The Necessity Of Being Unreasonable To Get Rich

The WILL To Win. The COLD Hard Truth. Rise And GRIND. All of these are the titles of books written by the Sharks we had on stage this year at our annual IT Sales and Marketing Boot Camp. Who wrote what isn’t important. The point is, getting rich in business is not that complicated.

Often you can reduce it to simple statements. You need to have the WILL to win, not just the wish to win. You need to have your feet planted in TRUTH of how things work, not how you’d hope they will work out or how you think they should work. You rise early and GRIND, not fool around on Facebook, meandering through your day at an easy, casual pace, minus goals and self-imposed deadlines.

Simply, it all is the DECISION to be unreasonable in your standards and expectations for yourself – a concept I learned from Tony Robbins over 2 decades ago that stuck. You’ve heard me say about clients, vendors and employees: you get what you tolerate. That holds true to YOU as well.

If you aren’t willing to set high standards for yourself as the CEO to demand exceptional growth, exceptional profitability, exceptional service, you can’t expect your employees and vendors to step in and do it for you. Average motivation, average execution, average work ethic gets average results. Average, is, by definition, mediocrity. You cannot be mediocre AND rich. The competition is too tough, the hurdles to overcome are too high.

In football, they say, “How you practice is how you play.” General Schwarzkopf talked about the concept of demanding his troops had polished shoes at ALL times. He was considered unreasonable in his requirements for this, but explained that “shined shoes saves lives,” in that attention to detail in the small things would result in attention to detail in the big things. Another way of saying this: How you do anything is how you do everything.

My friends in the restaurant business have told me if the bathrooms are dirty, you ought not eat there. That’s the exact reason why I walked out of one hospital to go to another when having my second child. Dirty bathrooms, messy registration desk and a poor check-in process. Do you need to know anymore? If they can’t keep the bathroom clean, how are they going to keep the operating room clean? Answer: they won’t.

Too many people have gotten supremely lazy about their intensity at work and have ZERO expectations of themselves for productivity. Covid just accelerated this with the now rampant “work from home” movement, with people showing up to “work” on a Zoom call, looking like they slept in the clothes they have on, unprepared, in bad lighting, bad internet, bad microphones as they sit in a corner of their bedroom with a half-naked kid roaming around in the background while they slurp coffee from a mug that says, “Clients Suck.”

At the top where the big money is earned, you see “unreasonable” CEOs demanding unreasonable performance and results. My staff has a button that says, “U.P.A.” on it, which stands for “unreasonable, picky asshole.” That’s what they say I am. Good. I encourage the wearing of it so they don’t forget it.?