Why Going All-In is Bad in Business

So there's one piece of kind of social media advice I see over and over again. It's in the self-help books and all this different stuff. And basically it's the idea that if you want to be successful, if you want to achieve your goals, you have to be all in to achieve those goals. It has to be the thing. You get rid of everything else in your life and you just focus entirely on that one thing. Whether you're, you know, Kobe Bryant trying to be the best basketball player ever, or different folks like that. We're all supposed to be obsessed with our stuff such that we go all in and we have maniacal focus and everything else is put by the wayside in order for us to achieve our goals. But as I kept hearing this advice over and over again, it didn't match what I keep seeing in the world. And in the world is, over and over again, there are tons of people, in fact probably the majority of people, who are involved in a bunch of different things and they're being well-rounded people, they're getting exposed to a bunch of different stuff. Heck, the kind of priming example example right now is the world's richest man, Elon Musk, who is not involved in one business. He's involved in like a bunch of them and in a hands-on manner. And he's doing everything from spaceships to electric vehicles to, well, now trying to fix our government. Like, so what gives here? Like, we have this common wisdom which we're told to follow, but then I see really successful people not following it. Well, as I dug into it, it turns out that the more you maniacally go all in on stuff, the data shows the less likely you are to succeed. So that's what this video is about. I'll tell you some stories and share some of the research and stuff I've learned, and maybe you'll change your mind about, well, how you live your life a bit. If you're new here, my name is Michael Girdley. I basically give myself an excuse to go exercise by researching and recording videos. I'm a business nerd, and to some extent my career has ignored the thesis of this video, which is that you're supposed to go all in and focus on one thing. I've been involved in business types from fireworks to software to coffee to staffing and everywhere in between. So I've ignored this advice to my own peril sometimes, but I've also seen the other side of ignoring what this advice is. That's what this video is about. And if you like that kind of stuff and you want to hear more about business and life, stick around, give me a follow. I produce videos like this all the time. It makes you feel good when you watch them. So to explain a bit about how this common wisdom is broken, Let's go back and let me tell you a story about a high school athlete, and his name is Steve. And Steve is one of those kids who was born with a hell of a lot of talent. Like, we all knew those guys and gals who showed up to school as a first grader and they were twice as fast as everybody else, could jump twice as high, all that kind of stuff. And for Steve, that particular gift that he had was he was an incredible runner. And he ran and he got involved in it. And by the time he was in high school, he basically was all in on being a runner. He realized he had been gifted in this stuff. And by the time he got to be a senior, he nearly ran a 4-minute mile. 4 minutes and 1 second. Yeah, very close. And what got Steve there was, well, what gets a lot of people to be successful. And he combined natural talent and ability with just a relentless drive. And Steve worked his ass off, right? He would spend every waking moment getting better at running, right? He would think about his running. He would practice his running. He would be recovering from his running. He'd be eating to get better as a runner. He would keep a log of what he was doing for running in order to try to become a better runner. And like, he followed the common wisdom. He was all in, obsessed. Getting rid of everything else while other kids went out to go party, other kids focused on extracurriculars, joined clubs, all that kind of stuff. For Steve, it was one thing and one thing only: how do I become an amazing runner and reach the highest levels of kind of running ability? And Steve was like a lot of other kind of famous athletes. Like, you look at Kobe Bryant, somebody who was renowned for his drive and single-mindedness. Kobe, Kobe basically threw away everything in his life in order to become the biggest and best winning basketball player of all time. That was his goal. And Steve was the same way. And just like Kobe Bryant gets celebrated now for his single-mindedness, hard work, and focus, Steve got the same thing. His coaches, teachers, parents, and to some extent even the other peers, like everybody would cheer on his level of dedication. You know, became a self-fulfilling prophecy to some extent for Steve. And for a while, this maniacal focus for Steve, like it totally worked. You know, he worked harder than the other kids. He had more focus than them. He brought his natural talent, and he eventually got down to where he hit that 4-minute and 1-second mile, right? Just 1 second higher, kind of, of that magical 4-minute barrier, the 4-minute mile that everybody wants to break. And for Steve, all this hard work and everything worked really well until he stopped improving. And no matter how hard Steve worked, his times weren't actually getting better. And in fact, by working harder, sometimes he made his times worse. He would get into his own head and be scared of not being able to break his time, or that, you know, he would just be too tired from having worked too hard. In other words, for Steve, being more dedicated and being all in on this stuff and being more focused and working harder, it was actually making him slower. And this is kind of counterintuitive if you think about it, right? The harder Steve was working and the more Steve was doing, the slower he was getting. Like, it was making his mind worse and his body worse. And this is a pattern that happens to a lot of people. You understand and are taught that the harder you work, the more results you're going to get. But at a certain point, working harder actually