Embracing the "Ugly Truth" About Your First Business Idea | Dave Ramsey

0:00I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

0:38Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.

0:52If someone was asking you, you know, Dave, I want to get, I'm excited to launch my own business. I want to do this thing. I want to try this out. I've got an idea. I want to launch it. And you could give them three keys of really what to look out for before launching it to try to set them up for some type of success and eliminate as much pain as possible. Although they're going to have challenge and pain and stress. But if you said, if you could do these three things, when you launch your business or right before you're launching to make sure you do every day, or you set it up in the beginning, what will support them in getting to the best success possible?

1:27number one know that the first thing that you try you think it is a beautiful baby and it is an ugly gargoyle it's not that's not that thing's not gonna survive the prototype is not gonna make it yeah and i know you love it and i know you think it's your thing and i know you think it's your first child it's not it's just a bad idea that hasn't told you yet Oh, man. And so it's just you're every nothing. No one launches a gets their first idea. Very few people does that ever even get to market. It never gets past test market or beta or whatever you want to call it. And because your customers look at you and go, you're an idiot.

2:13This thing sucks. And you go, OK, I got to change that because I still want to do this idea. I still want this service to be provided. But the way I'm doing it, the model or the shape of the widget is not right. And so just get your little feelings hurt. Go ahead and get ready because your little baby is ugly. And so, you know, you just, it's hard. That's hard. The second thing is for God's sakes, don't borrow money. Of course, you knew Dave Ramsey is going to say that. But what happens is you're going to make mistakes. We just talked about that. There's no one that's the exception of that. And when you borrow money into your mistakes, you magnify the size of them.

2:48And so if you buy 42 ,000 of that widget and go put it on a credit card, and then you figure out they all have to go in the dumpster. Now you've got credit card debt. And because, you know, but, you know, the optimist in us, the abundance mentality in us says, oh, it's going to work. And it's not. It's going to work eventually, but it's going to be its pretty cousin to the thing you thought was really pretty. And it's not really pretty. So don't borrow into it because you're really going to hasten the end of this endeavor. It's going to come down on your heart. And then the other thing, I guess, is the old three rules of business.

3:26You know, it's going to take twice as long as you think. It's going to cost twice as long as you think. And you're not the exception. Those are the three rules of business. And that's true here today inside of Ramsey. We get ready to launch something. We got this little thing. It's coming out in two months. Yeah, yeah. No. And I sit down. I talk to the tech guys. I'm going, OK, we ought to be able to put this out in about, what, a week and a half? And they're like, no, try six months. Oh, my gosh. And I'm going, no, I don't write code, but we're not waiting six months. Let's figure something out.

3:52but they're going no chance your six-day dream that you can just end that right now so we end up settling reality somewhere in between but it costs twice as long or takes twice as long cost twice as much therefore uh even if you're building a digital product because you got the man hours and the stinking thing and the you know the the team on it and and so yeah that those are the things that pop into my head first when you ask that but it it's it's still a great adventure It is a great adventure if you can manage it. And speaking of managing it, how did you learn to manage your mind or your emotions during the first kind of three to five years of launching the business?

4:30When things changed so much, when you made a lot more mistakes probably back then than you do now, when people came and go, when you had to learn about culture? Like, how did you manage your emotions and your mindset around all of the crazy adventures of entrepreneurship? ship uh practice uh i the things i thought were going to kill me didn't and so the little drama queen that lives inside my head um got smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter the first person that left ramsey that was on our team i was emotionally devastated why would anyone want to leave. We're perfect. It's me. Why would they want to leave?

5:13And now, you know, we've got 1100 people, people leave every week. And I don't even know some of them. It's not an issue. And I'm not mad. I mean, I'm not being, I don't flip and I don't want them to leave still. But the thing I thought was going to kill me, didn't kill me. And you know, the, the, the death of the prototype and the rebirth of it as a prettier version of it didn't kill me. Hurt my feelings though. and now I expected more. Now I expect, you know, I'm probably about the only one here at Ramsey that's not going to leave. Right. Someday, you know, and so I kind of expected. I hope nobody leaves today.

5:52I hope nobody leaves 10 years from now. I hope they stay with me until I'm gone. But the reality is that that's probably not so. And so I've just got to go. And we survived that. And we're sad, but we're sad. Yeah. Especially when somebody's key and that we love deeply and we've been with for a lot of years. but you're sad. And so, but again, that's just drama. It's like, cause you're like, oh, the whole thing's good. No, it's not. Yeah. No, it's not. And so the more I had things I thought were going to kill me didn't, or that I thought were the end that weren't, then I went, okay, the drama queen, it really has to shut up.

6:29And it's inside my head. You really got to sit down and take a back seat back there because, so I just practiced it. And now when I look back on the things 10 years ago or 20 years ago that we thought were the end, this is it. I don't know if anybody else has these thoughts, but that's the way it rings in my brain. And then I look back and it's like, that's almost funny that I thought that because that's so stinking small. There's no chance that was taking us out. We were so much bigger and stronger than that by then. And it's like, nope.

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7:57Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.