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In this podcast, I want to talk about the difficulty of growth, the difficulty of stagnation,

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and the difficulty of decline, and what you can do to avoid all of them by doing more of what's

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already working. And this is what most people don't. Before you even think about doing something new,

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do 10 times more of what's already working. And so this is like one of the things as soon as I buy

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a portfolio company, what I'll do is I go to the head of market and I go to the founder and I say,

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hey, why can't we 10x what we're currently doing? Tell me why we can't. Honestly, two times out of

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three, they're like, I mean, we could, and I'm like, then why aren't we doing that? And what

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happens is they have all these other priorities that are not going to 10x the business,

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and they have this one thing that we already know works, that we have nothing that's stopping us

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from 10xing the business. And I say, great, let's do that. Call me in six months. Now, the thing is

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is in the one out of three times where they say, well, we can't 10x this because of this thing.

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Then I say, guess what the constraint of this business is solving that. And if you're doing

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anything but solving that, then you're not growing the business right as a founder. Rather,

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you're not growing it as fast as you could be growing it. You're doing outbound. It's a great.

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Why can't we do 10 times the outbound? Well, I don't have enough leads from from lists. Okay, great.

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So our constraint of 10xing this business is that we need to find more sources for lists. So we need

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to either scrape more lists, we need to buy more lists or make more lists ourselves. Okay,

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that's solvable. Let's do that. If it's, hey, if we 10x are advertising dollars, like we just need

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to add more to the budget, oh, we can't do that because our ads aren't good enough. Okay, great.

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So we need to have more creative. That's the constraint of the business. If it's

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content, which is why can't we make 10x content or make our content 10 times better or maybe

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realistically a combination of two, which is we're going to put out two times the content and we're

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auction trying to make it two to three times better. Great. Then just what? Now we have a 6x. Can we

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triple the content and make it three times better? Sure. Well, what did we do in the best content

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that we had that we're not doing in all the other pieces? Great. Can we templatize that and make

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that the playbook that we use with every piece of content? Great. We're not doing that. Cool.

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Let's do that before we do any of these other ideas that you had. And so a lot of entrepreneurs

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because it's boring to them, they figured out how to do this one thing and they think, oh, I should

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figure out how to do something else. When once you get something to work, the whole goal is to

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beat the living hell out of it is to squeeze every last drop from that thing that works.

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And you do as much as you possibly can, as well as you possibly can, before even thinking about

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doing something new. So let me walk you through the five stages of the traditional entrepreneur for

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advertising or even for business. They have something that they hear about. They think it's cool.

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So they go into uninformed optimism. They're really optimistic, but they have no idea. Then they

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jump into this new thing and they become an informed pessimist. And so they find out way more about

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this thing. And then they're like, wow, this is actually kind of hard. And then they go to stage three,

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which is the value of despair, where they're like, wow, this isn't working. This isn't what I

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thought it was going to be. And then what they do is dot, dot, dot, they start over at uninformed

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optimism because they hear something else is easier. But they miss out on step four and five,

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which is they become an informed optimist. So they say, okay, I understand how app

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out works. I understand how paid ads work. I understand how organic works. And what are the

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things that it takes to scale and how much work it really is. And then finally get to level five,

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which is achievement, which is they actually achieve the goal. But most people just repeat one,

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two, three, one, two, three uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, value of despair,

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start back over. And they just hit all three of those over and over and over again,

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whether that's new marketing channels, new products, new businesses. And this is a version of

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the woman in the red dress is that it's always deceptive to think that the new thing is going to be

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easier. And the only reason you think it's easier is because you don't know enough. I wish I could

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just give you the scar tissue of having done that three part triangle over and over again. But all

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I can tell you is that like when I get that little tickle on the back of my neck where I'm like,

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oh, this looks exciting. It's now become a warning flag to me because I've been burned so many times

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doing it to say, oh, I must not know enough about this because everything is hard. I'll give you

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an analogy that a mentor gave me that I really liked. And I think it applies to a lot of things. But

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when he was talking to me about departments in my business, he said, you have to know where the

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bodies are buried. And I was like, what do you mean by that? He said, if you've ever talked to

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like a head of a department like IT or HR or legal or whatever and they say, yep, everything's good.

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If you don't know what problems are actually going on in the department, you're too far away.

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And so that's in a way uninformed optimism. They're just telling you it's great and you don't

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know any better. So you're uninformed. But you should know enough about the business to know where

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all the bodies are buried. You should know where all the skeletons in the closet are. And so if

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you're getting into a new thing, you have to know all of the ways or as many ways as you possibly

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can about what's going wrong. And once you do a little bit more research, you often find out that

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there's a lot of things you don't know about. And guess what? The thing you do know is working right

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now and the likelihood that you doing 10 times more of that has far fewer unknowns than you doing

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brand new on something net new. Entrepreneurship already has so many risks and so much unknown.

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Bezos talks about this. He says, we want to manage as many of the risks as we can. So of course,

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we're going to incur some risks that are going to happen that are unforeseen to us. But the risks

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that we know about, we want to limit to the greatest degree possible because there's enough risk

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of our business going out of business by being a business. Why take on more risk for no need?

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It's risking what you have and need to survive for what you don't have and don't need. Growth is

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stressful. Stagnation is stressful. Decline is stressful. That means that business is stressful.

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And so the only stress-free people are people who are dead. And if you're in business,

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you need to accept stress as a fact of life and not something wrong with you or wrong with your

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particular business. It's just that things are stressful in general. Welcome to life. And so I see

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a lot of entrepreneurs trying to change their businesses because they feel stressed. But every

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scenario of business has stress. There are different kinds of stress, but they're all stressful.

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And so the idea that there's something wrong with you or wrong with your business because it is

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stressful misses the point of how business works. And I'll tell you an analogy to make this

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make sense. So if you've been in business for any period of time, think about your first business

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or think about your problems that you had two years ago or three years ago in business.

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You're probably like, oh my god, those weren't even real problems. Those were like nothing problems.

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Well, future you three years from now thinks that about your problems right now.

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And so I think about this a lot because when I think about my problems of like when I was

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worried about how to get trainers shop on time and like, you know, somebody's membership wasn't

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wasn't recurring. I had churn issues or whatever it was within the within the gym that I had.

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Those problems I could solve those in my sleep now, right? Because the problems that I have are

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bigger. And so the thing is is that you just become more enduring. You become tougher and your

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tolerance level for stress or what you deem to be stressful goes up. And so what's really

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interesting about this is that I still have the same problems I had when I had a much much

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much smaller business. I just don't think there are problems anymore. And so then that means that

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my choice to categorize the issue as a problem is actually the greater source of stress than the

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problem itself. And if you can adopt that perspective, you can be less stressed as you grow and

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make better decisions. And so I just I wanted to hit this point because I I almost stopped and

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killed so many businesses early on because I thought there was something wrong with me or something

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wrong with the business because I was stressed rather than accepting that stress is a fact of life

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and that I'm going to continue to be stressed as long as I'm alive. So fundamentally stress comes

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from an adverse stimulus. A stimulus that's not that's not enjoyable, right? But if you grow,

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there's tons of things that are not enjoyable about growth. If you're stagnating, there's tons of

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things that are not enjoyable at stagnating. And if you're declining, there's tons of things that

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are not enjoyable at declining. So there's just always going to be things that you don't like.

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Get used to it.