7 Terrible Habits That Keep People Broke

You're sabotaging your income right now with habits you don't even know you have. So today we're going to break all 7, starting with the one that costs you 23 minutes and actually steals your day. Because one of the most expensive habits is thinking that a 5-minute meeting request is only 5 minutes, you know? So habit 1, death by paper cuts. You know the feeling, like, hey Codie, can I pick your brain real quick? Hey Codie, we need a meeting to pre-align before the alignment meeting. Dear God, a whole day flies by filled with small requests here and there, and then you look at your to-do list and you didn't get anything done. Like, a small paper cut isn't going to kill you, but then you add another one and another one and another, and pretty soon you're starting to see the light. This is exactly what happens with every little request for your time. It kills your day. It's not just the time it takes away, but the real problem is the time that it takes you to refocus. One study from UC Irvine found that when you are interrupted, it takes you on average 23 minutes to refocus on a new task. For most people, they don't go 10 minutes without a request. Here's how you fix it. It's actually an idea from Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator, called the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. And I loved this from Paul. The first is the manager's schedule. Managers live in roughly 1-hour blocks. So, you know, 10 AM meeting, 11 AM interview, 12 PM lunch, 1 PM review. In this rhythm, adding another meeting usually isn't catastrophic. You find an open hour and put it in there. But then in the maker's schedule, which is like writers, programmers, designers, strategists, if you're trying to solve a difficult problem, it doesn't work well in tiny 1-hour pieces. Makers tend to think in much larger blocks. Think sort of 4-hour blocks like this, because creative and strategic work requires enough deeply uninterrupted time to go really deep into a problem. But at work, you have to do both. So the solution is to give yourself defined time blocks by what mode you are in. Are you in manager mode or are you in maker mode? Number 2, underappreciate your most valuable asset. I think everyone has worked for someone who never noticed. It's the cheapest way to lose really good people. Wins become expected, their extra effort becomes normal, and without anyone meaning to do it, the people around you can start to feel like nobody cares and their work isn't meaningful. There's a 70-year-old management theory called Herzberg's 2-Factor Theory that explains what actually makes people satisfied at work. You see, Frederick Herzberg separated motivation into 2 buckets like this. The first were hygiene factors, things like salary, company policies, working conditions, job security. If these things suck, people are sad. Sad. Unhappy. But making them better doesn't necessarily make somebody love their job because there's also this other bucket over here called motivators. These are things like achievement, responsibility, and advancement, recognition. Those are things that culturally make people feel happy about the work that they're doing. Now, which one do you think ping pong tables and nap pods fall into? People don't actually really care about those. They want to be part of something that is worth being a part of, and they want to be recognized. So here you can change this. I call this the 3 C's of culture. Let me break this down. Think about it like this. At the very top, we've got credit. I want you to give specific and individual positive feedback to someone around you. And if you do that, the studies say actually those who receive high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to leave their company after 2 years. Think about how much that costs in recruiting, hiring, and training. So don't drop a message in Slack and say, you all are doing great. That does nothing for credit. Instead, you want to call people out specifically, like by name, for what. So Sarah, great job on the report you sent. Love that you ended it with an actionable next step. Next, we've got cause. The mission has to be greater than the way to achieve it. Your job as a leader is to sell a vision so big that people drop everything to get behind it. Our mission at Contrarian is to create 100 million owners. We work really hard, we have tough days, but knowing the impact we're making makes it worth it, right, YouTube team?

Yeah!

