Throwback: Why You Need To Be Working On Hard Stuff | Ep 948

0:00Welcome back to the game. Today I want to talk about hard work and what it actually is. not the pseudo manifesto bashing your chest, but what it really feels like tactically in the world of an entrepreneur. The hardest work is the work that you don't know how to do. And the reason this is so tough is that the vast majority of the time, if I said, what would it take to grow your business? If you only had one thing you could do by the end of the year and make sure that it was accomplished, that if you just did that one thing, all of your other goals would get accomplished, what would that one thing be?

0:31By the way, that one thing is what we call a priority. Now, the thing is, is that you might not know how to make that one thing happen. So it could be if I had a mega brand by the end of the year, all of my other issues would go away. It could be if I didn't have the churn issue that I have by the end of the year, all my other issues would go away. If I had a good sales director that could scale a sales team, all of my issues would go away. Many businesses have one thing that if you think about it long enough, have enough downstream effects that it would accomplish many of these other goals that you have or more likely make them irrelevant.

1:03And so what we do oftentimes as entrepreneurs is we solve the problems we already know how to solve. And so we like doing those because we have fast feedback loops, because it's rewarding because we know how to solve it. And so it's basically like going back to level two when you're at level three and you don't know how to beat that boss. You just keep beating level two again because it feels good. But the thing is, is that the level three boss hasn't changed and he's still sitting there, Bowser, you know, with his fist and his spikes, sitting there ready to wreck you. And so the thing is, is that the hard work of entrepreneurship is the failure that you're inevitably going to encounter by not knowing what you're doing and then taking action steps despite that with the idea that you will eventually succeed if you don't stop.

1:46And so we as entrepreneurs have to accept that that is what hard feels like. It is confronting the unknown that we don't know how to do and realizing that we're going to take our best shot and probably be wrong four, five, six times in a row. And yet that single priority has not changed. If we still built the big brand, if we still hired that really good sales director, if we still fix churn in our business, if that thing were solved, it still doesn't become less of a priority. But what happens is the entrepreneur fails once, fails twice, and then decides, you know what, I'm going to go back to level two and beat that to feed my ego, to feel good about myself.

2:21But most of entrepreneurship is eating glass. And that's why I said earlier, growth is stressful. Stagnation is stressful. Decline is stressful. Because in each of those scenarios, you're still doing the same thing, which is that you're solving a problem you don't know how to solve yet. And so the actual doing this in all three of those scenarios is the same. And so that's why when you want to say stress is the problem, it's not the problem. Stress is a fact that occurs when you solve problems. And if you're solving problems you don't know how to solve, welcome to the game. If you knew how to do everything, you'd already be Elon Musk.

2:52And so the whole journey of entrepreneurship is turning the unknown into the known through trial and error. There's a company that I was thinking about investing in that has a consumer packaged good, CPG product, that I asked the founder, I said, how hard is this to manufacture? And he said, it's actually a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. And I was like, that's amazing. And he just looked at me cross-eyed. He was like, why is that amazing? I was like, because that's more things that anyone who's going to try and copy us is going to have to overcome. And if we can bet on the fact that we're more perspicacious, that we're more relentless, that we're more unyielding in our desire to keep solving the problem and keep bashing our heads against the rock until the rock gives way, then we will be able to be the winners.

3:34And any single thing that you have to overcome to be successful is what anybody who behind you wants to compete with you will also have to solve. And so I like to think about it like there's this big rock that I have to figure out how to move with rope and some duct tape and a lot of sweat and a few guys with me. And on the other side of that rock is a big bag of money. And the bigger the rock in general, the bigger the bag of money. I mean, I use this frame all the time. One of our other portfolio companies, we have a software that we've developed and has now gotten really, really good and is generating a lot of revenue.

4:05And there's this next big feature that we have to build out. And he's like, this is going to be really complicated. I said, well, the good news is we're going to get paid$150 million when we solve it. And he was like, well, when you say it like that, and I was like, well, it is like that. And so when you think about these things, whether it's I need to add a second acquisition channel or I need to learn how to hire, manage, and train a sales director, each of these are hard things that you have to figure out how to do. But if you can quantify how much more valuable your enterprise or your business will be as a result of this change, then you can ascribe a value to it.

4:34And if I said, hey, man, if you hire that sales director, I'll pay you$5 million. Guess how motivated you'd probably be? More motivated. But the thing is, is that your business will pay you$5 million when you solve the problem. And so if you frame it that way, it stops being this, woe is me, people are hard, man, life is stressful. It's, we get compensated for our ability to deal with that stress and take action despite it. One of the biggest unknowns that I had when I started a few years ago is how do you run a family office? So I went from an entrepreneur building businesses to I have to manage cash at a portfolio and allocations of resources and capital across multiple businesses and different industries?

5:13How many resources do I allocate in terms of man hours to each of these companies? Is it proportional to the capital? What kind of deal structures are gonna be the things that are gonna mitigate risk but also give us the most upside? These are all these things that I had no experience with. And so I just got on the phone with anybody who would give me time and ask them as many questions as I possibly could. And then guess what happened? Once I started doing it, I learned way more than I did from all of those conversations and I developed my own thesis of how this works. And so the thing is, is that every time you start on something new, whether it's starting a business to begin with or learning how to run paid ads or learning how to sell, it always feels like this big amorphous thing.

5:47But once you take your first phone sale, once you run your first ad, once you hire your first person, all of a sudden you're like, oh, okay, I kind of wrapped my arms around it and now I can see all the holes that are there. And so in my experience, the faster I can get to me just wrapping my arms around it, me actually taking the first action, you learn a hundred times more from your first hundred phone sales than you will from 10 ,000 hours of reading books about it. And so my goal with a lot of the content that I have here is if I can just shrink the time between you thinking about doing it and doing it, the faster you're going to get to your goal.

6:20Because learning is same condition, new behavior. If you have not changed your conditions and your behavior remains the same after this video, you have learned nothing. And you can measure how intelligent someone is by their rate of learning, which means by the rate at which they change their behavior given the same stimulus. So if I say, hey, pick up the phone and answer it. Someone picks up the phone, they say, blah, blah, blah. I say, great. I want you to read the script. Now pick up the phone. Now they pick up the phone, they read the script. Same condition, new behavior. They've learned. And so right now in your life, there are conditions that probably remain unchanged.

6:57And so if your behavior does not change, you learned nothing. And you can measure every video, every piece of content, every book that you, or every sales exchange, every meeting you have, as to will this change my behavior? If it didn't, it was a waste of time. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our Scaling Roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance, and we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level.

7:43It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. R-O-A-D map. Roadmap.