MBA2547 Why New Ideas Are Keeping You Poor

0:05Hey everyone, welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm. And in today's episode, you're going to learn why new ideas are keeping you poor. This is going to be a wake up call for many of you, because if you're constantly chasing new ideas, you're not building wealth. The people who get rich, they know how to focus. They know how to double down. They know how to stay consistent. I'm speaking out of experience here because for many years I was chasing the next idea. I was just a slave to the next idea that pops in my head. Let's go do this. This is a new business. this idea, this is a good product.

0:41Oh, I can't wait to try this out. And I was constantly going from one thing to another. And I had no momentum, had no consistency. I had no way to kind of build any kind of business that has any kind of value or reputation. And therefore, I wasn't making any money. I wasn't making any significant wealth. Once I chose something to commit to and was consistent, which I call pick and stick, where you pick and stick to what you're doing, that's when I started to get momentum. That's when I started to build my wealth, started to build my business, started to be able to start thinking exponentially about what I can do and what I can earn.

1:17So today's lesson is incredibly important because if you're having a hard time getting traction, you're probably falling into this trap. It's time for you to get honest with yourself and have a new way forward. I'm gonna show you how to do it. Let's get into it. Did you know that 70 % of startups fail due to reasons like lack of focus, poor planning, or they're trying to do too much at one time. This was a study that I found from CB Insights. And the data really reveals that distractions will kill your business, right? It's just a matter of time where you run out of time. And that's the thing about business is that you need consistency and you need enough reps after another to learn, to iterate, to grow.

2:02But if you're not doing the same thing over and over, you don't get a chance to learn, right? You're starting over all the time and then you lose that compound interest of skills and reputation and customer testimonials and all that kind of stuff, right? Today, I'll explain how staying focused is the real secret to building wealth and why jumping from one idea to the next is keeping you stuck. It's keeping you from progressing and taking that next leap in your business, in your personal wealth. Let me show you how to do it. First, we need to establish something. We need to agree on something. And that is new ideas are your worst enemy.

2:40You might think, Omar, what are you talking about? Aren't business entrepreneurs, innovators all about ideas? No, they're not all about ideas. They're actually about one big idea that they have and they focus on implementing that idea. Okay. I'm going to give you plenty of examples in today's lesson, but we need to establish that each time you jump from one new idea to the next, you lose momentum. Successful people don't do this, right? Successful people don't follow every shiny object that comes up. They follow one path until it pays off. Jumping from one project to another feels like it's productive.

3:16Feels like, oh, I'm doing this and then I'm doing this, but you're actually counterproductive. It's actually disguised procrastination. That's the truth, is that you're moving from one thing to another because you don't want to go through the pain and the anguish of fighting through working something out, working out that idea till it gets better and better and refining it and shining it up, right? Jeff Bezos didn't become rich because he started Amazon and then moved on quickly, right? He stayed focused, right? He built it and then it became what it is today years and years later. It took many years to become profitable, many years to become a millionaire and then some years after that become a billionaire.

3:52But the point here is that he didn't just jump around. He focused on Amazon, right? And he focused on the one aspect of Amazon. First thing he did is he started selling books online. He became an online bookstore, which is actually quite brilliant because you don't really need to touch and feel books in order to buy them. You kind of understand they're usually books are bought by word of mouth and you could see the first couple of pages through their website. But the point here is, is that Jeff focused on this. Let me just get us, you know, selling CDs and music. And once he did that, he started selling more things.

4:31And then after he started selling everything, right, in his e-commerce store. And then after that, he did AWS, which is, you know, selling servers up in the cloud. If you didn't know, it's one of the most successful arms of their business. But Amazon started creating their own products, the Fire Stick and, you know, a Fire tablet and whatever, all that kind of stuff. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. But the point here is that he focused and got successful first on one path, which was the bookstore, He found success. He had traction. The company went public. The stock went up. He was able to invest and start selling other things, right?