makes you worse at that thing and makes you slower at that thing and makes you perform, well, just not as good. And so eventually Steve got to a point where he had tried everything. He'd worked harder, he tried working smarter, he'd gone to different coaches, tried different shoes, different environments, summer camps, all that kind of stuff. And he was about ready to give up. He was at the end of his road. And he went and got referred to a renowned sports psychologist. So one of those people that is a head shrink and basically, you know, designed to help people with the mental side of being a great athlete. And he went and sat down with this person who had worked with Olympic athletes and all these different folks. And this sports psychologist gave him some advice that kind of blew Steve's mind, which was Hey, you actually need to be trying less. You actually need to be working on broadening your horizons and being involved in other things rather than making your entire identity and your entire self about how good of a runner you are. In other words, go find some other stuff to be part of and live a whole complete life rather than getting rid of everything else, everything in life, so you can focus on that one thing. So for Steve, this single-mindedness that he had and this hard work and work ethic and his talent, well, that single-mindedness specifically had taken him, well, as far as he was going to make it. It wasn't going to help him any further. As I talked about earlier, his hard work and dedication and obsession had actually started to be counterintuitive for him. And, uh, you know, here's the sad part. Usually in these stories I'm supposed to tell you there was some sort of redemption, like Steve listened, But in fact, he didn't listen, like many of us don't listen when we get advice. And he ignored the sports psychologist and he never got below that 4-minute mile. But for this sports psychologist, it turns out the data backs up her opinion. Anecdotally, she had advised people to do things like take up knitting or singing or be in a play or go, you know, take up another sport. And when she did that with folks, anecdotally, she saw that a lot of those athletes started to perform better. And similarly, there was a study of 5,000 entrepreneurs, and they studied them getting started with new businesses and discovered that the ones who kept their day jobs, in other words, stayed kind of in the process of like having other interests and succeeding in other places, they were 33% more likely to succeed than the people who quit their jobs and went all in on starting their new business. But wait, there's more. Michigan State did a study of Nobel Prize winners over the past 100 years, and it was kind of a crazy set of results. Rather than what you think, which is the people most likely to win Nobel Prizes in science and stuff like that would be the people who would go all in on their craft, the people who actually went and found creative pursuits outside of their, basically their main job or their main science, were much more likely to succeed. In getting a Nobel Prize. So for example, some of the numbers, it's like they were 22 times more likely to win a Nobel Prize if they had hobbies outside of their scientific pursuits. And so I just looked up the stats again. It was 22 times if they pursued things like singing or being in plays and stuff like that, 12 times more likely to win a Nobel Prize if they did creative writing. There was something like 7 times more likely if they like played a sport competitively. Like, just a total case in point that you can do so much more if you are allowing yourself to not, you know, get rid of everything else in your life and be a whole and rounded person. And another thing in terms of data points, in 2021 they did a meta-study of athletes, which is about 3,000 athletes, and basically they discovered that the athletes that were most likely to succeed later on were not the ones that went and specialized super early as children. They were actually the people that well, basically started other sports and had other interests, and only later in life did they truly specialize in one sport. And my favorite example of this is from my hometown of San Antonio, Texas. Our greatest basketball player ever in San Antonio is San Antonio Spurs legend Tim Duncan. Even though he was 6'10", he famously was a swimmer, you know, and so that just translated into such a set of different expectations from him and skills that he brought to the basketball court that set him aside. And only later in his life did he become a basketball player. Pretty cool. And look, I'm not saying that you can succeed without hard work, right? That is table stakes, as they say in the poker world. Like, you have to work hard in order to achieve things, but hard work will only take you so far. And it has to reach a point where eventually working less is the smart way to work and working on other things and being a more balanced person and stepping away from your craft is, well, a way to succeed. And all this is kind of counterintuitive because we're taught from a young age, like, you work hard, that's how you get ahead. Hard work is what America is about, right? We famously work fewer vacation hours than almost any other country in the world, you know, save Korea and Japan. But like, famously, we're hard workers and that's part of our culture. That's what we're taught. But at a certain point, like, hard work stops helping you. So the biggest reason you would think is kind of physical, right? And energy-wise, that at a certain point hard work doesn't help anymore and you start to overload your body. But the actual bigger problem is a mental one. And what happens is the harder you work on things and the more you let it consume you, the more it becomes your entire identity. And if something becomes your entire identity, which is saying like, oh, my identity is that I'm a successful business person, or I'm an excellent basketball player, or I'm a 4-minute miler, or any of those sort of things, the more that becomes your identity, the more failing becomes something that would be horrible for you, right? Because if your whole