https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kt-EYieNko

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 every time i take a step towards kind
of a better ideal in this direction i make significantly more money and
so i figured i'd share it with you but uh recently i've been spending a
lot of time reading um and specifically reading from people who make a
lot more money than i do and i think that i haven't had a good um kind
of a little bit more heady of a podcast until recently so i'm going to
try and break that streak today so one of the hardest learn lessons that
i've i mean and i'm still actively learning it but every time i take a
step towards kind of a better ideal in this direction i make
significantly more money and so i figured i'd share it with you so um in
some of my earlier podcasts i talk a lot about focus right about
learning to say no and i think that over the last year and a half two
years there have been my hardest learned lessons were where i said yes
to opportunities that were now

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 at a larger size than what i used to
learn to say no to and so i've referenced the opportunities that that
come to us as like the woman in the red dress if you're familiar with
the matrix is that the thing is is that at every opportunity level as
you level up the opportunities become sexier right the woman in the red
dress becomes more attractive because you know in the very beginning
before you've made any money anything is attractive you say yes to
anything but then as you acquire more and more skills more and more
opportunities open up and better and better opportunities open up which
is why you have to like relearn the same same concept but at a different
level right um because at one point you don't say you you say yes to a
10 million opportunity or one million dollar opportunity everything's
relative right but at another level you have to learn to say no to that
if you were above that at that certain time and i think i've made that
mistake multiple times at different levels and so i'm partially making
this you know video for me and so um there's a book called the road less
stupid

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 it's really really good i'd highly
recommend it especially if you're an entrepreneur and especially if
you're prone to getting excited about new ideas constantly wanting to
innovate constantly wanting to tweak and change things um which is
really really you know the thing that excites us a lot and it's a lot of
times it's the the key to to big breakthroughs that being said one of
the quotes i used to quote a lot uh was from jeff bezos who said um
basically business is different from baseball in that uh in business uh
in baseball when you swing for the fences the most you can ever score is
four runs right but in business every once in a while when you step up
to the plate if you hit the ball hard enough you can score a thousand
runs and um so big people who bet big win big but they bear the cost of
experimentation right and so um the he references earlier on in that in
that little address that he said if you have a chance of a hundred times
payoff and you've got a one out of ten chance of hitting it you should
take that bet every time and after having thought about this i mean jeff
obviously makes a lot more

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 money than i do um i think that that's
not it's correct mathematically but in practicality i think there's
another sentence that needs to be added to it and so to give it a
realistic context imagine you're going to the casino and that's the bet
right that's the bet is uh you have to put uh let's say ten dollars down
and you can win a thousand but you've got a one out of ten chance right
now here's where it makes it realistic let's say you only go into the
casino with thirty dollars then what do you do think about it so that
means that if you were to bet three times you've got a one you've only
you've only got a one out of three chance of ever of coming out of the
casino with anything right and so that's i think a more realistic
paradigm for what most entrepreneurs go into is because you have a
constrained amount of capital money and a constraint amount of time and
resources and bandwidth for your team and so kind of adapting that extra
sentence on there of just understanding that there's a cost to making
that bet it's not just oh if i have a one out of

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 10 chance of scoring a thousand um then
i should definitely make that bet every time for a 10 bet yes you
absolutely should mathematically and in jeff's case he's had access to
unlimited money virtually unlimited money for 20 years he's been able to
re raise funding um and fund i mean they have 500 million dollar
mess-ups and they're like whoops that didn't work but a lot of us don't
have that and so um there's in the in the the book the road less stupid
he gives a context um that i think has really really been useful for me
even lately in making decisions about opportunities right it's the
things that i have to say no to and so the three questions are really
simple which is why i've been using them so much which is what's my
upside what's my downside and can i live assuming that the downside is
going to happen and so the third question stated a little bit
differently but that's how i'm using it and in phrasing the three
questions that way it's helped me so much in

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 saying no right in like man why don't
we try this new follow-up sequence so that we can get you know uh more
leads in well what's the what's my upside maybe i get a 10 boost what's
my downside i lose 50 because the test doesn't work or it bombs because
what i'm going against is a control which has already been tested
against other things and is working and can i live with my downside of
losing fifty percent for the hopes of gaining ten no i can't because i'm
gonna assume i'm gonna make that loss and so then i just say no and
what's happening is it's giving me so much attention back so that when
i'm making my bets because ultimately if you really think about what
business is it at it's very basic it's just betting which is why a lot
of entrepreneurs love gambling uh because it's what we do we do it in a
controlled setting it's like you know business is the ultimate version
of poker right like poker is a combination of skill and luck right
business i would say is even more skill and still a little bit of luck
and so it just has more skill under control but the other day there's
still bets they're replacing it's not just on black and

