These 5 Habits Feel Responsible. They're Actually The Reason You're Not Succeeding.

Here's something that most people don't want to hear. Most people fail in life and in business because they let it happen. They don't get wiped out by a competitor. They don't get crushed by bad luck or a bad economy. They fail because of 5 things. Every single one is internal. The worst part is that these 5 things, these 5 patterns are so ordinary. They're so disguised. They're so easy to justify within yourself that most people carry them for decades without even knowing. I've watched them quietly end careers, stall businesses until they go out of business. I've seen these 5 things crush people's personal lives where they normally could have thrived. And I know them all very intimately because I have experienced all 5 of them myself. I call them the 5 Silent Killers to Success. And in this episode, I'm going to name them. I'm going to show you exactly how they work in your life and in your business and and give you the antidote for each one. Let's get into it. I want to start by just explaining why I use the word silent killers, because these killers don't just announce themselves. They don't look like problems. In fact, they actually look like a good idea. They actually look like caution. They look like thoughtfulness. They look like being patient. They look like humility. They disguise themselves as virtues. And that's what makes them so dangerous because you can't fight something that you can't see. Wasn't it Muhammad Ali that said, "You can't hit what you can't see. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." He was right. So the first step is seeing these killers clearly like day so you could understand and recognize them. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, some of these are going to make you feel uncomfortable because you've experienced them and you kind of ignored them, but we're not going to ignore them anymore. Let's get into it. The first silent killer is indecision. Oh ho! This one is number one for a reason, because it's what kills most dreams and most businesses and most goals and aspirations in life. And it looks like this. You tell yourself things like, "I just need a little bit more information. I want to be thorough. I want to make sure I'm getting this right." All those things sound really reasonable, right? Sounds logical until you realize you've been saying them for 6 months. Indecision is not caution. Caution is thoughtful and time-bound. Indecision is endless. And in business, indecision has a cost that most people never calculate. They don't think that making no decision is bad. Every day you don't make a decision, you're making a decision, right? You're making one. You're making the decision to stay still. Some might even say this is like indifference, like you're not sure either way. And that's why it's so important to have a vision. Somebody who's a big believer in this is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He talks about this all the time in all his speeches and all his books. You got to have a clear vision for what you want out of your business, out of your life, out of the next year. What does the end of this year look like in your head? The reason why this is so important, because if you have a clear vision, then you can't be indecisive. You have a clear understanding that, hey, this is my destination. Does this decision help me get to that destination? Yes. Easy decision. No, I don't do it. In business, indecision is even a worse crime because what you realize as you start building your entrepreneurial muscles and start building businesses and start selling products and services is that you need to start making quicker decisions. And at the end of the day, you can't spend hours and days and months, you know, wondering if you should pivot at your pricing. You just need to just try it. And everything needs to be seen as an experiment. You need to experiment with everything in your business to see what's the best optimal way to run that part of the business, whether it's pricing or finance or marketing or sales or customer service or whatever it might be. And by getting in the habit of doing these experiments in the different areas of your business, you start not worrying so much about whether this is the right decision or the wrong decision. And it stops you from indecision because you're just seeing it from a lens of, we're just doing a little experiment. We're gonna see what happens. So what is the antidote to indecision? How do you fight this silent killer? Well, it's very easy. The bottom line is you need to set a deadline, a decision deadline. For any significant decision you've been sitting on, give yourself a date which you have to decide. Not research, not discuss, decide and move forward. Take steps towards that decision. The deadline forces your brain to stop looking for information, stop collecting information, start synthesizing the information and start taking steps towards what you're going to do. And I'm telling you right now, most entrepreneurs that I've seen, they don't delay decisions because of lack of information. They delay them because of lack of commitment. And remember, not deciding is a decision. And it's probably one of the worst decisions because you don't get anything out of not deciding. At least if I make a decision, even if it's the wrong decision, I learn That didn't work. They say failure is feedback. So make sure that every time you need to make a decision, you set a deadline for yourself so there is no room for indecision. Silent killer number 2: worrying. Okay, by the way, if you come