MBA2547 Why New Ideas Are Keeping You Poor

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Hey everyone. Welcome Back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm. And in today's episode, you're gonna learn why new ideas are keeping you poor. This is gonna be a wake up call for many of you because if you're constantly chasing new ideas, you're not building wealth. The people who get rich, they know how to focus, they know how to double down, they know how to stay consistent. I'm speaking out of experience here because for many years I was chasing the next idea. I was just a slave to the next idea that pops in my head. Let's go do this. This is a new business idea. This is a good product. Oh, I can't wait this out. And I was constantly going from one thing to another and I had no momentum, had no consistency. I had no way to kind of build any kind of business that has any kind of value or reputation. And therefore I wasn't making any money, I wasn't making any significant wealth. Once I chose something to commit to and was consistent, which I call pick and stick, where you pick and stick to what you're doing. That's when I started to get momentum. That's when I started to build my wealth, started to build my business, started to be able to start thinking exponentially about what I can do and what I can earn. So today's lesson is incredibly important because if you're having a hard time getting traction, you're probably falling into this trap. It's time for you to get honest with yourself and have a new way forward. I'm gonna show you how to do it. Let's get into it. Did you know that 70% of startups fail due to reasons like lack of focus, poor planning, or they're trying to do too much at one time? This was a study that I found from CB Insights. And the data reveals that distractions will kill your business. Right? It's just a matter of time where you run out of time. And that's the thing about business, is that you need consistency and you need enough reps after another to learn, to iterate, to grow. But if you're not doing the same thing over and over, you don't get a chance to learn. Right? You're starting over all the time. And then you lose that compound interest of skills and reputation and, and customer testimonials and all that kind of stuff. Right? Today I'll explain how staying focused is the real secret to building wealth and why jumping from one idea to the next is keeping you stuck. It's keeping you from progressing and taking that next leap in your business, in your personal wealth. Let me show you how to do it. First, we need to establish something. We need to agree on something, and that is new ideas are your worst enemy, you might think. Omar, what are you talking about? Aren't business entrepreneurs, innovators all about ideas? No, they're not all about ideas. They actually about one big idea that they have and they focus on implementing that idea. Okay, I'm going to give you plenty of examples in today's lesson, but we need to establish that each time you jump from one new idea to the next, you lose momentum. Successful people don't do this, right? Successful people don't follow every shining object that comes up. They follow one path until it pays off. Jumping from one project to another feels like it's productive. Feels like, oh, I'm doing this and then I'm doing this. But you're actually counterproductive. It's actually disguised procrastination. That's the truth, is that you're moving from one thing to another because you don't want to go through the pain and the anguish of fighting through, working something out, working out that idea till it gets better and better and refining it and shining it up. Right? Jeff Bezos didn't become rich because he started Amazon and then moved on quickly, right. He stayed focused, right. He built it and then it became what it is today, years and years later. It took him many years to become profitable, many years to become a millionaire and then some years after that become a billionaire. But the point here is, is that he didn't just jump around, he focused on Amazon.

Right?

