In this motivational presentation, Mike Andes urges entrepreneurs and business owners to commit to a five‑year "lock‑in" period during which they adopt an ownership mindset, aggressively acquire essential skills, stay humble and teachable, and surround themselves with high‑performing peers. He argues that external challenges—AI hype, economic uncertainty, political turmoil—are constant excuses used to avoid growth, and that the most successful people historically have thrived by going on the offensive when others retreat. Andes outlines what participants will gain (personal ownership, skill mastery, a learning‑oriented humility, a stronger network, the ability to endure discomfort, and a habit of rejecting excuses) and what they must lose (shallow friendships, comfort, and the habit of making excuses). By eliminating these barriers and focusing on controllable actions, he claims viewers can transform their businesses, achieve generational wealth, and alter their family’s trajectory over the next five years.
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In this video, my goal is to convince you to lock in for the next 5 years. Whether you're just getting started or you've been doing this business thing for 20 years, I implore you for the next 5 years to lock in. Every big business owner that I know, everyone that is super successful, is currently looking at the landscape and saying how much opportunity there is to be able to grow and scale your business. Every, every other pundit, newscaster, person that likes to give their opinions, they're all talking about how AI is going to wipe us out. They're talking about how gas prices are high, it's impossible to find good people, it's hard to be able to acquire customers, customer acquisition cost is going up, it's hard to advertise. They're constantly coming up with excuses as to why success is no longer possible and why the American dream, building a business, becoming successful, is harder than than it's ever been before. And whether you talk about a war on the other side of the country or a politician coming into office, someone's going to try to convince you that it is out of your control to be able to become successful and achieve the goals that you have. And this video is made to convince you otherwise. And that is if you can lock in for 5 years, which the vast majority of people will not do, but if you can lock in for 5 years, the likelihood of you achieving your goals and what you have set out to do to change your family tree, to be able to provide for the people people that you love, to be able to do things that you wish you only, only have ever dreamed of doing is absolutely possible. And so I'm going to talk about what happens in these next 5 years as you make a generational run at trying to build the person and the business that you've always dreamed of. So let's talk about first what you're going to gain, and then we're going to talk about what you're going to lose if you do what I'm saying, which is locking in for the next 5 years. Because there will always be bad news, and if you go back 50, 100, 150 years, there's always been plagues, viruses, economic recessions, political battles, wars. There's always been things as to why you should not invest in your business, in yourself, grow your company, expand. There has always been a reason why, but every single one of the people that played defense or withdrew during the time that it was— there was fear in the marketplace, those are the people that lost out. And the people who won were the people that when everyone else was laying people off, they were hiring. The people that were buying more trucks and equipment when all of their competition was having to sell it for pennies on the dollar because they were overleveraged. There were people that went out and marketed and advertised at a time when everyone else was reducing their marketing budget and trying to conserve and pinch pennies. The people that go on the offense when everyone else is going on the defense are the people who win in business. And so when you lock in for the next 5 years, these are the things that you're going to gain And then let's talk about the things you're going to lose. First off, what you're going to gain is ownership instead of a victim mindset. And so if you've been raised around people that everything happens to them, not because of them, you're going to have to shed this mindset. You're going to lose this identity that everything happens to you. You aren't successful because you don't have a degree. You're not successful because you didn't have the right family connections. You're not successful because you don't have money. You're not successful because of the color of your skin, or the shape of your body, or your height, or your religion, or where you were born, and we can constantly come up with these reasons as to why we are not successful. And by giving power to that thing, we become a victim instead of taking ownership of whatever circumstance we've been put in, and then realizing that I can do something to change it. And this mentality of constantly trying to get more than give is where this comes from. The constant mindset that everything is owed to me for me doing nothing is something that many of my generation, Gen Z, people that are new and coming up, we're used to it. We came up through COVID when all of a sudden we didn't have to pay for student loans. We didn't have to pay for mortgages. No one could kick us out. No one could actually evict us from a rental for years in many states. And so this mindset that without doing anything, without any sacrifice, without any toil, we will be given everything is baked in the mind of so many people. And although we could look at the global perspective and say how bad that is, think of the opportunity this is when the rest of your competition, everyone else you're against, has this mindset that they can sit back, do nothing, and somehow win. Everyone else is sitting on their laurels, sitting back