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 black and red it's should i hire a
salesperson first or should i spend more in this marketing campaign uh
should i test out this new follow-up sequence or should we try and run
seo uh or should we do cold outbound messenger right and so it's like
all of these things are decisions where you're choosing between two
different opportunities and i think if you apply that framework that
three question framework it's been i just like for me it's been a game
changer it's been so helpful um and we've seen you know huge reaps you
know we've reaped the benefit in the business just in the last 90 days
even during covid we've had some explosive growth i'll tell you more
about it in a couple months um but it's been in really trying to hone
that discipline and i feel like at every level you get that that
discipline muscle gets stronger and stronger and stronger and the things
that i'm able to say no to get better and better and better and so um
one of the things that if you look at if you study like charlie
montgomery they talk about the best the best bettors the best gamblers
actually bet the the least frequently

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 they actually bet the fewest amount of
times but when they met they bet big and so um i'm trying to really
apply that and when they bet big they bet on what they call no brainers
right it shouldn't be like you should have in their mind it virtually no
chance of not succeeding when you make the bet right and then if you
think about that then you're like well shoot there's i mean when will i
ever see those types of bets if you look at them over 40 years they only
have 15 bets that have created all of the the billions that they've been
able to generate 15 15 winning bets out of all the bets they've made
have been the winning bets that got them to where they are and i think
that in business it's a lot like that so let me just tell you one one
quick anecdote to wrap this up to make this real for you tell me if this
sounds realistic you get really excited about a new concept a new idea
that you think you're going to test out right and you uh you pitch it to
the team you let them know what's going to happen you're saying we're
starting on monday this could be the new way we do things

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 the team's not 100 um trained up on it
but they're kind of go you know fly as you go your speed is king let's
rock and roll with this thing and after a month or two months you look
back at your stats and they're pretty much the same maybe even a little
bit less but there's like three other things that happen during that
same period of time so like i don't know if it was this or it was
because of the new process honestly you know there's this and that and
then all of a sudden you realize that you didn't even get a definitive
answer on the test that you ran um and you definitely didn't get the
result that you were hoping for and so what ends up happening is that
your company and you incurred this enormous cost of change without real
like without any real upside and so in in thinking through the bets that
i'm making now i'm assuming the cost and what i mean like i'm assuming
that i'm gonna have the downside even the one that i'm understanding but
i'm assuming there's gonna be some that are unknown that i'm going to
have to incur and so when i'm making that assumption which is that third
question which is

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 and can i live with it assuming that
it does happen i ca it's just like it's been it's been so illuminating
for me and so helpful for me because what happens is you get in these
vicious cycles especially um especially if you're in an emotional
situation right because i know a lot of a lot of um where a lot of
business owners in general right now are cash constrained they're trying
to figure out what to do they're trying to pivot fast make fast
decisions on on incomplete information sometimes that's just the name of
the game right but in doing that um they're they're hoping for the hail
mary and so their internal optimism which is what leads them to be an
entrepreneur ends up ends up weighing against them it ends up stacking
the chips against them because that one thing which has been your your
hope right your greatest strengths can become your greatest weakness as
an entrepreneur there's no different right our optimism can become our
achilles heel because we believe that the chance of success is actually
greater than it really is and we underestimate the cost of taking

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 the bet and that's where we get right
and so when you go back to the casino and when you're considering the
bets and you're like man if this hits this could be ten times what we're
doing right now right but just remember you only might have three bets
to make and you got a one out of ten shot so use them wisely so anyways
i hope that was useful for you it's been incredibly useful for me um
i've been saying no to way more um tests and tweaks and variations and
and and and and just small things that would really distract the team
and just saying guys we're just gonna keep we're gonna keep focusing on
executing we're gonna keep focusing on doing better at the fundamentals
and it continues to pay dividends because the team doesn't have to be
scattered they just have to think how can we get one percent better
every day rather than one percent better for two weeks and then change
everything and then one percent better for two weeks and then change
everything right um where they never actually get to get that long-term
compounding uh improvement which is what ultimately will separate you
over time so like i said hope that was valuable for

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 you it's been it's been a huge lesson
for me and in studying some of the the greats the all-time greats seeing
how they make decisions seeing where they place their bets um i wish i
had learned it earlier um but hopefully i can pass you know at least
that that nugget on too because it's been really helpful for me so lots
of love keeping awesome hope you ever made saturday and um hopefully a
beautiful view here from the from bear lake and i'll catch you guys soon
\[Music\]
