The Survival Show That Taught Me Important Business Lessons

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. I am fresh back from my honeymoon in Hawaii. What an amazing trip. And one of the things that we did on our way there at the beginning was we binged this show called Alone, which I'm sure you've heard of. Uh, we had just started watching it. It's about these people that go alone out into the wilderness and they try to survive for as long as they can. They don't even have cameras following them, they just have like GoPros and trail cams and stuff, um, you know, sort of monitoring them. So We watched this show and I'm learning so much about survival, obviously, because they have to, you know, make fire and go for food. But it was funny how many business analogies I was able to draw from watching the different contestants because, you know, the winner gets $250,000 or $500,000. But looking at the traits of the folks that were able to outlast the others drew some really big ahas about business. So I'm going to talk about business survival this morning because it feels a little bit like a game of survival these days, given the, um, the economy, given the political climate we're in, given the disruption that's happening technologically. And if you're an online business owner, it may be like, oh my gosh, everything is so much harder than it used to be. I don't even know if my business is going to survive. And I am telling my clients, listen, it's not about like winning, right? We always— if we're entrepreneurial, we always want to like the goalpost. We want to do better, grow, grow, grow, infinite growth, straight line to the top. That's not really the game right now. The game right now is to outlast, right? Is to still be in business by the next year. That's really the game, which may be depressing, or it may provide some relief for you because it's like, okay, I don't have to be the most amazing business owner in the world. I don't have to have the best profit margins ever. I just need to keep going. I need to not stop. I need to be flexible. I need to pivot. I need to be adaptable. I need to be resilient. So let's talk about endurance, which is one of the key, um, you know, faculties of a person who can last alone in the wilderness. And that is also a personality trait of business owners who are going to make it. So I'm going to talk about a few of the contestants that I saw and some of the similarities that I see in business. So the first is— I'm calling him the gadget guy. This guy, brilliant guy, you could tell he was— had an engineer mind, but he spent so much time and energy making fancy tools and gadgets, right? Whereas, you know, one guy was just like throwing a line with a little piece of bait and catching fish and eating. This guy was making this like complicated kayak and fishing pole, and then he of course got a leak in his kayak, and then he had to fix it, and he just wasted so much time overcomplicating looking for food because he was just obsessed with like, look at what I made, like look at how I did that, look at how I, you know, built this, you know, two-person kayak out of leaves and twigs, which I mean is amazing in its own right. It's not that it wasn't, you know, an admirable thing, but he like lost sight of the goal and he was more fixated on what he was building than how he was surviving. And I see this a lot in business. It's endless software purchasing and trying and migrations. It's tweaking of branding. It's building really complex project management systems that you don't need, and, you know, a million org charts. And it's the person who's really good at that, with that engineering sort of detail mind, but they end up losing sight of the main goal. And the goal is to keep things as simple as possible and to focus on revenue and customers. And so this guy didn't win. He had coolest gadgets, but he didn't actually survive in the wilderness long enough to win the prize. Okay, so the second contestant that I noticed was— I'm calling the energy waster, right? So these contestants, they don't balance energy versus reward. So they, they're like, okay, I'm going to go, you know, kill a moose, and that's going to allow me to survive for 6 months out here. But they're chasing these animals, they're burning calories, and they end up worse off because the chance of getting a moose is quite low in this particular season. And so they missed some of the easy wins around camp, right? And so in business, if you're pouring effort into these like big goals, but you haven't really like successfully figured out the chance of hitting that big goal in the next 6 months, or what that goal is actually going to return to you. I mean, in this— in the, uh, show alone, had they gotten a moose, it would have been, you know, it would have been epic. Although I will say, you know, getting an animal that big and then trying to preserve the meat so it doesn't go bad is a whole nother problem in and of itself. So I, I don't know. They, they were like eyes on the big prize, but they did not adequately figure out how much energy it was going to take. And so in business, you really want to work smart and you want to think about, okay, that big goal or that big idea is really cool, but is there an easier, a little bit lower bandwidth lift that I could do right now that maybe isn't going to get me quite the same return, but is going to keep me moving in motion? The energy wasters never win the game. And so I think the same is in business. Okay, number 3 is I'm calling the overbuilder. Now, she was a little different than the gadget guy and a little different from the energy waster, but just slightly. Basically, she knew how to build a house, right? She knew how to build a log cabin from scratch, which is amazing. And she went into the contest with this idea that I'm going to build the best shelter ever so that I can survive these like terrible— this terrible winter. It's going to be like -40. And it's not a bad strategy, but I think she was so into the idea of building this house and building it from scratch. It served a really important purpose and she did not realize