Why 9 Out of 10 Entrepreneurs Fail (And How You Can Avoid It)

I'm making this video for every entrepreneur who has wanted it for a really long time. This is for those of you who have been thinking about it or trying and wanting it for so long and it just hasn't happened, or you feel like you just haven't had your big win yet. You haven't had the big breakthrough.

Things just haven't lined up the way that you thought they were when you got into this thing. And you've been beating your head against the wall for a long time, and you have watched of my videos and 3,000 of other people's videos, and it just hasn't fallen through. And now the world is falling apart. Now the economy is going down and the stock market is going down, and interest rates are going up and inflation is. Is going up, and. And people are rioting, and the world's falling apart. And maybe you missed your shot. I'm making this video for you because I had a conversation with an entrepreneur that I work with very closely, and he told me that the conversation really changed his life. And I watched his actions over the next few weeks, and they were radically different. And his mindset started to show up differently, and he started to get different results, just as the product of the conversation that we had. And I want to share this same conversation, the same advice that I gave to him with those of you who feel like you just haven't had your big win yet, because I know how frustrating it is to feel like you are doing the things or learning the things, and it's just not happening. The advice that I gave to a struggling entrepreneur recently was that what he needed to do was pick an aim and messily go forward with it. We put so much energy into trying to figure out the right thing to do, trying to figure out the right strategy or the right decision or the right platform to launch on or the right how to thing that will get us the result. And what I have seen, especially in the early days of building a business, is that the real way that you do it is pick an aim and you very messily just do things toward it. Specifically for this person, he had one product that was selling pretty well and it needed more reviews, and he was building very complicated processes to get reviews, and it was working okay. But I said to him, you know, if you just decided that you were gonna get 250 reviews, you'd figure out a way to do it. And over the next couple of weeks, he very messily figured out a way to do it. And it looked a lot like texting everybody he knew and emailing his customers and being in the DMs of people who follow him on Instagram and asking and being aggressive with that strategy. And there was no good operational system for it, but he figured out a way to get it done. And sales went up and his energy started to come back and his mindset started to improve, and that gave him the momentum to do the next thing. I was working with an entrepreneur that we invested in inside of the fund, and he was trying to figure out the best way to launch his product. And he was saying, should I launch on Amazon or should I launch on Shopify? Should I partner with an influencer? Should I start a podcast? Should I do all of these things? And instead I said, why don't you just set a date on the calendar that you're gonna take sales and you start working towards it, whether you've got product or not? That's exactly what he did. He picked an aim and he immediately started moving towards it. And before he was Ready, he sold $25,000 in product within his first week. And so often we put off the next step forward because we want to see what happens after that step, or because we want to see the right path or the right how to. And I fall into this, too. I know that I'm off track every time I'm in my mind trying to figure out exactly how things are going to go, which usually means that I'm operating from a place of fear. I'm not actually thinking about what it is that I want. I'm not actually thinking about the result I want to create. Because if I was really thinking about the result that I wanted to create, I would feel excited. Isn't that true? When you think about having a million dollar business, do you feel excited? Do you feel enthusiastic? Do you feel energetic? If you're really thinking about the possibility of having that result, of course you feel energetic and excited and proud, because that is what your true desire is. But what most of us do instead is we feel a sense of fear. We sense a fear, a sense of hesitation. And that is because we're doubting the result. And we're doubting that what we're going to do is going to work. And so we buffer that with a whole bunch of thoughts. We buffer that with a whole bunch of different opportunities and different things we're going to do over here and looking at what other people are doing. And we collect this data set in our mind about what could work or what would work or what worked for someone else. And we have this large database in our brain of all the things that we could do, and we feel confused about it. And that's because we are actually thinking about what it is that we do not want, rather than what it is that we do want. When you think about what you do want, your brain starts to align behind that and create the action plan behind it. Rather than starting to doubt yourself, you know, if you were believing or if you were doubting based on that response, do you feel a sense of hesitation and fear and you need to get more data? What? Or are you excited and you want to go messily make actions towards that result? And when you can be okay with the suck in between, that is when you have permission to go do the thing. For example, I have messily created content for the last 10 years and I'm okay with some of it sucking. I am okay with the negative feedback that I get in comments. I am okay with people telling me that I don't know how to dress because I know they're right. I am okay with things not coming out as articulate as I would like them to, because I would rather take very messy action towards what it is that I want than try to think about what it is that I need to avoid or create in order to guarantee that I get the result. And I only know because I spent years in my head trying to figure out the best way to create content or launch a business. And that only kept me stuck. And it may be something that I'm. It's not who I am. And it made me pursue businesses that I didn't really want, and it made me invest money into things that I wasn't really excited about. And so you create a life based on this idea of lack of what you don't have, rather than moving towards what it is that you do want. When we feel that sense of lack, we come up with all of these reasons why that's a justifiable fear. When we doubt our own success, when we doubt our own motion forward, when we doubt the inevitability of the results, we said we start to find data to support it. We start to say, well, this company went under and the economy is doing this, and this person who's credible in the media said this. And so now I'm finding evidence for the fear that I feel for the doubt that I'm experiencing about my own goal. And now I can be justified in not moving towards it rather than just picking an aim and. And very messily moving towards it. What does that look like in a Practical and tactical sense. That means like just picking the product and launching means just asking people for reviews. It means just going and creating the content. It means just reaching out to the influencers. And if you believe in the inevitability of your success, which is something that you have to foster, something you have to cultivate, it's something that you have to nurture that belief, start looking for the evidence of that success. And that was the second thing that I told this young entrepreneur who was really struggling. I told him, you have so much data, so much of a record of you failing, that you don't see how close you are. And what I want for you is to go get a little bit of momentum so that I can remind you that this is evidence of your own success.

