The SEASON OF NO (What it Takes to Win)

So if you have trouble being productive, then I would consider entering a season of no. Warren Buffett once said, the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. When I look at the periods of my life in business where I've had huge amounts of growth in very short periods of time, I've gone through things that I call the season of no. And a season of no isn't forever, it's just for now. And sometimes seasons can be three months, sometimes seasons can be three years. The longest season of no that I had was a three year season. During that season of no, I said no to friends. I was a little bit extreme, but I also was running from absolute poverty and I had started seeing some success and I was so afraid of messing it up that I said no to alcohol. So I stopped drinking entirely. I stopped saying yes to any social events. I was in a paid group that I was paying like $35,000 a year to be in, and I didn't go to any of the events for two years, even though I paid for it. A lot of people think it hurts to say no to things because it does. Because you feel like you're rejecting other people. And most of us have been on the other side of that and feeling rejected sucks. You have to kind of trick your brain into think the no is actually a yes to the thing that matters most. Because the way that I've always thought about this was from like first principles perspective of if I achieve this really big thing in three years or five years, all of these doors will be open for me. But if I allow these onesie, twosie, one off conversations, one off favors, one off things to take me away from that one big thing. I know that five years from now, me not having the thing makes it far less likely that even those first doors are still open. They're only reaching out to me now because of the little bit of success that I've experienced, which I got here because of being focused on the one thing that mattered most, gym launch in the big $50 million, whatever exit was built during a season of no, and all the people that I said no to still hit me up. But if I hadn't built that during a season of no, and I had said yes to all these little things, and I said no to the thing that mattered most, they might not be here still hitting me up. There's two scenarios that I play out in my head. One is that at the end of this, where you achieve something, 95% of people are going to be even further, further behind you. And so you'll still have access to them. The people who were on par with you, shoulder to shoulder, always mutual respect. You still also have access to them. If for some reason someone is offended that you said no to them earlier on, guess what? There are other people that in this future state will be walking into your life. And so there's a lot of no's that I made earlier on that I can't even remember. The door that probably permanently shut because I have so many other doors that have opened for me. I like to think of yeses that I give to other people as withdrawals from my personal energy account. And I think of no's as deposits into my goal account. Here's how Warren Buffett told people to make goals. He said, write down your 25 top goals in life. He said, really think about it. Make them in order, 1 to 25. Then circle the top five, tear off everything underneath and throw it away. Because those are the only things that matter during a season of no. I put all of my effort into the one goal of those five that matters the most to me. Then I write down what is the minimum that I have do to not move backwards in these ones. Kind of like bodybuilding, you usually can only work on one weakness at a time. Steve Jobs said, people think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on, but that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to a hundred other good ideas that are out there. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. When you think about focusing, right, you think, well, focusing is saying yes. No. Focusing is about saying no. Innovation is saying no to a thousand other good ideas. There's the opportunistic yeses and nos that we have to make. So the better and better your business gets, the more attractive the opportunities that will present themselves. And so you may have this marketing agency, for example, and it's doing well, then all of a sudden one of your clients is like, hey man, how about I give you equity in my business and you keep doing the marketing for me and then you start thinking yourself, well, yeah, because I'm gonna make more on this deal. I should do this deal. But the thing is, is there's so much inefficiency in this one off or onesie twosie relationship that you lose on the main thing if you build this massive agency. That's the thing that everyone's going to come to you for if you have this weird thing with two or three odd appendages from these one off deals, I'll tell you, as an investor, when I see that I see an undisciplined entrepreneur, I see someone who cannot focus on the thing that matters most. And that's why when we talk about leverage in terms of getting more for what you put in, that's why being so selective on the one thing that matters most is so important. Because most people don't achieve the success they want because they either don't do the thing that matters most enough times, they don't do it for long enough, or they're doing the wrong thing altogether. Most plans taken to their natural end are actually pretty good. So even if you had a local business that was a dry cleaning business, if you did it for 40 years, never got distracted, I promise you that one, you'd have a pretty good dry cleaning business. Two, you probably have multiple locations and three, you might have been able to scale nationwide. I was in the gym space for a decade, so I could have gone into probably having 100 locations of my own or doing the franchise route, I went the licensing route. But just staying in that game for a decade