It took me 30 YEARS to realize what I’ll tell you in 36 mins
In a 36‑minute monologue, Mike Andes, founder of Augusta Lawn Care and Augusta Nation, distills three decades of experience into 13 concrete principles that guide how he builds, runs, and lives his business. He blends personal anecdotes, biblical references, and case studies (e.g., a snow‑removal firm that raised prices) to illustrate each lesson. The principles cover mindset (remain teachable, avoid mediocrity), pricing strategy (the chicken‑and‑egg of price vs. service), hiring (focus on inputs), delegation order (admin → ops → sales), customer value (sell time, not price), goal execution (boots‑on‑the‑ground focus), community (climb with peers), ambition (surround yourself with high‑performers), tax strategy (Section 179 only works with profit), lead management (raise price instead of turning leads away), health habits (lift, run, avoid alcohol, sleep), effort vs. results (average inputs yield average outputs), median avoidance (reject average outcomes), and generosity (give to create abundance). He also announces a platform migration to Homeworks, emphasizing its alignment with the three‑department model. The talk is practical, candid, and aimed at home‑service entrepreneurs seeking scalable, profitable growth.
Chapters
It took me 30 years to learn the business lessons I'm about to give you in a few minutes. These are the 13 principles that shaped how I earn and live. Not theories, hard earned realizations. They came from building a $50 million lawn care business, making expensive mistakes, and watching what actually works over time. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact lessons one by one. Product Practical, uncomfortable and useful. And if you're thinking this sounds obvious or this doesn't apply to me, that's usually a sign you haven't paid the price for it yet. Let's get into it. Number one, remain teachable. Whether or not you read the Bible. In First Kings, chapter three, verse seven, Solomon, who is considered the wisest man in the world, was quoted saying, I am but a child, and praying and asking God for wisdom and understanding. In my opinion, regardless of whether or not you're religious, this sort of stance is very useful for getting successful because it opens you up to the possibility that you might not know everything and that other people have something to be able to teach you. And this is actually something that I constantly pray. I refer back to the scripture every time before a big moment. So this picture here is actually from last year's conference where for the first time ever, I actually got on the stage and pitched people to join Augusta Lawn Care and and become part of Augusta Nation. I had never done that before, and this was me praying those exact words. Understanding that I don't know everything. I'm opening myself up to the fact that I need understanding and that I need wisdom. And by doing that, regardless of whether or not you're speaking to God and the Creator or you're just acknowledging the fact that you don't know everything, it opens you up to learning and understanding from other people. Whether they be ahead of you or behind you, someone is able to teach you something. But by constantly thinking you know everything, it prevents that from ever happening. Number two, raising prices is a chicken and egg dilemma. I'm actually remembering to Stefano Deducci who came to my podcast. We had a podcast together and he has over 5,000 snow removal customers up in Ontario, Canada, and they have a really cool business model. But last year they had about 4,000 customers and he almost went bankrupt. So what did he have to do? He raised prices by. By 30%. What's crazy is hardly anyone complained because he had such great service. I asked him, like, what happened last year? Why did you. When did you come to this realization you need to raise prices? And it was the fact that there's this chicken and egg problem and that is I can't raise prices because my service is bad. Many times when you need to raise prices, you're also getting complaints from customers. It seems like everything's falling through the cracks. Falling behind on estimates, you're way behind on the schedule and customers are mad at you. So why in the world would you raise prices now when reality, your service is bad because you haven't raised your prices. And so Stefano, what he did, he raised prices by 30% and then he invested in a second mechanic to make sure that there was no downtime. He invested in buying more tractors so there was more redundancy and if one or two went down, it didn't slow them down dramatically. He also invested more in management because he found out like, I need better managers and dispatchers and office people to, to be able to make sure that in the middle of a two week snowstorm that we continue to run on time. If you're stuck in this dilemma of like, I can't raise prices because my service is poor, remember that by having good prices you are able to afford the service and the standards that your best customers deserve. But this is the death loop that business owners get into. I can't raise prices, so I don't raise prices. I don't raise prices because my service is bad. Because my service is bad, I cannot raise prices. And this death loop that we fall into, and that is what constantly causes the race