Okay, next we've got calculated bets. This is where you reward data-backed failures. I know this seems kind of crazy, but if someone tried something new with like a good sound reason, executed well, but the result didn't work out, celebrate it. There are very few things more demoralizing than trying something, failing, and having your boss yell at you about it or even ignore it. Habit 3, originality is sometimes an expensive ego trip. I don't think you have to write your own playbook from scratch. The truth is that everything has been redone thousands of times. Like, so why would you spend time, money, and so much energy trying to learn something that's already been done? Business is already hard enough. Data shows that after 10 years, only about 1/3 of businesses are still operating. You don't need to make it any harder. There's someone in the world who is already the best at the problem you're trying to solve. So, if you want to use my frameworks, go ahead. I have one called the Owner's Score. It's like a personality test, but for you as an achiever or as an owner. You answer a few questions and it tells you exactly what is wrong with the way you work and what's holding you back from making a lot more money. It's completely free and you can get it in the link below. I made this for you. Also, I'm a workhorse. I'm really curious what you are. Drop it in the YouTube comments. Now I wanna talk about stealing somebody else's playbook. So first, there's something called the 80/20 rule. Innovation rule. 80% of business should build from proven systems, benchmarks, templates, and people who have already solved the problem. Then you pick about 20% of it, and you're gonna actually run your own weird, right? That was actually, I believe, the author Davenport Adams that said, great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil. So I want you to iterate on proven systems that you can then improve on top of. No more total cowboying until you're really good. Build on top of what is repeatable and already works. Number 2, I want you to take my homework and I want you to learn from it. So we have something called Growth Accelerator Workshop where we teach owners live all the systems I've used to build my businesses. You can actually take my 15 years, apply it to your business. That's what we do in our advisory business. And then you sprint using all my pain. Find the people who are best at doing what you're trying to do and Study their homework. Last one, use existing solutions. You don't need a vibe-coded CRM that breaks every day that you're trying to make with Claude. Please, dear God, don't do that. Use HubSpot. That's what we use. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars making one of the best platforms in the world. Use an existing system. Why do you think that your MacBook and ChatGPT Pro subscription can do better? They can't. Habit 4 is kill your darlings. If you really want to be successful, you're going to have to kill some of your darlings. And what I mean is one of the most expensive things you can do is fall in love with one of your ideas. You spend a lot of time working on something, you nurture it, you raise it, and then it sucks. And it turns out nobody wants it in the first place. Like, do you really want to be known as the person with the baby that sucks that you keep trying to sell to people? I think nearly half of all the products failed do so because of one simple reason: no one wanted them anyway. Like even Google, one of the most successful companies in history, has a graveyard of ideas that didn't work. I actually met Astro Teller, the head of Google's Moonshot Labs, at a conference, and he told me that he keeps a resume of failures, ideas that didn't work out and they didn't attach themselves to. Killing an idea doesn't mean you're a failure. It means you are pushing forward and just found a path that didn't work out. There's an entire chapter in my book on this. It's the chapter on product. It'll tell you how to know which of your babies probably need to be killed. Here's how to kill a darling. The idea scorecard. Basically, you can do this math on a napkin, or HubSpot actually built you a tool to guide you through it. There's 4 categories, and I want you to rank each one on a scale of 1 to 5. We'll start with F, frequency. How often does the problem your idea solve hit the target customer? If not often, it's a 1. Every day, 5. Urgency. How badly do they need to fix it? If it's a 1, not that badly. If it's a 5, a lot. Current cost. What is the problem costing them today in money, time, and risk? Luxuries, lower end. Are they already paying to solve this problem? 1, not at all. 5, yes, they are. The scoring is basically built like this: 16 to 20, you go for it, build it. 11 to 15, you need to pre-sell it. So you can kind of figure out how to spend time validating before you build. And if you score a 6 to 10, be careful. That is what we in our business call the dessert business, not an oxygen business. You'll spend a year just finding an audience. If you want to steal all of this, it is on page 74. This will save yourself months of headaches. Now, underneath the score, I put 5 rules I actually use to find an idea worth building in the first place. These are the filters I run every deal through. And every time I'm reminded the fastest path into a business is almost never starting one from zero. So anyway, this is free for you. The link's in the description, and you can reset it and run it on the next idea. And if you do go forward with your idea, you have to set a kill day using the Keep/Kill decision framework. This is also page 78. So basically define a period, 30, 60, 90 days. You're going to clear benchmarks to figure out if you should keep going. If you're growing, double down. If you're stable, keep your sunset. If you're declining, kill in 90 days. I love this framework. It's in the book, and it's going to prevent you from doubling down on ideas that started hot and flame out. Habit 5 is using busy as a coping mechanism for not going anywhere. You may work 12-hour days and accomplish approximately, I don't know, 45 minutes of work that matters. And that's because you're buried in Slack responding to everything marked as urgent, reviewing a $37 expense, and then fixing formatting on your slides. It's— I don't think most of this is that you're lazy. You're actually probably incredibly hardworking. You're just working on the wrong things and going nowhere. And there is a name for this. It's called the mere urgency effect, which is basically you are more likely to choose tasks that seem urgent sort of objectively over more important tasks. With better payoffs. And that's because urgency itself becomes this artificial constraint. And I think this is because your brain is wired to want rewards immediately, right? So you'd rather get those small little rewards sooner than larger rewards later. This is also— there's also a fancy word for this called temporal discounting, which kind of sucks because it means that your brain is working against you. So if you want to make a lot of money, you're going to have to figure out what you should be doing. And here's actually how I do it. So here's how you fix this