See, the truth was I believed in his success more than he believed in his success, which is easy to do when you don't have a record in your mind of all of the losses. When you don't have a record in your mind about all the failures, it's easy to look at someone else and say, of course they're going to be successful. But when you in your mind have a long record of, I failed at this. This didn't work. This person screwed me over, then you start to collect this data for your failure rather than your success. And I want you to take away from this video the relief that that can be undone. Because what's happening in your brain is you have now trained yourself to look for something. You've trained yourself to look for failure. You've trained yourself to look for negativity. You've trained yourself to look for where things aren't going to work out. But you can retrain that. You can retrain that muscle to look for the inevitability of your success. One of my good friends is named Alex Hormozi. You might have seen his content. Excited to see him here in a couple of weeks. He just moved out of Austin. I haven't seen him in a while. Going on a trip together. Can't wait to see him. Alex told me the most interesting thing once. He told me that his mental chatter, his mental noise, is him all day, every day, convincing himself of why he can do something.

All day, every day, he is talking to himself about why something can be done. And when he told me that, I took inventory of what goes on in my brain.

I realize I don't have that kind of chatter.

My chatter is playing over the failures. My chatter is playing over where I messed up. My chatter is playing over the embarrassing thing that I did or said, no wonder I'm not getting the results that I want in my life. No, I actually have a filter where I'm looking for more of it. Please send me more bad news. Please send me more failures, because I will look at them and I will focus on them and I will recreate them and I will repeat it over and over and over again in my head. How do you expect to take action when that's playing over in your head? I'm speaking to myself when I say that you can't. You cannot take action towards what it is that you want. Which is why when you hear people say, just take action, you're like, fuck you.

Fuck you, Tony Robbins, for saying, go take massive action. You don't know the record of wrongs I have in my mind. You don't know the failures that I've been through. You don't know that when I take action, I fail. Because that is the loop that's playing over and over in the minds of entrepreneurs who feel stuck. That is the record. That's the tape that's playing over and over. For those of you who feel like you've wanted it for so long and yet it just hasn't happened, and the way out, the way through, that is two things. It's one, accepting your failures because the reason they keep playing over and over in your mind is because you just haven't accepted them. You haven't taken the L. You haven't been like, didn't work. And you know when you have accepted them, when they no longer have a reaction in your body when you think of a failure and you go, because you haven't really accepted it.

But when you can just say, didn't work.

Then there's no more of a reaction in your mind, in your body, keeping you stuck. I can only talk about this because I had to go through that. I had to learn how to feel my negative emotions. I had to learn how to actually process guilt and shame over the fact that something failed. I've had projects lose millions of dollars and a lot of sleep was lost as a result.

But the problem wasn't that it lost millions of dollars. The problem was that I bought into the story of what that meant about me as an entrepreneur. The problem was that that prevented me from making the next good decision. Instead, I tried to fix the bad decision. I tried to undo it. I tried to fix it. I tried to work on it, put more energy towards the failure, trying to fix it because I hadn't accepted the Fact that it just didn't work out. And sometimes that happens.

When you accept it, when you are okay with it, it's like, yeah, it didn't work. Doesn't mean anything about me, doesn't mean anything about the inevitability of my success, doesn't mean anything about my value as a human being. Only then can you start finding different evidence, both past, present, and future. You can find evidence for your success, for things working out. You know, I'll tell you a quick story. I went through a losing streak during COVID During COVID I just had several projects not work out.

They just didn't work. I lost millions of dollars doing some stuff.

Thankfully, I had a few million dollars to lose. But as a result of that time, I couldn't see the successes in front of me. I couldn't see the opportunities in front of me. I was so focused on trying to fix those problems that I couldn't see the good stuff that was happening because I was trained to find the bad. And so I had a really successful book launch right there. That book right there sold 120,000 copies. 120,000 copies of that book. I felt proud. I felt good. But I never felt the satisfaction that you would expect.