5:05He didn't just give up or pivot or think, oh, maybe there's more opportunity here. Let me go over here before he hit the finish line, before he actually found success with the first thing. Second thing we need to establish is consistency matters. It matters. If you don't give yourself a chance to get better through reps, you'll never get good at anything, right? Consistency builds mastery, right? And mastery is what we're looking for here. If you don't commit to something, if you just keep dabbling, you will never become great. You don't become great by dabbling, period, right? Mastery comes from repetition and commitment.

5:40I learned this from this book, Mastery by Robert Green. This is a great book, which talks about a lot of different types of people. Some of them are called dabblers. Some of them are called masters. There's also this other type called Hackers. I'm not going to ruin the book for you, but one of the best books I've ever read in my life, Robert Greene is a genius when it comes to this. And guess what? People pay for what you master, right? People want great people at something because you're highly valuable. So therefore you're valuable to the marketplace, right? People are not interested in you being pretty good at 10 different things.

6:13That is not going to get you anywhere and it's not going to make you money. Let's take, for example, Elon Musk. Love him or hate him. None of us are perfect, but let's use him as an example and his company Tesla. He stuck with electric vehicles with Tesla despite many early failures and setbacks and almost going bankrupt several times. Okay, let's talk about his company SpaceX where they're, you know, shooting up rockets in the sky, trying to get to Mars eventually, but they're also trying to reuse these rockets and get them to land, right? A lot of people forgot that many rockets blew up in the air on live TV, okay, on live streaming several times before they actually had a successful landing, right?

6:56We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars just evaporated in the air, in flames, literally, but he stayed consistent. He stuck to it, and now he has a very successful car company called Tesla, which is one of the best-selling cars in the world. And SpaceX is changing the way people are thinking about space exploration and how rockets are used for sending payloads to space. Consistency and focus eventually pays off. Number three, something very important, something that I still have to remind myself constantly so I'm still focused, right? And this is something I learned from Felix Dennis, who is the founder of Dennis Publishing, one of the biggest publishers in the UK, created many of the famous PC magazines as well as Maxim Magazine.

7:44But he says, don't forget to chase the ball marked the money is here. Okay. A lot of us forget to chase where the money is. Wealthy people focus their energy where the money already is. They double down on what works and resist that temptation to jump into something new. It's all about discipline and knowing when to stay in your lane. There are several times where I'm working on a business and the business is doing great. It's growing. I'm making money. I'm making a lot of profit. And then there's this opportunity comes and says, Hey, why don't you start this little branch of the business? Why don't you get into this world?

8:24Why don't you build this product? Right? And it's very tempting because there's a lot of promise. Now, the thing about new ideas and new opportunities that come to you is that if you decide to take that opportunity, you will take away attention, time, effort away from the thing that's working and making money. You know, that ball that says the money is here. You're keeping your focus away from that ball and you're looking at something else. You're going to dedicate more time and energy and sometimes money into that new opportunity. Now, the problem is that new opportunity is not proven. All you see is the promise.

9:01All you see is the good things that could happen, but you don't know all the bad things. The funny thing is that you know all the bad things in your current business, in your current endeavor, in the current product you're doing. You know all the challenges you have to deal with, and you've kind of worked them out already. You're going into this blind, and you don't know if there's money there, right? There's just some hope or wish that there's money there. Stop doing that, right? I had to stop myself so many times where it's like, I have this opportunity that I can take. I'm going to go ahead.

9:27No, the ball that's marked the money's here is here where I'm working on. There's plenty of money here. Let me just keep on going here. That's if you want to get rich, right? If you want to explore new things, waste some money and time, get frustrated. And if you have the time and patience for that, go ahead by all means. But I'm not looking to waste my time and my energy. I only have a certain number of years in my life and I don't want to Like spinning my wheels. That's my personal opinion. One of my favorite quotes that encapsulates this whole idea is by David Packard, who's one of the founders of Hewlett Packard, the computers, right?