from an immigrant family, uh, this is probably something that you are very familiar with because worrying is like a hallmark. It's almost like a— as a badge of honor. But I see worrying as something that is very, very subtle, but it actually has a lot of negative effect on your progress and success. What does this look like? Well, worrying looks like this. You have an idea, a really good idea that you want to pursue, whether it's a new business idea, a new product. Maybe you have an idea in your personal life, like to get healthy, something that really excites you. And then the worry starts. What if nobody wants to buy this thing? What if I put all this time in it and it doesn't work? What if I look stupid? What if I fail publicly? What are my parents gonna say? What are my family members gonna say? Oh my gosh, I can't put that on Instagram. People are going to make fun of me. And so instead of testing the idea, you just worry about it. Worrying is a fascinating phenomenon. You either can do something about it, take action and figure it out, or you can't. Worrying really has no place. Worrying doesn't solve any problems. It's the biggest time waster. It's an energy sucking device. And worry does this thing where it takes away your time and your mental energy, and it takes the space of where action should be, right? Here is what I want you to understand. This is really important. Worry is not preparation. It feels like you're being, you know, getting ready and being prepared. It feels like you're doing something responsible, but you're not. You're just experiencing the stress of not knowing for a fact what's gonna happen next. I'm gonna tell you, in my own life, I used to have a huge worrying problem. I used to worry about everything that you could possibly think about. It was really a problem in my life. And then I started to realize that most of the things I worried about, probably about 98% of the things I worried about, never happened. I spent so much time and energy and anguish on things that never happened. And once I started to see that data in my own life, I started to realize, This is probably the biggest waste of energy, time, money, everything that I've ever experienced. And the funny thing is, is that when I actually worried about something that actually happened in those 2% of the time, like, you know, I launch a new product and it fails, right? I've had flops before. And when it fails, it's actually not too bad at all. Every single time, every single time something I thought was going to happen actually happened that I was worried about. It's not that bad. I survived it. Not only survived it, I learned from it and I became a new version of myself because of that experience. So what do you do? How do you fight the silent killer? Well, replace worry with what I call a minimal viable test. Whatever you're worried about, ask yourself, what is the smallest version I could try this week? Not a full launch, not a finished product, not running a 46K marathon or whatever, how long a marathon is, right? Just going for a jog around the block, right? Just do a little test. How would that feel? What does that experience look like? What results did I achieve? Run that test, get some data. And what happens is when you start giving yourself a chance to see truth, real information, real, real data that you're gathering, you start to silence the worry. The worry doesn't have a voice anymore. So here's the bottom line with worry. Worry is the price of not trying. When you don't try something, worry fills that gap, fills that space. So just try it, okay? If you fail, it's okay. You're gonna learn something. One of my favorite, uh, quotes by Anthony Bourdain— I'm probably gonna butcher it here— but he traveled the world, he ate exotic foods, he met amazing people in different cultures, and he used to say that you just got to be okay with eating a few bad oysters once in a while if it means that you're gonna have a life full of great, delicious meals. Silent killer number 3: inconsistency. Everything I have achieved in my life and my business, everything is due to consistency, is due to the fact that I pick and stick. And I'm not saying this to beat on my chest. I'm saying this because I know how hard it is. And I have to trust the process of consistency to know that it's going to pay off. This is the one that kills the most promising businesses. Not the struggling ones, the promising ones, the ones that have an idea that is solid. The founder is talented. They have early signs that they're on the right track. They have product market fit. They validated their product and service, and then they're inconsistent. When we launched this podcast in 2014, there's a lot of podcasts that launched at the same time that were incredible productions, right? Really great production value. Amazing content, good host. They would show up on other podcasts as well and promote their show. They'll be all over social media and they were doing amazing. They were ranked very high on all the charts. Then life gets busy for them. Some other opportunity presents itself. They see another shiny object. All of a sudden that podcast is not publishing regularly every single week. They don't show up. They don't do all the marketing they should be doing for their podcast. And today those podcasts are dead. No one even knows what they're called. They never even listen to a single episode. They're irrelevant. They had an opportunity, but they just let their foot off the gas. See, the thing about business and in life is that success is really boring. Okay? When I say that, I mean getting to success. The secret to getting