Your Tolerance to Pain Determines Your Success

There was a season in building Military Lawn Cuts where I wanted to quit, not because the money was gone, because I was mentally done. And I almost let one hard season destroy everything I worked for. I can still remember the day standing in my kitchen on the other side of this wall, and I walked in. I had multiple people on my team tell me that they couldn't show up multiple times, and this was the last straw. I had had it up to about here. And I still remember that I had to go out, pick up the slack, get the routes done. That military mindset of always placing the mission first and getting the work done caused me to get arthritis in my feet. I still remember standing in the kitchen and telling Larissa, my wife, I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. I can't do this anymore. I repeated it over and over and over and over again. I had had it. The next day, I remember getting home from the route, calling her dad, who was a business owner, and calling him and just saying, look, like, at what point do you think, like, I should throw the towel in and, and give it up? Now, mind you, at this time in the business, we were doing $350,000 in annual revenue. I mean, we had a decent business. We had 4 to 6 employees that were, you know, coming to work and working for us. Like, we, we had it somewhat together, but mentally I couldn't handle the hurdles, and I was hitting my breaking point. And here's what I learned: you can have the best systems, the best team, and the best routes and still lose. If your mind breaks before your business does, it's over. Mental toughness isn't a soft skill. It's the foundation of everything else built on it. So the question is, is who can stay in the fight when you're constantly taking punches left and right and every logical reason is telling you to quit? Mental toughness. And until you master it, your ceiling stays exactly where it is right now. By the end of this video, with my success building a $1.6 million lawn care company with 3 locations, managing managers of technicians. I am going to teach you exactly how to overcome and build your mental toughness to get you to where you want to go in life. So you aren't where you want to be in life because you can't withstand the hard times and hard things that happen to you, and it takes you too long to recover. So you fall too far when bad things happen, and then finally when you do recover, you're worse. Than you were when you started. In order to get what you want out of life, you must master this one concept called mental toughness, which is you becoming resilient. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do it right now. When I talk about mental toughness, so I want you guys to understand that mental toughness is not a, do you have mental toughness do you not have mental toughness, but instead, to what degree of mental toughness do you have? Fundamentally, what we are talking about is how people respond to bad things. Just to be clear, when I say bad, this means against your preferences, something that happened that you wish didn't happen with that outcome. We must create an environment in in which mental toughness can be exercised and then ideally measured. I'm going to give you a visual so that you can begin to think about your own behavior within this context. Number 1 here, that is how you normally behave. Whatever your normal kind of baseline is on a day-to-day when things are normal throughout your day and week, that is how you act every single day. Then at some point, a bad thing or enough bad things happen that it forces you to begin to change how you behave. This is step 2. Step 3, once your behavior changes due to these bad things happening, the question is, is how low do I go, or how upset do I get? So you're acting normal, bad thing happens, boom, your behavior starts to change. How much do you act out from your normal baseline? Then there's a certain period of time that elapses where you continue this bad behavior, and then you start coming up, you start recovery. So as you can see here in the diagram, acting normal, bad thing happens, behavior drops or changes. So then the next question is number 4: how long before you restabilize to your new baseline. That's the next period, which is number 4. Number 5 is going to be bi-directional. Either you get better as a result of this hard thing, or you get worse. As you can see, you hit your low point, you start coming back up. Where does your new baseline land? Are you worse than it started? Do you return back to your normal behavior, or do you get better, right? Do you learn from it and grow? And then number 6 The last one there is how much better did you get or how much worse did you get? So you can see on the diagram how much worse or how much better. This is what we're measuring. Okay. Mental toughness. It's not just about do you have it or do you not have it? It's to what degree. And all of these will be different for every single person. How low you act out is different than the person to your right or to your left. How long you go while you're coming down from the different behavior from a bad thing happening will be different for everyone else. And so this gives us kind of a framework to think through mental toughness, not as this like masculinity, I'm so tough attitude most of us use, but really how resilient are you as a human being. So let me ask you guys a question that are watching. And by the way, if you're finding value, please hit the like button. Also, I'm, I'm curious for you guys, like, where would you guys say that you struggle with most? Would it be phase 1 of like how long you go until a bad thing happens and you act out? Is it phase 2? It's like bad thing happens and then phase 3, it like drops down? Like, how low do you get? Where do you know internally you need to improve on? Do you go a day of restabilizing, or do you go a week? Or a month, right? Like, that will dictate and vary depending on the person. The other question that I would kind of ask you guys to think about this, right, is like AI. I mean, there's people out there building robots. If we wanted to build a robot that was freaking resilient, like to a degree where you could hit it, you could knock it down, you could talk trash to it over and over and over again, and it could fail over and over and over and over and over again until it'll just keep going until it until it wins, until it, until it overcomes that objection, until it masters whatever it is it's trying to overcome. Like a true robot that is the most resilient AI robot. What do you think that robot would have to go through? What do you think the programming and the, and the lessons and the teaching internally on the back end that you would have to teach this AI robot to be that resilient, the most resilient? Where it would keep going and keep trying and keep going after it and keep trying to solve the problem? Probably a lot. So if you find yourself in a season where you're hitting a wall or hitting a ceiling or hitting a problem or bad things are happening to you, how resilient are you? 5 years ago, I was out in the field every single day, knocking on doors, pushing mowers, and bootstrapping my business from the ground up. Today, I am not in the field and rarely ever in the office. I work on the business and not in it. And that didn't happen by luck. We put the systems in place and now we're handing them over to you. Inside our school community, you will gain access to