Why 'Someday' Never Comes: Breaking the 5-Month Slump Cycle

The most overword used in the English language in my opinion is can't and try. You know, unless you're going to say, I can't jump off the Empire State Building and fly down on my own. That's true, but I can't make it to the thing this weekend. No, you just don't want to just say that. You know, I just can't get myself to diet. No, you just don't want to. You know, I can't get up at 5 o' clock in the morning and do cardio to help with it. No, you just don't want to. So start saying what you mean is, it's just not that important to me.

Hello, everybody, this is Larry, well, at the Big Hitter podcast and I'm here with my son Adam, and as usual, we're talking about winning. Hello, Adam.

Good afternoon.

Hey, you know, one thing, Adam, that I wanted to ask you about is people wonder how they, how they start exerting themselves to move forward in their life. You know, it's like, what steps should I take, what should I do? You know, people are always looking at, whoa, what do I do? Well, one thing is stop tolerating sorriness in your life. You know, there's a, you know, the lesson for today I would say, is stop tolerating less. It's a matter of settling. And so, you know, if we're gonna cut through the noise and talk about what it really takes to win, one thing is if you're tolerating, sorry, you don't get what you want in life, you get what you tolerate. If you tolerate lateness, you're going to be late. If you're making excuses, and it's fine for you that you're late, everybody's going to be late like you. You set the example for everybody around you. And if you tolerate sloppiness, your standards go down. And so one thing about being a big hitter, a winner is you got to set the tone. You got to set the tone with what you do. And one thing is what you tolerate. You know, what, what, what's the acceptable standard and how have you seen that play out?

I think if you give yourself permission to give others excuses about why you're not getting things done that you want to, that's a bad habit to get into. If people hear you giving excuses, that gives them permission to give excuses. But if they're, if you're, if they're watching you, if they're following you, if you follow through with everything, never given excuses, never putting up with Excuses. Never want to hear excuses. That kind of takes the option off the table for them as well. So you kind of have to lead by example as far as that goes.

It's kind of obvious if you. You tolerate, if you. You got to be the example. You got to set the standard for first with yourself. You can't ask people to do things that you're not doing. And if you show up late, it's a little hard for you to be on their case when they show up late. When you miss deadlines, it's a little hard for you to jump down their throat when they miss a deadline. And so the deal is, people wonder, well, I don't want to be mean. I want to be. I want people to like me. Yeah, but you also want to get the job done. You know, it's like, is this the girls glee club? You know, is this the crochet circle where we sit around and tell jokes? You know, we make pimento cheese sandwiches for each other and have a happy time? Or are we doing this for recreation? Are we doing this for business? In business, you got to make money. In a business, you got to get things done in a time frame or you're going to be out of business. And as you transform yourself from someone who's just going through the motions to someone who's getting things done done, you develop that kind of instinctive intolerance for sorriness because you've taught yourself it's all right to make those excuses, but it doesn't work. So, you know, the deal is you learn by getting. Turning yourself into where you start to accomplish the things you actually start. You learn that drama, distractions, excuses don't cut it in the business world because it's going to affect your results. And, you know, especially if you're running a company, you got people depending on you. If you're going to have any success in life, you're gonna have people depending on you, and they depend on you to perform it. You gotta set the tone, set the standard, and the moment you lower that bar, you start slipping. I'm not saying you never make an excuse, an exception, but once that bar starts to slow down, you know, it's like on a diet. You know, once you make, you know, you get that one little sugar snack in there. And the trouble is, error is contagious. Sorriness is contagious. And part of your job is to make a stand against disease. And, you know, I remember Tim Tebow when he, you know, he was such a maniac. And, you know, College and pro football. You know, a great example of why he was so dogmatically positive all the time. And they asked him, why are you so positive? He said, well, let me tell you this. He said, when I go in the locker room, I know this negative attitude spreads. Positive attitude spreads. And I know if I don't, the natural thing that's going to be in there, if I don't take a stand for positive, it's going to be negative. It's a lot easier to be negative and complain and make excuses in the locker room than it is to be positive and have everybody pumped up. And he said, if we don't go out of that, when we go out on the field, if we're not pumped up and we're not positive, he said, we're going to get our butts beat. And I don't like getting beat. So I said one thing I know, for us to be at our best, I've got to be positive. It's got to start with me because he was quarterback. And so, you know, leaders have got to be unapologetically dogmatically positive to take a stand for that, or it's going to. You're going to be swimming in a sewage of excuses and failure in your company, and you're not going to last long. So, you know, it's a matter of people wonder, what do I do? What do I do, you know, to start winning? Well, what one thing is, you gotta set a standard and you got to live up to it yourself and get yourself setting out the example in your performance. And then you got to expect that out of others. And so if you wonder what to do, start raising the bar, start moving it up, start being more productive, start being more specific, stop tolerating excuses. It's like, I love you, I understand what you're going through. Unbelievable. But, you know, we got a business to run. And if you can't be here, you know, because you got emotional burden right now, you got to go home and come back when you're ready to play. Because right now we got things to do here right now, and our mind has got to be on getting things done rather than comforting and bearing you up and, you know, with what you're going through. And so it's not going to be great if we go under and everybody lose their job because they're spending all our time patting you in the back, you know, so you got to pull your little red wagon. We've all got to prove our. Pull our little red wagon. And that tone and expectations Got to.

