in a way that aligns with that, that puts you in the best position to have that eight figure exit. If you're not planning for it, then you're lucky. If you get it right, you can guess your way there. But it doesn't happen as predictably as if you are planning for it and you are working to toward it. And that's what I wanted to chat with you about today because I was surprised while hosting this call that there were people in the group who despite being in the training and hearing me talk about this, had not thought about working towards that exit from the very beginning. And it makes sense that some people would get lost in confusion or doubt or uncertainty or a product launch doesn't go very well. And so we worked through a lot of this on this coaching call that we had. So I was really glad that this topic came up because it showed me that we need to be a little bit more direct about how important it is to set that target and start to move toward that target. Now while we were talking about this inside of the incubator, I noticed among some of the members, based on the Questions that were coming up, that there was some indecision, some analysis paralysis about what the best way was to move forward, about what the best decision to make, about the best marketing strategy or one person brought the best tagline for the brand. There was, I could sense that there was some uncertainty, some hesitation when making some decisions about moving forward in your business. And I finally kind of stopped the call and I said, hey, hang on everybody. Everybody just stop for a minute. I want to play a game. I want you to imagine for a second that God himself came down from heaven and entered into your room and looked you in the eye and said, you are on the right path. Everything that you're doing is exactly the right thing that you should be doing. And then he left. Now, if God himself told you that you were on the right path and you were doing everything right, would you be asking this question right now? Would you be wondering about what the best next thing is? Or would you just instinctively know if God himself told you, you are going to have a 50 million dollar exit three years from now, are you freaking out about this decision or do you just make the decision? The reason I asked this question is because.

There were comments or questions coming up from the students that were coming from a place of low confidence, of uncertainty. And when you're asking questions from that place, you're probably going to make uncertain decisions. Oftentimes when we're feeling uncertain or we're feeling scared or we're feeling doubtful, we look to data, we look to the marketplace, we look for validation from other people to justify the decision that we're going to make. And so in entrepreneur land, what this means is we look for the right product to sell, or in investor land, we look at should we buy Bitcoin or should we buy Coinbase stock or should we buy Tesla? And we look for what other people think is the right decision. Is the economy gonna go up? Is the economy gonna go down? What should we do and what do other people say is going to happen? Because there's safety in that. There's safety in trusting other people, safety in trusting numbers. But those rarely lead to the decisions that we feel most aligned with, meaning the decisions that reflect the business or the investment portfolio or the family that we want to have. A personal example, meaning in your personal life would be if you hop around wondering if this person's the one or this person's the one, or that person's the one versus just picking one and making them the one.

You'Re gonna hop around for a while and you're always going to be in this indecision. Sometimes it can be helpful to look at what other people are doing as a one data point about a suggestion of how you should move forward. Sometimes it can be helpful to look at data to justify what you are thinking about doing. But sometimes there is no right decision. There is just a decision to be made. A coach of mine once described it as choosing between chocolate and vanilla, and that I was beating myself up in my brain about losing vanilla by choosing chocolate instead of just picking a flavor and enjoying it. I was battling around in my head about what was the right flavor to choose. There's no right or wrong here, there's just a preference in how we move forward. And that same coach gave me another piece of advice that was really helpful, she told me. And if you decide differently later, that's not a mistake, it's simply another decision.