to the bottom in this industry. Instead of just having the confidence to know that if you raise prices, you'd be able to afford better equipment, you would have less downtime, you'd be able to answer your phones, you'd be able to get back to customers faster, you'd be able to afford the software that allows things to run smoother. So by having the right price and then we'll have a profitable business, you're able to serve your customers better. Number three for leaders hire based on inputs because outputs are hard to validate. Most of us when we're interviewing employees, we are constantly asking about their outputs, that is their work experience, certain skills they have, certifications, they've ran that piece of equipment before, if they've done that type of service before, education, training, these are all outputs. I like to ask in my interview questions more about their inputs because these are things that can't be fudged, they can't be made up, they can't be lied about. For example, if you ask someone, how long have you ran an excavator before they could very well just say five years when really reality it's been like five months. But you don't really have a great way to validate whether or not they've been on there for five years or for five months. Outside of hiring them and seeing if they do a good job when, especially when it comes to leadership, I like to ask more input based questions. For example, if you ask someone who they draw inspiration from, what was the last book you read about our industry? What podcast have you been listening to? What influencers are you following on social media? By knowing who they follow and the type of content that they're reading and listening to, I have a pretty good understanding as to whether or not they're gonna fit into our culture. This is really relevant when it comes to leadership. Maybe for skill based entry level positions, I just need them to check certain boxes. When it comes to leaders, I need to know that they're gonna constantly improve. And if they're the type of person that's not listening to books, they're not actively trying to improve themselves. They're not following other influencers in this industry. There's a really good chance they're not gonna be the type of person. Back to our very first step. They're that is trying to seek wisdom and understanding because they think they know everything. And that's not the type of person I want to have in leadership. Interviewing based on inputs instead of outputs has served me well. Number four, admin, ops and sales delegate, in that order. When we look at every home service business, there are three departments. There's admin, there's operations and sales. Sales is getting the work, operations is doing the work and, and admin is making sure I get paid for the work. Now everyone, always, as you grow your business like, oh, you need to delegate. I have so much on my plate. I just need someone to take something off of it and help me out. And we sometimes delegate in the wrong order. Now I made this mistake. I was doing around $900,000 in annual revenue and my very first Augusta lawn care location. I thought I needed to have someone help me in sales because I was doing all these estimates. I didn't have enough time to do the estimates. So I just figured I needed someone to do sales for me. And so what I do, I hired someone full time to go out and do artificial turf sales. So we started doing putting greens and synthetic turf. And it was horrible because I was also doing sales in landscaping and in mowing and all the property cleanups. But they were doing artificial turf. So all of a sudden a business that had $900,000 in annual revenue had two full time salespeople. That's crazy. What's really crazy is I was still doing operations and I was still involved somewhat in the office. And so I see three common mistakes when it comes to delegation. First off is delegating before you can afford it. That is the business owner that hires an office manager and they're doing like $150,000 in annual revenue. You can't afford it. And inside of my book, the Copy and Paste Millionaire, I break down exactly the revenue and how many employees you should be having when you delegate each of these things. But a lot of times people just delegate before they can even afford it because it's a lot of times the things that you don't like to do, I, I hate answering the phone, I hate doing sales. So they just go delegate those tasks. The second common mistake I see when it comes to delegation is delegating higher leverage tasks too early. Remember, we want to delegate in this direction. Admin first, then Operations and then sales. Thank you everyone for being here at this press briefing today. Just a quick announcement from here. The team wanted to let everyone know that we are officially moved from Copilot CRM over to Homeworks. You can check out the website. It's Home Dot works and it's not just going from blue to orange. We're getting away from the AI stuff in the past. We're moving forward because the links, the chain links on the logo of Homeworks are actually representative of Sales, Operations and Admin, the three departments in every home service business. And our whole objective of Homeworks and our motto is to grow without breaking. That's why we have the chain in the logo. And that's truly our purpose, is