Come from the top 100%. You got to lead by example. You have to be out there, you know, lead, lead from the front, encourage the ones in the back. The ones that don't want to keep up get left behind. You know, you can. All you can do is all you can do. I heard somebody say one time, if you take two seeds that look exactly the same, you put them in the ground, you water them, sun, fertilize everything else, one grows up as an oak tree, one grows as a squash, there's nothing you're ever going to be able to do to make that squash the oak tree. And there's nothing, nothing you're going to be able to stop the oak tree to where it becomes a squash. So all you can do is provide the right environment, provide the right leadership, and see who blossoms out of that, those scenarios.

Because when it ultimately comes down in your life, in your business, in your world, if you're the leader, you got to make positive things happen one way or the other. And so don't be afraid to take a stand for what's right, what's necessary. And you learn what's right and what's necessary by turning, you know, getting yourself on a winning track and keeping yourself on a winning track. So that's what you do, folks. You let people know what's acceptable and not acceptable. And eventually, over time, you get a group of things we call the non negotiables that, like, you know, there's certain things we'll tolerate, certain things we will not tolerate. And the reason we don't tolerate it is because we found out we can't win if we're going to do this, that or the other. So you grow into those things. Don't worry about them. You'll find those things. But that's how you get your business. That's how you grow your business. You get your identity, and, you know, it's part of building a business. You learn what works and what doesn't in your particular area. So, anyway, hope that's helpful. We're from this is the Big Hitter podcast. It's fun talking about winning. It's fun talking about winning in life. It's fun talking about winning in business. And it's fun talking about the things you could do for yourself and others, because you put yourself through these changes and you learn these strategies and these skills. So come see us over at the Big Hitter community. Let's talk about winning, and let's talk about making you unstoppable. Everybody. The idea is, if you're going to make your life count. Enjoy life. You've got to have some. You got to at least think right. And the first step, you know, there's the whole thing behind everything I do, is getting people to understand winning, because winning is a skill. It's like learning how to play chess. But chess, checkers or whatever, there are moves, there are strategies, there's things you can do. You can be proactive. You don't have to sit there like a punching bag and be punched by life. But that's what's going to happen to you unless you fight back. You got to learn how to fight back in life. And even beyond that, you've got to learn how to mobilize your resources and head in the direction you want to go with your life, your hours, your friendships, you know, the activities you do that would get you in a place where you like it. You know, you're happy, you're enjoying it, and you're around people that enjoy similar things to yourself. You know, it relates to everything where you live, all of it. And so the deal is, first step on becoming unstoppable is you got to have your mind made up about winning. And if I were to. You know, to me, Adam, winning is, like we've talked about before, is progress. It's progress towards what you want in life and then eventually get some real win, you know, big wins, specific wins. And, you know, you achieve the goal, get a promotion, win a championship, get a pay raise, whatever. Build a business and sell a business. But the idea is, you know, you still gotta live after that. So are you gonna be winning after all of that happens or not? And so you don't want to go down in the gutter just because you win a big thing. So winning's a way of life. Winning is making progress and continuing to meet new people, having new experiences, getting new skills, rewards like money and things in life you like. So what do you. When you think about winning, Adam? How do you think about it?

