119 How Success Becomes A Blocker to Personal Growth

If you're in a stage of life where your goal is to, quote, unquote.

Make it, oftentimes we don't stop to.

Consider what the life of making it looks like because we are so busy wanting to make it right, we're consumed by the notion of making it. But if all you want to do is make it, then once you make it, all that matters to you is not to lose it. The result is you're one of two types of people. You're either trying to be successful or you're trying to stay successful.

And I'll be honest, that's just not.

That interesting to me. I love having a challenge and trying to strive to do a thing, but oftentimes you get to that thing and you're like, it's hard to find joy there. You're actually paralyzed with fear at the notion of you potentially losing that thing that was so important. Right? So how do we get off that hamster wheel? I wanna share some thoughts of mine, stuff that I've struggled with thought through, and how to keep things interesting in a way that is more like the infinite game, right? Something that you can do for your entire career that will keep you growing as a person. So come on in, let's talk about it. I think we've all probably heard that analogy of, like, you're climbing a mountain and you get to the top of the mountain and you're like, okay, what do I do now? And what actually, like, a lonely place that can be. If you spend a decade of your life trying to accomplish this thing, and then you accomplish this thing and you're like, oh, what's next? It turns out I was actually just so entirely consumed with that accomplishment that once you got there, you don't really know what to do with yourself. And I try to be mindful of this. We did another episode a bit ago about goals, and I try to lean more into process than achievement or goal or this step destination. Because I don't know that there's a destination that's, like, fun. Like a destination kind of by definition ends and has this finality. And so it's probably more goals have. Have value, but it's almost more like, to me, EOS is framing of, like, quarterly rocks. Like, what are these small incremental things that will take you on a journey, but then it's more about the bigger journey and how do you find something that you can do and be passionate about for decades? And what I've learned, for me is that looks like kind of chasing new skill sets that I'm interested in. And, you know, obviously, video was a great example of one. I dabbled in it a little bit, and I found, like, oh, this is actually really fun. This is like, an interesting way to kind of bring to life some of the silly ideas that I have. But it was also something I found that I really enjoyed that could also be valuable to, like, where I was trying to go and the people that I. I enjoyed helping. And, like, you know, what it looked like to build a business around that. And for most of us coming into accounting, there's this element of you put in a decade, or you put in 15 years, or you put in 20 years, and you develop this core skill, this expertise. And for the first, I don't know, decade at least, the focus is just on building that expertise and becoming a domain expert. Cause that's hard. And so when you're in college and you're learning and all of that, that is success. That is the destination to be able to confidently do that thing. But once you hit that, when you're 30, 35, 40, what do you do after that? Like, to me, that's almost where you get into the, like, doldrums of adulthood, at least when it comes to professional things. Like. And I'm just gonna talk about the professional lens, not the interesting things you do on the personal side, which you should absolutely have. But I also am not a believer that you should just get by with your work not being interesting and, you know, just let your personal life be the interesting thing too. I think both ought to be interesting. Like, there's no. For most people, you can find a version of work that you love and that you're passionate about and that you enjoy doing every day. And if you haven't, you should. You should try to find that. But once you develop that domain expertise, what's after that? Is it then just about, like, playing the business game and, like, playing politics in a bigger firm and all that? That's admittedly where I kind of ran out of steam. And. And so what kept me entertained was after 10 years doing tax, I was like, okay, I don't know