on defense, trying to conserve, trying to blame others, trying to think about the next politician that will give them more instead of what can they give to other people? What can they give to their community? What can they do to be able to build a business that provides great jobs? What can they do to make sure that their employees make more money? What can they do to make sure that their team members get to the next stage of their career? What can they do to change their family tree and make sure that we aren't living on food stamps? We aren't going from paycheck to paycheck. We aren't the person that When we retire, we have to live on Social Security. These are the people that I'm speaking to, and I would encourage you to lock in for the next 5 years, because in those 5 years, you will have to lose this mindset that everything happens to you, and rather gain the mindset that it happens because of me. And you might say, well, that's not fair. There are people born into bad circumstances and it's not their fault. I agree. But for every person's situation, there is an example that was of a person that was in the exact same situation or had it worse and somehow got the goals and the things that you are trying to achieve. And if that's the case for them, why not you? This mentality that it's good for everyone else to win but not me is a limiting belief. And getting beyond this mindset that everything is owed to me and I'm a victim to what politicians or the economy or the weather or the market or whatever is going to somehow keep me and hold me back is crazy. It doesn't matter what comes in my way. I'm gonna take ownership of my circumstance, ownership of the things around me, and I'm just going to win. That mindset is something you will have to gain. The ownership mindset instead of victim mindset. Alright, the other thing you're gonna have to gain in the next 5 years as you lock in is skills. The only thing standing between what you want and where you are today is skill acquisition. In other words, the only thing you need is to learn how to do certain tasks in order to achieve the goal. You're like, well, no, it depends on getting more customers. That is a skill. That's advertising, that's marketing, that's sales. No, I just need to find great people. Leadership is a skill. It is something that has to be learned. And once you've identified this, the only thing you think about is how do I gain these skills? If I have a lack of customers, how do I gain the skill of marketing? How do I gain the skill of sales? How do I learn Facebook ads? How do I learn Google ads? Do I need to pay someone? Do I need to get a coach? Do I need to get a mastermind? Do I need to get a book? Do I need to get a podcast? The only thing I care about is gaining skills. And some people have confused this with reps. And they'll say, well, I just need to do it more often. Well, if you do the exact same weight at a gym over and over and over, 20 pounds, 20 pounds, 20 pounds, and you're lifting 20 pounds, you're not gonna gain any muscle size. You're going to have to upgrade. You're going to have to increase the amount of weight that you're lifting. And so it's not just reps. So many people do the same thing for 20 years and they wonder why they're in the same spot. They have not been gaining more skills. They have not been putting the proverbial weight on the bar and increasing the weight and gaining the skill, hiring more people, increasing the marketing budget, adding a division, hiring someone that's actually better than them at a certain skill that they always thought they were great at. These are skills, and once you learn that the only thing you have to do is gain them, you very much start to think in terms of how can I buy them? Like, can I go hire someone that has a skill? Can I go to a group? Can I pay to be inside this mastermind? Can I pay to be inside this group? Can I get this book? Can I get this podcast? Can I go to a conference? All in the effort of gaining a skill, because that skill unlocks The things that you want in life. And this is why getting around the right people and getting in the right rooms is so important. The third thing, what you will want to gain in the next 5 years as you lock in and make this generational run, is going to be the ability to learn and be humble. If you think you know everything, where you're currently at in terms of success and on the progress towards your goals will stay stagnant. The only way to gain the skill is the ability to learn. And the only way to learn is to realize I have a deficit and I need to learn that skill. And so many people will say, I need to gain skills, like, show me how to do it. And then they show up at a group, they show up at a conference, and all they wanna do is talk about themselves and how great their business is and how good they're doing. And it's like, can you not be teachable? Can you not be a good student? And I've consistently found that the unlock to to gain the skill is simply becoming a good student. But in order to become a good student, I need to first have the mindset of a student. And in order to have the mindset of a student, I need to humble myself and realize I don't know everything. And I'm not going to allow the size of business that I'm at now to keep me from gaining skills from people that actually have a smaller business than me. So I might have a $5 million business, but I can learn a specific skill from someone that might have a $1 million business, but they have a really good talent at a specific task or specific skill. But most people, as they start climbing the ladder of business or success in any sort of discipline, they start looking down at everyone else that's below them without realizing that there's weaknesses in your vocabulary in terms of skills that you might be able to actually get from someone below you. And even people above you, it requires a student's mindset to be able to extract those skills and those experiences from them. Most successful people want