all of the systems that we've used to allow this to happen. Click the link in the description below. Improving your mental toughness is the one thing that will directly impact the level of success that you have. Most people think mental toughness is only one thing. I actually believe it's broken down into four components. These are the four components that I believe mental toughness is actually broken down into tolerance, fortitude, resilience, and adaptability. Each is a measured point in this behavior frame. So the first one is tolerance. The second one is fortitude, measuring how low we go. The third is resilience. How long does it take to get to our new baseline? And number 4 is how adaptable are you? Do we get better or do we get wor— worse? That's what we're measuring here. Let's go down and break down every single one of these in depth. Your tolerance, fortitude, resilience, and adaptability. So the first one is tolerance. This is how much hardship or the number of hardships you can endure before you have a change in behavior. Does it take a lot of little things? Does it take one massive big thing to tip you over the edge? Like, where is your trigger point? How much tough stuff can you go through before you crack? Long fuse equals high tolerance. Short fuse equals low tolerance. Now, as we go through these, I want you to think about it for yourself and maybe in the comments below right now, maybe put, hey, do you have a long fuse? Do you have a short fuse? Does it take a while for you to crack and act out and change your behavior? Not only do you want to kind of measure this for yourself, but I also want you to think of like other people. That you know? Like, do you know anybody that has a super short fuse where you like, one thing kind of ticks them off and they fly off the handle? It's like, dude, chill out, bro. It's not that big of a deal. Or do you know people that have like the longest fuse where it's like, dude, they got all this crap happening in their life, they just lost their job, and they're just steady flowing? Yeah, man, I'll find something else. You know, like, man, they got a very long fuse. I want you guys to think for yourself and ask yourself, do I have a high medium, or low tolerance. Because the reality is, is none of us is perfect. And if we can begin to measure these components of mental toughness, we can begin the process of being able to improve ourselves. So right now in the comments, put, I have a high, or I have a medium, or I have a low tolerance. The next one is fortitude. Fortitude, which if you can look here, measures how low we go. This is the intensity of the behavior change once your tolerance threshold has been surpassed, which means how low do you go and how upset do you get? Do you take a deep breath, go for a walk for 5 minutes, remove yourself from the room, or do you quit your job, get into hard drugs, and drive recklessly on the highway endangering your life and everybody around you? We want to measure the steepness of drop in behavior. This is fortitude. I believe this next one is the most important. So the next one we're going to look at here is resilience. This, I think, if you master one thing— you guys want to grow a big business, you guys want to have a great family, you want to buy a car, you want to buy your first house— you must have mental toughness. It just is. You want to do anything big in life and grow your career and have people follow you and lead, and you be the leader, you have to master this. And I think number 3, this one right here, dictates your success more than the other ones. So really lean into this one. If you don't have what you want in life right Now, I would encourage you to work on this one the most. This is the one thing that if you want to get the largest return— we talk about levers all the time in the business. There's 1,000 levers you can pull. There's 1,000 fires you can fix today. There's 1,000 problems you can fix. If you want to pull the biggest, baddest lever, this is it right here. Resilience. So what is this? After a change in behavior has occurred from a bad thing, this is how long it takes you to return to a new baseline. Once a bad thing happens, you start to act out. How long does it take you to stop acting out. That is what resilience is. It's a measure of time. So the question: do you bounce back in 5 minutes? High resilience. Or do you bounce back in 5 months? Low resilience. The question is— put it in the comments because this is an interactive thing— how long does it take for you to come back to normal? We need to measure this stuff to improve ourselves. Going back to our thing, bad thing happens, your behavior changes. Okay, it doesn't matter if it's super steep or not a lot. How long does it take to get us back to this baseline? That is resilience. I want you guys to think of somebody in your life right now where when something bad happens to them, like, they're gone, like, for the next 6 weeks. You're like, yeah, John, man, he's going through it again. He's got, you know, had a couple problems come down, and like, you know, don't, don't worry about calling him this weekend because he's not going to come out. He's in his slump for 6 weeks. You already, you already know. Don't, don't contact John. He's not going to come out of his shell. He's not going to come out of his cave. He's in low, low resilience. Or do you take a deep breath, step outside for 10 minutes, you got all this stuff, this, this chaos happening around you, you come in level-headed and you're able to make good decisions? That would be high resilience. Do you— put in the comments— have a low, medium, or high resilience? What do you need to work on in order for you to get what you want in life? The last one, fourth one, is adaptability. So this is basically how your new baseline compares to your old baseline. So let me show you guys this. Bad thing happens, you start to come back up. Where's your new baseline? Are you worse from it? Are you better from it? Or do you just resume back to your normal baseline? This is adaptability. As a result of this hard thing happening to you, are you better from it or are you worse? When you stabilize— it's not a matter of if, it's when you stabilize from this bad thing happening, which again, you will eventually— if it's above the baseline that you currently had prior, you have high adaptability. You let the hard things strengthen you. If you come back to that same baseline, then you have medium adaptability, which means you didn't let it affect you, which is fine. If you or someone you know comes back to your baseline and it's below your previous baseline, that means you have low adaptability. This means you let the hard times beat the strength out of with you. Measuring these 4 components of mental toughness will show you what you need to improve on in order to be more successful and to— for you to achieve your personal goals. Tolerance: how long do you go before you crack? Fortitude: how low do you go? Resilience: how long do you go about these— this changed behavior? And number 4: do you get better, do you get worse, or do you resume back to normal? Improving your mental toughness is the one thing that will directly impact the level of success that you have. Is this helping? If so, guys, hit that like button. Let me know in the comments below and make sure you are subscribed to the channel if you want to grow a $500,000 lawn care business. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you in the next video.