My Six Lessons From Over Six Years In Business That Allows Me To Take Six Holidays A Year

My Six Lessons From Over Six Years In Business That Allows Me To Take Six Holidays A Year

Long post warning from Luxor, Egypt - but I hope my humble message resonates…

These are the things that have truly changed my life…

Speed Over Perfection with a Sense of Urgency

- You don’t have to be great to start, but you do have to start to be great, there are countless examples of billion-dollar companies that started from offices lit by candles because they couldn’t afford lights, or selling presidential cereal to meet payroll, or a single conversation that led to a world wide empire, these are the ones you hear about, imagine the ones you don’t hear about because people never even got started...

Being a Problem Solver and Relentlessly Resourceful

- When you’re an employee you can’t understand what actually makes a good employee; until you’re an employer, then you can - that is the paradox.

And what I realized is that being relentlessly resourceful, taking ownership and solving problems, is what makes the BEST employee, or member of a team, or entrepreneur/founder, or really with anything in life - be a problem solver and you’ll always be successful, the bigger the problem, the more successful you’ll be.

Insane Focus on Your Customers and Continuous Improvement

- When in doubt, talk to and focus on your customers, I think a lot of people forget this, and get so caught up in putting out fires, they don’t realize that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, if you treat every customer like they’re an old best friend you haven’t seen for years, and you focus on solving their problems, you’ll be very successful.

With this comes arguably the most important thing which is continuously improving, and understanding that creating anything meaningful happens by putting one foot in front of the other, day by day, and improving by just 1% per day makes you 37x better than when you started after a year - that’s a lot!

Making Decisive Data-Driven Solutions and Using Common Sense

- It is all too easy in life to get caught up in emotion, and make decisions based on feelings, rather than logic and data.

And that’s not to say that emotions and gut feelings don’t have their place, but I think you’d be surprised how important trusting data in the new digital age can be when making decisions, trust the data, be logical, and then use your gut feelings, emotions and common sense to objectively evaluate your final decisions based on data - and watch your business and your life expand!

Having an Owner Mentality and Working Backward from Your End Goal

- A common theme amongst billionaire autobiographies is that working on a MASSIVE problem, vision, goal, and business is the same amount of work as working on something small.

This logically means that we all should THINK BIG. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he used to wake up excited to go lift weights for 6 hours per day because each day it brought him incrementally closer to his goal.

Human beings need goals, they need purpose, and working toward goals and making progress gives you that purpose, and progress is happiness.

So create your goals, make them measurable, in SPECIFIC detail, give yourself timelines, and work your butt off starting with the end goal you want, and working backwards to create incremental momentum toward your dreams!

Simplifying Complexity and 80/20 EVERYTHING in Your Life

- The famous Pareto Principle… Due to the complex chaotic nature of the universe, 20% of your actions in nearly all situations give you 80% of what you want.

If you don’t take the time to stop and think about what you actually want, I promise you that you’ll never get it.

So the next time you have a problem, break it down into the end goal you desire, and then think about the 20% of your actions that will have the greatest disproportionate effect on moving you steadily toward your end goal.

Steve Jobs said that innovation is saying no 1,000 times, and that simplicity is often harder than complexity, say no to what makes you unhappy, remove complexity from your life, and from your business, and focus only on the 20% of things that matter most, and watch how profoundly your life changes.

I hope this brought you value