When I started this podcast, the very first episode all the way back in 2013 was about the five steps to freedom. They were decide, cut out, expand, invest and give in that order. Decide what you want, cut something out to create room for you to expand, invest long term, and then give from a state of abundance. The first step was always to decide. In order to have any progress, you have to just decide. And often we are hesitant to make decisions because of the fear of what we will give up or the fear of what we will lose. And this is why I asked that question on the incubator call. If God himself came down from heaven and told you you were making the right decisions, you were on the right path and you're gonna have a $50 million exit that was designed to give these students permission to just make decisions and if you get it wrong, you just decide something differently. I have so many people who apply for the incubator or write to me on Instagram or send me emails and and they're looking for feedback on something that I could tell them my opinion. But there's really not a problem here. There's just a decision to be made. I remember when I was in my mid teens reading a real estate book and I don't know if I've ever said this publicly that when I got into Internet marketing I got into it because I wanted to fund a real estate empire. I thought I was going to be a real estate investor before I became a full time entrepreneur and I was reading a bunch of real estate books and there was this one in particular that I really liked and the author's email address was at the back of the book And I wrote the author and I asked him, I said, I really liked your book, but could you please tell me what is the best strategy that I should just follow? Is it flipping houses? Is it buying them and renting it out? Is it wholesaling? Like, can you just tell me what the right route is? Now? The author never got back to me. This was, you know, this, this is the mind of a teenager who's looking for a path. But it didn't occur to me until I was living on my own that any of those strategies would have worked just fine. Any of them. You can be a multimillionaire doing any of them. You can be a full time investor, wholesaling houses or flipping houses, or buying them and renting them out, or buying apartments or just raising capital for people. They all work. All of them work. And in the same way, selling spatulas, which I throw mud at all the time on the podcast, you can make money selling spatulas. You can make money selling supplements or beauty or coffee. You can make money selling to horse trainers or new parents, or people getting fit, or people who eat organic food or yogis. You can make lots of money doing that. There's no right or wrong. There's just a decision to be made. So if God himself came down from heaven, came into your room and told you that you were on the right path, that you were gonna be successful, that you were gonna have a 50 million dollar payday three years from now, would you give yourself permission to just make that decision? Would you give yourself permission to more effortlessly decide what the next step is going to be? And of course, the pushback on something like this is very simply, but what if I get it wrong? What if something bad happens as a result of making this decision? And when you are thinking about that and when you are processing that, that impairs the ability to make any decision at all. Because now you are imagining the negative future that you are trying to avoid. And what most people will do then is they will now make decisions from a place of avoidance, avoidance of pain, rather than building what it is that they want. And so we kind of have to come back to, are you making a decision from a place of a wanted future, from what you've decided you want, or are you making those decisions from a place of an unwanted future? This is why that question of if God himself came down and told you you're gonna have a 50 million dollar exit, which is the wanted future, was so helpful for so many of these students. Because that presupposed that the wanted future was inevitable. The wanted future was in the bag. It was gonna happen. God himself told me so. And if that was the case, could you just get yourself to move forward and make those decisions? I like to play a game with myself when I am feeling stuck in inaction or if I am doubting myself, if I'm questioning what the right thing is. And I like to simply try on a belief. I like to just try on something and see how it feels. For example, if I really believed that, that I was going to be a billionaire, or if I really believed that she was the one, if I really believed that this project was going to work out exactly how I wanted, if I really believed that this investment was going to go spectacularly well, if I believed that, how would I see the world? And I like to try that on and just see how it feels and see what I would think about. I first did this about a year ago when the world was very uncertain. Everything was getting kind of crazy. I was feeling kind of afraid because of what was happening in the markets, what was happening on the streets, what was happening in the news. And I was feeling stuck and scared. And so I asked myself this question. What if I really believed that everything was going to work out and that the projects I have right now are exactly the right projects that I need to be focused on and that the world's conspiring for me? What if all this works out perfectly? And it took me a few minutes of sitting with that belief, I until I started to journal about how I could see how everything could work out. I could see how all the things were pointing to a bigger and a brighter and a better future. And it helped me to align all of the wacky things that were going on in my business and in my life with the state of the world. In fact, I might even say I never put this back, put this together until I'm reflecting on it now. But my 180 on crypto and blockchain technology happened around that time. I had been quite bearish on bitcoin in particular, saying it wasn't backed in anything and I didn't see the utility to it, when really I was just kind of avoiding the emerging trend that was happening. And if I ask myself the question, well, what if everything is conspiring for me? I can now see how everything that's emerging is here to support what I am trying to do, not trying to threaten what I am trying to do. Interesting. So I like to try on these beliefs just to see how I Would see the world how I would think about my life and my business. So if you really believed that you were on the right path, if you really believed that you were going to have a multimillion dollar exit, what decision would you make right now? How quickly would you make those decisions? If it didn't matter which decision you made, the result was still inevitable, what would you do? You know, it's interesting. I once played this game with food, something as very.

