Measure Momentum, Not Just Money: The Key to Long-Term Success

Good morning, Believe Nation! It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in your potential, and I want to see that thing that you've got inside you come out so you can have a positive impact on yourself, on your family, your community, and the world. So to help you on your journey, today's message is Measure Momentum. Over to you, Simon Sinek. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning, Success is an elusive thing, right? What is it? And I think it's very interesting that if most people can't define success— well, it means you made X amount of dollars, or— but if you make X amount of dollars but you spend more, are you successful? Or, well, it means you come home happy every day. Okay, how do you know when you're happy, you know? So I think success is a funny thing, which is we all seem to pursue it, but we don't know how to measure it or actually how to define it. So how do you pursue something that you can't measure? Fascinating. So when people say to me, "How do you measure success?" It's a question we all have to ask ourselves. Am I successful? I don't know. I mean, I had a good year last year. And what does that mean? Does that mean I made a lot of money? Does that mean I was really happy? Well, I'll let you decide, right? Maybe neither, maybe both. I had a good year last year, but am I successful? And the answer is no. I don't feel I am because I'm trying to build a world that doesn't exist yet. I'm trying to build a world in which 90% of people go home at the end of the day feeling fulfilled by the work that they do. So I definitely took a step, a big step forward towards that goal, but I'm still so far away. So somebody said to me, "Then how do you know if you're successful?" And the answer is, "If it can go by itself." And so what is more interesting to me as a measurement of success is not the markers per se, It's not the financial goal or the size of the house that you want to buy. Those are nice things. Go for it. But those are not measurements of success. Those are just nice things to collect along the way. For me, it's momentum. I want to measure momentum, which is, you know, when something is moving and you start to see it lose momentum, you're like, "Uh-oh." Give it a push because if you don't give it a push, it's going to stop, and an object in stasis is much harder to get going. It requires a lot more energy. To get something started than it does to keep it going, right? And so if you don't let it stop and you can keep it going, it's this, you know, it still might slow down down there, but you can get it going again much easier. And for me, the opportunity is to get the ball rolling faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's like a snowball. And my responsibility is, because it's not rolling downhill yet, it's not on automatic yet, I need to still keep it going to find that critical mass where it can go, pshew, and at the point it can go by itself without me. Then I will find something else to do, and that may not happen in my lifetime. I think we must all stop measuring promotions, salaries, and these things, but rather measure the momentum of your career. Does my career have momentum? Can I see it moving in the right direction? Can I see it gathering moss? You know, can I see that it's becoming easier for me to keep the momentum? It's becoming easier for me to grow the size of this thing. It's requiring less effort. That's the thing we need to measure. That's the thing that we need to be cognizant of, which is the momentum of our careers, not just the, the markers that we think define our success.

There's a famous saying in business that "What gets measured gets managed." In other words, what you are measuring is what you're going to work on. If you have a specific goal that you're working towards every day, then that's what you're going to work towards every day, right? Once you start tracking something, that's where you're going to guide your effort. And so it's really important that you track things that are meaningful and important to you. For me, money has never been the primary target. Money for me is always a byproduct of having an impact. The more value you're giving, the more impactful what you're creating is, the more money you're going to make. And so I would much rather track those efforts instead of the byproduct, which is going to be money. So I couldn't tell you how much money I have in my bank account right now, or how many investments I have, or for, for Toronto Dance Salsa, what our top line and bottom line is right now. I couldn't tell you. It's important, like money is still important. It's not like forget about money, doesn't mean anything. You know, I have access to the data and I make decisions based off of it, but it's never the number one thing. It's not the most important metric, right? As soon as you start making decisions only based on money, you're going to lose. The most successful entrepreneurs in the world, look at who they are, look at your heroes. We profiled tons of them on this channel. The most important metric they track is never money. And so then you've got to find what is the thing that means the most to you. So as an example, on YouTube, I track my subscribers. The subscriber number in general is not a huge deal. It's not like I hit a million subscribers and now I'm worthy, or I hit 5 million subscribers or 10 million subscribers and now I'm worthy, right? And I'm not going to do anything just to hit that number because I could do a lot of things. I could create a lot of negative content and entrepreneurs fighting each other that could lead to a lot more views and a lot more subscribers. It doesn't fill me up. For me, when somebody chooses to subscribe to my channel, it means that they like my content. It means that I'm having an impact. So it's loving the work, it's loving the day-to-day, and having a meaningful metric that you can use to measure, is your momentum growing? Are you succeeding? Are you having some results? So on the YouTube side, it's the big subscriber number, and it's also the day-to-day. It's, it's the comments, it's the qualitative, right? Seeing you guys comment every day, seeing the impact that it's having, Having somebody say, "This video changed my life, totally improved my perspective, had a big impact." Like, those little things, the day-to-day, the little whys, right? Like, say, big Y, little y. Those little whys keep me motivated, as well as that big Y of chasing down the big number, the billion entrepreneurs, the million subscribers, the next goal of 10 million subscribers. If you look at TDS, the main metric that we measure is student satisfaction. So after a student has finished a class, we send out a survey. How did you like this instructor? How was the experience at TDS? And it's on a scale out of 5. And my goal is for every instructor at the school to beat my all-time high. So I have the all-time high historical record of being the best instructor at Toronto Dance Salsa. It's like a 4.92-something. I want every instructor to beat me. Not as an ego thing, like, I just want them to perform really well. My goal is to make them better than I was when I was teaching. That means we're having a huge impact on the students who are coming in. Right, if my instructors are scoring a 4.95 out of 5 on average, that's a pretty big result. That's a lot of satisfaction that are going through our customers and our students. And so that's the main metric that we track every single quarter. And my goal is to help them become better than I was and give a way better result for our customers. And so I'd highly encourage you to think about what is the metric that really means something? How do you measure momentum in your business? Yes, money is important. It's not everything and it's not nothing. It's still important, but it's not number 1. It's number 2 or 3. It's a little bit further down that list, but it's still close to the top. What's at the top though? Like, how do you measure your success? How do you measure that you're making the right decisions? How do you measure the momentum in your business? I would love to hear from you. Please leave that metric down in the comments below. I think it could really inspire some of the people watching, and I might learn something new as well. So share your thoughts. I also want to give a quick shout out to Adil Zuberi from superpowersolutions.com. Thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book. Your one word. I really appreciate the support, and I hope you enjoyed the read. So 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. Much love, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