straight without doing anything else. And when I did do something else, which is why I make these videos, because it was one of my bigger mistakes, I started the supplement company and I probably shouldn't have done that. I probably should have kept doing the main thing. There's also the no of doing work that's below your pay grade. This actually happened with a portfolio company recently. They have excess cash flow, they're making profit every month. But the CEO in the short term didn't want their cash flow to go down. There was this clear role that he was spending 10 to 15 hours a week on it. I'm like, dude, that's two full days of your work week. But he didn't want to give it to somebody else because it wasn't 40 hours of his week. Do you not think that in the two full other days you can make up for the work that you shouldn't be doing that somebody else can do? And realistically they'll do it better than you because they're actually fully focused on it rather than trying to get it done, you have to say no. And this is going to be a controversial one. To family obligations. We even say the word family obligation as though it's assumed and expected. It's a choice. It's a family choice. I'm not saying don't talk to your family. I'm saying you might not want to talk to your mom every day. What you really have is a family trade off. You're going to trade getting a one off comment or a stink eye. You think you're too good for us now or Mr. Big Shot comment for the one thing that matters most. If you can't talk to me, your father, you got all the money. But you know what you don't have? You don't have no heart. You ain't got two balls. You have to let other people's dream of you die so that your dream can live. Because there's only so much of you to go around. Everybody else is trying to get you to be the version of you that best serves them, including your family. I don't think it's a malicious intention, but they have goals for you that are probably not your goals for you. And somebody's goals have to die. And where most of them die is right in the middle, which is you try and do theirs and you try and do yours and you actually accomplish neither. So you might as well do 100% yours, do none of theirs and then actually achieve the long term goal, which they probably have, is that you live a happy and successful life. You only get there by saying no in the short term. To get the long yes. This is a big one. This is business contacts. And this is one of the hardest ones to say no to. So you hop on the call, you hop on the zoom call, you take the. Hey, got a second? Hey, you got 15. I'll show you. Literally, I looked at my inbox. Let me tell you the actual words, what it sounds like. Hey, I wanted to touch base real quick about something. Hey, I've got this opportunity I think you're going to want to take a look at. Let's catch up. It's been a minute. It's not the 10 minutes they're stealing from me. It's the time that I'm thinking about what I'm going to say before I get on the call. It's what I'm thinking about after the call. It's the one. I wake up the next morning and I'm still thinking about someone else's business rather than my own. And it's the actual cost of switching. They've done a ton of research on this, but basically you are like four times more productive per unit of time if you do one task rather than try and go A and B and they just did it between two tasks. Just asking people to go Switch between task A and then do task B. And they were different tasks. And it took people four times as long versus just doing A and then B. So when people interrupt your day, think about it as they just 4x how much longer it's going to take me to get this thing done. That's the real cost of saying yes to them. Now, in the beginning, if you want to hop on calls with other people because you want to provide value to them, by all means, do it. But you're being conscious about it. So if you have trouble being productive or getting the things that you want done or achieving the big goal, then I would consider entering a season of no. There was a season where I was going from six locations to 10. Now, I ultimately talked to a mentor, decided to sell my locations, turn into licensing, and I was like, shit sucks right now. I was like, I'm working 80 hours, 100 hours a week, every hour of every day. I gave up football, I gave up Netflix. And what I started doing is writing down the things that I was willing to sacrifice for my goal rather than the things that I was willing to do. Because a lot of times people have these really big to do lists. But what I don't think people do is make really big to don't list. Everybody ahead of you has the same time. So if you're working all day and you're not making progress as fast as you want, it means the people ahead of you, it's not that they're doing things you aren't, is that you're doing things they aren't. They're choosing to say no to more activities than you are. And if you say no to everything else, what's left is the work in front of you that just needs doing. Jerry Seinfeld talked about how he wrote comedy. He never forced himself to write, but he said during the time block, he wasn't allowed to do anything else but write. He said, I could sit there bored, but I couldn't do anything else except for write. It's a long time to spend on something that means absolutely nothing. But that's what I do. That's what people want me to do, is spend a lot of time wastefully so that then I can then waste their time. People aren't willing to sit for that two or three minutes, and they allow themselves to get distracted. And so I think one of the easiest ways to be really productive is just allow no space for anything else to occur. And then what happens by default is you become productive because you have nothing else to do when I need to change a behavior, I try and change the environment rather than changing myself. Because it's way easier to change everything else than to change you.