to be successful. Requires you to do a lot of boring stuff, which means doing the same thing over and over again and not giving up even when, you know, new opportunities arise. Just remember, your attention is your value. So if you lose your attention and you get distracted every single time something new comes out and you don't continue to do what you got you your success, you don't continue to build upon what you have, then you are asking for trouble. I want you to think of anyone who is successful, was successful, that you admire. The through line you will see in all of them is that they are consistent every single time they show up. Kobe Bryant, one of the best basketball players of all time, was known for the fact that he would go and practice in the gym about 3 hours in the morning, 3 hours in the afternoon, and he would basically shoot the same shots over and over again, the most basic fundamental drills. It was the most boring thing in the world, and no one really thought it was special, but he continued to do it. And then when it came to the game, it was easy because he was consistent with his practice. Michael Jackson, who you see behind me here, okay, he was known for the fact that he was obsessive about perfecting his performances. He would do his dance routines, his spins, over and over until his feet would bleed. He was maniacal about how consistent he was to make sure he nailed it and it was perfect. If you wanna be great, you have to do what the greats do. And the minimum you gotta do is be consistent. Choose something you wanna be great at. I chose podcasting. I chose the fact that I wanna become the number one resource for people that wanna start, grow, and scale a business. This is my mission, and I'm gonna continue to be consistent with it until I hit it. And when I hit it, I'm gonna keep doing it 'cause I wanna still be on top. This is why we have over 2,700 episodes. OK, we've been publishing consistently for over a decade. We haven't missed a single beat every week through sick days, through holidays, through the hardest years of my life, through running another business. Episodes went out consistently. Why? Because I was committed. You can't expect to be successful if you are not committed in anything. So In your business, your customers, your audience doesn't need you to be brilliant every day. They need you to be there every day to commit to them and to what you deliver. Listen, if this episode is landing for you, subscribe to the show. I have an upcoming episode that I'm working on right now that you absolutely love. I tell the story of how I found my co-founder, Nicole Baldino. If you're wondering, how do you find your co-founder? You might be surprised. With the advice that I give. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but in my opinion, it's actually really, really helpful. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Sign killer number 4: Not knowing your numbers. Let me say something that makes a lot of creative entrepreneurs uncomfortable. If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business. Full stop. That's it. By the way, business is numbers. Business is money. If you don't have money, you have no oxygen. And if you have no oxygen, your business dies. That's just the truth. The facts. The sooner you admit it, the sooner you'll have a healthy business and life. By the way, knowing your numbers applies to anything in life. If you want to get in the best shape of your life, you need to know your macros. You need to know where you're starting out with your weight. If you want to lose weight, you need to know your measurements. If you want to change your body composition. As Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. And you need to know your numbers in anything. And in business, it's just as important, if not more important. I met entrepreneurs who couldn't tell me their monthly recurring revenue. They don't know their churn rate. They don't know their cost to acquire a customer. They don't know their net profit margin, their average customer lifetime value. They don't know these numbers. And by the way, if you're intimidated by numbers and you've never kind of like, how to profit and loss sheet. You don't know how profitable you are. We have a free template, by the way, that you could just download for free. There's nothing that you need to buy. Just go to 100mba.net/templates. In those templates, we also have a dashboard that you can use as like a spreadsheet so you could see the health of your business. And it's important to know all the important numbers, not just revenue. A lot of people just look at the revenue and like, wow, I'm making all this money. My business must be amazing. But they don't really see their profit margin. How much money are you actually keeping? What do your costs look like? How much does it cost to get a customer? How much does it cost for you to be able to make a hire? How quickly are customers leaving me? I met a business owner who was doing $800,000 in revenue and genuinely felt successful, like, "I'm almost hitting $1 million in revenue. I'm rocking it." Until we sat down and we actually looked at the numbers and their margins were 12%. 