I studied rich people: THE WEALTH EQUATION EXPOSED

I want to talk about something that I feel is super important. When you're trying to build a business, not only that is big, but has a lot of power as well as has a lot of sway or wants to make a difference in any way, shape or form in an industry. The lives of the employees, the lives of the community. There's one key consistent theme that I see across the board when it comes to successful entrepreneurs and business owners. Now this is not necessarily to say that you're going to be successful using this mechanism in every single area of life. I don't think that this will work well in relationships. I don't think it will work well in other aspects of life that might, you might seem as being successful when it comes to business and it comes to entrepreneurship. This is the common theme that I see in most billionaires lives and the people that I've met personally that are worth hundreds or tens of millions of dollars. This is the constant theme that I see. And it comes down to one word and, and it's simple, but let me explain. And that's speed. Now before you say, oh yeah, of course, it's, you know, move fast, blah, blah, blah, break things like, you know, fail fast, all that sort of thing, just hold on because I want to explain a little bit more. And I'm going to give you a real life example of something that happened recently where speed was far more important than anything, including whether or not I was, whether or not I was correct or wanted someone else to think that I was correct. And so.

Jeff Bezos has said that moving quickly is important. And the way that he determines whether or not something should be done fast or if it should be done slow is based upon whether or not the decision that he's making is reversible. In other words, if something is reversible, you can take it back and change it. You should be, you should make those decisions as fast as possible and you should be more iterative and experimental and just move very quickly. And typically that's the approach you'll need to take in business to move fast. If you're trying to grow a big company or do anything of lasting change in any sort of organization, you're going to have to move very fast. And a lot of times the reason people don't do that, even after hearing that term and that quote from Jeff Bezos, is they overthink and overanalyze and think that decisions are irreversible when they're really not. Hiring someone is a reversible thing that you can do Going into a new sector, starting a new business, all of these things are typically very reversible. It's usually our own insecurities or our own deficiencies or characteristics that make us think that things are super big, big deal when they're really not. You can apps if you accidentally choose the wrong software, if you accidentally do the wrong marketing campaign. These are all reversible decisions. And therefore, instead of overanalyzing and spending an entire year figuring out that decision, you should make it as fast as possible, maybe like in one month. And yeah, maybe one out of three or four of the decisions you make are incorrect and you have to reverse them back. But it's not the end of the world. And by doing more of that experimental thought process, you're able to get more done. Now, if something is irreversible, and some would say something like marriage or potentially firing somebody, firing IC is pretty irreversible because no one's going to come back to you, typically, after you fire them. These are things that you might want to think a little bit longer about. And so you could look at a wide variety. And to some people, but reversible decisions are irreversible. And to some other people, irreversible decisions are actually reversible. And so a lot of this comes down to your, just your own personality. However, this is how I think about it, and that is speed is of the essence when you're trying to grow something large. And I think of it in terms of an equation. And part of this is because I went to college to become a medical doctor. I had to go through a lot of calculus and a lot of math stuff. And so I still this, I think a lot in terms of equations. I think most everything can be broken down to some sort of equation or mathematical solution. And so I think of it as this. And I wrote it down. Mass times velocity equals momentum. I don't know if this is an actual equation that actually makes sense when it comes to physics, but this is how I think about speed. Mass times velocity equals momentum. And so what that means is if a company's really, really large, they can move relatively slowly, but create a massive amount of momentum and power because they're just huge. If you take a thousand pound block, but and it's moving at five miles an hour, it's going to do some damage. Whereas if you take a, you know, a bag of feathers and it hardly weighs anything, it might be moving 200 miles an hour, but it's not going to do anything. And so mass times velocity equals momentum. And so what that means is if you're a small business and you're that the feathers, yes, you want to grow your business, but to get the most momentum and the most growth in your company, you're probably actually need to focus on speed because you're not very big if you only have a few employees, 5, 10, 15 employees. If you're comparatively small to the competition in your industry and the people that you're up against, you're going to have to move very, very fast. And if they're really big, you're going to have to make up for your size in the fact that you got to move way faster than them. And this is why you have companies like midjourney that have 11 employees outperforming and doing a better job of AI when it comes to graphics and pictures than massive companies like Adobe that have thousands of engineers working the same problem is because mid journey moves much faster. And, and yes, they break things and make mistakes and maybe they use copyright