Addicted To Progress: Why Going Slower Gets Faster Results

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Welcome to the podcast. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. It's been a while since I have done just an audio only podcast, but there's some lessons that I feel like are better taught when I'm not in front of a camera and I can just relax and hang out with those of you who listen to the podcast stream. And there is a lesson that I'd like to share with you that has to do with enjoying the process and also falling in love with progress instead of falling in love with the result. This is kind of a common theme that we hear in the personal development space, sometimes even in the entrepreneurial space, of enjoying the process rather than pursuing a result. And this has been a hard lesson for me to wrap my head around and a hard lesson for me to integrate into my own life. And I want to share with you a few realizations or a few key insights that I think will bring some relaxation to your progress on your journey. Whether it's your road to a million or it's your journey to financial freedom or your journey to have a billion dollar empire. I think that this will bring some peace of mind on your journey because it has for me. I want to start by telling you a conversation that I had that I remember back early in my career. This was before I was in E commerce and I was doing affiliate marketing and learning the ropes of Internet marketing, the ins and outs of how to build a business online. And I remember telling a friend his name was Jason. I said, jason, I often feel like I need to make a lot of money as quickly as possible because the world is going to change over the next couple years. Maybe the strategies that I know now won't work anymore. And I feel like I need to make as much money as possible now so that I can pocket that and invest it so that I don't have to worry about money anymore. Do you ever feel like that? And he admitted that he felt the same way too. Sometimes this is common with entrepreneurs because nobody gives us a safety net. Nobody gives us.

Well, we are basically thrown into the deep end and we have to learn how to swim. There's nobody who's going to bail us out if we fail. There's no customer who's going to buy from us to keep us in business if we don't continually provide value. That is really scary sometimes as an entrepreneur and for somebody like me who has never had a job before, I don't even have a reference point for somebody else paying the bills. So you have to learn to swim. And sometimes that can feel really exhausting. It's a very uncomfortable adjustment for entrepreneurs when they realize that nobody is going to come to their rescue if their business doesn't work out. And so it is common for us to feel like, all right, I've got to extract as much as possible so that I can pay myself, so that I can make money, so that I can feel safe enough. And then one day maybe I will build a business that is purely from joy or purely from service. I'll get to that day when I make it, once I have enough money to be able to, well, not have to provide value anymore because I can always live off my investments. So my strategy, my process was to try and extract as much as possible, to try and make as much as possible so that I could feel safe. And what this did was put me in a never ending mode of never having enough, of always feeling like I was going to run out. Like I was always one mistake away from everything crumbling. And that's fear based. That is running from something. That is not running to something. So while I would have said that I was pursuing a million dollar net worth or I was pursuing a million dollar business, what I was actually doing was running from the fear of not having enough. I was actually running away from the thing that I really wanted, which was to be able to create, which was to be able to provide value for a group of people that I wanted to be in service to, which was to launch products that I was genuinely proud of, which was to write things that I really felt compelled or convicted to write about. This is freedom. Freedom is the doing of the things that you want to do, not just the ability to do those things when you are in process, when you are in motion toward the things that you want to do, rather than running away from the things that you don't want to do. That is freedom. However, my mindset for most of my career was not that. And I still have days where I default back into a fear based way of operating, which is to run away from what I don't want. I am running away from the fear of losing. I am running away from the fear of, of not having money. I am running away from the fear of not creating what I want to create, but instead creating the things that I think will make money in the short term so that then I can feel safe enough to create the things that I want. Can you relate to this? These are very different energies. One feels creative and growth oriented and exciting. The other is always feeling this lack and this, this push and this fear and this angst of running out. And I have seen, as I have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs in my career, that those who are running from this fear tend to prioritize the short term things that they think will work very quickly and thus avoid building the long term foundation of a business that will actually set them free. I can kind of spot this in an entrepreneur. When somebody talks about scaling fast, when they think about scaling really quickly or they think about the strategy that is going to work really quickly, I always cringe a little bit. And I'm probably cringing at the part of myself that can relate to that when I am in one of those fear based spaces. But when we were trying to make something happen fast, I pause and reflect back to them that fast is bad. Fast is bad