that you as home service business owners can grow your business without breaking. Thank you so much. And what I see some people doing is they're delegating sales when they haven't even got someone to delegate operations to yet. These are lower leverage tasks. Admin Answer the phone is a lower leverage task than being out in the field doing sales. It's a lower leverage task than being out in the field managing your crew and doing operations. And that leads me to the third common mistake, which is partial delegation of lower leverage tasks. And what the owner ends up being is a master juggler. You're like, well, I'm growing 500,000, 600,000. I have someone in the office kind of part time, and then I get here doing operations. I'm Kind of doing sales still. But I get someone to kind of like a crew leader to be my operations person. Now I'm a million million two. I'm kind of doing sales, but I still answer the phone when my office person isn't in the office, I still make sure the crew is good. I'll take them some equipment or materials. And you really just become this master juggler of admin, operations and sales. Why would you try to delegate operations or sales if you haven't fully delegated admin every single task? Email, text messages, payroll, QuickBooks, everything is delegated before I move on to operations. Why? Because it's the lowest leverage task. And so any task when it comes to delegation, I'm just asking myself, what's the lowest leverage thing I do? What's the thing that adds the least amount of value to the business? I can promise you that categorizing your QuickBooks accounts is not the highest leverage task. When you compare it to selling massive jobs out in the field, doing sales, or leading a crew of four or five people on a big project. Why would I be spending my time doing QuickBooks entries and doing bookkeeping? To avoid being the master juggler, you gotta delegate admin first, then operations and then sales. And not doing it in that order can lead to loss of profit as well as a huge amount of stress. Number five, the best customer wants to save time, not money. The worst customers want all your time and are price sensitive. So let's go over some of the examples of how you can save customers time. Because your best customers value that a whole lot more than the estimate that you give them. You and we all get so wrapped up in, oh man, is that too expensive. When your best customers, they could care less if you doubled the price. If you can just get it done on time, on budget, not bother them, and they don't have to show up five times to go over work order changes. And so what can we do to save our customer time? Well, first off, which 80% of Home Service businesses don't do, answer your phone. Instant quote pricing is another way to save my customer time. Because they don't even have to call me, they don't have to send me an email, they don't have to fill out a form. They can just immediately get the information, check out, give me their car information, and bam. Inside of my system, they've accepted the quote and we're rocking and rolling. I don't to meet them. They don't have to leave work in the middle of the day to come Visit with me and go over the scope of work. Just instant quote pricing directly from my website speed to lead. I'm not going to wait three days after they email me. I'm not going to wait three days after they called. I'm not going to wait three days after I visited them for a proposal for a big project to send them a quote and speed delete. Just compress all the time in the equation in the sales process as much as possible. That's how you honor the time of your customer. And if you honor their time, they will pay you handsomely when it comes to prices that you're charging. If you have a card on file, they don't have to constantly go into their customer portal, put their payment information every single month they're doing the exact same thing. Put a bank account on file, put a credit card on file. Use homeworks to get this done for you. You can use homework also for automations so that way they're not asking when are you, when am I on the schedule? It's automated. You let them know when you left, you ask them for a survey, you ask for a review. Everything is automated. Also giving them a text message with season specific upsells allows them to not have to think about what their property needs next. You as the professional in your industry, you know what the customer is going to need before they even have that problem because they don't even see as a problem until it's actually a huge issue on their property. You can get ahead of them and you can save them time by saying hey Mr. Jones, you it's March 1st. Generally in March we do property cleanups. Would you like to go ahead and get one of those on the schedule? Here's your quote that saves the customer time. So season specific offers is what's gonna save your customer more time and because of that they'll buy more often from you. Same thing when it comes to deposits. I don't want as a customer to accept the quote and then wait for an email for 50% of an invoice that I can then pay and then the job gets started. I, I want it baked into my estimate process that when I click accept on the estimate I paid the deposit. That's how we have it set up in homeworks that as soon as someone clicks accept, the deposit