that much about running an accounting practice, which is very different than running a tax practice. I'm gonna go out and start this, and this will be fun. And I did that for a few years, and I enjoyed that. But then I was kind of onto the next thing, and it was more like, what does it look like to own a larger firm and kind of look at, you know, talent acquisition and strategy at a more meta level. And that was fun and I learned a ton, and it kind of developed me as a person because it was kind of a new thing. But where I think most people kind of stall out is you develop this domain expertise and you're still, you're going to have to have like the big brain domain experts, where they are just the mega, mega technical people who will do the research and all of that. And there's still a place for them. But for most of us, I absolutely think there are diminishing returns beyond a certain threshold. If all you ever do, if the only thing you ever invest in yourself is technical education, right? Think about most accountants is particularly true of tax accountants that I've worked with in the US the only way that you really invest in yourself is continuing education up to the minimum requirement as dictated by your credential, right? So that old chestnut comes up every year, every couple of years when you got to do the renewal, you. You go out and you do some continuing ed. And oftentimes it's most of that continuing ed falls into one of two buckets. It falls into the cheat off your peers, get 40 hours done in the last 24 hours between before the renewal sort of bucket, right? Where it's like, I just gotta machine through as many of these as possible. I've got that all you can eat subscription, and I'm just gonna try to nail these as quickly as I can. The other bucket is more the fringe continuing ed, where it's like, oh, we have a client where this new thing might be relevant to them. And so you go out and you're spending time learning a new technical thing which is not without value, to see if it applies to a client situation. And of all of the things that you could do with an hour of your time that will make you a better human, a more productive human, be able to help people in a more profound way. Man, the answer is almost always not that new little technical nuance thing. When you put that next to getting better at writing, like developing your emotional intelligence, persuasion, like confidence in speaking, like, there's so many, to me, other higher leverage skills that we don't invest in. Like, if accountants invested as much continuing ed in written communication and business strategy and stuff like that that they did in technical stuff, I think it would make us much better leaders and much better entrepreneurs. But this became doubly so maybe 10 times so when the Internet came around because all of a sudden certain skill sets became like infinitely high leverage. So for the first time, arguably, the Internet enabled distribution on, like an infinite scale. So I don't know, something like 5,000 people have watched a video of mine in the last 24 hours and I didn't have to do a thing to get that video in front of, you know, one more person or for them to watch that. And there's certain skills like that now that are wildly valuable. And so when you reach that level of technical expertise where there's a kind of a threshold there where you can confidently handle 99% of things, I think the path to continuing to develop as a person is probably not towards like going after more and more technical. It's developing the adjacent complimentary things that will better amplify the skill set that you already have. And as accountants, we're just, we're, we're bad marketers. Like, self promotion is hard and, and we're also still bound by the firm model that was defined pre Internet. And so it's very hard to go out and do things that you don't see everybody else doing. And what everybody else is doing right now is the same thing that everybody did for the past 50 years with professional services. Like the way people run firms remains unimpacted by the Internet. Maybe they're trying to get Google reviews, but like, that's it. And Google reviews are doing nothing to help you, like build a niche and find specificity and all that. And if you think about most of the people that you look up to in life, they are prolific not due to their technical expertise, they're prolific due to this adjacent skill that they have.