existence is because you're successful at your craft and then suddenly you don't succeed at your craft, well, your whole ego and your whole id of who you are suddenly gets at risk. And because nobody really wants to be seen as a failure in their own eyes, uh, suddenly what happens is, is this consumption to where your whole ego is based on your craft and your whole self-perception is based on your craft, you can start to, well, become so scared that you're paralyzed and so scared that you aren't able to take risks and you aren't able to push forward and you aren't able to relax in your craft because you're so scared of failing. And imagine trying to go through your life when you walk into the office every day or you walk onto the court every day and your entire self-image and your entire existence is on the line. There is zero way you're going to be making great decisions when you have that level of pressure put on yourself. If you look into the way a number of these, like, maniacal focus practitioners have manifested this behavior, they end up being, well, just kind of crappy people in the rest of their life or even business, right? Or in personal relationships. You know, if you look at Kobe Bryant, for example, like very classically this type of obsessive person who cut everything out, like The dude had a ton of personal problems. Like, he was renowned as a horrible teammate. Tons of stuff. He was, you know, sued for basically some incidents that happened with a lady up in Colorado. Michael Jordan was famously known for punching his teammates during practice. Like, if you're going to be maniacally focused and you put this amount of pressure on yourself and your entire ego, entire self-image is based on your success at this particular craft that you're obsessing about, Well, sometimes it just vents itself into the rest of your life and you turn out not to be that great of a person. Another example, the lady the Devil Wears Prada was, was done about the movie is a lady named Anna Wintour, who is U.S. Vogue's editor, renowned as just a tyrant, but maniacal focus for her. It was all about how that magazine and every episode and edition like that was her identity. Like that was her id. It was manifesting there. And yeah, the blowback and the side effects, if you're one of these people who obsesses too much, it gets nasty. There's 3 takeaways from all this. The very first one for me is you have to remember to be a whole person, right? My buddy Matt Willis, who's a few years older than me, very wise guy, you know, I told him once I was going through tough times and I was cutting stuff out of my life to maniacally focus on fixing the tough times. He said, "Hey man, don't forget to live." And what he was saying with that was like, don't go so far in terms of hard work on your problems or your journey or your goals that you forget to be a whole person. Like, you can't cut your friends and family out. Can't be a jerk and miss all of your kids' soccer games. You know, you gotta just continue to be a person and live and enjoy yourself no matter, you know, how focused you are in achieving a particular goal. Second, I think, The takeaway here is it's okay to have varied interests. You know, my personal experience doing it and being involved in stuff across the entire spectrum of things in industry and life and all that kind of stuff, like, I have really varied interests. And, you know, in one regards, I see how having that kind of, well, like, lack of focus on any particular thing has hurt me in life. And I've seen other people who've gone super deep in their craft and seen how it's benefited. But the other thing is I've seen how getting exposed to a bunch of different things has enabled me to bring and cross-pollinate things from one area into another and bring those ideas from one business into another or one craft into another. And there's lots of examples of this, and famously Steve Jobs is one where he studied calligraphy and design in college. Well, he didn't, he didn't graduate, but you see what I'm saying, and was able to bring that to help create the Macintosh. So there's a trade-off to where you getting exposed to a bunch of different things in different crafts and being able to cross-pollinate those and create innovations and improvements around them. Like, that's a good thing, right? Just like being really deep and being the foremost expert in your field is also a good thing. Both can work in terms of, well, making you a success. And lastly, I think the third takeaway here is it's okay to go against the common wisdom. If you look in history at all of the people that have achieved truly great things, universally people have thought they were crazy people. Like Christopher Columbus, everybody thought he was a crazy person. They were going to drive those boats off the end of the earth. The Airbnb guys, like who started that business, they thought it was crazy that people would want to rent out couches in somebody else's apartments. Like, if people don't think you're crazy, or at least a significant number of people don't think you're crazy, that's a bad sign. And it's actually a good sign if people think your ideas are crazy and they don't understand them, because that means you're probably onto something good. Because the coolest ideas, the biggest ideas, go totally against common wisdom. And if you have that insight and nobody else does, that's where greatness tends to happen. So, you know, I love going against the grain here, and I think people should be comfortable doing it. I'm curious what you think about this whole topic. One thing, shout out, Steve was actually a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I read his article and I'll put a link to it below. It's what inspired me to tell his story and to talk about this topic. And I am so glad that he wrote that article because for me it was validation of something that had bothered me for a long time, which was that this common wisdom of going all in on one thing, man, there's some benefits to it, but It's not a recipe we all have to follow. So thank you, Steve. Anyway, what do you think? Tell me in the comments below, and I'll see you next time.