Very personal as food choices. And I started to kind of play this out of if I knew that I was going to be abundantly healthy, incredibly fit, have the body fat and the muscle mass that I ideally wanted, if I knew I was going to have that regardless of what I ate, what would I do? And the initial reaction is for me to say, well, of course I'm gonna go have a big bowl of ice cream. It's probably the first thing I'm gonna do. I'm put a bunch of peanut butter on it and I'm gonna just slather it in peanut butter if I do that. And I might do that once, might do it twice, but the truth is, if I know that the result of me being fit is inevitable, there is like this, for me anyway, this tenseness that goes away around food. There's no more voice in my head that says, can't eat that, can't eat that, don't do it. And the restriction is taken away and all of a sudden there's this space around it. And I want to stop eating when I'm full. And I don't want to eat late at night and go to bed comatose. And I don't want to eat stuff that makes me feel crappy. I want to eat things that make me feel good. I want to eat things that I enjoy and feel good all the time. I want to eat things that make my brain feel sharp. And all of a sudden I started to realize, oh, well, if I just thought that I'll probably make better food choices, which would lead me to the outcome that I decided was inevitable anyway, what if I really believed that I'd end up being a billionaire no matter what I did? What if God himself came down from heaven and said to me, you're gonna be a billionaire in five years no matter what you do. If I really believed that, if I really knew that, would I give myself permission to just do the things that I enjoy? Probably means that I'm not going to sit on the couch and numb myself out because I'm avoiding doing work that I don't enjoy. I would probably feel freed up to go do work that I do find meaningful, that I do find enjoyable. I would probably spend my time pursuing the things that I enjoy the most. And you know what I have discovered that leads to billion dollar ideas, billion dollar decisions, billion dollar partnerships, at least in my case, this is different for everyone. But for me, when I feel really charged up, I come up with the coolest things. And there's no one I would rather be than me when I am in that state. It's what I enjoy, what I like to pursue, what I like to think about. And so this question, this permission really to simply believe that the result is inevitable, that the result will happen regardless of what we do.

Frees me up and seem to free up a lot of my students on this call to simply make the next decisions. Because when you are afraid that things aren't going to work out, when you are playing that negative future, you tend to hedge, you tend to hesitate, you tend to avoid making the decisions that lead you to what you do want. You instead go into defense mode, protection mode, and very little growth tends to come out of that place. I'll leave you with one more story, and it comes from when I was running Sheer Strength with my partner Matt, and we had three straight years in which we doubled the business. If my memory serves me correctly, I believe we crossed a million dollars our first year or right at the end of our first year. And then we doubled to two, and then four. And then we had, I think in our fourth year, kind of a flat or not as big of a growth year. And one thing changed that year. We started launching products that were not in alignment with the business we were building. They were in alignment with gaming, the Amazon algorithm. We got into defense mode. We went into the mode of trying to sell what would sell based on what we were afraid would happen, which is we might not grow this year. We should probably sell products that the marketplace says they want rather than what is best for our market and our brand. And that fear, that hesitation led us to make decisions that made us grow slower. And it took until the next year for us to say, well, that didn't work. Let's go back to what we really believe in. And then we grew again and we sold the company for a whack ton of money. If we had really believed or if we had known that we were going to have a major exit, if I had believed or known that the marketplace was going to continue to boom, how would I have acted differently? I would have only launched the products that were best for my customers. I would have only made the decisions that felt best for what we were trying to do. We still would have had conflict as partners. We still would have had decisions that needed to be made. We still would have had work that had to be done. But we wouldn't have had this tenseness or this temptation to deviate away from what we really believed. We wouldn't have had this temptation to hedge or protect ourselves from the future that we didn't want. We would have more excitedly marched towards the future that we do want. Now I lied. I actually have one more story I want to share with you. I saved the best for last. My friends. This week I have had conversations with several, I mean, a handful of entrepreneurs who have had significant exits or significant offers for their businesses to be acquired. And all of them have had a very similar conversation with me. They said something like, I thought I would feel different. Or now I'm just thinking about what I want to do next. Or they're saying, man, I think I was having more fun when I was running the company. Now this is not to depress you. I know you still want the big exit and you should go get the big exit. It's really fun to get a big exit. But on the other side of it, you will have the question of what do I do now? What am I going to do next? What really excites me and the conversation that I had today with an entrepreneur who was going through this is questioning whether or not they should sell their business or if they should just make it exciting again. Because what we're really after is not the money or the result at all. We're after the excitement and the enjoyment its unfolding. So when you are concerned about your result not happening, you have cut off the excitement that is the reason for the goal in the first place. You want the ten million dollars or the hundred million dollars or the one million dollars because of the excitement that it will bring you. And when you doubt it, when you don't believe in it, it's like you're bending the hose. It's like you have cut off the flow of excitement that is the reason for the goal in the first place. The reason for a goal is to align you in the moment, is to give you proper context for the decisions that are to be made in the present, for the enjoyment to flow through you right now. That's the purpose of a goal. And when we fear that it won't happen, we can no longer operate in the joy or the excitement that we're after on the other side of getting the goal. So what would you do? Who would you be? What would you think about if you knew for certain that what you wanted was inevitable? If God himself told you that it was going to happen and there was nothing that you could do to stop it, how would you show up? How would you believe? What decisions would you make? What company would you build? My challenge to you is to try that on for a few days. Because I would be willing to bet that by trying on that belief, you will make the decisions. You will do the things that make that result inevitable. Thanks for listening, my friends. It's good to hang out with you. I'll see you next time. Take care.

If you found value in this podcast and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.