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You need to know to get started hiring offshore. You already know I'm down with offshore hiring. Learn more@hireteamup.com so the only reason people tune into this show or tune into my YouTube channel is because we found a way to like create engaging video content around this stuff. I'm far from the biggest brain, you know, small accounting firm advisor type of guy, but the reason that people tune in is because we can make that hopefully fun and engaging. Like an entertaining way to learn. If you think about, you know, if you're in the tax base, you Tony Nitty's of the world. Obviously that guy's really good technically, but the reason that everybody loves him is his writing and his ability to be a killer public speaker. You look at people like who else? Nyle Carter Gray, who's at all the conferences. She does a lot of talks. She is a phenomenal public speaker and she goes and she talks about firm running. But the reason that you look up to her as a firm runner is because she's an unbelievable a public speaker which is like a reflection of her just like super enthusiastic, energetic personality. And so you'll find like when you think about this, even people who are held up as the biggest brain tech experts, like technical experts you know, even your, your Ed Zollers of the world, who have just unbelievable technical knowledge, the reason that you even know they exist is because they're good at talking about it and writing about it. So what is the adjacent skill that will take you on a better path than the path you're on today? And how can you start investing in that in a way that will boost wherever you're trying to go? I love this notion of skill stacking, the idea that you can kind of build this complementary set of skills that work together really well that boost that, that core technical ability that you started with. And so if I was giving advice to my kids, it would be, I still think you need to start with, like, the thing that separates you from the charlatan that's just like putting out get rich quick stuff is you have that core technical ability. Like, you really need to be like, really, really good at that and get to that point. But that doesn't need to be in an entire career sort of thing. So I would tell my kid, like, go into something specific, something hard, where you develop that technical expertise, spend a decade, two decades on that, but then think about what are the adjacent things, then that, that will amplify that skill that you already have. And I went through an exercise a while back of like, thinking through what my progression was. I started with tax technical skills, and then I built that more into accounting systems. And so that was like building an accounting practice. The projects we looked for there were the really hard technical ones where systems could be a good solution. Next, honestly, was probably the skill of persuasion, which, like, I know, comes through my content a lot. Just the fact that I can sound the, you know, very confident and sure of how I feel about this thing. And I learned that skill of persuasion, like, coming of age in a firm with a bunch of other very mature partners who had done this stuff for decades and were very opinionated. And we came through stuff like Covid relief. And it was like kind of put up or shut up sort of times. And you had to get a bunch of people to buy into your vision of doing things. And that was honestly, that was learned just through, like, doing it in a corporate environment. But that skill of persuasion, obviously is still super, super valuable and comes through in everything else that I do, right? Like through my videos, through social media, through writing. Like, persuasion is one of those mega valuable skills. And then stuff that I started investing in that were kind of adjacent skills. Actually, the very first thing I did besides firm running was I created a little newsletter called Launch for accountants, that was like five new apps every week that could be helpful to accountants. But because a really hard thing for me was tech discovery, there's so much new software coming out all the time. I was combing through all this different stuff, trying to find solutions for the problems our clients had. Because my business model was really built around, we're gonna find people with bad systems, help them get onto better systems. And that sort of arbitrage of time of us being able to automate a lot of that stuff would lead to a really profitable accounting practice. So I was combing through a huge volume of new tech every single week. And I'm like, accountants have this same problem, like, how do I find the right tool for this and that? Who's going to filter through all of the noise? Because nobody can filter through this new stuff. And I was like, I'm already doing this work. What if I just sent out a weekly newsletter sharing those five things? At the time, I was really fascinated by email marketing. And this was. When was this? I don't know, 2018, 2019? I was really fascinated by the mechanics of email marketing. Cause there's a lot of people investing a ton of money into that for advertising, anything. And I was kind of fascinated by it. And so I just started doing it because I was like, this is going to be a helpful skill to have no matter what I end up doing. So I'm just going to start a newsletter and learn more. And since then, like, the whole, you know, think boy newsletter thing is massive now, obviously. And we all have. You're subscribed to way more newsletters than we could possibly consume every week. Right. But that for me, email marketing was this complimentary skill where I was like, okay, I could see this helping me no matter what I do down the road. It's going to help me right now in running my firm. It's going to help me in, you know, doing this other little tech project with launch for accountants. So let's just start learning. And a trap here is to try to define what your takeaway is from all this and the ultimate value that it has to you. Like, we're so ROI focused. The trap here is to fixate on, well, I want it to get me to this outcome when what we're really doing is just growing. And that's okay. That's a thing that is always going to be worth investing in, is if this is ultimately a high leverage. And that's an important distinction, a high leverage skill set where for one more person to consume that thing it doesn't require any more effort from you. If this is a high level skill set, it is worth you investing in that thing doubly. So if it's something that you enjoy and you're curious about and can have fun with, like, that's gold. So this is where I move my focus away from what is the destination to what's the next thing I can learn, like what can I become good enough at. And that started with email marketing. And then one week I put in a 90 second video of last week's most popular tool, what people clicked on the most. And three times as many people clicked on that video as anything else in that email. And I'm like, okay, I've stumbled onto something here. And that video was horrendous. It was in actually the same room at the time. It was like a wood workshop recorded on my laptop webcam. It was so, so, so bad. I mean every bit as bad as you would expect your first video you ever make to be. But way more people engage with that than anything else on the email. So I started doing that every week and it kind of build a habit of having to practice each week. Eventually that I started putting on YouTube because. Cause I was like, you know, newsletters are basically ephemeral. Like they come in, people archive em, they're not discoverable. It's like, if I'm gonna make this video, why don't I at least put it on YouTube so it has a little bit longer of a life. And that's how my YouTube channel started. And like that's where we are today. It was a product of that. And so when I started learning email marketing, I couldn't tell you that I expected I was starting email marketing so that someday I could have a daily podcast and a YouTube channel and newsletter and like actually make a business out of all this. Stu, that was the last thing in the world that I ever would've expected, right? But the email marketing thing led to the video thing. And when I started doing video stuff, man, I never thought people would like pay to sponsor content. You can build a media business around it. Like never could have imagined that. But there's so much value in developing high leverage skill sets adjacent to your technical expertise that so much of opportunity is what is your surface area for luck and how people are able to discover you and find you and all of that and high leverage stuff gets you there.