And he focused on the one aspect of Amazon. First thing he did is that he started selling books online. He became an online bookstore, which is actually quite brilliant because you don't really need to touch and feel books in order to buy them. You kind of understand they're usually books are bought by word of mouth and you could see couple pages through their website. But the point here is, is that Jeff focused on this. Let me just get a, you know, a successful e commerce business that sells books. Once he did that, he started selling CDs and music and once he did that, he started selling more things. And then after he started, he started selling everything right in his e commerce store. And then after that he did aws, which is, you know, selling servers up in the cloud. If you didn't know, it's one of the more successful arms of their business. But Amazon started creating their own products, the Fire Stick and you know, Fire Tablet and whatever, all that kind of stuff. Some of work, some of them didn't. But the point here is that he focused and got successful first on one path, which was the bookstore. He found success, he had traction, the company went public, the stock went up, he was able to then invest and start selling other things. Right. He didn't just give up or pivot or think, oh, maybe there's more opportunity here. Let me go over here. Before he hit the finish line, before he actually found success with the first thing. Second thing we need to establish is consistency matters. It matters. If you don't give yourself a chance to get better through reps, you'll never get good at anything. Right? Consistency builds mastery, right? And mastery is what we're looking for here. If you don't commit to something, if you just keep dabbling, you will never become great. You don't become great by dabbling, period. Right. Mastery comes from repetition and commitment. I learned this from this book, Mastery by Robert Greene. This is a great book which talks about a lot of different types of people. Some of them are called dabblers, some of them are called masters. There's also this other type called hackers. I'm not going to ruin the book for you, but one of the best books I've Ever read in my life? Robert Greene is a genius when it comes to this. And guess what? People pay for what you master, right? People want great people at something because you're highly valuable, so therefore you're valuable to the marketplace. Right? People are not interested in you being pretty good at 10 different things. That is not going to get you anywhere and it's not going to make you money. Let's take, for example, Elon Musk. Love him or hate him, you know, none of us are perfect, but let's use him as an example and his company, Tesla. He stuck with electric vehicles with Tesla, despite many early failures and setbacks and almost going bankrupt several times. Okay, let's talk about his company, Space X, where they're, you know, shooting up rockets in the sky, trying to get to Mars eventually, but they're also trying to reuse these rockets and get them to land, right? A lot of people forgot that many rockets blew up in the air on live tv, okay, on live streaming several times before they actually had a successful landing. All right? We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars just evaporated in the air in flames, literally. But he stayed consistent, he stuck to it. And now he has a very successful car company called Tesla, which is one of the best selling cars in the world. And SpaceX is changing the way people are thinking about space exploration and how rockets are used for sending payloads to space. Consistency and focus eventually pays off. Number three, something very important. Something that I still have to remind myself constantly. So I'm still focused, right? And this is something I learned from Felix Dennis, who is the founder of Dennis Publishing, one of the biggest publishers in the uk, created many of the famous PC magazines as well as Maxim magazine. But he says, don't forget to chase the ball marked. The money is here, okay? A lot of us forget to chase where the money is. Wealthy people focus their energy where the money already is. They double down on what works and resist that temptation to jump into something new. It's all about discipline and knowing when to stay in your lane. There are several times where I'm working on a business and the business is doing great, it's growing. I'm making money, I'm making a lot of profit. And then there's this opportunity comes. This is, hey, why don't you start this little branch of the business? Why don't you get into this world? Why don't you build this product, right? And it's very tempting because there's a lot of promise. Now, the thing about new ideas and new opportunities that come to you is that if you decide to take that opportunity, you will take away attention, time, effort away from the thing that's working and making money. You know that ball that says the money is here, you're keeping your focus away from that ball and you're looking at something else. You're going to dedicate more time and energy and sometimes money into that new opportunity. Now the problem is that new opportunity is not proven. All you see is the promise. All you see is the good things that could happen. But you don't know all the bad things. The funny thing is that you know all the bad things in your current business, in your current endeavor, in the current product you're doing. You know all the challenges you have to deal with and you've kind of worked them out already. You're going into this blind and you don't know if there's money there, right? There's just some hope or wish that there's money there. Stop doing that, right? I had to stop myself so many times where it's like, I have this opportunity that I can take. I'm going to go ahead. No, the ball that's marked, the money is here. Is here what I'm working on. There's plenty of money here. Let me just keep on going here. That's if you want to get rich, right? If you want to explore new things, waste some money and time, get frustrated, and if you have the time and patience for that, go ahead, by all means. But I'm not looking to waste my time and my energy. I only have certain number of years of my life and I don't want to expend it spinning my wheels. That's my personal opinion.

