MBA921 Why Hard Work Is Not Enough

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Heyoo. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that knows what you want. You want straight business strategies and lessons without all the fluff with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over@100mba.net and in today's episode you will learn why Hard work is not enough. Yes, you heard it right. I'm here to say that working hard is just not enough. You hear all the time people say you gotta hustle, you gotta gr. If you work hard, you can achieve anything. Well, I have a different take. I think there's an element that is critical. You need it to win, to do well in business, to succeed, to make it that not a lot of people talk about because it's not pretty, because it's not sexy, because it doesn't sound as nice as just hustle. And I want to get into in today's lesson because I want to make sure that you're in the note. And we're going to get into it in today's lesson because I want to make sure you don't miss this so you are successful. Listen, talent, skill, smarts, experience and hard work can only take you so far. Heck, even luck can take you so far. But there's one ingredient that everybody that I know or I've studied that has been successful has. They've really made sure that this is part of the repertoire and I'll be sharing examples from my own career as an entrepreneur to really drill this home. This is such an important episode. I've taken a lot of time to plan this episode out and make sure it's delivered properly. I understand that this might be hard to hear, to say, hey, just because you work hard doesn't mean you're going to be successful. So I want you to hear me out. I want you to really take in what I have to say today and give it some thought. I guarantee you'll find it useful. I guarantee you're going to say to yourself, you know, he's got a point. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I want to start this episode with making something absolutely clear. I don't want to belittle hard work. Hard work is very important. You have to be a hard working person to make it in anything in life. I also want to state that you have to work hard, but you also have to be able to provide unique value. Meaning that you have to have some skills. You have to have something that you're offering the world that's unique. You don't have to be the best in your market, but you have to be better than the average person. So these are all kind of givens and I want to make sure that this is clear that, hey, you got to work hard. This is not a joke. You have to work hard and it's a part of success. But there's a word that a lot of people don't talk about, and it's really important. And that word is commitment. You have to be committed if you want to win in business. I want to explain what this means because it's so important. You have to be committed to being successful. You have to be committed to seeing success in your business. That means when things don't go right, your commitment has to outweigh your disappointment. Let me say that again. When things don't go right in your business, your commitment has to outweigh your disappointment. Why? Because when you're building a business, when you're growing a business, when you're running a business, you have to have this sense of inner obligation to say, hey, I have to do this. I gotta do this. I cannot not do this. I gotta keep moving forward. The reason why commitment is so important, you have to have it. You can't just work hard and hustle and da da da da. A lot of people work hard and they burn out and they don't make it. Or they work hard and they say, hey, this is too competitive, this is not good enough, or I got unlucky, or it's not fair, or somebody cheated me out of an opportunity. All that stuff they say is the opposite of commitment. When you're committed and things happen when you have challenges, when you don't get that gig, when you don't get that Deal. When you don't get that client, you keep going forward. You keep saying to yourself, hey, this is just part of the game. This is just part of being an entrepreneur. Think of any successful entrepreneur that comes off the top of your head. Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, whoever. They've had tremendous challenges, incredible amount of adversity. Read some of their biographies. But the reason why they are who they are is because they move forward. They were committed to what they were doing. They were committed. Even though everybody was telling them they were crazy or that they're foolish or they don't have enough experience or they don't have enough skill, they kept moving forward. They were committed. When you're not committed, you get distracted and you mask these things and you tell yourself a story. Let me explain. If you're not committed to becoming a successful entrepreneur, you start working on your business, start building your business. You might not get a lot of traction. You might not get a lot of email subscribers at the start. Completely normal. But sometimes, because it's so painful to not have that success, we say to ourselves, you know what? The timing is not right. I'm going to stop this thing right now and do something else. Maybe a different business or maybe go back to my career or whatever it is now. There's no problem with doing that, with pivoting to a different business or even pivoting and going back to your career or in your job. If you're honest with yourself, you say, this is not for me. If this business is not working out because people don't want it, or I did the market research and I did some idea validation and made sure that, you know, hey, this business needs to pivot, or this is not a good fit with my lifestyle. If you're honest with yourself, that's completely fine. But if you tell yourself a story and say, hey, this is not the right time, or the market's not ready for it, you're just basically giving yourself an out. And it's all due to the fact you're not committed. I'm going to give you an example from my own career as an entrepreneur, and I'm going to use this podcast. Actually, Nicole and I really loved podcasting. We were big podcast listeners. So when we started our first podcast, we were really excited. We really thought, this is really going to work. And in fact, our first podcast is not the $100 MBA show. It's another podcast called People who Know Their Shit. I know, silly name, but it was an appropriate name given the amount of failure we had with that show. It just wasn't a successful show. It was an interview show. We were now good interviewers. It was poorly prepared and edited and produced. It was just a disaster. And on a great day, I think our best episode, we had 400 downloads. And that's just not the success we were looking for with our podcast. We wanted to kind of surpass what we were getting per blog post, and we were Getting more than 400 blog post visits for every time we published a blog. And 400 downloads is not really what we were looking for because we wanted to surpass our blog post views. That's really what we were looking for. We're hoping