Folks, the difference in the great coaches and the average and ordinary coaches is the ability to get momentum and to keep momentum. Think about this, folks. A.O. Williams for 20 consecutive years grew. Now during those 20 consecutive years, we changed companies 5 times. I had to terminate the number 1 producer in our company on 2 different occasions, and it was almost impossible to get terminated, you know, from A.O. Williams. We had wars with the regulators. We were kicked out of Mississippi for 2 weeks. Canada passed a rule where there was no part-time recruits. Texas limited the number of recruits so we could— 350 a year. And with all of that, A.L. Williams grew for 20 straight years. Now, how do you grow? This is the difference in a pro, a real pro, an average and ordinary coach. There are 3 things you do now to guarantee you keep momentum when you get it going. Number 1, you grow by multiplication. You grow by multiplication. You've got to always be promoting people to district leader, to division leader, to RVP. Okay, because once you get things growing by multiplication, then what you have— or you have hundreds, then hundreds or thousands of people that are doing what you are trying to do, okay? Building friends, praising, recognizing people, recruiting best friends. Does that make sense? And see, once you have— once you're growing by multiplication, that's the greatest opportunity for you to keep that momentum that you've kept, okay? That make sense? Alright, number 2, the second thing in keeping this momentum once you have it is you've got to have an enemy. You've got to have some kind of injustice out there you're trying to create. You know, you've got to have an edge. I don't care if you're in the real estate business, right? If somebody's charging, charging, let's say, a 10% commission on just raw land that you sell out there, then you do it for 8.5% or something, right? You've got to have an edge over the enemy. You've got to have an enemy you're trying to beat out there, right? Now we were fortunate to have the worst enemy in the whole history of the world, right? The trash value guys, right? But, but you're selling a crusade. There's nothing that energizes people and keep that momentum going like a, like a crusade, right? You're out there trying to save the world. You're trying to make a difference with your life, right? And then the third thing is you have competition competition inside the company. I was a master at promoting competition inside the company, right? Like Lawrence Walker, I'd get him taking on Dick Walker, you know, down in Tampa, Florida. You know, I mean, I was, I had a gift of always egging people along a little bit, okay? So if you wanna, if you wanna keep momentum once you get it, there are 3 keys. You grow by multiplication, you keep recruiting. Listen to this, folks. For 20 years as president of AO Williams, the first thing I look for every day on my desk— Kathy Herring, my secretary— the first thing I did when I went in the office before I talked to Bo or anybody and gotten, and got in my million things I needed to do, okay, The first thing I did every morning was look at recruiting numbers. First thing I did every morning. The second thing I did was sign 200 go-go letters. That's the first thing I did and got that out of the way first thing every morning, right? And so you've got to have a way— I'm gonna talk to you about that in the morning— to monitor this kind of stuff so when you know, you can anticipate when you are slowing down, right? When you're fixing to hit a brick wall down the road. Correct? So if you, if you're growing by multiplication, if you've got people out there recruiting best friends, picking up policies of best friends, you know, making presentations to best friends, building friends with their recruits, praising, recognizing people, promoting district managers, promoting division managers, promoting RVPs, and you've got people, you're teaching people how to do all these same kind of things to build these powerful relationships, right? Then you're guaranteed that you're gonna keep that momentum going if you have an enemy. You've gotta have an enemy. You've gotta have something you can get people riled up about. And then the third thing is you create competition inside your own organization or inside the company, right?

Let me give you the one, one secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy.

The most important word.

Ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.