because it tends to prioritize the things that may work very short term but don't actually build the long term foundation. And thus we are running from quick win to quick win rather than building a long term business that will set us free. It's kind of ironic that my book is called 12 months to 1 million because the entire premise of the book is about doing the boring work for about a year so that you have a million dollar foundation and it is about not paying yourself for six to 12 months while you continue to create value for a core group of people. And as you do that, you will start to make progress towards a million dollar will spit off enough cash flow usually for someone to be a full time entrepreneur. Gary Vaynerchuk told me that he thought that my my book title was douchey. He actually said, you know, your book title flies in the face of everything that I teach and believe in. Right. And I explained to him that the premise of the book was about delivering value for a full year before expecting the result. And so the premise, the idea of the book is about actually going slower than what most people will see from the outside. For six months it feels like nothing is happening. For six months it feels like things are not growing fast enough. And then some things start to move. In fact, while I'm recording this right now, I'm just on the other side of having a few days where my supplement company Sheer Strength has had a million dollar run rate days. Meaning that it's done around $3,000 in sales in those couple of days. And that's a million dollar run rate. That's exciting for me because this is a brand that I bought out of bankruptcy. I sold it in 2017 for $16 million. The company that bought it bankrupted It, I took it over, it was in shambles, it wasn't moving. There was six months of nothing happening just because we were trying to turn the ship around. And I found out that turnarounds are sometimes harder than new starts. And now some things are finally starting to move again. And it's by coming back to the basics of nurturing a small group of people, launching products to them and getting them moving again. The reason I'm sharing all of this context with you is because I know what it's like as an entrepreneur to look out at the result and think that when I get to the result, then I'm going to feel how I want to feel and do the things that I want to do. But I found that when we can flip it, when we can focus on the 1% progress on a day to day basis, or the 1% incremental changes that we can make, all of a sudden that energy starts to get liberated. And I experience this the clearest over the last couple of years when I had my exit where I made more money than I had ever had in my life. And I lost a lot of it. I lost a lot of that because once I got a big pile of money, I invested it in ways that would give me the short term results. I invested it into things that were cool on paper but didn't provide a whole lot of value for the long term. And so they were profitable in the short term. And then those businesses went under or those businesses got shut down by the sec, which is a story for another day. But when I invested into long term boring things, it didn't feel exciting, but it provided the safety that I actually wanted from that big pile of money in the first place. I'll give you kind of an example of this. I often tell the people who are going through the 1% that one of the first things that they could do in order to go down the road to 1 million is to set up an automatic transfer of $500 a month into long term index funds or mutual funds. This is not investment advice. You probably shouldn't come to me for investment advice. But if you have an automatic transfer into the S&P 500 or into a mutual fund or an index fund that you feel good about, and the average return is 9%, which is actually lower than the average return of the S&P 500 for the last 50 or 100 years, if all you did was set up an automatic transfer there, you would be on the road to $1 million. If you play that scenario out over 30 years. If you invest $500 into an investment that has an average return of about 9% over 30 years, that becomes a million dollars. Now no one wants to wait 30 years and no one wants to have only a million dollars after 30 years. But I've seen in my own life and with the people that I have encouraged to do this, that there is something that just relaxes in us when all of a sudden the brain says, I've got my million dollar plan. For me, my goals are a little bit bigger than having a million dollars in 30 years. But if I run the same kind of numbers and I say, okay, what would it take for me to have $100 million either to retire with or to leave to my kids or whatever the goal is, and I run those exact same numbers, then I could get to $100 million in net worth over 50 years of just investing like $100,000 a year. Now that means that you got to have $100,000 a year to invest. It means that you got to wait 50 years. But when I just think about that as the basics of the strategy, all of a sudden I relax a little bit. It's kind of like, okay, there's $100 million plan here that I don't have to effort my way into, that I don't have to make happen right now. And so now my focus is freed up to look at the chopping wood that happens on the day to day basis. Meaning that if all that ever happens is that you have a business that produces $100,000 in profit and if that's not enough for you to go full time as an entrepreneur, but you invest that money and you invest it for a long time at boring investments, meaning that you don't beat the market or you don't find the next Nvidia or the next Apple stock, you just keep chopping wood for a long time that still becomes tens of millions of dollars if done consistently for a long time. What this has done, as I have taught this to members of the 1% or when I practice it in my own life, is