https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noO8ERpgMr4

1 00:00:00.000 --\> 00:01:00.000 what's going on everyone it's alex
mosey uh ceo of allied prestige labs gym launch we've done 120 million
dollars in sales the last four years and i have nothing to sell you and
so today what i want to talk about is the three entrepreneurial evil
ease of entrepreneurship all right so these are the three kind of ease
that i that i see over and over again from the entrepreneurs that we
work with directly in our portfolio companies but also in the
entrepreneurs that i talk to in general the biggest mistakes that are
made stem from these three evil e's and so what i'm gonna do is i'm
gonna i'm gonna walk through all three of them i'll tell you an easy way
to try and at least attenuate the mistakes that you can make from them
and then at the end i'll show you the one that i think is actually the
most evil of them all all right so the first e is expectations all right
and the reason that this one is so evil is that most of the time us
entrepreneurs we think that everything has to happen immediately right i
had an entrepreneur not that long ago reach out to me and say hey how
can you know if we work together how can you

2 00:01:00.000 --\> 00:02:00.000 guarantee that i'm going to get to a
million dollars a month within the next six months and they were
currently i think doing a hundred thousand dollars a month um and that
kind of expectation and mindset is literally what will destroy you in
business because what happens is you set these arbitrary because all the
goals are arbitrary for the most part right these numbers that in your
mind make you feel good or make you feel accomplished and you set these
things up there with not a huge path of getting there and you put an
arbitrary timeline on it and then you try and force yourself into it and
so what ends up happening is you take shortcuts you make hasty high risk
decisions and most of the time you end up destroying the business and
taking 10 steps backwards and so expectations that we set for ourselves
and our teams we want to be intolerant of anything other than excellence
but focused far more on the process than the outcome so if you could
shift the expectations from outcome-based expectations to process-based

3 00:02:00.000 --\> 00:03:00.000 expectations and then meet that with
the intolerance of excellence right or tolerating only x links excuse me
then you can help mitigate expectation evils right where you basically
destroy your business as a result of thinking that you have to be a
million dollars a month or a hundred thousand dollars a month or ten
thousand a month or whatever that number is for you by x time right what
i see again and again and again of the people who make way more money
than i do is they have reasonable expectations that would be
unreasonable to achieve based on process right i have a mentor right now
who who always repeats the same thing he says good process drives good
results and i just that's that's been something i've been trying to
ingrain in my mind good process drives good results all right so that's
evil number one the second evil is emotions all right the second thing
that will kill your business all right if you look at the biggest ceos
in the world you look at the bezos as you look at you know you look at
you look at monger

4 00:03:00.000 --\> 00:04:00.000 you look at buffett you look at all
these guys right and what you may notice is that they are very devoid of
emotion and it's not that they're like emotionless people it's more so
that they try and stay as even-handed as possible with the decisions and
this is just something that i've observed and so here's a telltale sign
that you can tell for yourself if you're if you're suffering from this
because sometimes it's hard especially for guys for us to be like i'm
emotional right now right but like we're human we have emotions and so
if you're if you're looking and you flip-flop a lot on decisions as in
you're presented the same data and one day you feel this way and another
way you feel another day you feel this way and literally how you process
the decision flip-flops all the time it's because you're being subject
to emotions now if you look at the trajectory of a business and the and
the hundreds and thousands of decisions that we have to make as an
entrepreneur you could see how quickly these thousands of decisions can
spin this way or this way on this path based on your emotions and it can
be the right way or the wrong way and so i'll give you here's here's two
two pieces to this it's it's very

5 00:04:00.000 --\> 00:05:00.000 difficult to eliminate emotions right
but if you can detect when you are emotional then you can decrease the
speed of your decision-making which is usually contrary to what most
people do when they are emotional they speed up their decision-making
process when they're in emotions all right and so if you feel urgency so
for me these are these are things that are like red flags if i feel like
i have to make a decision buy today or whatever most times it's
completely fictitious and made up in my mind and so what i try and do is
extend the time horizon between the the feeling i have and when i
actually decide to take action i can't tell you the amount of huge
mistakes that i was able to avoid simply by sleeping it off right giving
my myself 24 hours to think on it right and a lot of times the entire
world looks different when you wake up in the morning and so that should
frighten you because it frightens me how can the world look so different
only you know after nine hours of sleep right it's because our emotional
state's different and so this is a a tactic that i do like

6 00:05:00.000 --\> 00:06:00.000 a lot um for managing emotions so the
best decisions that we make for ourselves in my opinion or that i have
made for myself have come from a state of contentment and so there have
probably been moments that's why when you go on vacation you feel like
you have a lot of clarity it's because you're in the correct emotional
state to make the right decisions because you're not operating from a
place of scarcity right you're not operating from a place of have to
you're not operating from a place of deficiency where i am not good
enough right when you're operating from a place of contentment um and
i'm not saying we're always content that's not my point right the point
is that you can probably recognize those times where you sit back and
you're feeling great you know you have a lot of gratitude for an
experience or or things that give you perspective and so it's in those
time periods where you should make big decisions for your life and then
know that you made them in the proper emotional state this is something
that i'm actively focused a lot on for me because