and trademark images or whatever, but they move so much faster. Their technology is so much better with 11 people than thousands of engineers working for a company that has billions of dollars like Adobe. And this is achieved because they move fast and for what they lack in mass, they make up in velocity. And therefore the momentum they have is actually greater than the company that's large, but moves much, much slower. Now, how does this relate in everyday life? Just last week there was a decision in the company where someone that isn't necessarily a manager, but they, they have a department. And I needed to have one of the decisions that I was making ran through that department so that change could be enacted. And I very quickly made a decision based upon the fact of inputs from other managers. And I quickly made a decision. The person in this department was against it and they, they pushed against it. And in, in. The first inclination I had was like, forget them, we're moving fast. That's how this organization runs. And they weren't happy that we were moving so fast. They thought, they said that we were moving too quickly. And so my first inclination is like, forget them and they're wrong. And this is the way the company's gonna run. It's my business and it's always gonna move quickly and forget them. However, then I had to realize, is not only is that true about speed, but you have to realize if speed is actually what you're after, what that means is if someone comes and opposes your decision, it might actually be more advantageous to simply give in to their opinion and their thought process. Then spend the time and energy trying to debate, go back and forth, get everyone on the same page, have meetings, discuss things like this is not a big deal, this is a very small issue. And the time it would spend just to get everyone on the same page as me in my decision making process is actually greater than just rolling with the decision as it already is going and maybe it's wrong, maybe it costs a little bit more or whatever and maybe I think it's the wrong decision, but it doesn't matter because it is so small if the size of the decision is so small, speed, if it's actually the thing that you're looking for, what you are going to have to realize that sometimes you will make decisions, but because there's friction against the decision and in order to overcome that friction would take more time than you're saving in actually having that decision enacted. You might actually just completely forget and just gloss over it. And that means that when you move fast, you're gonna, there's gonna be inefficiencies. This is why I say growth sucks cash. But growth also creates chaos. Is because in growing as quickly as I am trying to do and grow the companies and move quickly, and it means I'm actually going to allow wrong decisions to be made simply due to the fact that either A, I don't want to take the time to weigh out all the options, or two, I don't want to get everyone on the same page as me and I simply am okay with anything going on, any decision being made, any sort of forward momentum instead of trying to get everyone aligned and going in the same direction on one specific decision. Now back to my equation of mass times velocity equals momentum. I truly believe that mass and velocity, if left unattended to by leadership, are inverse, which means if mass increases typically, what I'm also going to see is that velocity decreases, which means the bigger a company gets, typically the slower it gets and the faster a company moves, the faster they want to adapt, innovate and change. They typically have to reduce their size. They'll usually lay off people. This is why you see companies like Google and Facebook and all these companies laying people off and they're actually becoming more efficient and more profitable and getting more done and actually being more innovative than ever before is because as they reduce mass number of people working on their teams, they actually get much faster. So the question is, well then should I just have as small a company, as small number of team members as possible and just move very quickly and be able to get outsized returns. Not necessarily because the companies that truly dictate change in their industry make changes in the world and completely revolutionize what is their landscape in terms of their industry. Those are typically the companies that are do both. And that is as they grow bigger in mass, they actually get faster in velocity. These are companies that down through the ages you can look at, and most of the time it doesn't last very long because eventually they enter the five stages of decline that Jim Collins talks about. But before they enter those five stages of decline, every one of those great companies was likely growing very quickly and holding their team accountable to being very, very fast and having fast velocity. So. So if you have an increasing mass, the company's growing larger. At the same time, the pressure is to be fast, make decisions quickly, and have a higher velocity. That's when momentum crushes. And this is companies like Tesla and SpaceX and the likes of those businesses that we are in this day seeing. The same could be said for companies in the past that entered the stage five stages of decline. And typically what happened there is someone got to the point where they said, all right, we're going to slow things down, we're going to create more organizational efficiencies, we're going to start creating hierarchy, we're going to start creating pay scales, we're going to create a massive HR department, we're going to focus more on marketing than product. That is typically when someone goes out of that vicious cycle of having mass and velocity and when they start becoming slower and slower. But when a company can both increase in mass and velocity, the amount of momentum they have is incredible. And that's truly the businesses that can change the world.