Why Smart Entrepreneurs Often Plateau (And Others Don't)

My first business made six figures at the age of 19. And it wasn't because I was smart. It was actually because I understand something about learning that I think 99% of entrepreneurs get completely wrong. If you don't know who I am. My name is Peter Vanderwaal. I'm the owner of Social Club Studios. We help seven figure B, two B firms scale to multiple seven and soon eight figures a year. And this is the mistake I think most entrepreneurs make when it comes to education. See, we tend to think of education as being basically one of two camps. You've got traditional and you've got alternative. And then there's a bunch of different options that all fall within those camps, right? On the traditional side, you've got college and you've got industry continuing education, you've got MBA programs. On the alternative side, you've got courses and coaching and masterminds. And what we tend to do is we dip our toes into each one. We kind of figure out which one is the easiest and most intuitive for us, and then we just stick with that one mode of education for forever. I know so many people who joined some sort of coaching program or mastermind, shelled out thousands of dollars and didn't really get anything out of. And so they say, oh, coaching and masterminds don't work for me. I know others like myself, this was actually my mindset for a while. I dropped out of college after about a year and a half. And so for the longest time I just believed the traditional classroom experience just can't work for me. And I think this is a massive limiting belief that's holding us back. If you really want to win at this game of business, then you need to go find the information that's going to close your skill gaps and not expect it to come meet you where you're at. Back In, I think, 2021, I got my Spotify wrapped at the end of the year. It said that I was in the top half a percent of podcast listeners on Spotify that year. And the reason for this was I was building my first business. I was actually working a job on the side and I was doing a ton of driving. So I would be working these like 12 hour days plus driving an hour and a half each direction to the location that I was working at. And so I easily had 15 hours a day where I was listening to something. Now sometimes this was music, but most of the time this is actually podcasts and audiobooks. So I listened to the Dave Ramsey Show, I listened to, to Alex Hormozi that was actually when I discovered the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson. I listened to a ton of Jordan Peterson and this one. Podcast creators are brands that I got really into for a while and I listened to a ton of incredible books during this time too. Now if you back up, even before that I was in a traditional business track in a four year college pursuing a degree in entrepreneurial management, whatever that means. But as much as it's cool to hate on the four year college institutions now, there were still at least four classes I can think of that were really, really beneficial for me in the work that I do today. Principles of Marketing. If I hadn't done that class, I wouldn't be doing what I do today. Principles of Accounting. I mean this is literally the framework upon which a business is built. And so if you don't understand this, then you're not going to be able to run business finances and what do we here but to make money? And then macroeconomics and statistics are actually probably the other two most impactful college courses because they just shape the way you think. They give you a view into how to understand data and how to look at charts and you know, supply and demand cur. I mean just very like basic concepts that are really valuable to understand in the entrepreneurial walk. And sometimes I wonder too if I would have continued on that track, like what else would I have gained going through those 200 level and 300 level classes that you get into your junior and senior year. But then if you Fast forward to 2023, in that year I spent over $30,000 on courses, coaching and masterminds. And to be honest, this past year, 2024, I think I probably gained about the same amount of knowledge just from reading like two specific books really key to the stage of business that I'm in. So buy back your time really got me thinking around systems and team building and getting myself out of the day to day of my business and kind of like what the ladder looks like of climbing. Dan calls it the replacement ladder. But what that ladder looks like of climbing out of the day to day operations and expert secrets was the other one which I would describe as a framework for communication that's really, really beneficial for anybody who's in kind of some kind of expert field. I'm in marketing, right? But if you're in accounting or legal or finance, having this skill of communicating complex ideas and really bite size digestible frameworks is really, really valuable. And then there's also something I found recently which is this eight week Financial accounting course that Harvard Business School offers, it costs like 1800 bucks. It's self paced. You do it on your own time. You just got to complete it within eight weeks. And it's like a legit business class from Harvard Business School. And I'm considering taking that. The way I look at entrepreneurship, I see it as climbing two separate ladders that are next to each other, and you've got one person climbing one ladder and one person climbing the other and a rope in between. And so you know, neither person can get way too far ahead of the other. And these people you could represent as information gaps and implementation gaps. Right? So information gaps are the pieces of information, the knowledge that you need that's holding you back from being able to implement. And the implementation gap then is the gap between your knowledge now and your ability to actually implement that knowledge. And so it's constantly a battle in entrepreneurship of learning new skills, learning new information, and then implementing that and plugging it into your day to day and what you're doing, and then learning more new information and more new skills and plugging that into your actual operation of the business. And so you acquire skills and information through education, and then you max out those skills through implementation. And it's just this rinse, repeat process over and over and over, theoretically, for the rest of your life. And so if that framework is true, then that means that 50% of your constraints, throughout your entire career running and operating a business, 50% of your constraints are going to be related to skill gaps or information gaps that you hold. In other words, knowledge that you don't have. And so why would you confine yourself to the education methods that work best for you? For you to say that you only learn effectively from podcasts, or from continuing education courses in your industry, or from coaching and masterminds, you're now siloing yourself off from at least 80 to 90% of the total knowledge out there to acquire. So it is your duty to be able to get the knowledge you need and acquire the skills you need from the scummiest, most overpriced influencer masterminds and everything in between. Guys, I make these videos because these are lessons that I need to hear, usually right now, but certainly I needed to hear this in the past. And so if you would just share this with a friend who you think would get something out of it, or maybe enjoy giving it a listen, then that would mean the world to me. But that's going to be it for today. We'll see you in the next one.