the podcast would surpass how many people would read our blog posts. When we published a new post at that time, now 46 episodes in, we started to see our listenership even go lower and lower and lower. And it became apparent that this is not working at this point. We could have told ourselves a story, hey, we're not good podcasters, or it's getting too crowded. You know, a lot of big names are launching podcasts like Tim Ferriss and Startup. And there's established players who have been in podcasting for over a decade, like the Art of Charm by Jordan Harbinger. And we could have just been like, hey, let's just stick back to the blog and, you know, podcasting, hey, that's just not for us. I'm going to be honest with you. If we went down that road, I'm going to be honest. If we said those things to ourselves, it would have been a lie. There is no evidence for that. There is no evidence that it's too crowded. There's no evidence. We didn't know any of that. We just didn't have a good show. The show was horrible. That's. That's the reason why we weren't successful. But because we were committed to podcasting, that we thought, hey, we really can do something special with podcasting. We regrouped. We spent two months focused on building a new show. We took a look at how we can leverage our strengths, which is teaching. You know, I am a trained educator. I have a master's in education, taught for 13 years in the classroom. Why am I doing an interview show? It should be a lesson based show. And then the $100 MBA show was born and we had our challenges. It's a daily show. We had to work really hard. We had to be very committed to it. We had to make sure that we published on time and that we were way ahead so we were not rushing. If we were off a day. I got sick in the first few months. It was really great. And we were getting all these downloads. We were new and noteworthy. But after new and noteworthy, we had to work extra hard, three times as hard, because we weren't getting that exposure on itunes. And this is all just the first few months. And yes, we won best of iTunes in 2014. That was a great honor. But then what are we going to last the test of time? We had to be committed to keep on publishing, to keep on creating great episodes, to improve our production quality if we wanted to leave a legacy, if we wanted to really have a show that would last a lifetime, one that could be relevant for years to come, or what Ryan Holiday calls, like we mentioned in our must read episode, a perennial product, a perennial seller. And in our case with podcasting, a perennial podcast. So commitment is so important. And I like the word commitment more than just saying, don't give up. Because when you're committed, you make it a priority. You make time for things that are important. Why do you celebrate your birthday? Because it's important to you. Why do you take your why for your. Your significant other out for dinner on your anniversary? Because it's important. You make time for it. You're committed to that person. It's a priority to you. So if your business, if your success as an entrepreneur is not a priority, and that means when something's a priority, you have to give up things that you like, then all the hard work and all the talent in the world is not going to help you because you're just not going to survive. You're not going to be sustainable. You're going to give up when it's most important, when things get hard. That's when it's so important to be committed. It's easy to be committed when things are great. You gotta kick in that commitment muscle when things are difficult.

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Listen, business is super, super challenging. It's super hard. I've been doing this for over 12 years now, and it doesn't get any easier. It doesn't. I still have my own challenges in business. I still have days where it's just like, wow, this is so challenging because I keep upping the ante. I keep trying to improve and trying to, you know, keep the stakes high because I want great results, right? I want better results. So I keep challenging myself. But I sometimes look back and think, what if I wasn't committed? What would my life be? What would I be doing? Would I be in my day job? What kind of day job? Would I be filled with regret? Would I feel sorry for myself? Would I blame myself? Would I put that blame on other people? Boy, that is not good. So the opposite of commitment, not committing can cause you a lot of pain. I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. Having commitment, being committed takes courage. You got to be brave. You got to kind of see the challenge in front of you and say, hey, I'm going to go forward anyway. Even though this is hard, even though I can see some either easier alternatives in life, but I really want this. This is important to me. So what I want you to do today, really, I want you to do this with me. I want you to renew your commitment to you and business. Tell yourself, I am committed. I'm going to make this happen. And as things get more challenging and more difficult and as I get more successful, I will continue to renew my commitment. Entrepreneurship has to be like this lifelong partner to you, like a lifelong friend, somebody that you're going to be enjoying that relationship, the sweet and the sour, throughout your life. And with that commitment, your talent, your skills, your experience and your hard work will all pay off. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, if you love this episode, if you love any of our episodes, let us know in an itunes rating and review. It really helps us learn more about you and what you love about the show as well as give the show more exposure to other listeners. Thank you so much. It takes two minutes to leave us an itunes rating and review. And everybody who leaves us a review enters our weekly random draw. Every Friday, we do something called free ride. Friday, we will give away a free ride to one of our courses. This Friday, we're giving away a free ride to easy course, which is a $500 course to how to create an online course. It's a great, great course. You can check it out over at easycourse co and it could be yours for free. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter the weekly random draw. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I want to say that if this was a tough episode to listen to, if I gave you a little bit too much tough love, it's all coming from a great place. I really do want to see all of you succeed. I am very inspired by those who listen to the show because it means there are people that really believe in themselves and encourages me to believe in myself, to continue to believe in myself. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being a part of this. And I want you to know that any kind of advice I give on this show, it's because I want to see you win. I want you to kind of sidestep some of the challenges I had in my journey. So all that tough love is out of love. All right, I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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