This ONE Thing Will Make You A Better Entrepreneur

The one thing that limits every business is the entrepreneur. Not the opportunity, not the business vehicle, not anything else. It's the entrepreneur. Everything stems from them. There's three things. You've got the skills of the entrepreneur, the character traits of the entrepreneur, and then you have what I would call the beliefs of the entrepreneur. What do they believe about the world to be true? And what do they believe about the world to be true that isn't. We have so many of these belief statements that like quote society or things that we inherit, but we just choose to say that this is how life is the easiest way to think about. This is an analogy which is if you imagine a ladder, right, which you've got the ladder of success, skills on one side, beliefs on the other side, and then you've got character traits in the middle as the rungs. You might have a tremendous amount of skills and great character, but your beliefs are limited. If all of a sudden you see somebody having overnight success, it's usually because they had two of the three already very, very high level, but they were missing some huge part. Some belief was wrong. So for example, for me, when I went from 2 million to 7 to just under 30 in a matter of like three years, I believe things that were true about the world that weren't. I didn't know that licensing was a model. I didn't know I could expand in that way. And in so doing, I was able to explode because I got into the right vehicle. The vehicle wasn't limiter, it was me and my beliefs about it. And then as soon as I changed the way I saw the world, I was able to get into a much better vehicle and explode from there. The skills we learn through education, education comes from repeatedly doing things and learning from that experience. The information that we acquire to learn things comes in a lot of different forms now. The things that I actually invested in, workshops, books, seminars, coaching programs, one on one tutors, one on one mentorships, and Google. And I would say if I had to allocate amount of time spent learning things, Google was still by far the biggest one. It's funny, the other day I just set up this new widget for our site. I googled it and I did it in two hours. And so I think that the amount of time that elapses between wanting to figure something out and doing something, the more advanced you get, shortens. I remember it took me three years to figure out how to build a landing page. And the day I decided to do it, it took me four hours. So it took Me three years and then four hours to actually figure it out because I was avoiding feeling of sucking. And so if you can confront sucking faster and just get over that idea that sucking is a bad thing, then I think you compress the time between you and the skills you want. The highest value I've gotten from is from one on one mentorship is from people who are far ahead of me that were willing to speak strategically into my life. And that's usually because those people can identify all three of those things. They can identify skill deficiencies, they can identify character trait deficiencies, and they can identify things that you believe that are true, that aren't. So that is where I've gotten the most leverage in my life is on. And I've paid 20, $30,000 an hour to many, many different people just to have them speak into my life. Right underneath of that, as I was coming up was Jo Masterminds. It was the getting around other people because for me it was very lonely. And so just being around other people, doing things, it a got my competitive drive up because I always wanted to be the best. And seeing people that I didn't think were like, better than me do something better than me gave me hope that I too could do it. I'd see somebody be like, I don't think they were harder than me. I don't think they've got like some genius brain. If they can do it, I can do it too. Also, when I was in those communities, they would also already have sifted through information for me because there's lots of information out there. The problem is that we have limited time. So it's no longer about, oh, information's free, you can find anywhere. It's not free. It costs time to go find where it is. And so the idea is when you pay someone for information, it's not you're paying for the info. You're paying for the time took them to sort through it to hand it for you. So you're cutting time. That's what you're saving when you exchange the money. That's the idea. And I think a lot of people don't get that this is the actual order that I bought things. So the first thing that I did, I did free interviews. So I tried to reach out to people. So I just said, hey, I'll show you the stuff that I've got. You want to share notes with me, I can drive out there, we can meet up. And that's how I learned a lot of my initial stuff. Usually it was older guys who were willing to, like, you know, take a young, young buck under their. Under their wing. If you're young, the advantage you have is that you're young. You can get a little bit of that goodwill from older guys that you might not normally get if they're the same age. You're like, well, the millionaire won't let me pick his brain. It's like, well, no shit. His time's more valuable than yours. Either pay them or you have to go down a run. You have to keep going down until there's somebody that's either a peer or just slightly ahead of you who you can provide value to any very narrow way. The next one I did is I joined a Mastermind. That was $10,000. And that was Sam Baktiar's mastermind, rest in peace. And he actually took enough of a liking to me that he said, why don't you just become my apprentice? And then he started paying kind of weird. So I paid him and they paid me back. So I worked from 4am to 4pm every day with him basically as his secretary. And I learned a ton. Three months, just like learning all these new terms, sales, copywriting, affiliate marketing. I learned all this stuff just from him because he was in that world. From there, I started my first gym, and I stayed in that gym Mastermind during the time, I also bought a weekend workshop for Facebook ads. I learned Facebook ads in a small group of 10 people in two days. It was really valuable for me. Then I didn't really do anything for a couple of years, and then I went to Traffic and Conversion Summit. So that was an event. And I just learned more about marketing in general. I got introduced to different softwares that I then started using. And then from there I kind of got more into the digital marketing world. So I joined some masterminds in that world. I didn't do coaching programs myself. I actually ended up buying them for teammates. I think the coaching programs are really effective to teach methods. So if there's a method of acquisition you want to learn, whether it's like YouTube ads or Twitter ads or cold calling, whatever it is, joining a coaching program, but other people trying to learn the same thing from Teddy, who's good, is a great way to fast track your success. It just gives you the accountability. It helps you resolve