Whatever it is, big or small, it's setting a goal and not making any excuses on the way to get there and not saying. Not setting the goal. And I was talking to somebody the other day, they were like, they have a bad habit they're trying to break, and they're in a. They're in the midst of something right now that they're very focused on. They say, well, man, I hope that their exact words were, hopefully, when I get done with this project, even though I won't have anything to focus on, hopefully I won't try not to fall into those bad habits. And I said, that sounds fantastic. Say that same thing to me again, but different. And they said, okay, when I finish this thing, I'm focused on, I'm not going to fall back into those bad habits again. Right. You can't hopefully try to do anything. You know, the most overword used in the English language in my opinion is can't and try. You know, unless you're going to say, I can't jump off the Empire State Building and fly down on my own. That's true, but I can't make it to the thing this weekend. No, you just don't want to just say that, you know, I just can't give myself the diet. No, you just don't want to. You know, I can't get up at 5 o' clock in the morning and do cardio to help with it. No, you just don't want to. So start saying what you mean is, it's just not that important to me. I'm not going to do that as opposed to I can't. But if you set a goal, whatever it is, if you have something in mind that you're focused on, you're not going to let anything get in your way. You won't make excuses, you won't carve out time, you will find a way, you will get it done if it's important to you and you won't give up until you know there's, no matter how impossible a thing it seems, if you've got it in your mind that you can get it done and you're going to do it, you're not going to stop until you accomplish that goal. Now, if you go into the mindset with, you know, I really want to do this and I'm going to try as hard as I can. No, I'm going to do this and I'm going to die trying or I'm never going to get it done.

I was going to use some of Andy Young's things, excuses, like, you know, ways of overcoming excuses, you know, like if you had a gun to your head, you know, would you do it? You know, if people said, you know, I've got your kids right here, I'm going to blow their brains out unless you do it. You say, would you do it? You know, you can find the motivation to do it. You know, it's like, you know, I'm sure we've offended some woke people there. But the thing is, you need to make up your mind about winning. You need to make up Your mind about your life, Are you going to amount to anything? Does your life matter to you? And you know, the things are important to you, how important are they? And you're going to make, you know, fight for them. And so it's a lifestyle, not a lucky break. It's not a hobby. It's not you trying weekends or once a year when you feel inspired. It's not like I want to get a goal by the time, time I'm 30 every time I'm 40 and yeah, but it's like, well, what happens after 30 or 40? I'm going to be a millionaire by the time I'm 30. Gary. What's going to happen after that? Wonderful. You know, it's like you're going to keep winning. Are you going to turn into a derelict after, you know, you hit your million? The, the, it's a way of thinking that you know where you want to go through life inspired, moving forward. It's where you gut yourself mentally organized, where you'll keep pushing and you keep pushing to overcome things. And so you're going to be in offense, you're going to be. Winners are in a hurry to do great things. They don't just want to do something great, want to be great. They're in a hurry to do something great. And because of that they stay in motion. And from that motion you get your energy, momentum results and you get the compounding and every win fuels the next. And so why that's important is, you know, losing will drain the life out of you. It's radioactive. You go to the, you have two teams play the same game, pretty much work, put out the same effort. You go in after the game in the losers locker room, they're all down, depressed, you know, negative. We should have done this, should have done that. It's quiet, you know, over in the winners locker room, they're happy, they're high fiving, you know, they're ready to go out and have a little party with each other and looking forward to the next game. And what's the difference? The adrenaline that comes from winning. Winning recharges you, but if you're never winning, you never get recharged. And so I could do the thing about momentum. When you lose your momentum example that I've heard all along used all my life. Don't know the science on this, so don't give me any grief over it, but the whole idea of a locomotive at rest takes 2,000 pounds of pressure to move it an inch. But once you got it moving an inch, then 2,000 pounds of pressure. You can move it a mile. And so the thing is, Adam, have you. The deal is you want to keep your momentum. You want to keep that momentum going. That's the adrenaline from things. And so when you understand this and you accept it, you don't like, you know, you're going to minimize the things that go wrong. Whereas, you know, most people, they'll make mountains out of molehills rather than make molehills out of mountains. And have. Have you. You know, when I say that, what does that trigger you to think about?

