A concept I’ve been struggling with recently.
When should you push or grind through hard things, and when should you pivot or quit?
This is one of the most difficult parts of business as a whole, because you don’t know what it’s meant to feel like.
Should it always feel like a massive uphill grind? Should it only feel like that 10% of the time?
What about for the first 1,000 hours or 2,000 hours?
How much impact does personal preference play? What about efficiency/effectiveness variables?
It’s just so tough to know.
But you know when you watch/listen to a video/podcast that’s just come out and you feel like it’s been released solely to talk to you, that’s what happened yesterday.
I was sitting in the office working on a few new big structure ideas but things just weren’t clicking.
New projects were taking a lot longer to grow, others were plateauing, and all in all it was just a bad week.
Which usually is fine, I can deal with bad weeks nowadays, it’s been 7+ years in business so there’s been a few. What I struggle to deal with is the indecision from whether this is the right approach.
As a side note, anxiety is actually just indecision in it’s symptom form. Once you make a decision you’ll experience other emotions, regret, guilt, shame or happiness, motivation etc etc. In short, make a decision to the best of your ability, don’t keep putting off making the decision itself.
Anyway, this indecision feeling is something I don’t actually get all that much, but over the past few weeks and even months if I’m honest, it’s been bubbling up.
It’s tough to explain all of the complex elements involved as there’s multiple businesses, people, employees, structures etc, so I’m not going to go into detail I’m just going to share the 2 main points I took from thinking this through and listening to the best timed podcast by Hormozi.
If you are winning at something you dislike….
Imagine how good you’d be at something you did like
I don’t think “do your passion” is good business advice, I actually think it could be terrible advice.
This is actually backed up by Cal Newport, the short version of which is;
He also goes on to say something along the lines of;
People become passionate at things they are good at.
This is especially true in the business world. If someone paid you 100X more to do pretty much anything, suddenly you’d be pretty passionate about that thing.
I really don’t enjoy client based businesses, but if I earned $10M a year to run one, it would be pretty f*cking good.
But I’d rather earn that same amount, or even less, to build the business structure I want. So instead of passion or just doing it for the money, meet in the middle.
Do something you are good at and build something that if you win (however you define it) you’d be happy with the outcome.
AKA, if you are going to succeed anyway, build what you want to build….
Another line that really f*cked me up in the podcast was based on a long conversation he had with someone running a failing-ish business.
The short version is she had a upmarket soft drinks business that was doing poorly, niche issues, product issues, marketing issue, far too thin on distribution etc. The business made no profit but had $1.5m/yr revenue. [Bad Hard]
Then she mentioned she lives/earns a decent amount off of another business in property development, that sounded like it was in a far more streamlined way, good money, easy to run.
When pushed on why she didn’t scale that property business instead, she said “it doesn’t scale….” — A limiting belief….
Which led to a quote that I really connected with.
When money comes easy, I go hard.
When money comes hard, I go easy.
This is such a good framing of the entire situation I’m in and how to improve it. It’s also something I think everyone can really absorb.
If you have 8 projects.
And 3 are a grind, 3 are OK and 2 take you 30 minutes a month to run and earn the same as the other 6, what do you think you should do?
MORE OF THOSE F*CKING 2!
And if you dislike one of them for whatever reason (say you just don’t like clients and one of them is a client business) — Then there’s your 1 project.
Close the rest and liquidate everything else, you might even end up losing money in the short term as you will sell under their real value or walk away from smaller earning projects, but just completely disconnect from it and you’ll be better off.