is being paid, the card is being on file. I'm not emailing or trying to get that message to the customer after they've already accepted the quote. It just baked into the estimate acceptance process number six. Be very careful with goal setting, you climb a mountain mostly by looking at your boots, not the summit. If you think of a mountain climber when they're going up this mouse massive mountain, they're not looking at the top the entire time. They're actually just looking down at their boots for probably 99% of the time. Occasionally look up, oh, there's the summit. Oh yeah, I'm going in the right direction. But most the progress is made just by putting one foot in front of the other. And when it comes to like beginning of the year planning or you're going into spring rush, it's good to do planning and do projections and create a budget. But day to day operations, execution on those goals is what actually yields progress. Now I remember when I was in my late 20s, listening to Bezos, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, talk about making a few decisions per day and how that was all he really focused on. Why do I need to make a hundred decisions today? If I make like three good decisions a day, that's enough. And I just thought, well, I don't have to like work crazy amount of hours, I don't have to work hard, I just need to make a couple good decisions. And the reason that it was useful for him is because he was at the time a CEO of hundreds of billions of dollars enterprise. I was just starting my business and had 30 or 40 customers. So that was good information for him. But I was way too early. The same thing as I listened to the E Myth, the book that everyone loves from Michael Gerber. It talks about working on my business, but it was way too soon. It was way too soon for me to think about the summit and my business and all the processes, how I was gonna have all these locations when most of my actual wins was made by upselling customers, making sure my equipment was maintained correctly, setting up my software correctly. Those are the day to day boots on the ground actions that actually got me to the goal of the summit. But constantly just thinking about the summit and then if you, you're going to walk off a cliff, if you're being a mountain climber, you're going to walk, if you're going to injure yourself instead of just focusing on your day to day operations. And so I would spend 1 or 2% of my time looking at the summit, making sure directionally I'm correct, I'm moving towards my goals, but spend most of my time actually working in the business to make sure that what I am doing today tracks towards that goal and the changes in the business that I am Making are going to get me to where I want to go. One thing that's really helpful for me when it comes to that analogy is I like to think about, well, who shall we watching? Like I'm trying to look for inspiration. I'm trying to look for someone that can show me the way. And if you're telling me I can't look at the summit, what should I be doing? Because there's days where looking at my boots, I get super frustrated. There's days I get depressed, there's, there's days I want to quit. That's where in my opinion it's really helpful when it comes to mountain climbing, to climb in packs of people. This is why community is so important, getting in a group of climbers. Because what I can do is I can look at the person, the mountain climber that's just a few steps ahead of me. Maybe they're 10 yards ahead of me, maybe they're 50 yards ahead of me. And so when I am stuck in my daily operations and boots on the ground, when I need to look up, I don't have to look to the summit and then immediately have this huge deficit of where I'm at from versus where I want to be and feel completely inadequate. Rather I can look at someone 10ft in front of me like, oh, I can see their boots, I can see where they're at. And so I recommend getting in a community, getting a group of people that are trying to do the same thing as you and then look towards the people that are just a few steps ahead of you. Maybe if you're doing a million dollar business, you look at someone doing 2 or 3 or 4 million, don't look at the business person that's doing a billion dollars in revenue. The things that they're saying, like when I was listening to Bezos, probably has no impact on your day to day business. It has no impact on the actions you need to take now to get where you want to go. Number seven, your ambition dies slowly when you surround yourself with people that have none. Now I had a close friend that was around, a person that really just moved super slow and avoided making decisions. And I started to notice over the course of time that those same tendencies showed up at work and they started to feel complacent with their department and avoided what we believe at Augusta Nation to be very important. That is constant improvement, which is we are constantly improving for the sake of the game. And yes, you did good, but you can still do better. And that can lead to some people feeling Exhausted, but that's a core value of the business. And because this person was around someone else that didn't have that same push and shove, didn't want to constantly improve and was pretty happy with where they were at, and they weren't trying to get ahead in life, it started