to give you knowledge. They want to give you the unlock. They want to give you the thing that will allow you to grow your business, the thing that will keep your business from being bottlenecked. They want to give that thing to you. And for many people that have built a bigger business and gone through the same trials and tribulations that you're currently going through, they would love to give you the answer. But the reason they can't give you the answer is because you do not have a student's mindset. You don't come to the table with the mindset of a student to learn, understand, and instead you're constantly trying to give excuses as to why it won't work for you, constantly giving excuses as to why you've tried that before, why it won't work in your market, why it's different for you, why you're somehow some special snowflake compared to everyone else and compared to the exact person that has the skill you want. And most people will never grow their business because of the pride they have in their head, in their heart, that keeps them From having a student's mindset and learning from people that you might not agree with. The person might not look like you, they might talk differently than you, they might have different political beliefs, they might, like, they don't have to be you in order for you to gain skills from them. And so many people are so proud because the person that they're wanting to gain the skill from has the skill but doesn't look like them, doesn't act like them, doesn't believe like them, doesn't talk like them, and they can't filter out all that noise and get the signal of the skill that they need to acquire from them. The teacher doesn't have to be just like you for you to be able to learn from them. And so many people are so proud in their mindset that they can never humble themselves enough to learn from anyone. Someone above them, they give excuses to. Someone above them that says, hey, this is the answer, they say, no, I'm different. The person below them, they say, oh well, I can't learn from them. They have a smaller business than me. They're not even as far along as me in my entrepreneurial journey. And that person will You will stay stagnant. And so what you will have to gain is the ability to learn, become a student, and be humble. Now, on this 5-year lock-in time that I'm asking you to take for the next 5 years that will probably set you up for the next 50 years and will likely change your children and your children's family tree if you do this correctly, you will also have to lose certain things. First thing you're gonna have to lose, that you will inevitably lose, you're not even gonna have to try to lose people. Is shallow friends. You will lose shallow friends in the next 5 years if you lock in. The person that expects you to be at every single social obligation, they get offended if you don't respond to them right away. The person that gets offended if you're not in the WhatsApp group or the Facebook chat or the Instagram group. You're not the person that's going to be out partying till 2 and 3 AM. You're not going to spend every single weekend going out and getting hammered, spending all of your money and time and energy with a whole bunch of people that you hardly know. Your friends in high school, if you take all of them and you say, well, they're my friends also when I'm in my 20s and in my 30s, the likelihood that you will probably be the average of that group is extremely high. And so what I would encourage you to do is get a new group of friends. And yes, that might be a few of your friends from high school, but if you just take your friends from high school and they're the same friends in your 20s and then in your 30s, you will almost always just be the aggregate, the average, the median of all of their net worth, all of their skills, all of their levels of success, and you'll probably stay around the same area that they live in. You'll probably marry similar people. You'll probably have the same level of fitness. You'll probably have the same religion. You'll just stay the same. And average people are overweight. They don't have a relationship that they're super excited about. They live spiritually unfulfilled lives. They don't build a great business. They hate their job. They never get financial freedom. And so if you're going to just take the average of your high school senior class and just live with them for the next 20 years and be friends with them, you will probably not be able to lock in because during this lock-in phase, you will lose all the shallow friends that expect you to show up to those types of events and just be involved with the game, be part of the crew. And what really stings is that this might actually be even friends that are really close to you and family that are shallow. And the reason I call them shallow is because if they don't support your goals, They don't really want you to succeed, you will likely lose them. You will pass them up, and there's nothing against them. They might have goals down here, but if your goals are up here, you will have to shed them. And it's not that you have to say anything negative about them. You don't have to block them. You don't have to say, you know, negative things about them. Just realize that you will likely lose those shallow friends because they will no longer feel comfortable in your presence when the size of goals that you have are so much bigger than theirs. Everyone Likes being around people that have similar or lower goals than them, but they get uncomfortable. Average people get uncomfortable when you get around them and you have bigger goals, bigger expectations, huge levels of effort, and you have a massive maniacal focus towards this lock-in phase of your life. They just don't feel comfortable. That's the average person. No one above you will ever make you feel this way. No one closer to your goals will make you feel bad or less than, or make you feel as if you're doing something wrong. on your effort towards getting where