Transcription
Hard work will not make you rich. I get driven nuts by the amount of gurus and influencers and whatever who want to brag and say, "No one can outwork me. I'm the best in the world." So many people outwork me; I still make more money than them. There has to be something else.
One of the things that grinds my gears about a lot of people that I see on Instagram that you probably see too is this whole "like no one can outwork me" mantra. First off, it's objectively false because many people outwork you today, have outworked you in the past, see you haven't met everyone; indeed, it doesn't [__] matter anyways. It's the same thing when someone's like, "I'm the best," and you have to say you're the best because if you don't think you're the best, it shows that you're not confident. To me, I don't take that at all. If someone's like, "I'm the best," then why aren't you on [__] billboards? That's what the best would look like.
Absolutely, you need to do the work; you need to put volume in; it's the only way you get better. But if you start claiming that you are the best, you cannot be outworked, you are making statements that you know are not true. Why are we bragging about work? Because work has very little to do with the highest levels of the game. Warren Buffett talks about if he makes two good decisions a year, he's had a good year. And so how, how is it that one of the best investors, one of the best business people in terms of measuring it by money, which is how you measure business, talks about how he does basically nothing, reads five or six hours a day, eats McDonald's, and makes a couple good decisions a year? How is it that that guy is making so much more money than the people who are bragging about the fact that they work so hard? Everyone only has the same hours of the day. Anybody who only sleeps eight hours or only sleeps seven hours and works the remaining hours of the day, all of them would be tied for hardest working. So what creates output? You have volume of activity, and then you have the leverage of the activity that you're doing; that's what creates the total output.
In order to do anything, you must do something. There has to be some level of energy that gets input into the system. Our activity in terms of number of activities is a very newbie measure of success in the beginning. Warren Buffett doesn't say, "I sent a thousand emails today." He doesn't talk like that; he's playing a different game. Jeff Bezos didn't "like woke up at 4 a.m. today." Now, mind you, I'm saying this to somebody who likes waking up early. We can't be as superstitious about what matters. Waking up early doesn't matter; going to bed late doesn't matter; not sleeping a lot doesn't matter. The few things that matter are the inputs that go into the system that have the most leverage to create the most output. Now, if you're a newbie and you can't get your ass off the couch, then by all means, figure out how to actually get your ass off the couch and do stuff. But then there's only so many hours, and so boom, and then very quickly you hit your capacity of work. Great, you've maximized that; now what? The leverage that we have on that activity is going to dictate how much we get out of it. And if we do a low leverage activity many, many, many times, we might get more than a high leverage activity that gets done once.
A CEO who's going to work with acquisition.com works virtually every hour of every day when they come in. Almost everybody does. Sometimes they ask, they're like, "Am I going to be working more?" Or like, "It's impossible for you to work more," but you are going to be changing what you work on because that's the only lever we have. There's only 24 hours, so we're going to switch these nine out and we're going to plop these in with higher leverage activities. And so the way that we do that is we look at their calendars and we look at their org chart. This is how you [__] grow business. You look at what they spend their time on and you see which of these activities are low leverage. Is there anyone else in this org chart that we can hand these activities to? And if a large percentage of these activities are a certain type of thing and they don't exist in their chart, then it's a role that we need to hire.
The point of why I hate the concept of "no one cannot work me" is that there are many ways to win the game. If you were to think about an amazing goal as a dragon to be slain, if you are familiar with video games in any way, when you create like a war party, you have a group of people that are going to go, go on a quest. You don't just have 10 paladins or guys who just have shields and swords. So you've got a healer, a mage that's really good at damage but can't take a lot of damage, then you've got a paladin; you can't hit as hard, but he can take a lot of shots. You find people who have complementary skills. If you're playing football, you don't have 10 running backs. The entrepreneur really should be the coach of the team. It's about organizing the pieces and how well they play together that ultimately determines how good the team is. Like how many times have you seen the team with the All-Star that has the poor supporting cast get beat by the overall better team? It happens all the time. A lot of entrepreneurs, as I see in them, are trying to play the game like they're the star player and they want to score all the points, but they lose to Apple because Apple's got a team. We celebrate a specific action like work when it's really just saying, "Oh, look, there's a paladin who can take a lot of hits. Cool." That's not the only thing that's required to win.