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One of my favorite quotes that encapsulates this whole idea is by David Packard, who's one of the founders of Hewlett Packard the computers, right? And he says that most businesses fail because of indigestion and not starvation, right? We take on too much, right? Too many opportunities, and we are in pain because of, oh, I got too much going on, right? I don't know where to split my ideas and my, my energy, my time and all that kind of stuff, right? So what you want to do here is you want to get in the habit of saying no. One of the things I learned the hard way is once you do something, once you choose to do something, it's like, say, for example, you get invited to a party this weekend, and that party is from 5pm to 10pm you decide to go to that party. Guess what? You can't do anything else other than that party. That's it. Every other opportunity, every other option you have, by saying yes to something, you're saying no to everything else. So be careful about what you say yes to because your time is limited. You don't have that much time. And by the way, a lot of people say time is on your side. I'm a believer that time is ticking, okay? You got to be very conscious about where you're spending the next month, two months, year, decade, because it's going to go like this and you're going to say, oh, man, I'm way behind. Why didn't I focus? Why didn't I double down and work on what works? So this is my message to you. My message to you is make sure you are conscious of the fact that I can't keep jumping up around and going from one thing to the next. I got to chase where the money's at, where I'm actually making money, where I'm getting traction. If you're in that position, be thankful and just focus. One of my favorite examples of this is Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple, right? He got fired from Apple, went to Next, and then he got rehired as a CEO of Apple. And the first thing he did is that he cut down the product line as much as possible, cut out all these products to focus on just a few things. And really, it was the few things that Apple does best. And that's when Apple started to take off again. All right, number four, and I kind of touched on this a moment ago, but we're going to go deep, and that's lack of focus costs you time and money. Every time you abandon a project halfway, you waste time and energy that you invested, right? Meanwhile, somebody else is sticking to the project and getting better every day. And they're getting ahead and they're making money and they're getting richer. And that's just the bottom line, is that without focus, you'll never gain that momentum. You need to break through. Here's the brutal truth. Building something great takes time. It isn't always exciting. It is always fun in a walk in the park. But without focus, you're going to stay stuck. If you keep switching gears, you'll be stuck at square one forever. Right? You'll just never get better and they'll get frustrated that eventually you're going to give up on your dream. The bottom line is, is that new ideas are a distraction. They feel productive, but they're just delaying your success. Pick one idea. Pick one product or business and see it through until it pays off. Wealth comes from consistency, not novelty. Right? The best way I've seen it done is that wealthy people get rich on one concept, on one idea. Once they get rich, they use that money to build the next concept, to build the next idea, to build the next product or service or business. But they don't do that until they hit a finish line and get enough wealth to be able to leverage that and do it easier the next time around. Right Now I know that today's episode was a little bit of tough love, a little bit in your face, but I am speaking out of frustration. Because of my own past. I was dabbling for way too long, probably for about eight or nine years when I was in a job of side hustling, building businesses on the side. And I would try one thing another, and it was really okay. But I wish I didn't do that because I didn't get any consistency and reps in getting better at any particular thing. But once I decided to choose something and commit to it and grind it through, even through the tough days, that's when I started to get traction. Right? That's when I started to build something that was significant. That's when I started to make some money and get some financial freedom and not worry about my bills so much Right now that's a great position to be in because now you have the luxury to say no to people and no to opportunities and allow you to stay focused. Now that's not gonna happen by accident. You're gonna have to focus, choose something that you believe in and work towards getting better at it. Every day. Thanks for tuning in to the $100 MBA show. I hope this episode gave you some sort of inspiration, even just a wake up call that you needed. If you want more insights, more resources, check out the description below on the video if you're watching on YouTube. If not, just go to 100-mba.net and we got a ton of resources, free templates, book reviews. We have over 2,500 business lessons all for free. Check it out 100- MBA. NET I'm Omar Zenholm. Thank you so much for being a part of the Hundred Dollar MBA and we'll check you in the next episode. We publish three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. See you then. Take care.

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