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So if there's one thing I can stress like it's, it's, I guess avoid the trap of fixating on a destination and instead like build that core technical expertise and then think about how you can layer in really complimentary skills that will not only help the thing that you're doing now, but also be an asset for the rest of your career. Like, man, like, I'm like the most exciting thing to me about video production and the podcast and all that is like, there's never gonna be a day where this isn't a really valuable skill set for me. Right. Like, I've been super fortunate that I could make it actually a business out of it so that I can keep investing in this skill while it makes money and so I can devote, you know, more time and effort to it than I otherwise could if I was just running the firm. But all of these skills are gonna be super relevant skills long term and they're mega high leverage. Right. And most accountants, I don't think are actively investing in high leverage skills. Like, I don't. I just don't see most of us doing that right now. Maybe you're still laying the groundwork of developing what that technical expertise will be. I will say I think it is normal for accountants to set the bar too high for exactly how high that technical expertise needs to be. But once you're beyond that threshold where there's to a degree, diminishing returns of continuing to go deeper. And again, especially in the context of a team, you do not have to be the number one technical expert on your team. Like, that's also a thing that you can hire for. But I don't think a lot of us are investing in that right now. So as kind of a ideation exercise, I ran some prompts, thromps, I ran some prompts through ChatGPT. So I did the same prompt again of give me 10 micro niches that I could support in my tax or accounting firm. And so what I want to do is cruise through some niches, but then pair those with what are some really high leverage skills I could start developing. So that would actually support the business that I'm trying to build here with my accounting firm, while also, like developing me as a person. Like, this is a skill that will always benefit me because that's like, that's the Venn diagram that we're looking for here is what's the high leverage skill that will boost what I do today while also developing me. Like, that's, that's what I want to find. So 10 micro niches generated from GPT4 here. I actually built on this prompt a little bit. I said, I, I used the same specific micro niche prompt as before, but I said, then make that niche even more specific by identifying the target business size and a key pain point for the business owner. That's specific to that micro niche. So that's all part of the prompt that I gave to ChatGPT. So first one I returned here. Artisanal coffee shops. Small businesses with a single location and less than 10 employees. Key pain point, struggling with managing inventory costs and cash flow due to the perishable nature of their goods and seasonality. Number two, independent mobile app developers, solo owners and small teams of less than 6. Difficulty in managing a regular income streams and understanding tax obligations in different app marketplaces globally. These are great. Like there's a killer firm to be built around all these. Third was small scale organic farms, family owned farms, less than 50 acres. Challenged in accessing government grants, managing cash flow during off seasons and tax complexities due to various income sources. Number four, boutique fitness studios, I. E. Yoga, pilates. Single location, less than 20 employees, high operational costs and irregular income streams. 5. Independent children's book authors. So solo authors or those that work with a small team of illustrators or editors, usually self published. Managing the complexities of royalties, copyrights and digital sales tax. Gosh, these are good. 6. Vintage car restoration businesses. Small shops with less than 15 employees. Handling the financial intricacies of sourcing rare expensive parts and managing project based cash flow. 7. Small wineries or breweries under 20,000 barrels per year. Understanding tax regs and seasonality. 8. Freelance digital marketers specializing in SEO. Small teams. Less than 10. Irregular income, managing client retainers in the financials. Number nine, specialty pet stores. That is exotic pets. Single store location with less than 15 employees. Managing inventory costs of specialized, often expensive products. Number 10, home based artisanal soap makers. Oh, usually one person operations. Navigating taxation for online sales and seasonal fluctuations. Okay, let's grab one. Let's grab number nine specialty tax doors as an homage to one of our most engaged listeners, Romeo, who's super into reptile stuff. This one's for you. So we got our micro niche around specialty pet stores. Now we're gonna pair this with a high leverage skill. So I got another prompt here. Okay, for number nine.