I think what is more valuable is to know: a) what are each of the roles that exists within the business; b) is there one of these that you map to based on your characteristics and skill sets; and then c) what is my eventual evolution through entrepreneurship? We'll start at the beginning, which is what are the players on the field. So if you think about it by function, you've got somebody who has to promote, who's got to be a good marketer. They have to understand how to make things known across different platforms, telling stories, building a brand, providing value to an audience; that's what marketing is. Sales is being able to convert that raw attention into a sale: direct response ads, sales pages, video, your sales letters, etc., which is pretty much anything that's physical products or software based that's low ticket or it's higher ticket, people-to-people hand-in-hand combat, who know how to in the beginning sell and then later train how to sell, and then later, later lead people who train how to sell. These are not necessarily the same people. I've met really brilliant marketers who suck at sales; I'm really good salespeople sucking at marketing. Then you've got somebody who understands product: how do I make something beautiful? The guy who started Shopify, he's not CEO of Shopify; he's had a product; he's a mage; he knows how to cast spells. And you've got the experienced people who are managing everything outside of the actual product itself: how do customers engage with us, how it can provide more value, how to give an amazing experience, how do we make sure they're hitting these milestones? This person who knows customer experience and customer success is not the same person who understands product and UX and design; that's a different game, which is different. The guy who knows how to close is a different guy that knows how to promote. The bigger the enterprise gets, the more specialized the skill becomes and the deeper the well of experience that people need to be; they have to be more specialized.
When people are like, "I can't be outworked," you're bragging about the wrong thing. It should be like, "I can't be out-recruited; I can't be out-managed; no one can build a culture like me that's super high leverage across the organization; no one can lead like me." But "no one can outwork me" is just an irrelevant activity metric. I love working; I work all the time, but I would never claim that no one works harder than me. I tend to have very good leverage with the activities that I do. I spend tons of time writing a book; that book prints and sells copies forever; it's a different way to play the game. And so level two of this, which player you are in the middle run of this, you end up segregating yourself to a portion of the business that you're an expert at or that you're best at: CMO or chief sales officer, chief product officer. It's not about one player being the champion here; it's about how the team works together, which then gets to the third level of this is just about being the coach. Think about what the best coaches do; they're literally trying to headhunt the best players, and they're trying to recruit the best people from college. Look at what Google does; think about their recruiting efforts; they have huge influxes dedicated to getting the best and smartest people out of college, and they have another ring for the best and smartest people come out of business school, and then another one is their very high-level recruiting at the top of the executive level. The parallels between sports and business, they are almost the same in that way. Now, mind you, you can only have, you know, 10 or 11 people on the field; you might have ten thousand, but if each of those players represents a function or department of the business, it makes more sense. When we move up the levels of entrepreneurship, we need to make sure that we're playing the right game and that we're using the right metric to measure our success.
Final level of this is being the coach is recruiting the top-level executives and creating a farm system underneath to feed into the company that you have so you can have a sustained competitive advantage and create a dynasty for the team, so you can create the best winning team every year and have the soft skills of creating a culture of high performance so that you get the most out of every individual player. And the difference between amazing coaching and mediocre or poor coaching is: what would players do if they had no coach or leader? And then what would they do if they had the best coach and best leader? The delta between those two is the value of the coach, the value of the CEO. The CEO needs to have the highest return on time out of anyone in the organization because they need to always be solving the next problem. As long as when they replace their time, the activities they do with the new stuff builds the business even more, then that trade will always work. And if a CEO can come in and turn a business around, even behemoths around in two, three years based on the standards that they set and the values that they stand for, that delta across the entire organization is your greatest leverage.