Well, that's true in every aspect of life, from the smallest thing to the biggest thing. If you were a. And anybody knows this, if they're even if they're just working around the house all day trying to get this cleaned up and this cleaned up in the yard mode and this taken care of and box this stuff up, and they work like a dog all day long, and they got everything done except, like, the last 15% of what they want to get done, and they're like, you know what? I'm just going to sit down on the couch for a second. Well, as soon as you stop that moment, as soon as you sit down and feel the air conditioning, have yourself relax for a minute. It is nearly impossible to try to get yourself up, just up off the couch. It's almost like you're velcroed to the couch. It's like, yeah, I can't get back up. But once you are starting on these projects, unless you follow all the way through, most of the time, you never end up finishing. There's millions of weekend projects of people working on their. Working something on their house or redoing a car, rebuilding a thing. They're working, working, working, working. They get halfway through it, they're sanding the car, they're rebuilding the car. They got the parts for the motor. They got everything there. And then they take a weekend off, and then 20 years later, the car's still in the garage, the motor's still sitting off to the side, and it's like, because they lost that momentum of giving themselves permission to take if they're working on. On the weekends or whatever their schedule is. Well, I'm going to take a break this weekend. I'm going to go this. Not going to fool with the car. And then when are you going to finish that? Well, someday or one day? Well, one day is never. Someday is never. Unless you have an end date on anything, it's impossible. So you have to give yourself a date and a timeline. You want to finish and then put pressure on yourself to make you get, make sure you get it done by that time.

Yeah, that relates to. The thing is, there's no such thing as spare time. You know, when I get a chance, when I get some spare time, when I get some free time, the rest of your life, you're probably not going to have spare time. Free time. There's always going to be, you know, it's like the next time I walk into a room and there's no air, I'll do it. You know, there's always going to be air. There's always going to be interruptions. And what we found in our business, you know, momentum with teams and what we've said, you know, if you're focusing on your marketing and your sales and your growth numbers, you know, you got clients coming in and you're growing your outlets, you're growing all of the growth numbers. And so if it's employees, if it's outlets, if it's sales, new clients, whatever it is, you grow or die. And you don't have to grow by a thousand in a month, but you do have to grow by one. You have to keep that teeter totter leaning forward to where you can say to yourself, well, at least we grow. We grew, you know, because we kept our momentum. That's why that, you know, when you start a month, the race out of the gate is to make sure that in a month you at least have got enough momentum to wind up a month if everything goes wrong, you know, that's why you want to start the month with a bang, the week with a bang, whatever, so that even if everything goes wrong towards the end, you'll have started with enough energy and focus to where, worst case, you'll still be ahead of the game compared to where you were the last month. That means, you know, that you carried your momentum. And if you keep focusing on that, then sometimes you'll go in there and you'll have your explosions and you'll be able to maintain those explosions. But when you think, when you lie to yourself, the tendency is to lie to yourself. I've seen this played out 100 million times in business. You know, you have a bad month, sales were down, growth was down. Number, you know, your, your growth numbers are down. And so what you do you think, no, we're fine, actually, the computer's wrong. But that's what people do their own self. They're like, well, I know it showed up there that we're slumping, but the first month you Live in denial. Denial. You cannot live in denial and win. And you go, no, we're fine, we're fine. It just didn't show up. We really put the effort in. But then you go the month two shows up and the slump continues. And now you're going, well, a little harder to keep that denial going by month three. Okay, now panic sets in because you can't. Denial is not working for you anymore. You've had to admit to yourself that I got a slump. Well, now you go back to work in the fourth month, you say, okay, we're going to turn things around. I'm going to get back on my schedule, I'm going to ramp back up my activity. And it's in the fifth month before the extra results start to show up again. And so that can be, you know, that can be a five week period of time, five month period of time, five year period of time. But that's usually how the cycles go. It's usually a five cycle slump you go through. And you cannot let that happen. Even if the progress is just a little bit, you cannot slow down. You know, Adam, even the Beatles, that's one thing George Harrison and even Paul McCartney said they learned from Lennon, John Lennon, because Lennon and McCartney, you know, greatest songwriters of, of the last hundred years or something. But John Lennon, for all of his weirdness, he had one thing. Once he started a song, he would not, he would not quit until he finished, you know, and that's what he said. Keep going, keep going, finish it, finish it. We got it on our mind. He had learned something. I don't know where he learned it, he never said where he learned it. But if they got started on a song, they were going to finish the darn thing. And that's what. It's funny how these principles of winning play out in all kind of different walks of life. That winning is winning. Thinking the right way plays out so many different areas of your life. And you could try and experiment with it, but once you learn how to win, the great thing is you can win in just about everything you do. So when you hear that, how have you seen that played out?

