Transcription
What's a belief or maybe a behavior that you had, let's say 10 or 15 years ago, that you now see as misguided?
Um, not committing.
Not committing. Interesting. Tell me more. Say more about that.
So, I mean, I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives, which was I had the misconception that I will work on multiple things and see which one works. When in the reality, any of them would have worked if I had worked on it. And so I would just never get past the point of critical mass. And so the easiest analogy I have for this is imagine you, uh, want to start a party, right? It's very hard to start a good party. Like, you have to invite a lot of people, you have to prepare, you have to do all this stuff. Um, but if you are successful enough and get enough people to the party, the party can't eventually take off on its own and kind of become its own thing.
Now, to the same degree, imagine you try to start four parties on the same night at the same time. It's almost impossible because you only have, you only have the same resource. You have the same number of people. You know, you have the same amount of money. It's very, very hard to do that. And so this is what I see the vast majority of, you know, smaller entrepreneurs, uh, doing is that they're trying to start four parties and say, "Well, whatever party takes off is the one that I'm going to, I'm going to invest more in." But none of them will take off. That's why in the beginning, it feels very manual, very like push. You're like, "I promise the party is going to be great. It's going to be awesome." But who else is coming?
No one. You. No one. Right? But if you just put all, you're like, "If you're like, I'll be there. I'm not doing anything else. This is all I'm going to be doing is trying to make sure this party is amazing." The likelihood that party one is good and then two gets good enough that you don't have to push to keep growing it is good. It's just kind of a microcosm for a business, just on a much, you know, shrunken time scale. But I think for that reason, that's that is probably the number one reason that people don't get what they want is because they spread themselves too thin. You have such limited resources in the beginning. That's like, I think this is the piece that people misunderstand. Like, you have functionally no money if you're an individual. You have basically no money when it comes to a corporate scale, right? You have almost no money and you have almost no time. Uh, again, compared to 100 people, right?
You have no, no money, no time. And so you have such, such, such limited resources that the actual skill that's missing is strategy. And so strategy is prioritization of resources. So said simply, like, what do we do? And more importantly, what do we not do with the few things that we can do out of the few things that we can do? And so just being able to just say, you know what, all four of these parties could be good. It could be a pirate theme. It could be a, it could be a Greek theme. It could be a, you know, whatever theme. But I'm just going to try and make this pirate theme one. That's all I'm going to do. And the thing is is that we then think, "Oh, well, this succeeded because it was a pirate theme." No, it just succeeded because I was the one that you worked on. So, as long as fundamentally, like you let people know about your stuff, you have a conversion mechanism, and the thing that you sell cost significantly less than the thing you sell at the price you sell it for, you'll probably be okay.
But people just spend forever trying to figure out which party theme is going to be the best theme. And you just don't need to do that because as soon as you pick, you eliminate the alternatives. You commit, and then you're good to go.
How did you figure out that that was the problem that was keeping you from success? Or did something just eventually take off through sheer brute force and you realize that you wasted your time with the other initiatives?
No, nothing took off. I, um, I, and people may be surprised by this, but I was probably making a few million dollars a year, not income, revenue, uh, between like nine different businesses.
Yeah. That stresses me out just thinking about it.
I was 26, uh, at the time. Uh, and I like to tell people I, you know, nine businesses, but like that's because I thought that's what successful entrepreneurs did. When in reality, it's like, no, you make one business extremely successful, and then you just make investments and you don't spend your time. You can only be CEO of one thing. And so I was CEO of nine businesses and almost, I almost died. Um, got DUI, head-on collision, whole thing, like, like, yeah. And then I had somebody, uh, thankfully say, "Hey, uh, you were spread too thin. The stress will kill you, quite literally, and you need to make decisions." The difficulty was for me, I was the rainmaker in all the businesses. And so I basically was just killing myself to generate income for all of them.
Um, and almost nothing was left over every month because I had to pay people to do everything else because that was the only thing that I was doing. And so, uh, Leila obviously came into my life, not obviously came into my life. Um, and she said, "Hey, you know, genius, wouldn't it be cool if there's this one thing that you do that seems to work better than the others, but we haven't given it a chance because you're only giving two hours a week to it?" Yeah. What if you spent all your time on that? And so I thought that logic made sense. And I clearly, what I was doing was not working. And so I, um, I had to have all the hard conversations and I lined them up over 48 hours. I literally called every partner that I had with all the other businesses, and said, "I'm out, and you can have everything." And, you know, when I, when I made that call, you know, the people that were in my life were like, "You worked for years to build these businesses and like, what are you thinking? Like, why don't you, why don't you sell them for more money?"
Um, and I, yeah, exactly. Cuz I fire sold, fire sold it all. What was really interesting is that over the next six months, I made more money than I would have made from the sale of all those businesses, uh, put together by just focusing on one thing, which is why I've been such an advocate of it. And I repeat that theme because the thing is is that focus never gets easier. It's kind of like an addiction. Like, you have to beat it every day.
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