to wear off on them. Now one thing that I've always told myself is if someone says they're a loser, believe them and act accordingly. If someone around you is saying I'm just a loser, there's a good chance they are a loser. Like when was the last time you met a real winner? And they said derogatory comms like that, the sort of thing that they are talking about, they end up manifesting. And if the people that you are around are self classified losers, there's a really good chance that you will also become a loser and very much like them. If you believe the law of the five people around you, you're the average of them. Try to do a friend audit and ask yourself, does this person actually get me closer to my goals? And one way you can actually do this is list off all of your friends, especially the five that you spend the most time with, and put a red, yellow or green. Red being they do not get me closer to my goals. That would be a negative. Yellow would be neutral. That they, you know, they, they're nice to me. We have, they're friends, we spend time together. They don't really push me towards my goals, but they don't, they don't push, pull me away. That'd be a neutral yellow friend. And then there's gonna be those very few and far between friends that would be green. These will have a positive influence and actually push you towards your goals. These are the people that actually push you to become a better version of yourself. These are the people that wake up earlier than you, that work out harder than you, that make more money than you, that have bigger goals than you, and they push you to become a better version of you. If your goal is to become the best version of yourself, having other people around you doing the same thing, and at the very least pushing you towards your goals increases the likelihood you'll actually succeed. Now you might be saying, well, isn't that kind of selfish? Like why would you do a friend audit? Like the IRS does an audit, Here you are auditing your friends. That seems kind of selfish. The bottom line is if you actually value your goals and there's someone that's holding you back from you reaching your goals, eventually you will resent them. Eventually you will come to the understanding that having that friend or, or that person that you hung out with kept you from the goals that you had. And if you want those goals and you actually revere them and you truly desire to have those goals manifested in your life, eventually when you don't hit them, you will resent the people that kept you from doing so. And I would just say to my younger version of myself, and the thing that I've learned over the past couple decades is it's okay to get obsessed. And the people you aspire to be were obsessed with, with something at one time on their climb up, you're like, well, no, the person that I'm looking up to, they only work one or two days a week and they kind of chill out on the weekends. They have all these little side projects. So that's actually what I'm going to do. When reality, if you rewind the tape 10, 15, 20 years before, they were working 70, 80 hours a week, they were sacrificing time with family, friends. They cut out all the people that were holding them back so they could break out and get past the inertia to the point where they're at now. And so I'm always asking myself, did that person ever get obsessed? Did they ever take time where they were unbalanced, where they spent more time on the business or their relationship or their family, or areas that were important to them to be able to reach their goals? And time and time again, whether you look at the greatest athletes or the greatest entrepreneurs, or the greatest actors and performers, the people that are those top 1% are the ones that got obsessed with something for some period of time. And so being obsessive about the friend group that you're going to surround yourself with and making sure they all are pushing you towards the goals that you have is a surefire way to prevent resentment in the future. Number eight, section 179 is useless without profit. Now, you might have heard business owners talk about end of year write offs as if they get it for free. Look, section 179 is only useful if you're making a bunch of profit. After you take a standard deduction for most people, they are getting like a 10 to 20% coupon on stuff they don't really need. And so under the guise of write offs and section 179, at the end of the year, they blow all of their profits. I still remember in the second year of my business, I bought two trucks in December and my profit for that year was something like $40,000. I was like, I'm not going to pay the government any taxes. I'm going to make sure I spend all of the money. Like, I saved hardly anything on taxes because at a $40,000 profit, after you take away the standard deduction, you are such a small percentage of your profit going out the door of taxes. So I probably saved a few percentage points and I bought trucks that I didn't need for the next six to 12 months. Ultimately, banks and equipment manufacturers are the real winners here because they get people to get a whole bunch of loans and leases they don't really need. And then a whole bunch of equipment manufacturers do a bunch of advertising to make sure, hey, get your write offs. Get your section 179. Don't pay the