Timothy Schucker argues that business owners overcomplicate problems by overestimating their intelligence. He uses a customer-retention example to show that simple fixes like directly asking customers to buy or following up more often work best. Start stupid, add complexity only if you have to.
Alright, so this is why you have to basically think like you're stupid when you're running a business. Because problem is you, me, most people that run businesses think that we are smarter than we are.
And this is a little bit different than my typical style of video. But the reason why is because I worked all day and I didn't have interesting anything interesting to vlog. So you're just gonna listen to me rant. So essentially my point being everyone who runs a business thinks that they're smarter than they are. It's good sometimes, but it's bad most of the time. The reason why is because most of the time whenever you have a problem, it's a really simple solution, right? Something happened to me just this week and I'll tell you what happened. But before I do that, I'm going to kind of jump into everything here. So my point being, whenever somebody's smart or at least thinks they're smart, they're always going to try to over complicate everything. I do this myself, right? So whenever a problem comes up, you always look for how can I solve this intelligently or how can I come up with this cool, amazing system to do this or blah blah blah blah, whatever it is, or maybe I need to switch offers or switch businesses or whatever. A lot of people have these, the shiny ball syndrome where they are a crypto person one week and the next week they're doing an AI agency and then they're doing drop shipping and just like they bounce around, right? The problem is they think that there's too smart. They think that they're smarter than they are. So sometimes in business, actually most of the times you have to act like you're literally stupid. Like a just complete brain dead idiot. And the reason why is because when you look at things on the most basic level and you think, think of things like you're stupid, you come to the most simple answer, the most easy, simple answer. That's, that's what you're going to come to most of the time. If you're thinking like you're stupid, you literally just think of things on the most simple basic level as possible. So basically what happened to me is my business partner and I were running into this issue with our business where we were getting a lot of people to come in on the front end. Getting people that, you know, want the offer, want the product. But the problem is they were not renewing after they bought. So we thought about all these different solutions. Hey, maybe we should try to increase the quality of the product, whatever it was like test all these different things, but which would then cut our margin like crazy. Do all these different things, like add more steps, do all this crap right, Just bullshit. And the only reason we were thinking that is because we thought we're smarter than we were, that we could, instead of just thinking about it on the most basic level, we tried to overcomplicate it. We were thinking, hey, what if we switched to this offer, did this and incorporated this and did this and do that. All of it didn't make any sense. And so essentially I jumped on a call with a business coach of mine and when I explained the problem and explained what we were doing, when I said it out loud, I felt like a. Like I felt stupid. Like I felt like an idiot. Not in the good way what I mean by this video, but I felt like an idiot because I thought I was smarter than I was. And essentially what we were trying to do is keep people to keep buying something. And our only follow up was to send them two emails and then send them a slack message, which most of the people that were our clients don't even use slack, so they weren't responding. So all of these other ideas that we had, if we would have just thought, thought of things in the most simple, basic, stupid way, we would have just said, okay, how, how are we going to get people to keep buying? Why don't we just ask them to buy?
So that's my story at least yesterday. This has happened to me a million times where I've thought I was smarter than I was. How do I over complicate this, over complicate that, And I overdo everything. Instead of just literally thinking about it on the most simple, basic level, solving that problem and then you solve that problem. If that problem doesn't solve the issue now we go to the next level. Okay, what's the next most simple, stupid, basic thing that would be the easiest for me to fix right now? Okay, this. And you just go up the chain until maybe very rarely are you going to be solving and doing that crazy new big flashy idea that you want to do. Basically, like Hormozi says, you just got to do the boring work and act like an idiot. So that is why when you run a business, you actually would be better off if you were really, really low iq because you would just think of the most simple basic things to solve every single time. And sometimes you have to trick yourself to think that you are dumb and not smart, because if you act smart, you're going to end up being dumb. If you act dumb, you're going to end up being smart.