you want to be at in life and where you want your business to be. It's always the person that is trying to pull you back, hold you down. And unfortunately, many times the people that are closest to you, the people that you have known for a long time. And if you want to upgrade your life, if you want to upgrade your business, if you want to upgrade your net worth, you will have to upgrade the circle of friends that you are around. Second thing you're going to lose in this generational 5-year lock-in period is going to be comfort. It will not be comfortable When you want to sleep and you have to keep working. It will not be comfortable when you need to wake up and you have hardly slept. There will be so many times where you have to do things that are uncomfortable. Working out in the heat if you're in home services, working in a crawl space, working extended periods of time from a labor perspective. And then when you get employees and someone calls out, someone isn't reliable, someone drops out last minute, and it all falls on you. This generation is so obsessed with comfort. Whether you talk about the climate, whether you talk about the way that we feel and our feelings, whether we think about our mental headspace, we are always looking for comfort. But on the other side of comfort, on the other side of getting through that period that it says, ah, this is uncomfortable, I don't want to do this, but pushing through that is where success lies. On the other side of comfort and doing something that is uncomfortable is what allows the top 1% of athletes to get to the level that they're at. The top 1% of business people, the top 1% of singers and performers, the people that want to have a top 1% relationship with their spouse, with God, they're going to have to do uncomfortable things. And that goes against everything inside of your body that will tell you to do otherwise, which is seek comfort, make sure that if it's causing you discomfort, you cut it off. The exact opposite thing is what you will have to do You have to embrace this for the next 5 years. You are going to lose comfort. And this will go against everything inside of your body because we are trained to seek comfort. We want softer chairs, we want more comfortable clothes, we want everything to be comfortable around us. And that pull, that draw, that magnet that is pulling the vast majority of people towards comfort is the reason most people won't achieve their goals. Comfort is that the polar opposite pulling in this direction away from your goals. And so if you can cut yourself from that magnetic pull towards comfort and embrace discomfort for the next 5 years, I happen to believe you'll wake up on the other side of that much closer to your goals. The last thing you will have to lose is excuses. No more excuses. No more excuses as to why it will not be you. No more excuses as to why you can't work out. No more excuses as to why you're overweight. No more excuses as to why you cannot figure out how to do advertising. No more excuses as to why you can't hire more employees. No more excuses as to why it won't work in your market, for your service, for your industry. And rather, instead of excuses, you look for solutions. You look for people that can help you find solutions. And anyone around you that is constantly bringing excuses forward, you will cut them out of your life. You will lose them because excuses around you give you permission to fail. If you fail in an initiative, on a project, on a challenge, an excuse steps forward to bridge the gap in our brain as to why that failure occurred and give us a permission slip to continue without addressing the uncomfortable feeling that says you failed. Excuses will keep you away from your goals because you will not be able to stare failure at the in the face and ask yourself, what did I learn from that? The thing that really separates the most elite performers is the person that can look back at the game tape, look back at the failures, the mistakes in a game, and learn how to improve instead of just giving excuse. Well, I was sick. Oh, my foot wasn't feeling good. Oh, well, you know, the shot clock was way behind, the referees. And they point to everything exterior from themselves, and because of that, they can never actually change their behavior. They can never improve. And so the minute you shed, you stop giving excuses, and instead say, I failed because of X, Y, and Z. That did not go according to plan. That marketing, that challenge, that budget, I squandered it. I made the wrong hire. But instead of giving excuse, because it's the employee's fault, because the market's fault, it's the economy's fault, it's the politician's fault, instead of giving excuse, you take ownership of it, and you can actually learn from your mistakes, And move forward. And so many people hear someone like Mark Zuckerberg say, move fast and break things. In reality, it means move fast and learn from your mistakes. It is the ability to not give an excuse as to why things happen, but rather realize that you can look back at the game tape and improve on your footwork, improve on your shot, improve on the release, improve on your defense and your offense, and take extreme ownership for every single part and performance of your game and your craft. And every single hire, every single marketing campaign, every initiative you roll out in the business, even if it fails, you learn from it, but you take ownership of the results instead of making excuses. If you do this for the next 5 years and you lock in and you block out the noise and you delete every single news app and news widget on your iPhone and you just focus on what you can control instead of everyone else that is vying for your attention and trying to spike your cortisol and get you stressed out about things you cannot control, I believe the next 5 years will get you closer to your goals and they'll set you up to change your family tree. And I only wish for everyone watching that in the next 5 years.
