Is The Grind Even Necessary?

Foreign.

Welcome back to capitalism dot com. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. Hey, I hope you have taken a moment today to appreciate what is good in your life. Man, if you look at social media, everybody is talking about their fears about what is going wrong in the world. And I hope you have remembered today that you are in control of your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and therefore the outcomes to some extent in your life. And I hope you've taken a moment today to appreciate what is so good, what you're so thankful for today. Hey, today I want to answer a question that came up in a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not it's necessary for there to be a period in your business in which it's a grind, in which things really suck. And just to define our terms here for a second, when I say the grind, I'm not talking about what I've called the grind in my book and in my content about that early stage of your business where everything is sort of feeling like nothing's happening, but you're begging and crawling for every piece of momentum and every review or every sale or every like or every comment is a little bit of incremental progress and you gotta fight for every single one. I'm not referencing that kind of grind because in my opinion, that part of the business is the best part. It's exhilarating to get every sale, it's exhilarating to get every new opportunity, every connection, every breakthrough is monumental. And it's the best part of the business. And being in resistance to that deprives you of the most enjoyable part of the journey. But I'm not talking about that kind of grind. I'm talking about the kind of grind in which you are overexerting yourself, where you are taxing this system, where you are over hustling. Is that part of the process? Is it a necessary piece of success? Now, just yesterday I saw someone post some sort of meme that said that Jack Dorsey is known to spend 18 hours a day at the office. And I almost used the term Bill Gates, but if I say Bill Gates, somehow you'll think something political. So Elon Musk tends to work 21 hour in 21 hour sprints. And they were making the case that you have to overexert yourself or exert yourself that much to get unbelievable results. Now, I can't tell you whether or not it is necessary to work 21 hours a day to have a multi billion dollar company, because I've never had one. I've never had a multi Billion dollar company. I've never had a billion dollar company. I've never had $100 million company. I've only ever had a $10 million company. That's the best I've ever done. So I am not speaking from a place of authority. For those of you who are wondering, is it necessary for me to work 20 hours a day to make $100 million? I believe I'll get there. And I also believe that I will get there without having to overexert over tax the system. Because I do not believe that the grind, as most people call it, is a necessary part of the process. Because there are two types of hard work, there is a big distinction of what we might call inspired hard work. Inspired hard work versus operating from a depleted tank. You know the difference because you felt it inspired action or inspired hard work is when you are so excited, so enthralled with an idea, so motivated to move forward, so excited at the thought of progress, so enjoying the unfolding of what it is that you are building, that you can't help but keep working. I remember when I was coding websites from my dial UP computer in 2006 in raw HTML in a software called Dreamweaver and I could not wait to finish up my homework in high school and college and go over to my computer and code websites. I couldn't wait. I remember in high school making a WWF wrestling site because I just loved the coding of it. I remember coding blogs just for the fun of it. I would lose myself in the process and in the design of it, not caring if it would go anywhere. And one day my brother looked over my shoulder at my desktop dial up computer with like six gigs of space. And he said, I think you can make a lot of money doing this. And I thought, maybe right now I'm just really enjoying the process that's inspired hard work. When you have a passion, when you have an excitement, when you're in love with your business, you feel that then there is this operating from an empty tank that most people call the grind. It is where you think that the route to success is the hard work. And Therefore you schedule 12 to 16 hour days that don't actually move you forward toward the experience that you want. The experience is different than the result. The experience is, is freedom, the experience is joy. The experience is growth. The experience is new connections. The results that people want is money or a better lifestyle or more followers. It's status, it's recognition. And the mistake comes in thinking that the experience is determined by the result. In other Words, I will have freedom once I have money, I will have joy once I have status. I will have recognition once I have a better lifestyle. And therefore, you start working for the sake of the result rather than for the experience. Now, I can hear some of you thinking right now that this is new Age BS or that it is. I am talking out of my rear. I am speaking from a position of experience of both being an entrepreneur and working with hundreds of entrepreneurs and noticing a pattern, that we go out on this journey of pursuing freedom because we feel trapped or because we want to change, and then we add more to the plate rather than saying, what would freedom feel like in the experience of building something? Now, in my experience, getting to the end result can happen in either way. You can have a joyous journey or you can have a really hard journey. It's kind of like if you ever played that game growing up called Oregon Trail. If you played that enough, there were two kinds of journeys you would go on. One is where you would get dysentery and cholera, and you'd be saved by the doctor a couple times before half of your friends died and you were starving the entire time in the video game. And then the second was everybody survived and you hunted a few bears and you always had enough food, and sometimes you had to dispose of food in order to make the cargo lighter, and you still got to the end. In both scenarios, you got to the end. One was an easy and light journey, and one was a really hard journey. And those who take the hard path will turn around and say, hey, all of you people who got it easy, you're doing it wrong. Don't we see that in the media today? Don't we see that people are thumbing their nose at success, tearing people down and saying, it's not supposed to be this easy. It's not supposed to be fun. Look at all these people who are not having it easy. And we point our finger at that. And the same is true in success among entrepreneurs. We look at those who have worked really hard and gotten a certain result, and we point to them and build monuments for them. And we say, that is how it has to be if you want to be great. But there are also entrepreneurs. There are capitalists who are billionaires or centimillionaires or DECA millionaires that have danced their way to success without the grind. Warren Buffett doesn't hustle. Warren Buffet reads five hours a day. And you could say, but that's his hustle. But it is also his greatest joy.