IRS any money. No, let's. How about we do pay the IRS money so we actually have a bunch of profit? Because that's the reason you got into business. You didn't get into business to have a whole bunch of trucks and equipment sitting around. You got into business to have profit. And if they're going to take a piece of the pie, that's fine. Like, I'm not going to give 30, 40% of my money to the government. If you're giving 30 or 40% of your money to the government means you're making hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. You're winning. Don't worry about trying to save $1,000 or $2,000 on tax incentives when you're just getting started and your business is in growth mode. The government does all of this. Section179, all these loopholes that they create, they do this to spur economic development and, and spur spending when you're trying to do more saving and making more money. Number nine, never turn off new leads that are coming in. This makes me so mad. Like, the fact that you would turn off new customers is insane. Instead, we should raise prices. If you have, you can only serve 100 customers and you have 101, do not turn off your new customers that are coming in. Instead, raise prices and cut the bottom 10% of your customer base to make room for 10 more new customers that are willing and happy to pay a premium price. If you want to reframe it, your best customers deserve higher service and more value that comes with healthy profits. We already talked about the chicken and egg issue. Like, I'm not going to raise prices. I don't want to do. That's not fair. I'm just going to turn off no more leads, no more customers. I'm not Serving anyone, turn off the phone. I'm not taking anyone else on. When you do that, you're basically turning off profit. Because if you could otherwise just raise prices, cut your bottom 10%, you'd be able to serve the top 90% a whole lot better. You will afford higher wages for your team, better benefits, longer retention, better trucks, better equipment, better advertising, people actually answering the phone, better website. These are all things that add value to the customers that value the most. By raising prices, you. You cut customers that perceive you as low value and make way for customers that see the value of your service. Now, when it comes to raising prices, I have three tips. Number one, tell customers after the price increase that if it's going to actually create financial hardship for them and their family to contact you. And then, number two, extend the terms if needed. So they're like, hey, this is gonna actually create a real problem for me. Say, okay, Mr. Jones, we'll extend your. Your current pricing to the end of the year to give you a little more room to make sure your budget is able to accommodate it next year. And then the third tip is show that you actually care and don't take it lightly. If you just drop a price increase on someone and you don't give them any sort of, like, recourse, any way of extending their terms, there could be a really good chance you put someone in a really bad financial position. I don't want to hold that over their head. So show that you care. By showing that you care and you don't take it lightly, the customer will take the price increase. And this is why last year at Augusta Lawn Care, I was looking at the math that over 50 locations raised their prices by at least 15%. So 50 locations all raised their prices a minimum of 15%, somewhere like 25, 30%. To my knowledge, none of them lost more than 10% of their customers. Most of them lost like 3%, 4%, 5% of their customers. And yet they were raising their prices by 15, 20, 25%. This shows that if you raise prices and just show customers that you care and you give them the option to reach back out to you, and you're not trying to catch them. You're not telling, hey, tomorrow, this changes the price. We're trying to make this as humane as possible, and we're trying to be empathetic with them, and if you do that, they'll stick with you. Number 10, lift heavy weights and run. Avoid alcohol. Go to bed early. Now, when it comes to life in general and just health stuff, I try to keep it as simple as possible and focus and consistency is found through subtraction instead of addition. So a lot of times people are like trying to add stuff to their diet, add stuff to the routine. It's like I've got to do fasting, I've got to do a fad diet, cold plunges, I got to do sauna, I got a three hour morning routine, I got all these supplements and these protein shakes. They're trying to add stuff. And honestly, it's mostly because of consumerism. We've been sold on the idea if we buy something, that something is going to fix our problems when reality, most of the time just remove stuff. So I always wanted to be healthy, especially because when I was like 11, 12 years old, I had a whole bunch of acne. And so what actually got me into health is just eating clean so I wouldn't have breakouts all the time and have a whole bunch of pimples. That was the honest truth. And so I started getting to whole foods and vegetables, et cetera. And now I eat a lot more meat. To be able to be healthy and gain muscle, I try to just keep it really simple. There's so many rabbit holes. You can run down to different diets and different things you should be doing to stay healthy. When I just try to