that it gets us to relax into the enjoyment of the process rather than feeling like we have to hurry up and get to the million or the hundred million or have the right strategy. And when I'm in that energy of I, I need to find the right strategy or I've got to get to the end result, I'm constantly doubting myself. I'm looking at is this the right way or is this the right way? Is this strategy a Better strategy than this over here. What about this investment over here? Is this a better investment than this investment? And I'm constantly at war with myself. But when I focus on just the process of getting there, even if it takes a long time, my work is better, my energy is cleaner, and I'm less likely to show up trying to get something. I am thinking more about creating value because in the back of my mind, I know that I'm going to get there, even if it takes a really long time. This also de stresses every decision being perfectly right or optimal. For example, I always tell my clients and students that you should build your businesses around serving one core person. People overanalyze this question a lot. Who is my person? Who should I choose? Who should I provide value to? But this entire question is made to get you to choose who you would enjoy doing business with. Because if your focus is on creating value for a core person, you will get all of those people to want to work with you. Instead of you trying to sell a product and talk about how amazing your product is, you can relax into the service of a person. And when you do that for a long period of time, you tend to create more value and you tend to create an asset that is worth something. This is the weird irony of when you can flip this process and relax into the daily chopping of wood and the daily progress towards a goal. Even if on paper it's gonna take a long time to get there, here's what happens. Somehow the process accelerates. Somehow the exponential curve starts to work in our favor. Instead of thinking about, I'm going to make enough money so that I can stash it aside and not have to worry about money anymore, when we know that we're going to get to the result anyway. Even if it's going to take a long time and we relax into the creating of value and doing good work, over a period of a year, maybe two years, the compounding returns start to stack up. And those compounding returns tend to outpace the results that we get from doing the short term things. Maybe you've experienced it like this. Maybe you've had some progress happen, like you launched a product or you had a really strong financial month and you feel like you should be really happy about it, but for some reason you still feel like it's not enough. You feel like you're not there yet. And so what you do is you plan for some way to beat the month that was really good. And if you don't beat that month, then it is a failure. And it is. It's regressing instead of progressing. I've experienced this when I am married to the results. We're more excited about the result than the current progress because I'm afraid that I'm not going to get to the result. I have this gap in my mind about not getting there. And as a result, every month or every day that I'm not there, I feel like I'm falling behind or I feel like I'm losing. But when I turn it around and I know that I'm going to get to the results even if it takes a really long time, then when I have those months that are really good, I say, oh cool, the process is working. Next month doesn't have to beat the previous month. In fact, we don't even got to beat the previous year. We just got to keep chopping wood.

The irony is that when I show up like that, I often beat the previous month or I beat the previous year. Growth tends to happen more naturally when I'm showing up in that way. So how do we practice this? What does enjoying the process look like? Brooke Castillo said to me once that even though she doesn't have a hundred million dollar business, that was her goal. She enjoys her $100 million business now. She enjoys thinking about it. She enjoys the process of getting closer there. She doesn't wake up and think about the gap that she needs to close. She thinks about how exciting it is to be building towards it right now. When I think about the net worth I want to have every month that I stock away a little bit towards that goal, every time I sock away a little bit more money, I feel a little bit of progress towards that goal. When I cut an expense and I turn that expense into an investment, I feel the excitement towards that goal. When I make a decision that I'm confident brings me closer to that goal, I can feel the excitement that brings me closer to that. In that way, I'm using dopamine to my advantage rather than using it as my distraction. I know that I am obsessed with the result when I am distracted by new ideas and other people's results that I perceive to be getting there from faster than I am. But I know that I'm enjoying the process when I am making decisions that bring me a little bit closer today, even if it is a very small amount of progress. Because I know that over the course of a year, two years, 10 years, that is going to compound. I shared it like this on a coaching call inside the 1% recently. I said, let's say that you never have your 12 months to 1 million business. Let's say that your business only did a few hundred thousand and you didn't have 100% growth every year you grew at 20%. We ran the numbers live on a coaching call and over five years of growing 20%, that business finally got to a million dollars. Well, you would be four years behind the 12 months to 1 million plan if that was the case. But if you continue to grow at 20% per year over another 10 years, that turned into an eight figure business. Never having 100% growth, never having a business that took off, never having a influencer talk about you and get you