10:02And he says that most businesses fail because of indigestion and not starvation, right? We take on too much, right? Too many opportunities. And we are in pain because of, oh, I got too much going on, right? I don't know where to split my ideas and my energy, my time, all that kind of stuff, right? So what you want to do here is you want to get in the habit of saying no. One of the things I learned the hard way is once you do something, once you choose to do something, it's like, say, for example, you get invited to a party this weekend and that party is from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. You decide to go to that party.

10:41Guess what? You can't do anything else other than that party. That's it. every other opportunity, every other option you have by saying yes to something, you're saying no to everything else. So be careful about what you say yes to, because your time is limited. You don't have that much time. And by the way, a lot of people say time is on your side. I'm a believer that time is ticking. Okay. You've got to be very conscious about where you're spending the next month, two months, year, decade, because it's going to go like this. And you're going to say, Oh man, I'm way behind. Why didn't I focus?

11:13Why didn't I double down and work on what works? So this is my message to you. My message to you is make sure you are conscious of the fact that I can't keep jumping up around and going from one thing to the next. I got to chase where the money is at, where I'm actually making money, where I'm getting traction. If you're in that position, be thankful and just focus. One of my favorite examples of this is Steve Jobs. When he returned to Apple, right, he got fired from Apple, went to next, and then he got rehired as a CEO of Apple. and the first thing he did is that he cut down the product line as much as possible.

11:49Cut out all these products to focus on just a few things and really it was the few things that Apple does best and that's when Apple started to take off again. All right, number four and I kind of touched on this a moment ago but we're gonna go deep and that's lack of focus costs you time and money. Every time you abandon a project halfway, you waste time and energy that you invested. Right. Meanwhile, somebody else is sticking to the project and getting better every day and they're getting ahead and they're making money and they're getting richer. And that's just the bottom line is that without focus, you'll never gain that momentum you need to break through.

12:29Here's the brutal truth. Building something great takes time. It isn't always exciting. It is always fun and a walk in the park, but without focus, you're going to stay stuck. If you keep switching gears, you'll be stuck at square one forever, right? You'll just never get better and they'll get frustrated and eventually you're going to give up on your dream. The bottom line is, is that new ideas are a distraction. They feel productive, but they're just delaying your success. Pick one idea, pick one product or business and see it through until it pays off. Wealth comes from consistency, not novelty, right?

13:09The best way I've seen it done is that wealthy people get rich on one concept, on one idea. Once they get rich, they use that money to build the next concept, to build the next idea, to build the next product or service or business. But they don't do that until they hit a finish line and get enough wealth to be able to leverage that and do it easier the next time around, right? Now, I know that today's episode was a little bit of tough love, a little bit in your face, but I am speaking out of frustration because of my own past. I was dabbling for way too long, probably for about eight or nine years when I was in a job of side hustling, building businesses on the side.

13:48And I would try one thing, another. And it was really OK, but I wish I didn't do that because I didn't get any consistency and reps in getting better at any particular thing. But once I decided to choose something and commit to it and grind it through, even through the tough days, that's when I started to get traction. That's when I started to build something that was significant. That's when I started to make some money and get some financial freedom and not worry about my bills so much. Now, that's a great position to be in because now you have the luxury to say no to people and no to opportunities and allow you to stay focused.

14:24Now, that's not going to happen by accident. You're going to have to focus. choose something that you believe in and work towards getting better at it every day. Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. I hope this episode gave you some sort of inspiration, even just a wake-up call that you needed. If you want more insights, more resources, check out the description below on the video if you're watching on YouTube. If not, just go to 100mba.net and we got a ton of resources, free templates, book reviews, we have over 2 ,500 business lessons, all for free, check it out, 100mba.net. I'm Omar Zinhome.

14:57Thank you so much for being a part of the$100 MBA. And we'll check you in the next episode. We publish three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. See you then. Take care.