narrow it down to the few things that matter, lift heavy weights and run. If you do that, you're going to be lean and have a high amount of muscle mass, which means you're not going to have osteoporosis and a whole bunch of other degenerative diseases as you grow older, arthritis, etc. If you avoid alcohol, that one thing alone, if you're getting, you know, on Friday and Saturday, going out, spending four or five hours, hundreds of dollars and getting plastered on the weekend, there's a really good chance you're losing one to two days of productivity. Who do you think is going to win? The person that has a solid seven days to work on their business or the person that has to spend an entire weekend and Monday recovering from a huge hangover. And so it's just like avoid it. Like there are very few people you know that have what you want and are consuming copious amounts of alcohol. And then the last one is just go to bed early. Now I will be the first to admit there are times literally two nights ago I stay up past 2am working, so there are times I do not live by this one. I apologize. This is probably the one I'm the worst at. However, if you're not working. There's very few productive things you do at 11, 12, midnight, 1 o', clock, 2am, very few things that you're proud of. And even when I was working at 2am, my productivity is a lot less in terms of percentage than it was if it was 6am after sleeping for seven or eight hours, 100%. I know that I'm probably at 70%, 75% efficiency at 2am in the morning. So as a rule of thumb, there's not so many things that you do at midnight, 1 o' clock and 2am that you're proud of. There's just not. No one's ever been like, yeah, there was this time at 1:30, I did this thing. I was really proud of this great idea. It's very rare that you fall into some Zen state and do really the great things that late at night, as a rule of thumb, if I'm not working, I'm in bed at that time. And so by subtracting a lot of these different health things and just focusing on these very basic elements of health, it served me well. One of the things that I've done to kind of get me on the path was starting to track my macros. So that's your fats, your carbs, and your protein and calories in general. If you just do it for six months, even, it will change the way you look at food and the way you look at different types of food, like a piece of cheesecake versus like an entire bowl of carrots. Same calories, but this one's going to fill me up. One little piece of steak versus a whole bunch of, like, pork rinds. You start to actually see food for what it's worth, and that is the energy and the value of it that it gives to your body. So I would recommend MyFitnessPal or Macro Factor. I use macro factor, but it does cost a little bit. It's created by Jeff Nippard, which is a influencer in the health space. And just do it for six months. Track everything you eat religiously. I have missed one day in the past about eight to nine months that I've been doing macro factor. I miss one day every single day before I go to sleep, making sure everything is put in there. It forces you to see food in a different way and much more. Ask yourself, oh, I've already consumed 2,300 calories. I have 150 left. Is it really worth going and having a milkshake? Probably not. That's gonna put me way over. It's gonna put Me a whole bunch of carbs and it's probably gonna make me ruin my sleep score. These are the type of things that you can do in your day. Keep it simple and just track what you're doing and gives you so much more awareness into what you're actually putting into your body. Number 11. Average inputs equals average outputs. Don't think you will get top 10% results working 40 hour weeks. Now, this one's a little bit controversial because someone will always say that you should take time off and you should work from nine to five and no more. Not on the weekends, not in the evenings. But I have constantly, anytime someone has told me this, I simply look at do they have what I want? And most of the time the answer is no. And so if you're expecting to have outsized results and being the top 10% in business, in health, in your relationship, don't expect what anyone else considers as average to be the Standard. I'm now 30 years old, but in my 20s, basically the whole decade was dedicated to business. And in my 20s a lot of people would judge what I was doing, spending too much time, evenings, weekends, holidays, always working, etc. But I could only rationalize it by saying to myself that they are optimizing for something different than me. Because I was optimizing for the business. I was optimizing for what that business could do for me, for my family and for my community. That's what I was optimizing for. And because of that, I put all my energy towards it. And it's not that I had more energy, it was that I focused 100% of my energy on that instead of. For most people, they'll spend 10% on this, 20% on this hobby, 14% on this hobby, 5% on this hobby, 5%, 4% on this craft, 3% on this music thing, 4% on this friend. Like they just get drained in all these different directions and therefore never get a whole hundred percent of their energy in one direction. But that's how you get outsized returns. And if you look at the top 1% in every single industry, they just took all their energy and focused on one