it, but I think what it was doing for her was it was giving her purpose out there being alone, right? Because that's part of the game, is like you're out there, you're building, you're alone, and Thankfully, in entrepreneurship, we're not alone. We have communities and mentors, but she spent so much of her drive, not just her physical energy, but her focus on this house. And it took her 3 weeks to build it. And while she did have the energy wasting problem that I talked about before, you know, she wasted a lot of energy. The thing is, what she didn't realize is that once she finished her house, she lost all her drive to actually complete the contest. And so the whole time she was building this house, she was working towards a goal, which is cool, right? It's, it's— there's information there, right? So like, if you need to like endure a really tough time period in your life, having a tangible goal is, is really helpful. But the irony was that once the house was built, 21 days later, she now was set up to last the whole winter, but she had no motivation left and she quit. She quit like 2 days after she built this house. Like, it was crazy. And so think about that when you're building a really complicated website, for example, you know, you, you on the one hand, it's providing you this juice and this momentum, which is cool. But on the other hand, if that becomes everything about your business, right, or everything about your plan, once it's done, you may find yourself just wanting to give up, like, or not knowing what you— what to do next, or like, you know, a ship without a rudder. And so if you're not careful and, and don't like have a broader picture, a broader vision, that could be a danger for you. So she did not win either. Uh, the next one is the Invincible one, and these are the contestants that ignore sickness and ignore injury and in the wilderness, in this show, one cut— like a cut that wouldn't be a big deal here in civilization where there's, you know, antibiotics and ointments and stuff— one cut could take these people out. And so this is sort of the, um, same thing that you see like when people work out and they like focus on working out but they don't focus on rest and recovery. The same thing in business. If rest is a strategy, okay, and especially when you know you have a long game to play, like if you knew that you have to walk 100 miles, you wouldn't want to try to walk 50 in a day because you're going to be exhausted, right? So you would, you would pace your energy. Same thing in business. Burnout is real, and burnout can cause you to do some really, really unfortunate things to your business. And so rest needs to be a strategy built into your business flow because you're not a robot. We have robots, but we are not them. Okay, um, so there was a, um, smart survivor, and this person actually won. And this was a different season we watched, and I really thought that this was an interesting strategy. She came on, and number one, she had gained a lot of weight prior to the show, so she had a lot of fat reserves. Okay, so cash flow, savings. Think of it this way, because of that, she did not really stress about food when she got on, on the island or whatever. And she actually decided, I need to build a warm, cozy shelter, which is really like— but she also focused on like, I need to feel comfortable, like I need to actually enjoy where I'm living or I'm not gonna last. Like, she understood her humanity really well. And this is This is about people who build things and they don't— they're like, oh yeah, I can do 16, you know, 17 Zoom calls this week, and they don't understand they're building a business that they're gonna hate, right? And she didn't do that. And she also didn't stress about food. She did not start hunting for 30 days. Why? Because she had all these fat reserves, and so she just didn't waste energy hunting for food. And a lot of the people on the show, they end up actually burning a lot of calories hunting, you know. It's like, okay, I finally got this bird for, you know, 3 300 calories, but I spent 1,000 getting it, right? And they don't understand the math. Again, this is something I see in business all the time. Like, did you math this out? Did you, did you look at this membership that's a $9 membership? Did you see how many calories, quote, money, time, energy, people that you're gonna have to have in order to get that $9? You know, she didn't stress over food. She didn't waste calories on food. She built a cozy shelter while she had energy, and she let her fat reserves sustain her for 30 days. Once her shelter was done and she was in a good place, then she went looking for food. She ended up winning. And I, and I would say, you know, in a business sense, it was strong cash flow. It was mental stamina. She knew that she needed to build mental stamina, and that had a lot to do with her environment. And so when you're thinking about your business, how are you, how are you protecting your mental stamina? What kind of coaching and support do you have to protect that? Um, and so I think that that is like the— that was the character that I was like, man, she could teach me a lot about business because of how she managed herself. In the other season, the person that won was also very balanced. It was a lot of weighing. If he underhunted, he'd starve. If he overhunted, he'd burn too many calories. So it was a lot of input-output, input-output. And I mean, honestly, this is Business 101. I think a lot of people They don't do that. They don't look at the cost-benefit analysis, the ratio of what they're working on. So anyway, the show was really cool, and I thought a lot about business as I was watching it. You might hear symptoms of things that you're doing in your business, but this is a season of business survival, and so it's a focus on balance. Really important. That's not just about work-life balance. That's about cash flow balance, energy balance, and being careful not to get stuck in gadgets and over-obsession with things that are not actually going to help, um, that bottom line. So I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.