12% margins are very thin. Any crisis that happens, an economic crisis, a health crisis from them and their family, right? There is no room for error. They are just one bad quarter from a serious crisis, but they feel like they're on top of the world. The business looked healthy to them because they didn't know their numbers. The numbers told a different story. You need to know the truth about your business. So that you can make the right decisions. So what do you do to fight the silent killer? You need to schedule 30 minutes a week just to look at your numbers, same time every week. I do this on Monday mornings. Okay, no exceptions. Pull up your revenue and expenses, your P&L sheet, that template I just shared with you that's free that you can download and use for yourself. It has all the equations in there. Look at the numbers, don't judge, understand what's going on, and make decisions to improve it. That's it. What's great about this is that you'll start feeling responsible. You'll start feeling like you're doing the right thing for your business by just dedicating 30 minutes a week. Silent killer number 5 is disbelief. I saved this one for last because I wanted to give a really valuable one to those who stuck around to the end of the episode. I also saved it for last because it's the most personal and because it sits underneath all the other ones I talked about. Disbelief is the belief you have about yourself that you never say out loud. It's what lives under the surface. It's the thoughts that run through your head at 2 a.m. in the morning. You know those thoughts, those thoughts that ask questions like, who am I to do this? People like me shouldn't be building things like this. What do I have can be special or people really care about? I don't have what it takes. What I'm doing is kind of being done already by somebody else and They're probably smarter than me. That voice. I'm talking about that voice that goes on in your head, and we all are familiar with it. I know it. I experienced it for years, and I'm here to tell you that no one, including your customers, is going to believe in you until you start believing in you. You have to believe in yourself because if you don't, no one will. You have to be your biggest cheerleader. You have to shut that voice out. You have to tell yourself things that you might not truly believe in. You got to be slightly delusional sometimes in business to be successful. Yes, I said that. You have to tell yourself that, hey, I am worthy. I am smart. I can do this. I am the right person for this job because it starts with you. You have to start believing in yourself so others can believe in you because that aura, That charisma, that confidence is not going to just display itself magically. It's going to come from your belief in yourself. And people are going to see that and they're going to be like, "Wow, I got to learn more about this person. I got to figure out what they're doing. What's this business? What's this idea? That sounds interesting. That's something I need." There's another side of disbelief. And you might know these people intimately. They might be your family members where they're just pessimistic. They just roll their eyes at everything. You know, that's not, you know, a million-dollar idea or a billion-dollar idea. Oh boy, these people are cancer. I'm sorry, but they are. And you need to not infect yourself by being around them. In order for you to believe in yourself, you have to be very active and very vigilant about the negative energies in your life. You have to believe in yourself, but you have to believe in something. You got to believe in your vision. You got to believe in what you're trying to provide for the world. Through your business. You got to believe that it's possible that you can make a change. So a good exercise as an antidote to this silent killer is to build a win list, literally a running document. Record every time you have a win, every piece of positive feedback they gave for your business, every moment where you did something where you weren't sure where it was going to happen or if you're going to be successful, and you actually won and you actually did well. Okay, write down every single win. Read that list when you have disbelief. Okay, you need to show yourself solid proof that you have a reason to believe in yourself, that you are doing something positive, you are winning. Your brain will naturally start to quieten that disbelief, quieten those negative thoughts, and start believing the facts. That people love what you're doing. Disbelief is not a verdict on what you are capable of. Okay? It's just a belief. And you can change that belief. Those are the 5 silent killers: indecision, worry, inconsistency, not knowing your numbers, and disbelief. None of them show up with a warning bell, right? They feel like you're being cautious, but they're actually pretty dangerous and they're holding you back. Now that you see them, don't go back to ignoring them, okay? Use the antidotes I gave you. Use the activities that I prescribed to you because they work. I know because I had to use them so that I can get past these 5 silent killers. And you don't have to do all 5 right now. You could just pick one and work on that today and then work on the next one maybe in a couple more days. Okay, just get started. Be active. If this episode hit home, then you're going to want to check out another episode that I recently published called 20 Not So Obvious Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s. I just recently shared this episode with some of my nieces and nephews who are all in their 20s, early 30s, because I really felt like it would tremendously help them because I learned these things the hard way. And I don't want them to learn the hard way. And it was kind of like a little bit of a love letter to them as my family members, as people that I really want to see succeed and win. So this is my gift to you. Even if you're not in your 20s or even 30s, you're going to find some value in it. Go check it out and I'll check you in the next one.