a thousand sales a day, but just steadily showing up and putting in a 20% growth every year over a long period of time became an eight figure business. Even if you're only doing six figures right now, if you can believe that and rest in that, then every step forward, even if it's slow, feels like it is taking you towards that goal. If all that ever happened was that Your business profited $100,000 a year, which is only a few hundred thousand dollars in sales, that's a handful of sales every day, you know, growing a little bit every month. If all that did was make you $100,000 a year, but you invested that entire hundreds of hundred thousand dollars a year over a long period of time, that becomes tens of millions of dollars. Maybe you wouldn't quit your job in five years, maybe you wouldn't be flying around in private jets for now. But when you have tens of millions of dollars, you can. And what you soon find is that it was never about the jets, it was about how you spent your time. And so much of spending your time is about enjoying the unfolding of the progress towards those goals. You've probably heard enough people say, and you're probably tired of hearing people say that once they got to the end of the journey, they realized that it was about the unfolding of the journey. When they got to the end, they missed the process. So what does it look like to enjoy that now? For me, that looks like having a goal, but giving myself a luxurious amount of time to get there. And knowing that every step that I make along the way is another step that I can be excited about and proud of and that allows me to relax into doing really good work. And when I can relax into doing really good work, it tends to be more valuable. And when it tends to be more valuable, it tends to make more money. And when it makes more money, I tend to get to my goals faster. And when I can flip the order of being in love with with the result versus in love with the little steps that I make along the way, the little steps are a lot more fun and ironically, they get me to the result a lot faster. I'll leave you today with one quick house cleaning item. If you are looking to start the road to 1 million, the best way that I have seen that happen is by building a small launch list, building up demand first and then launching your first product to that launch list. That is a process that we are taking new students through inside a program called the Capitalism Accelerator. This is made to get entrepreneurs ready for the 1%. The 1% is about getting to a hundred sales a day, which is a million dollar run rate, which takes a full 12 months. But the first step is launching that first product to a small group of people. And if you have been on the sidelines for way too long, this process will force you to get into the game. So if you want to be on the waiting list or if you want to know about when we are opening this in the future, you can go to capitalism.com accelerator and be on the waiting list for when we start our next cohort. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you guys next time. Take care.

And now a quick word from Jared, one of our members. In the 1%, I was bankrupt and.

Crippled to making a million dollars in a year. And then I grew that business and kept growing it. So like my whole world changed financially very quickly. Like it was amazing how fast it was able to transition and like turn once things got rolling. Ryan in capitalism.com Pretty much like taught me everything I knew about like E commerce and specifically branding was the biggest thing that I think Capitalism really does well and they focus on teaching their students about building a brand and just teaching business to people. Like everything he teaches is stuff that he's done. You know, it's not like from theory that you're going to learn. So it's like all stuff that he's done. So I think the biggest thing that capitalism.com helps you with is that you're getting to learn from somebody who's done the exact thing that you want to do, which is the most important thing in the world. Like I'm in the like coaching business now. I like to help out other business owners. The biggest thing is going to someone who's done what you want to do and then learning from them. That's how you fast track your results. So if you want like the fast lane and to get your results really quickly, you go to capitalism.com and you have them show you what to do so you don't make all the mistakes and you get there really quickly. And it was the best money I ever spent because I went from bankrupt and crippled and all this other stuff to a million dollar a year business in one year, which is exactly what he teaches. And I was like, holy crap, this stuff works. Starting a business, it's scary. And so you have so many questions that go through your head about different things you need to do. When you have something, somebody who can just lay out, you know, a simple plan for that you can follow, that's like the biggest thing ever because you don't get stuck in your head thinking, well I, maybe I should do this over here, maybe I need to worry about that over there. But to have like somebody who's done what you want to do, lay out a plan that's like the fast track, fast lane, 200 mile an hour, like euro train going across the country to just get what you want, that was like the most beneficial part of the whole thing was just being in charge of my own life instead of having to stay somewhere I didn't want to and do a job I didn't want to do. I mean, it was really important to have that freedom, which is what I think everyone is kind of searching for. So I was a, it was a very healthy exit and was able to let me focus on many other things in my life and not have to worry about that stuff anymore.

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 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.