"Why Do I Keep Losing Focus?"

Here's something that's taken me way too long to learn. Staying focused is like beating addiction. It's not a one-time victory. You have to fight it all day, every day. Then, wake up and do it again tomorrow. Because the thing that's going to distract you is going to change every day. The thing that's going to trigger your addiction to distraction is going to keep morphing and changing its form so that it can steal or rob you of your future. And so you have to be adaptable in knowing that you have to fight it every day. And so it's not good enough to just say, I was focused for this week. You've got to wake up on the eighth day and the ninth day and do it again. And so you remember that guy who got rich dropshipping and day trading and buying crypto and wholesaling all at the same time? Yeah, me neither. Focus. To win in business, you need to be able to say no without remorse and hear no without a loss of enthusiasm. Which means that you have to keep feeling rejection, keep failing, and keep going while being willing to reject basically everyone else. And that seems so counter because you're right there and you're like, man, I don't want to reject this person because I know what it feels like to be rejected. You need to be able to maintain this discrepancy so that you can create the space to do the work that needs doing. So there have been a couple of lessons that I have learned over and over again in my career. I've had to relearn. So it's a lot like a fine wine. It's like it gets better with age and there's more nuance to the flavor. So I think focus is not a are you focused or not, it's how focused are you. And you can measure someone's focus by, again, the quality and quantity of things that they say no to. Which means that as you get better, more opportunities will emerge. Which is interesting because people who start out can't see opportunity anywhere. And it's because they have so few skills. And so there's very few opportunities for them. When you have a lot of skills, there are so many opportunities that are in front of you that you feel like you're missing out. But the real opportunity is actually in solving the problems in front of you. I was able to, in my opinion, become another order of magnitude greater in terms of entrepreneurship, which I would just measure by wealth. Once I was able to learn to say no and accept that I would not be able to pursue the many things that I know I could crush. Because once you realize how much actual work it takes to make something good, you realize how few things you're actually going to be able to do in your entire life. And so this is why picking becomes so important. Right now, the things that you're going to have to say no to are really the distractions and kind of, in some ways, easy. Say no to fantasy football, say no to drinking beers with the boys, going out with the club, whatever. But in a year from now, once you have more skills, there will be more opportunities. You're going to have multiple $10,000 a month income opportunities that you're going to have to say no to, to stick with the one that you have. And then once that thing becomes a $100,000 a month thing that you're doing, you're going to have to start saying no to multiple $100,000 a month opportunities. And here's the thing with opportunities that come up. They only show you the upside and not the downside. You have to know where the skeletons are buried. You have to know where the bodies are. If you don't know, and I've gone through this visual because I think about it every single time I have to walk through not doing something. You are here. You see this new opportunity here. Then you understand the downsides here. Then you live the downsides. Then you experience the upside. Then you achieve your goal. And so this is the starting point. This is called uninformed optimism. This is now informed pessimism. This is the valley of despair. And this is where most people quit. But what they do is they don't even quit because they don't want to say they quit. What they do is they start another one of these things. And they say, oh, this is now my uninformed optimism. And then, oh, now I understand this more. But the thing is, is that they never actually get through to this upside. And so they just keep jumping from thing to thing to thing over and over again. And so the reason it takes so long is because you're in a rush. Big things don't happen on small timelines. Because you have to start from zero over and over again. And if you actually stick with it, it's actually the shortest way to get to where you want to go. It just takes longer than you think. Must be easy for you to say is probably something that you might think while watching this or listening to this. And I like to tell the story because in July of 2017 is when I started my podcast. And it was 90 days after I lost everything. The last time. And from that point until now, it's taken that period of time to get to over a million downloads a month. And for the first three years, and I was making multiple podcasts, we're talking three, four hundred episodes. For the first few years, I never really cracked 3,000 downloads a month. And so I could say, man, why is this taking so long? But the real real is that it took me that long to get good. It also, being extra real, took me that long to have proof on the outside that what I was saying was true on the inside. And right now, no one who listens to my podcast cares that it took me seven years to get here. They just care that it's good today. And so people quit here when things get hard, because the thought of something being hard forever is unbearable. They think that this line is just going to keep going this way forever. But it's not. Because once you fully understand all the bodies, where the skeletons are hidden, then you can actually start solving them one by one. The thing is, is that that distraction only is distracting because you don't know what sucks about it. You might think you know what sucks about it, but you don't know what sucks about it. And so the big difference is, you have something called declarative versus procedural knowledge. And so there's two types of learning, and this is actually formal. This is from academia. So you have declarative knowledge, which is knowing about something. So if you go memorize a fact, or you learn how private equity works, this is knowing about. The other type of knowledge is procedural, which is knowing how to. And so a lot of people mistake declarative knowledge for procedural. And so they mistakenly think that if they watch 10 videos on doing a private equity deal, that it means they understand how to do a private equity deal. Or they watch 10 videos on cold outbound, and they think it means they understand how to do cold outbound. Or 10 videos on sales, and so forth. But you're never really going to learn how to do it until you do it. And so you're going to learn more from your first 100 cold calls, your 100 cold knock on doors, than you will from 100 books or videos that you watch. But I have good news. Nothing hard lasts forever. There's only three things that can happen. You either quit, it gets easier, or you get better. So no matter what, it always ends. You only lose when you quit before you see it all the way through. And I think that's incredibly encouraging. So no matter how hard whatever it is that you're doing is, But no matter how hard it is, you either quit, it gets easier, because something changes externally, or you get harder, something changes internally. But no matter what, it will end. Think about it like you're mining for gold, right? You're chiseling away underground, and you've got this pile of gold. You don't know how far away it is, but it's underground, and you're digging towards it. This difficulty of swinging the pickaxe can end when one, you walk out of the mine and say, You know what? Marketing doesn't work. Sure. The second is that all of a sudden you hit a soft patch, and then you're like, Oh my God, I'm digging so much faster now. This is great. And then you get to the gold. Or you just start swinging the axe harder, because you get more muscled, you get more efficient with your movements, and you just keep chiseling away. Even if it goes from dirt to rock, you just keep chiseling away at a slower pace, but you eventually break through and get there. But in all three of those scenarios, hard doesn't last forever. Real quick, if you're a business owner, and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had, and what stages of growth they went through, and more importantly, where they got stuck, and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages, and we made this little quiz thing, where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at, and the most important part for you, what to do for each of the functions of the business, across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, plug in your business information. And if you want us to actually help you decontrain the business, and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team, and we will look at the business, see if we can help. And if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas, we'll do this in person, live.