And Warren Buffett makes more money than me and he works less than me. And he's in his 90s and in good health, despite the fact that he drinks Coke every day. Elon Musk works a lot. He has $3 billion companies. And Elon Musk also does podcast interviews and makes time for media appearances and genuinely feels fueled by his work. I think we can say that about most incredible success stories, that they feel genuinely drawn to their work, genuinely excited about it. Maybe not every day. Even Gary Vaynerchuk, who's one of the happiest people I've ever met, says that about 16 days a year. He says, I'm done with this. This is stupid. But the mistake is believing that it has to be this grind in order to become successful. Now, I have outlined a couple of things that will guarantee it will be a grind. And if you address these and come at them from a different perspective, which I'll share with you, I believe that you can enjoy the entire unfolding. The first is isolation. When you're building a company in isolation, when you are becoming an entrepreneur in isolation, when you don't have partners, you don't have investors, you're behind a screen, it is very easy to burn out. It is very easy for that to become a grind. For most of us, businesses that are founded with partners have a higher percentage of success than those who are founded by solopreneurs. I've experienced this myself, too. When you have somebody that you are doing this game with, you're accountable to each other, you are able to stay in your own zones of genius, and it is simply more fun. This is also true if you have investors or a board or you just have a team of people that has your back. If you are, at the very least, not in groups or masterminds or. Or have a mentor, it's very likely that you will fail. And you will fail because we are tribal creatures. And if you're a tribal creature, operating in isolation is a fast way to burn out. That is one way to make it always feel like a grind. And most of you who are Internet entrepreneurs have experienced this. When you've been behind a screen for too long, when you've been on your phone for too long, when you feel like the world is on your shoulders and that you're about to break under the pressure, that's a lonely feeling. And it's to some extent, par for the course, because we as entrepreneurs are the leaders of our companies and of our lives. But if you don't build that support network, those partnerships Those mentorships, those allies in your community or your mastermind, you will burn out. You will go through a very long grind period. But this is a very solvable problem. By surrounding yourself with the people who do have your back, by getting plugged into groups that support you, by connecting with other entrepreneurs. And what I encourage people to do is to follow the owner's model. The owner's model is to create partnerships in each area of the business. Instead of trying to be an expert in every piece of the business, partner with people who already are. And that means agencies, that means partnerships, that means people that you hire. It means equity shares with individuals who are rewarded for growing the business in their department by sharing in the profits of activities rather than just paying a agency fee or a salary. Those are healthy partnerships that create an aligned incentive for the business to grow and to take off the weight from being on the shoulders of one person. So that's the first one. Being in isolation will make everything feel like a grind. The second is your beliefs. Your beliefs about how hard this needs to be, your beliefs about how hard you need to work, your beliefs about the outcome, your beliefs about what's a lot of money, your beliefs about the process will determine whether or not this feels like a grind. Your beliefs about the likelihood of your success. If you believe that you will be successful and you believe that it can be fun, if you believe that you are bringing good to the world.

