How to Avoid Complacency and Keep Your Business Thriving | Warren Buffett's Key to Success

That restlessness, that belief that tomorrow is more exciting than today, you just have to have it permeate the organization.

Complacency doesn't just kill big businesses, it kills small businesses too.

I like to be very competitive. I like to pour boiling oil over my competitors and think every day, how can I kill them?

Rise and shine, it's anspresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode. Explode out onto the world. So let's start your day off right together. Grab your coffee and sip on today's message: Always Be Competing. Over to you, Warren Buffett.

I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning. Well, what kills great businesses, if you look at— I do believe in looking at history. I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, all I wanna know is where I'll die so I'll never go there. And we wanna see what has caused businesses to go bad. And the biggest thing that kills them is complacency. I mean, you want a restlessness, a feeling that, you know, that somebody's always after you, but you're gonna stay ahead of them. You always wanna be on the move. And when you've got a great business, you know, like Coca-Cola, which is, There aren't any like Coca-Cola, but you really— the danger would always be that you rest on your laurels. But I see none of that, obviously, at Coca-Cola. But that is the key, to compete the same way when you've got 1.8 billion servings being sold daily as when you were selling, you know, 10 a day. And that restlessness, that belief that tomorrow is more exciting than today, you just have to have it permeate the organization.

Complacency doesn't just kill big businesses. It kills small businesses too. It's likely going to kill your business as well. What happens with so many entrepreneurs is at the beginning of our companies, we're so passionate, we have an amazing idea, we want to go off and build this company, and we're working really hard. We don't want to work for the man, we don't want to have a corporate job anymore, and so we create our own opportunity. And it's exciting, and it's different, and it's new. But then what ends up happening is, for so many people, We get bored of our businesses because we keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again. And so that can be really boring, especially if you get some kind of success with your company. It's easier to get bored of it because you're not making any changes, because whatever let you do that success, you keep doing it in the exact same way because you don't want to kill the golden goose. You don't want to change up your plan because you know this is working. But especially for entrepreneurs, we like variety. We crave different things. And as we grow and evolve as a human, your business needs to grow and evolve as well. And so complacency kills every business, kills every industry. And the way to get through it is as you grow and evolve as a person, you need to bring that to your business. As you change in your mindset and your beliefs, as you want to explore new paths, you need to bring that to your business because if you don't, you're gonna slowly go out here, right? It just happens. You are not the same person you were when you were 25. The things you cared about, things you were interested in, the things you want to explore and go and create are different. But if your business is still here, then the further out that you grow, the unhappier you're gonna be in your business. And so the key is you need your business to catch up to you. You need to grow and evolve with it. I use YouTube as an example. My YouTube channel is always a reflection of me, of what I'm interested in. If you go back on the content way in the early days, it's not exactly the same as it is now. As I come up with a new idea, I want to bring it to my channel, I want to bring it to you guys, I want to see what you think of it, I want to see how it can explode potentially into your lives and make a big impact. As soon as I get an idea, I need to go and test it out. If I wait, if I sit on it, if I get frustrated with it and I feel like I can't bring it to my business, that's when my business starts to feel like a job. If I ever stopped liking YouTube, which I'm sure will happen at some point, if I don't want to make videos anymore, the day that this becomes a job, like, "Oh, I gotta show up and I gotta make videos." I'm filming lots of videos here today for you. The day that this is a job is the day that I quit. Is the day I move on to something else. 'Cause you will never win doing work that you hate. Most entrepreneurs wait too long for that to happen. They wait for this big break to happen. Where what you want to do is Every time you grow, you bring your business with you. So it never becomes this big crazy initiative. I look at people in the YouTube community too, and they're complaining about the algorithm updates, and they're complaining about how YouTube isn't the same as it was before, and their videos aren't doing as well. YouTube is an amazing platform. The way that it worked in the first number of years is not the way that it works now. And all the big YouTubers, what they did was they stopped evolving. They stopped growing. They stopped injecting more of their art. They're doing it the same way they were doing it 5 years ago, and that's not the way to win anymore. And I love it when people complain. I love it when people complain about how things have changed, because the only constant is change. You can continue to expect your industry to change, always. And I love it when the people ahead of me are complaining, because I see that that's my opportunity. If the people with 10 million subscribers are complaining and they're slowing down and they don't want to evolve and change their business, that's great for me, because I'm going to continue to change. I'm going to continue to evolve, and I'm going to continue to bring that to you guys. And so complacency kills businesses. The day that you start getting bored with your company, you have two options: one, sell it, or find a way to evolve it. The worst thing you can do is try to hang on, try to hang on, try to hang on, because you will lose. Because the people who love their business, who are in the same industry as you, will crush you. Because you have no hope of going up against somebody who's absolutely in love with their company, when you hate doing what you're doing. So stop being complacent and continue to evolve your business as you evolve as a person. Now I've got a special bonus clip for you, but before we get into that, my question of the day for you is I wanna know what is one thing that you are bored of in your business that used to excite you, but now you're bored of it and you need to let it go. Leave it down in the comments below. I'm curious to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of Enespresso and enjoy the bonus.

I wake up every morning, Enespresso keep me going.

When it comes to winning in business, I like to be very competitive. I like to pour boiling oil over my competitors and think every day, how can I kill them? Because that is the war of business. Ultimately, I want my shareholders to make more money than my competitors, and that's very healthy. So I think the DNA of a business has to be How do you make money? How do you spend your time making money for your shareholders? And you're nobody as an entrepreneur until you've made money for somebody else.

I think ego and, like, people wanting to be the best, people with the Orson Welles personality, I think that's cool and really, I encourage, like, 25-year-olds to, like, inflate their egos as large as they can and compete with each other because they're doing it for the audience. The audience wins. Like, that's the way it should be. A bunch of, like, creatives saying, "I'm the best. No, I'm the best. I'm better than you. I'm better," because they're like gladiators and there should be a stadium of people around them winning every time.

If we're going to compete in a segment in any market, we're gonna go to win. I think that was a change for General Motors, and frankly, the team has rallied around that, 'cause everyone, whatever industry or business you go to, people wanna go and do their best. So I feel so much of what I need to do is just set up the systems, enable the processes, and have the right leadership that our designers and our engineers and our buyers can go do the best work they can do every day. And like I said, a simple thing I said to him is, no more crappy cars. And that resonates. He said, OK. Yeah. Deal. You're on. I think there was sometimes so many boundaries put on them that we didn't give them a recipe for success. So now we're saying, hey, no excuses. If it's budget, if it's resources, We have to do great cars, trucks, and crossovers, and it's our job to enable you to do that. And it's really been a transformation.

Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your It's something to me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Hey, Believe Nation! If you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.