You would. I never felt the joy and pride that you would expect when you put your heart and soul into something. But I do now. And now I see that as evidence for my future success. Before, all I saw was the number of book copies I didn't sell because my brain was trained to see failure rather than success. But now that I've worked on that, I say, that is another piece of evidence for my next success. I sold a company in 2017 for $15 million. You would think that that would be like a feather in the cap of why I'm so successful, but actually because of things that happened in my life and things I hadn't gotten clear on, I thought, well, other people sold it for $50 million. Other people that I mentored sold their businesses for $25 million. That guy. This is a true story. That guy that found my podcast and started with no money, that I started mentoring when he had like a low seven figure business, now just sold for 20 some million dollars. Oh, no, I'm losing my edge. I'm a. There's the failure loop starting again. Because if you have that record of failures and you believe yourself to be a failure, you will find more evidence for it, which will prevent you from taking the action that builds the seven figure business. But now that I'm good with That I see my exit as evidence for my next success. Now I know some of you are watching going easy for you to say, ryan, you sold 120,000 books and you had an eight figure exit. And I'm here to tell you, I'm just. We've all got that record. We've all got the record of wins and losses. It's just which one you feed. And so the thing that gets us through that is accepting the losses. And only then can we see the wins. Because you are blinded right now to the opportunities that are right in front of you. How do I know? Because I've given the whole playbook away here on YouTube and on my podcast. Because I have hundreds of successful entrepreneurs who have built seven figure businesses. And you just see them as evidence of why you're a failure.

Because there's content everywhere, there's evidence everywhere. There's capital everywhere. But you see the bad news on CNN and you see the reasons why things are going to crumble.

And if you are responding to that, if you're reacting to that and I'm talking to you, I just want you to know that there's another side to it. I just want you to know that there is.

Another side of that coin.

And, and, and if you, if you accept.

That that was just something that happened and that there's evidence for your success and that all you need to do is just make the decision and go with it and use that as the next piece of evidence for your success, you win.

And that might be just launching the first product, taking the first sale. It might be creating the first piece of content because you know you should and you haven't. It might be.

Pitching that investor. It could be whatever the next step is for you. The reason you're procrastinating is because you are prioritizing the fear of what could happen. Because you have a long record of things not working out in your mind.

I just want you to know that can change. It can change as soon as you accept the L, you accept the loss.

And you plan the next step forward.

Once you accept the loss, you can go launch the product. Because now if the product launch fails.

It says nothing about who you are. It doesn't trigger the internal response within you that believes that you're a failure. It just is the next step.

I have an acquaintance named Brian Lee. His four billion dollar companies on his resume.

I was visiting with him a couple of weeks ago.

I asked him, I said, brian, have you ever been on a losing streak? Because I just see this man who is just. He started the Honest Company, and he started Art of Sport with Kobe Bryant, and he started LegalZoom. And he invested in Honey, the app, which sold for $4 billion to PayPal. And I said, brian, have you ever had a losing streak? He goes, yeah, I'm on one right now.

And he told me what was going on. And I was like, why are you so happy?

He's like, this. This has nothing to. It doesn't say anything about who I am. And I know that all the best breakthroughs happen right after failure.

If you're open to them.

I started to play with this idea of. I seen that with so many people, that after a failure comes the next success. And I started to evaluate my own life. When I've had my biggest breakthroughs, there were when there was like this space, there was this gap, there was. I had failed, I had given up. And then I somehow hit something big. And I started to analyze why is that. And what I concluded was that.

My failures, when I really fail, in order for me to start something else, I have to finally accept that it failed, that I'm not going to fix it.

I forgive myself.

And then I've got the space and the energy to attack the next thing.

Man, that was profound. Because so often we're trying to force energy into something, and that is always out of fear. That is always us trying to avoid feeling that sense of failure that has been triggered by all the other losses that we have stacked in our brain.

But once you accept it and it doesn't affect you anymore, that is when you don't overthink the next step.

That is when you say, the next step is for me to launch this thing, for to make this decision. And then you go and you do it. And the results speak for themselves. And you either adjust or you double down because it doesn't say anything about you.

So if you've been at this game for a while and you haven't had the breakthrough, you haven't had the big win, the way through is to decide the next step and messily go forward with it. And if that feels hard or confusing to you, it's because you have a story playing over in your mind about past failures. The only way through that is to accept that and then to find evidence for your inevitability of success. And a really good way to do that is to just decide the next step and go for it. Without a system, without a plan.

Without a guaranteed win, just messily do it. You know, the way that you build a seven figure business that we teach is you get four products to 25 sales a day. That's 100 sales a day at a $30 price point. $3,000 a day, 90,000amonth, million dollars a year. And the way that you get a product to 25 sales a day is by launching it, replying to every comment, asking for reviews, running a little bit of pay per click ads and it's all messy. You don't know who's going to leave you a review. You don't know who's going to like it or dislike it. You don't know who's going to like your content or dislike it. It's messy. So why we call it the grind. It's the grind. 25 sales a day and that's like building a highway that now you can put more cars on because product number two, you put the car on and it's a little less messy. Product three is a little less messy, but it's awfully messy at the beginning and it really is that close to you. So if you have been trying for a long time, I just want you to know that it's possible that you're really close and if I can be of service or encouragement to you on your path, I'd consider it a privilege and an honor. My name is Ryan Danny Moran. I help entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses and our company is called capitalism dot com. Thanks for watching this video. Let me know if this hit you in the feels and I'll see you on the next video. Take care.