There is no grind. If you believe that this is your purpose, if you believe that you are in the right place at the right time, if you believe that you are uniquely qualified for what you are, are setting out to do, if you believe that you are giving more than you take, if you believe that your success is inevitable, there's nothing to grind. But if you believe that this is going to fail, if you believe that your past failures are evidence of your future failures, if you believe that money is scarce, if you believe that the world is getting worse, if you believe that making money is hard, if you believe that you've just got to work a little bit more, this is going to be a grind. If you examine those, you will see a pattern that is leading you to a consistent experience. If your business is consistently a grind, it is because you are practicing consistent beliefs that keep you in that pattern. Can you break those? Can you step outside of them? Can you see evidence for people who believe different things than you and are still getting the result? A good reminder for me was Trevor Blake. Now, I've never checked Trevor's tax returns. I'VE never verified how much his companies were sold for, but he tells me that he sold three companies over 10 years worth $300 million, and today they've increased in value to a total of about 600 million. And he didn't keep all of that, but he kept some of that. And the man has never had an employee because he focuses on partnerships. And the man says that he doesn't work more than four hours a day. There's no grind. He follows a different model. And if he's telling me the truth and I have no reason to doubt him, then Trevor is one piece of evidence that it can be different than how I thought it needed to be when I started this journey. I can find evidence of capitalists and entrepreneurs who live amazing lives. They're not always the ones who are on social media. They're not always the ones who are.

Talking about the game.

You know, even Tai Lopez, who I've known for a decade, who gets a lot of flack on social media, dude is so underrated. He's so smart. And Tai Lopez lives an amazing, fun life and has for the entire time that I have known him. And works so smart and doesn't overthink anything and works hard because he's excited about it, but sort of dances the entire way, sort of is in this constant state of expression rather than this constant state of grinding. Can you believe that that's possible? Can you believe that it can be a joyous journey? Can you believe that? Maybe that's the best part. I wouldn't have believed that until I found it out for myself. I wouldn't have believed that until I had a big exit and then missed the journey and immediately wanted to get back into the game. And then immediately practiced grind and hard work and burnt myself out and ran into trouble and made stupid mistakes and stupid investments and started pursuing money rather than the experience. And started pursuing results instead of the life I wanted. And started thinking about extraction rather than value creation. It was only when I realized that that was costing me results that I knew that I had to reevaluate, which is what led me to find other entrepreneurs and capitalists who. Who did things differently. So your beliefs will determine whether or not this is a grind. And the third thing is doing it for the money. If you are doing it for the money or the result in general, it will be a grind. It's kind of like when you are trying to lose weight. If you are doing it for the weight loss, meaning you are always thinking about the outcome. You're always Thinking about the pounds dropped, you will do things in the short term that bring you faster results. Like you'll cut calories a lot, you'll do extra cardio and those things will work in the short term. And then the body rebels and then you binge eat and you sabotage and then you're onto the next thing. Entrepreneurs do this with money. When they think the business is about the money. They start doing things in the short run in order to maximize profit, which is okay. But when it becomes the primary desired outcome, you are doing short term things at the expense of the long term growth and the long term health of the business and of the entrepreneur. So when profit becomes the result, rather than prioritizing things like service or, or freedom or joy or contribution or great products or total value or customer happiness, then all of the other things suffer. When short term money is the priority, you don't do the things that create money. Money is created by value, by customer service, by great product, by service, by contribution, by growth. And guess what? All of those things are freaking fun. They're life giving, they're exciting. Blowing away a customer is awesome. Creating a great product is exhilarating. Coming up with a good idea is fun as hell. Wowing your investors and your customers and creating amazing things is maybe the best part of the process. The money is the reward that sustains that good work. So prioritize the good work which requires that you are in a good place. And when you are in a good place, where you are thinking about contribution and you are growing and you're excited.

This is not a grind, it is a joyous unfolding towards everything that you want. And I want that for you. I have made the mistake of forgetting this lesson and I hope I have forgotten the lesson for the last time. And I share this with you in hopes that you will cling to the idea and subscribe to the belief, even if it is a false belief, that this entire journey can be fun. That if you prioritize your own internal state and you prioritize the things that create money, which are service, value, all that stuff, thinking long term, and you can only do those things when you're in a good place, then money inevitably follows. This can be fun, my friends. Allow the journey to be so. I'm rooting for you. If you want some help, jump into our mentoring group at capitalism.com 1. Rooting for you. Take care.

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