problems faster. What you're buying is speed. It's not that you can't do it on your own. It's that you can do it faster with help if you're trying to solve a specific problem. Finding spec, coaching Programs is really good if you've been stuck for a long time. I think that's where like masterminds and one on one mentorship is more valuable because you probably have a strategic issue more than a tactical problem. Now the beliefs kind of get solved concurrently when you're in communities because the best way to break a belief is to see someone doing what you thought was not real and then have it happen. A lot of people have heard of the Roger Bannister story. First man to break a four minute mile and then the next year 28 people or whatever it was broke the four minute mile. And so the nice thing is that when you join these communities, the biggest benefit is not even the coaching, it's the beliefs that are broken and the things that you thought were false about the world that aren't. And I remember there was a moment where I was in a mastermind and there was a guy making, I think $350,000 a month. And he got up there and he sounded like an idiot. And Layla and I looked at each other afterwards, we're like, if he can do it, we can do it. That was when we weren't even doing that much money. We were probably doing, I don't know, 20, $30,000 a month. Like it was not a lot of money. So when I joined one of the first masterminds, I wanted to get my money's worth. I wanted to get as much out of this as I possibly could. Remember be everyone's number one student. I talked to every single person in the mastermind. I set up a call with everybody and I was like, hey, I'm new, I'm good at sales. That was my first skill that I had. I didn't have any. I didn't know how to market. I didn't know ads, I didn't know webinars, I didn't know link. I didn't know any of that stuff. But I was like, I know how. What I did was I just offered every single person to go over their sales script, edit it the way that I would structure it, and then rewrite them a sales script my way for free. And I did that with everyone. And then what happened is I had all these big stack of IOUs. And then I was like, I want to get into Internet marketing. And I was like, Johnny was good at landing pages. Hey, Johnny, remember I have to do that sales thing. You think you could help me with landing pages? Sure, man, of course. Okay, what else do I need? I don't know how to run ads. Hey, Sarah, you were really good at running ads. Remember that sales thing? I helped you? Sure, of course. And I get one on one tutoring from everybody on the things that they're best at. Because I just gave everyone what I was best at. That's how I did it. You want to become the most valuable person in your network and then in so doing you gain access to everyone's network. Like Joe Rogan doesn't need to network, he just is Joe Rogan. And so if he wants access to somebody, he gets access then because he's valuable. I've never been a fan of like the networking hacks. It just provide value to people for nothing. And then you will have people who owe you stuff. You've got your skills, you got your beliefs, and then you've got your character traits. If there's one that is the most important. I do think it's character traits because the character traits are the wellspring that the other things are founded upon. If you don't have discipline, you'll never be able to actually study anything consistently to gain the skill. If you don't have focus and you're always building a new bridge every week about the new business that you're going to do, it doesn't matter how many skills you have and the beliefs you have about the world. Zuckerberg couldn't start 17 Facebooks, you only start one and you have to stick with it. And so that takes focus. This is a really important point. If you have a trait, and this is where it's helpful to have communities of other people and ideally mentors, et cetera, who can speak in your life. And there's not even that many mentors who have the social awareness to say, I don't think you have integrity, I don't think you have focus, I don't think you have discipline, I don't think you have work ethic, I don't think you have drive, I don't think you have empathy, I don't think you have patience. Like, these are virtues, these are character traits that people want to embody. And so you're like, how do you develop these traits? You don't develop a character trait. You act in accordance to what someone with that character trait would do and you do it despite being uncomfortable doing it. So I'll give you an example. I was walking the other day with Layla. I was like, God, I'm so impatient. I was labeling myself as impatient. And I probably, that's been something I've believed my whole life. I was like, yeah, I'M impatient. I'm an impatient person. I'm go, go, go, go, go. But I also want to be a more patient person. I want to be wiser. I want to be more long term thinking. And she said, you're not impatient. I was like, what do you mean? I was like, all I want is for all this stuff to go faster. And she's like, yeah, but you're not changing direction. All your actions are one of somebody who is patient. So the fact that you're uncomfortable being patient does not mean you are impatient. It means you're just patient. And so your internal feelings about what you're doing have nothing to do with the trait. And so you think about the reverse of that, where someone's like, I'm super disciplined. Except they don't do anything that's disciplined. You're like, no, you're not. They're like, no, but I feel good. Like, yeah, but you're not disciplined. You have no evidence to support that you were disciplined. The idea of building a character trait is not, do I have the character trait or do I not have the character trait? It's to what extent do I have the trait? And so if you can think about character traits that way, then you can start reverse engineering the character traits that you lack. And this is really hard because one of the things that I see with entrepreneurs all the time is it will happen, is that they will feel bad about something and then they will want to change something in their business to make themselves feel better. They take those emotions and then they try and feel better by erratic behavior that's non directional. And then they break their original strategy. The more willing you are to endure discomfort for an extended period of time based on a decision that you made in the past because you know it's better for your future, means you are more patient. Character traits, even more than any of them, are a pursuit of perfection that we will never attain. But in understanding it that way, you can see it as a journey of trying to stack up wins in your favor. You do the thing and you do it so many times that at some point you look back and you realize, you know what? I do do this. Most of the time, I guess I do own this trait. And then you can label yourself as a patient man, a wise man, a kind man, and I think in doing that, you'll ultimately tap into the wellspring that allows you to grow beyond your dreams.