with the 4D decision tree. Simple yes or no question. Does this task make me more money or bring me closer to my goals? If it's not a hell yes, guess what we're doing? We are deleting it. We're not doing that. Second yes or no. Does this thing have to be done right now? There's always some world-ending problem. Something goes wrong. Then without hesitation, someone will say to you, you got to fix this right now. Napoleon famously wouldn't open his mail for 3 weeks because most urgent problems resolve themselves. So the question I want you to ask yourself is take, take a step back and let the panic pass and ask yourself, does this need to be handled right now? If not, you're going to delay. Third question, do you have to be the person doing it or could someone else reschedule meetings? Fixing typos, like not the best use of your time. So if you don't have to be the one to do it, then I want you to delegate it. Now lastly, let's say that there's no other option. You gotta do it right now. Then do the thing immediately and do it with urgency because money loves speed. Poverty loves inaction. So at this point, you've basically determined that the thing will move the needle and you are the only one who can do it. So, you're gonna do it right now. But everything else, you're gonna push to somebody else to do. Only losers accept the first offer. One simple word can cost you millions over your lifetime. Yes. Someone sends you a price, you pay it. Yes. The bank gives you a loan rate, you say yes. For the love of God, stop accepting the first offer in everything that you do. Each time you are literally Throwing money in the trash. Negotiating your deals is one of the highest return habits you can have. One of our advisors here at Contrarian Thinking specializes in loan negotiation origination, a fancy way for saying getting loans at a better rate. A member had a business loan at 49% interest rate. Whoa. He, like most people, didn't really have time to shop around for other deals, and he accepted the offer. Within a few days, Jordan, one of our advisors, found him a new loan Negotiated a rate at way less than half the price, 22%. That saved that business over $1,000 a month in interest payments. That's an extra $65K of working capital. That's $1,000 a month just for not accepting the first offer, which is crazy. And by the way, I'm always happy if you guys want to talk to our team about how we do this for business owners, click the link here, and we will actually get you on a call live to see where we can help your business save. Now, here's how you fix this. First, I need you to fix your mindset. Everything is negotiable. They don't win if you don't say yes. So they need you as much as you need or want them. When studying job offer negotiations, a study found that only 6% of offers were ever revoked due to a negotiation. But the researchers said that within the 6%, managers noted that the person was inappropriate and rude. So you gotta be careful and respectful. Amateurs negotiate price. Pros negotiate terms. Most people look at a deal and only try to get the price lower, but price is only one piece of the deal. For loans and vendor agreements, you have how much you are going to put down right now, how long the agreement lasts, can you break it without penalty? I want you to reply to the first offer with, huh, is that the best you can do? You'd be shocked how often the answer is, well, actually, we could probably do X. Sometimes they say no, But you lost nothing by asking. Sometimes that one question saves you 5%, 10%, 20%. So create a negotiation schedule. Every year, look at the 5 to 10 highest contracts and expenses that you have and negotiate a new deal. This actually saved a lot of the businesses I invested in during COVID I thought we were going to go bankrupt. So I went through the top contracts of every one of my companies, called the landlords, the vendors, the debt holders, and said, we can't pay this right now, but we can pay this amount. What can you do? They want money, and some money is better than no money. It saved our lenders and us. There's 3 asks you can make. We've been a customer for 3 years. What can we do to improve these terms? You could say, if we commit for another year, what can you do on price? You could say something like, we're looking at alternatives. What can you do to keep our business? I think this is one of the easiest things you can do today to make a lot more money. Tell me in the comments how much you saved, or even better, tell Talk to one of our advisors, and maybe they'll run a P&L review for you. Profit potential. Some of your clients and customers deserve to be fired. Like, you guys know the feeling, the person who calls you at 1:00 AM demanding information and special services. Some people are just literal nightmares, and even though they're giving you money, they're not worth the pain. There is a concept called customer profitability whale curve. This is it, which was actually created by Harvard professor Robert Kaplan. He found, this is shocking to me, that your top customers create anywhere from 180% to 200% of your customers' profit. How is that even possible? It's because the middle isn't what you're looking at. It's actually the bottom. The bottom percentage of customers that you have are actually losing you about 50% of your profit. This is all actually in the profit chapter of my book. Which is chapter 5. The insane part to me is this doesn't mean which customer produces your highest revenue. It's not going to tell you that, but it does tell you all of the costs that you don't even think about when fulfilling a customer. And it actually is going to tell you what type of avatar you should go after again and again, and probably what type of avatar you should never sell to. You can say, thanks, no thanks. I got a perfect competitor for you. All right, let's talk about your perfect customer and your worst customer. So, once a quarter, I want you to log these 4 things about all of your customers. I call it the 10X customer framework. Here's how it works. Okay, first, economic fit. They pay well, and they keep paying on time. Recurring revenue, unmatched. Then we've got behavioral fit. So, they are easy to serve. You like them. They're maybe in the same geography. They have a predictable buying pattern. Low cost to deliver. Then we've got results fit. So they want what you actually do best, and they don't ask for one-off requests. Then energy fit. What does that mean? They don't text at 9:00 PM. They do the things you tell them to do. They don't want minor changes. Your perfect fit customer checks off all 4. Now I want you to actually fire the ones that check less than 2 to 3. Why? Anyone left is not your ideal avatar. So you don't want to go and chase after people that you don't really want anyway. So if you can kill all these habits, not only will your business be better, but your life. Don't try to fix them all at once though. Start with one or two and then move on to the next one. I really obsess on this in the book. Whichever is most urgent gets tackled first. And if you need somebody to help you to find your next lover in your business, I got the link. You can talk to my team. We'd love to help you.