Well, like you said, people just like want to give themselves excuses if there's something. And a win is anything that you com. Task you complete. Now you have to win a big game or win that, but something you set out to do and accomplish. There's certain things that are non negotiable in your life that you are going to get done no matter what happens. And then there's things that you allow the slide or whatever. Even so, even things as simple as, you know, I've done a lot of landscaping around my house, and I have a guy I work with. He's fantastic. He's done all kinds of things all over the state and all over the South. But I've had him at my house a few different times over the past few years. And we'll be working on a big project, putting in rocks, putting in things, but. And it'll be almost completely done. And it's like, all right, well, we ran out of time. I gotta do this. I'm gonna come back next week and we'll put in this dirt here and finish that. Every time that happens, it's like a year or two later before he comes back or just there's still stuff that hasn't got finished that we're gonna get done the next week or the next day. Now, that's not something I necessarily have control over because he's helping with some things. But if you allow yourself mentally to not follow through, that will happen. I've seen guys multiple times in the years in the gym, for example. Guys there, they'll be going for some kind of record. They're a bench press, a squat, a deadlift or something like that. And they're in there and they get hyped up. And multiple times, guys are just talking or whatever, and they're like, man, man, I'm not gonna be able to pull that. I was like. And I'm like, anytime that's out, I'm like, stop. Go over there in the corner. Visualize yourself repeatedly completing that lift and getting it done. Come back over here. Don't talk to anyone. Lock in, and don't stop pulling or pushing till you get it done. But if you walk up to the bar and be like, there's no way I'm going to get this, then you're not. You've already told yourself you're not going to complete it. If you set yourself a goal financially or business size or whatever, and you say, man, I'd really like to do that, but, you know, I probably. This probably. You cannot want yourself to a win. You can't want yourself to weight loss. You can't want. You can. Like you said earlier, I want to be a millionaire by age 30. You can't want yourself to a million dollars. You know, if you could want yourself, everybody would have it. You have to put the action in mentally and physically and get it done. That's why words are so cheap. And actions, you know, show People's true character.

