Nate Kennedy argues that discipline — not constant ideation or hopping between projects — is essential to scale and reach goals. He warns against "shiny object syndrome" (jumping from idea to idea before committing) and says success requires knowing where you want to go and staying disciplined. He supports the claim with personal business history (moving between multiple companies: education company, agencies, media company) and contrasts that with steadier personal-life discipline (family goals, fitness).
Chapters
Know where you want to go and stay disciplined to get there. So you hear all the time people talking about shiny object syndrome, right? You get an idea, you go work on it, and then all of a sudden it may not take off how you want, so you go work on another idea. And you never really go all in on kind of one thing and make it scale, right? So if you know exactly what you want and you know where you want to get, you just have to stay disciplined and not do the shiny object syndrome. So discipline looks a lot of different ways regards to how that is for you. But for me, I've actually done this a few times where I've bounced from different companies. I've had education company, I've had an agency, I've got a media company, I've got another agency, we've launched. We've got a handful of different things that we've done over the years. I got to say that I know where I've wanted to go, but I haven't always stayed disciplined along that path. I think that's super important. Now this also doesn't just go for business, this goes for personal. I think I've done a much better job on the personal side, I would say staying disciplined than I have on some of the business stuff. The family's always been. I've known what I've wanted, known where I'm going and what I'm doing with that and kind of goals of the family and goals with my life and personal life and fitness and all that. And I've always stayed pretty disciplined along the way. So it goes both ways.