Give me five high leverage skills I.

Can develop that will grow my personal skillset while also attracting entrepreneurs with these specific problems. When I say high level skill sets, I mean things that are infinitely scalable, like learning to produce videos, learning email marketing, writing, learning how to hook people on social media. Okay, so five ideas for how to hook the owners of specialty pet stores. 1. Content creation and storytelling. Master the art of storytelling, focusing on creating engaging, informative and visually appealing content. Develop stuff around the narrative stories of exotic Pets, their care routines, and the unique offerings of specialty pet stores. So I guess storytelling wrapped around running specialty pet stores, like, what are the pains those people go through and how can you tell that stuff in an engaging way that people will listen to? I love that. You know, there's. We talk a lot about education, but actually storytelling can be maybe easier isn't the right word. But just as powerful if not better. Because when we educate, we feel like we have to come from a place of expertise and being the best. When in reality, oftentimes all we need to do is tell people stories. And that can be really, really valuable. Number two, social media marketing. Create an online presence for exotic pet entrepreneurs, boosting visibility. And that's kind of meh. Number three, this one's interesting to me. E commerce optimization. Gain expertise in E comm platforms, online sales strategies and digital customer experience optimization. Now this may feel super specialized, but the reality is like we're on a path to everybody selling online. Like there used to be E commerce and that was a specialization. Reality is like ultimately everyone's going to be selling things online. That just kind of becomes the norm. So if you're the accountant that knows E. Com, like maybe you ran, like think about an accountant who has a firm who in the past ran an e comm business or maybe still runs an e comm business that is a unicorn. Right. And the skill of being able to develop an e comm business, kind of like video making or something like that, that's an unbelievably powerful adjacent skill to have to where if you have that experience, people are going to love you. And. And it is a skill that will always be valuable. How to sell stuff online. Right. I actually love that one. Number four, data analytics. Learn to collect, analyze and interpret data to make informed business decisions. Yeah. So if you can make sense of like buying patterns, that's going to be extremely valuable to your clients. But also learning how to do that will be a skill that will always serve you right. Like that's gold. And then number five, email marketing automation. Master the art of creating compelling email content segmentation and automation to personalize the customer journey. Drip campaigns. Super, super powerful. The notion that you can design a journey of different emails with all this branching logic according to are they opening it or not? Are they clicking on this link or that link? And that's a great indicator of what they're actually interested in that should inform what email they get next. That stuff's really fascinating to me. That's actually why I started my email newsletter was I wanted to lear more about drip campaigns. But if you know how to nail that to keep the engagement of someone, man, that's a skill that's going to be valuable forever. Right. So these are actually pretty good. The social media marketing ones maybe a little too generic. I would get more specific there, like learning how to make a killer hook. You know, something specific like that. That is really kind of what social media is all about. Or compelling blog posts or something more specific. But I would encourage you, if you're on this super sweaty journey trying to get to a specific thing that oftentimes we don't think enough about, if we're hyper fixated on that thing on the other side of achieving that thing, oftentimes we just become hyper protective and hyper scared of ever losing that thing. And instead I like to find a journey that I'm excited about where there's a new thing that I'm trying to learn that's complementary to the stuff that I already do that will amplify that skill set that I already have. And making time and maybe this is the hardest part, making time to invest in that super high leverage thing that will not only support the business that you already have, but be a skill that you will take to the grave that will always be valuable. Right. I don't know. I don't see a ton of us doing this. And so I would like super encourage you to find that high leverage thing that is like a force multiplier for. For the skill set you have. Right. If that's something you're working on or if one of these things jumped out and is like, that's interesting to me. I would actually enjoy learning more about that sort of thing. Pop it in the comments why that's interesting to you and how it may pair well with the business that you're building. That's all I got today. Hopefully there's a nugget in there that was for you and I'll see you in the next one.