thing. And that was that helped me so much as rationalize because I would, at first I just get mad. I'd get mad, like, why would they say that to me? Why would they tell me, like, they judge me for what I'm trying to do? It's like, oh, like that makes sense. They're optimizing for having all their weekends off and spending time with the family. I'm 22 years old, trying to grind for this business, get off the ground, because I'm tired of being poor. And if they do not have what I want, their judgment means very little. If you believe that, then the person that gives you feedback, that is nothing what you want in terms of relationship, they have. They have nothing like you want in terms of health, they have nothing what what you want in terms of spiritual life, they have nothing. What you want in terms of money or wealth, then why would I judge? Why would I feel their judgment? Why would I weigh that heavily when it comes to my decision making? Number 12. The world will push you to the median. That's the middle of the road. Riches, health and relationship success are found on the edges. So if you look at the average or the median, think about the median of a road. You have one lane of traffic and another lane of traffic in the middle. You have a median. That's the middle of the road. Now, the reason I abhor the median, the middle, is because I'm not going anywhere if I'm on the median. At least if I'm in the right lane, I'm going one direction, the left lane is going another direction, but the median's the middle doing absolutely nothing because the average marriage ends in divorce. The average business closes within five years and doesn't make money. The average person dies of a lifestyle disease because they're fat, they're obese. And so why would I want to be the average? And that's constantly where the world will push you. If you listen to the voices of everyone around you, they'll push you to be average. Don't work too little, but don't work too much. And if I listen to one person they're judging. Like, literally this happened at a Christmas party. Someone was judging me for working too much, and 10 minutes later was judging someone else, another friend of ours, for not working enough. Like, what do you want us all to be? Just this life of everyone fitting into this little box. The median. The average. The sooner you care about your goals than the opinions of others, the sooner you can make true progress. But that will require choosing your lane, committing all your resources, energy and time towards it to make progress. Number 13. Give. You get more. Now, I don't give because I get more. But it is something I have observed from people that are constantly giving to others, whether it be philanthropy, charities at church events, people that tithe or do offerings at their church. I believe that this unlocks something inside of us, the ability to give to other people. It really shows that you come from an abundance mindset instead of scarcity. Because if I have the ability to give, it comes from a place of I have excess, I have the ability to give to you without myself collapsing. And that sort of mindset of abundance versus scarcity, I have seen to serve many people well. And this mindset, like, I can't give to anyone else. I can't do profit sharing. I am not gonna open up my books, I am not going to give to my church, I'm not gonna give to my team, I'm not gonna give any health benefits. Always constantly thinking about themselves shows that there's a scarcity mindset, that there's somehow a limitation of how much money there is in the world, how many resources there is in the world. But I found the person that gives of their time, gives of their energy, gives of their resources to. To the people around them as they begin to get more wealthy, they just constantly do that same thing over and over. One time I heard someone say, you can't afford not to give. And this is one thing I've noticed, that rich people don't become generous. If you're making $100,000 in profit and you're not generous now and everything's hoarded to yourself, you don't want to give it away. You don't think about other people. You don't want to give any of it to your team, you hide it. If that's what you're doing to a hundred thousand in profit, you will do the same thing at a million dollars in profit. And so I really believe that rich people don't become generous. Money just magnifies who they really are, whether it be good or whether it be bad. And we see a lot of bad in the news of people that make a bunch of money and do bad with it. But I truly believe if you can create the habits of giving now, when you're on the climb, when you're getting started, it sets you up for this abundance mindset that down the road allows you to have more, more. And I think that a core tenet of any great community, any healthy community, whether it be a family, a church, a business, an organization, a relationship, is to give more than you take. This is one of the core elements at Augusta Nation, where we believe a lot in community, is does this person give more to the community than they take? And if so, if you can give without any expectation of return, that relationship, that organization, will continue to thrive. These are the 13 principles I learned in the past 30 years. If you want 40 more of these. Check out this video right here.