Well, you know, the thing is, you're much more like. But this is a skill. I mean, when not only did that person, you know, you went through, through that, they learned, they got that, you know, they did their lift, but they learned how to, how to keep forward, keep moving forward, getting stronger, you know, breaking new barriers. That's the whole thing, you know, it's like, you know, helping a person, you know, give them a fish or teach them to fish. What we're talking about here, teaching people how to win. And you got to learn yourself how to win. And then you, if you want to build a team, you got to teach the people around you how to win. Because you know, it's no good for you to be winning in life and then surrounded by a bunch of whiners and losers, they will eventually drag your butt down. And so the clearer this is in your mind, you gotta realize this is not an option for you, you know, to postpone it. It's not an option, you know, as much as it's in your control, get it done. And you can't. But when it's that important to you, you'll understand. All your energy will go into figuring out how can we get this done now rather than why it's okay to delay. And I figured, I found out something a long time ago. Even on an appointment, you know, we all, we do things in meetings, meetings, meetings. Like you talk about. The guy comes over, he's working. Here's what I found on those. If, when you run out of time and you absolutely cannot keep going to finish a project, a meeting, a consult, a thing like your yard, what you got to do with people, you cannot let them out of your sight without nailing down the next time they're going to be back. You got to nail that dad gum thing down. They say, well, I can't right now because my schedule is confusing. Check with me in the morning, call back next week. I got to see what's going on here. I got a lot of things going on. Shut, shut, shut, shut, shut, shut your mouth. Okay? You just got to say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's set a tentative time. Let's pick a tentative time, and we can always reschedule, but let's pick it tomorrow morning. Tomorrow afternoon, the day after 3 o'. Clock. Exactly at 3 o', clock, I'll call, remind you this, that, and up. You know, we can reschedule. You know, in all of my career, whenever I set a tentative appointment and they wanted to get away from me. They knew their mind was just so scrambled. It's like I don't know what my, you know, I'm not going to have an opening. If we ever set a tentative time, day, week, whatever in the future, like 99% of the time they kept that appointment because we nailed it down while I had them. But if I ever let them get out of my sight, it would take, you know, you talk about a year to get up with people. It would take me forever just to even get them on the phone or get an answer back. And we wind up spending more time setting up the follow up appointment than we would than we did when we actually got together and we're working on getting the project done. You know, I've been chasing them for all ever. That's really why I went to Monday morning. You know, we do my. On the community. We do a Monday morning do a big call to kick off the week with a bang. And before that I did a big hitter call inside my business. But the reason for. Have I ever told you the reason for that, Adam? The reason I did that was I had about 40, 50, 60 offices to keep up with and I could never get them on the phone. I spent my entire week calling them and trying to chase them down. This is before texting solved that problem. But I spent all my time getting. The answering machine could never get them. So I said, okay, I'm going to have one time Monday morning. I cover all the important stuff and if they don't get on, the heck with them because I'm not going to spend my week chasing the wonderful people anyway. The thing is you've got to take, you can take charge and you will take charge when you understand I don't have a choice in this if I'm going to keep winning. And it comes down to really a lot of it comes to me. It comes down to people that win are just a little smart. It's like wisdom is like proverbs. There's two kinds of people, the wise and the foolish. And the foolish seem to go through life doing stupid things over and over and over. And the wise make adjustments and they start patterning themselves in ways to where they can stack the odds of success in their failure, I mean, in their favor. And to me it's always been, you know, like it's not that they're smarter this, that the other, but, you know, are more intelligent or whatever, but they just do things in the right way to get an intended result. And that's what winning is. You Learn how to set yourself up for success more times than not. Doesn't have to be 100% of the time, but more times than not, you are setting yourself up for success because of how, you know, we all got 24 hours of the day. Some people are winning. Why are they winning? And then I keep getting beat. That's what you got to ask yourself. It's like, it's what they tolerate, what they don't tolerate. So anyway, Adam, I guess we've kind of covered this. Wrap this up for us. What I wanted to cover on this was where people get it clear in their mind about winning is just not optional. If you want to be fulfilled, you want to have above average income, above average satisfaction, you want great things for your family, you got to start winning. You're going to start making things happen and controlling the outcomes and send your life in the way that you want to have. Are you going to be miserable? You're going to be like a victim the rest of your life. And so this is not what I wanted to cover here is get people thinking about winning and realize they just don't have to get beat. And because either losing or winning is going to become a way of life for you, winning is a whole lot more fun, a whole lot more rewarding. So, anyway, what would you. How would you send us out of this?

Yeah, I would just say whatever it is you're focused on, never give yourself permission to quit.

That's basically it right there. So, anyway, thank you, everybody. This is the Big Hitter podcast. We got a big hitter community. If you like this stuff, you want to be in an environment where you got a lot of people working and sharing ideas and climbing the ladder together, come see us on the community. And if you want to, like, subscribe, do all of those kind of things again, you know the drill. I'm not going to waste your time on it, but thanks for listening. It's been a lot of fun. Winning's fun, folks. Winning is fun. Why should you go through life and see other people winning and you not? Yeah, you don't have to take it. You can stand up for yourself. It's a skill you learn. Go, go, go. Talk to you later, Adam.

All right.