Jeff Dudan on winning your current role by creating more than you cost, building indispensable teams through collaboration, and finding people who represent who you want to become. He emphasizes rapid learning through fast failure and deferred gratification.
Chapters
People often ask me, jeff, how do I get started today? What can I do either as an employee or I'm working under some sort of a contract or I'm just starting my business, how can I move forward? What's the best thing that I can do? And I always share with them. The best way to get the next opportunity is to win the one that you're currently working in. So first, create more than you cost. That is a rule of thumb for an entrepreneur. When you're starting a business, you want your expenses to lag behind your revenue. Let your lifestyle catch up to your lifestyle business. Let your outcomes supersede your income deferred gratification. If you're in an employee situation, understand what you cost the business, what you cost it in terms of wages, in terms of commission, in terms of burden, in terms of office space, in terms of the time that they're investing in you to help you be great at your job and then understand what the economics are. What am I creating? How can I create it more efficiently? How can I increase my output? Now you're thinking like a business owner, and business owners will appreciate and they will see that in you and they will continue to give you more opportunity, more to make more money and to create more value for the business. Now you're thinking like a business owner. You might become a business owner very soon. Make yourself irreplaceable by making yourself obsolete. Everybody has something that they produce inside of a company, but there's always a better way to do things, especially with technology and lead generation and AI and all of the tools that are changing rapidly, transforming the face of business every single day. You're in the best position sitting where you are to understand how to optimize and create efficiencies inside of your position. So let's just say that you see a tool during your position that you can download and you're like, oh, wait a minute, that's going to make, that's going to take half of my job away. What should you do? If I'm you, I'm going to say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do the research, I'm going to beta test this, I'm going to wrap this up in a neat bow and I'm going to go to my employer or my business partner or whoever I'm working with and I'm going to say, look at, look at what we can do here to build a better business, to create more margin, to create more income, or to create more opportunity. For the business. You've made yourself obsolete in that position, but you've made yourself irreplaceable to the company or to that relationship, whatever it is that you're in now. Amateurs add and subtract, but you need to multiply. So how do you multiply what you do? First thing you can do is collaborations. Work with other people who occur before you or who occur after you and whatever it is you're producing and see if there's a way that you can expand your your business or your job via collaboration. There's always people that are really hyper focused on what's right in front of them and moving the widget from the left to the right or creating the outcome based on somebody else's metrics that they created for them. But people that are winning and want to win the next opportunity are always going to be looking for ways to make the room bigger, to make the party bigger, and to make the outcome bigger for everybody. And when you learn to collaborate and you learn to include other people that are looking for a similar outcome and you make everybody's pie bigger, then you become irreplaceable to that business. Where is that person that did that great thinking? Who was that person that came up with that great idea? Who was that person that executed on that great collaboration that they had? And the second point of multiplying instead of adding or subtracting is make the team better. If you learn something and it doesn't necessarily apply to your position, but can help somebody else around you, keep your eyes open, keep your head on a swivel, be curious, but then also be generous. Being generous, you've got to have something to give and that's going to come from your curiosity and really thinking about, like, how can we win as a team? Everybody is looking for a winning team to join. Everybody wants to be up to something and going somewhere with a group that's doing the same. So if you're a leader inside of making your team better, you become irreplaceable. Now, once you've done all that and you're thinking, look, I can see clearly the impact that I want to make in my next game, in my next win from where I am, find your future self, find your future Mike, Tony, Suzy, whoever you are, and engage with them because there's somebody that is currently doing exactly what it is that you want to do. They've done it, they've done it successfully, they've gone through all the learning, they've got all the scabs, they've got all the road rash, they've got all the pain and they're willing to share their journey with you and they're willing to show you the way. We always have to find a bigger room. It doesn't matter where you are in your career, inside of your business, if you're doing a million, there's people that are doing 10. If you're doing 10, there's people that have found their way to 100 and so on and so forth. So always look for the person who best represents your future self and don't be embarrassed to go up and engage those people. And then at the end of the day, once you see it clearly, you've got to take fearless action. You look most of the things, the decisions that you're going to make, if they don't involve skydiving or ballistic testing, none of these things are going to be fatal. They're just going to be either a setback. But you can have a setback until you're not going to have a breakthrough, until you have some setbacks. So you might as well jump on that horse and move forward and try to and break a few things. Because taking fearless action, sometimes you're going to spill a little bit of milk, especially if you're trying to go fast. But the faster you fail, the faster it is till you'll succeed, and the faster it is that you'll learn how to get to where you want to go. So if it doesn't kill you, and most things don't, then take a chance and be fearless and take that action. And as my daughter likes to say, dad, never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Good luck. I hope you're winning today, but I know you can win bigger tomorrow. And. And the best way to do that is to win in the opportunity that you're currently in. This has been Jeff Doden and I'm cheering for you. Go get him.
