Mike Brown and his guest argue that hard work alone doesn't create wealth, since billions work hard and stay poor. High-performers get addicted to stress and crisis cycles. The fix: non-work challenges, a feedback community called Baby Bathwater, delegation to kill all-nighters, and coaching to shortcut painful learning.
Chapters
If hard work was all that it took to be successful, there'd be 7 billion rich people on this planet. Because most people are engaged in backbreaking labor and they're not financially successful. So what is that gap and how do you solve it?
Well, again, I think the thing is, is that like human beings need discomfort in order to thrive. If you engineer it all out, I mean, the most miserable people on the planet that I've ever met are the people that have the most resources at their disposal. And so I think the thing is, is that as an individual, one must determine the things that are valuable that they can provide, and they should also find something that feels challenging to them. And those things don't necessarily have to be the same thing. And I think it's incredibly healthy. And if you can, if you can give yourself the gift of doing things that are challenging outside of your work, I think it becomes a lot easier to break that cycle and sort of like allow yourself to to have the identity of a person who can accomplish hard things and also still be a person who can generate value relatively effortlessly.
So how do you apply that practically?
Yeah, so for me personally, I have been trying to engage in things that challenge like my body and my mind more that are not work and use those as ways to start my day or sort of like ground my week and then surround myself with people that are helpful in pointing out the value that I'm creating. So having a a short Rolodex of people that you run ideas by or curiosities or doubts, etc., and have them come back and be like, oh no, it's this thing here. Like, that part of it, that's the really valuable part. You should totally, like, focus on that. It's one of the things that I love the most about the Baby Bathwater community that we're both a part of is it's, it's an entire group of people who are all trying to give to one another and are willing to point out, like, oh no, the thing that you have that's really valuable is actually, like, this, right? And if you can open yourself up to sort of like accepting that, that's the key to hitting that sort of exponential growth instead of linear.
You actually jumped ahead and guessed the answer to one of the questions I was gonna ask you, which is how did you grow up with money and how does that show up for you today? So we've already heard about, you know, watching your father work really hard. How did you start to shift that identity or that money story, and then how do you think about healing that or changing that or writing a new narrative for yourself today?
Yeah, no, totally. I mean, the thing is, is that my favorite is when you, you're like, oh yes, I totally know the problem, which is different than I'm actively working against the problem. And so I have historically known, right, that I will actually just like attrit myself to death working on things. That was always a thing is like eventually it became like sort of like a gross like game, right, where all the client calls are on Wednesday. So inevitably, right, like, I know that I am addicted to stress from talking to you, Mike, and so I had gotten my business so efficient and so, and so, like, dialed in that I would just, like, self-sabotage and do stuff, like, dumb stuff until, like, 8 o'clock on Tuesday night, and then I was sufficiently stressed out enough to sit down and, like, crack out, like, a whole bunch of, like, great work until 4 o'clock in the morning and then just wake up and do all the meetings on 4 hours of sleep. And the problem is with high-performing individuals, you never learn the damn lesson because you always pull it off. And so being able to, like, thank my wife, like, she was like, hey, like, what if you just delegated all of this shit earlier in the week and made it impossible for it even to be a thing you're responsible for? Like, would that just be okay? Like, what if you just went to bed at 9 o'clock at night on like a Tuesday? Could that just be fine, right? And I realized like, oh, I'm just screwing around pretending like nobody could ever do this and not actually actively engaging with the problem 'cause I'm addicted to stress, and if I pull a late night, then I become less uncomfortable with the business because I must be doing a really good job. Can't you see how late I stayed up?
[Speaker] Well, I love it, and you touched on a few things that are kind of fundamental to the Unbreakable Wealth philosophy. One of those things being this idea of when you're a high performer, right? When you're in a situation that would send a normal person into fight or flight, we actually drop into calm in the chaos.
[Speaker] Yeah.
[Speaker] Right, sometimes it's when we feel most alive, and it's when we elicit elicit our best performance. So then, and that's a very useful evolutionary adaptation, right? It's what makes us great as entrepreneurs, great as athletes, like being able to drop into calm in the chaos is a useful skill until you're safe, until there's no chaos. And then we'll manufacture that chaos to put our back against the wall to elicit that high performance, acting as a forcing function. And we'll do that over and over, and if you never learn the lesson because you always pull it off, there's actually no feedback loop.
That's right.
That elicits that change, right? Because we'll never change unless the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
That's right.
So if you always pull a rabbit out of a hat at the last minute, you'll continue to reinforce that loop with negative consequences until the problem gets so big that the universe smacks you down in a way that you can't ignore it anymore. So most of us learn through pain, and that is a very effective teacher. But how can we begin to shift from learning from others' experiences or learning indirectly rather than going through the painful part?
Yeah, I think the thing is that if you stop kidding yourself for a second, right, like everybody knows the poor behavior, right? Like the patterns of things that don't seem like quite right. And I think the thing is, is like, yes, you can learn the hard way or you can go find someone that you trust who has literally been through whatever you're doing, right? And ask them to help you spot the pattern, right? And then you can do, you know, thankfully what I've done, right? Which is not die of a heart attack yet, which is great. And it's, you have to call it what it is, right? It's just, it's gambling. And so what I did in my company, right, is like I started talking to you, we worked through things together, I recognized all of the patterns, and then I just engineered a process to take the dice out of my hands to where like I couldn't even pull an all-nighter on a Tuesday if I wanted to because everybody got the work done on Monday. And I remember like the first night after I had successfully pulled that off in like a week cycle and it was like a Tuesday evening and I'm just like wandering around the house and I was just like, I'm just gonna go to bed, right? And I went to bed at like 9 o'clock at night and then woke up in the morning and was like, man, so this is what it feels like to do all of the meetings like well rested, man, this is like way better, right? And so again, like when you're a high-performing individual, you always find some contortionist way of putting yourself back into that problem again. And so I think, you know, using the same, trying to use the same tools of like, oh no, I'm just going to do it like differently this time or whatever, right? To overcome that is foolish. Go talk to somebody who can help you spot that pattern and then just take the dice out of your own hand. You're in a much better position to heal when like you just, when the things that you would have ordinarily, like, gone for are no longer accessible to you.
I mean, I love that. Essentially, you're describing the value of coaching and why it's so important for entrepreneurs, because it's— there's two ways. Yes, there's the hard way and the painful way, or there's the fast way. And the best entrepreneurs I know find that paying for someone else's experience in order to shortcut the pain is exponentially more valuable and less costly than actually learning it the hard way.
Oh yeah, the opportunity cost, just financially obviously, is huge. But like, what is what is the actual opportunity cost on like the wasted years of your life dicking around with this company and like, and ruining everything, right? Human lifespans are short. How much is yours worth, right? Because the thing is that I always say is like, lots of people start companies, lots of people like kind of scale companies and find product market fit. You can get lots of reps in that domain. What most people do not get a lot of reps in is the endgame. And so that's what coaches are for. As you are entering into the endgame, you just want to coach because you don't want to scale up and ruin 4 companies and then get it right on the 5th one because human lifespans aren't that long. You just want to get it up to that point and then pay somebody who like has observed the pattern already to help you work through it so you can just skip over that crap.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. One of my favorite sayings is, I love learning the hard way, but I'm trying to quit.