7 00:06:00.000 --\> 00:07:00.000 the being in the correct making the
right call is basically my only job now it's really just proper decision
making and so when i sense myself in a well-rested content you know full
of gratitude mood that is when i want to look at my most complex issues
my most complex multi-variable you know decisions and say this is what i
think the best course of action is and then sticking with that even when
the the the trials and tribulations that are inevitably going to happen
as a result of the decision later down the road and so that's my that's
my hack is i can't get around emotion i try and extend time horizons
whenever i feel urgency and then if um if i'm going to make emotions
from an emotional state i try and go from a place of contentment and
gratitude and if i do not feel that state i don't usually make the
decision so think about that so if you have like moments when you're
playing with your kids and you look back you're like man life's awesome
that's when you make the decisions that you need to make about your life
all right because from there you'll be

8 00:07:00.000 --\> 00:08:00.000 operating with a much longer time
horizon and that's i think my way i think this this is doing it that way
will trick yourself into extending your time horizon which ultimately
will lead to better decision making and the third e um of the third
evils evilly oops i'm writing down evil um is or are excuse me are
expenses all right so the first two one is what you think should happen
the emotions affect how you think it should happen and the expenses are
the the the it's like the cloud and the dirt right are the things that
that we incur along the way that increase the risk of it not occurring
right so if you think about expenses in general they are liabilities
they are risk that we take on and so if if our goal is as entrepreneurs
is to increase our upside and decrease our downside right that is kind
of entrepreneurship and business in general right then actively thinking
about decreasing our downside our liabilities is a way of increasing the
likelihood that our expectations are met right and so one of the biggest
mistakes

9 00:08:00.000 --\> 00:09:00.000 and biggest evils that will destroy
entrepreneurial businesses is because they set massive expectations when
they are emotional and emotionally deficient because they need to
satisfy you know emotional needs that their parents didn't meet when
they were kids they then incur expenses that they shouldn't otherwise
have to meet these demands that are completely arbitrary and made up in
their minds right and so i see this one happen all the time it's like
hey we want to scale we just hired four more people so that we can scale
it doesn't work that way get the growth first and then the growth will
pay for the people don't put the cart in front of the horse the only
exception to this is if you have like commission only uh you know reps
like sales reps things like that but most other times 99 of other times
when you are incurring greater expenses it's not like it's it should not
be to quote anticipate growth right growth

10 00:09:00.000 --\> 00:10:00.000 will pay the expenses and if you need
to quote delay something for a smaller period of time so that you can
shore up your infrastructure then you can do that and you would be
amazed at how much flexibility there is right it's much easier to solve
problems with cash in the bank with with contracts signed and you're an
entrepreneur like solving problems is what we do right and so if you're
in that state think about how much you eat like if you need to if you
have the immediate demand right you will solve the problem and the
people will come i promise you all right one of the biggest mistakes
that i mean i've made this one so many times um i hired 25 support reps
in anticipation of growth for our supplement company prestige labs two
years ago and i currently now have four people that handle more business
than the 25 did think about that and so what happens is when you
anticipate growth you don't even know what the growth is going to

11 00:10:00.000 --\> 00:11:00.000 look like and so you basically just
put people there the culture of the team decreases the morale of the
team decreases they're being less efficient and when you have lots of
people you don't think about driving good process right you just think
like we'll just throw more bodies at the problem and that's a horrible
way to go about business it's also not a good customer experience in the
long run and so if we can adjust our expectations to be reasonable and
based on process not outcome by managing our emotions and making
decisions from a place of contentment right so that we don't set these
deficient expectations on ourselves and our business that we have to
satisfy because we must be a certain way by this time then we won't
incur expenses and risk that is undo and not necessarily that will that
will likely destroy our business when it was a hundred percent based on
our false made-up expectations about what we thought should happen
should and so when i look at the things that undo entrepreneurs and
entrepreneurial businesses these are the three evil e's

12 00:11:00.000 --\> 00:12:00.000 expectations emotions and uh expenses
and i told you at the beginning that i would share the one that i think
is the most deadly and it's this guy in my opinion expectations because
what we believe because these are basically beliefs just said
differently right another way to say this and this is this is a really a
really good way that i got from a different coach to reframe beliefs is
she said if you just call all your beliefs assumptions they will be far
more malleable and it's such a it's words matter right and if we call
our beliefs assumptions they become far more changeable for ourselves
and so if i say this is my assumption what do you guys think rather than
this is my expectation what do you guys think see how different that
feels but they function the same way right but one of them is
approachable one of them is malleable one of them can take new feedback
and new inputs and new data and the other one is a must a should a have
to right

13 00:12:00.000 --\> 00:13:00.000 and so if we can readjust our
expectations right and be focused on our product over delivering
delighting the customers right being intolerant of anything but
excellence in the process and because of that our emotions stay more
stable because we're not missing goals that we have to hit right which
then create more scarcity more deficiency more more guttural feelings
that then make us shorten our decision-making loops that cause poorer
decisions and then cause us to make poor decisions that create expenses
all right so this is a loop that self-reinforces and it can either be a
virtuous or vicious cycle and so it starts at the top and spins all the
way around and so those are the three evil ease of entrepreneurship and
entrepreneurial mistakes that hopefully you can use some of these
tactics to to avoid all right don't don't hire before you need it let
the growth pay for the expenses when you're making decisions try and
extend the the space this is what i have found

14 00:13:00.000 --\> 00:14:00.000 effective for me and try and make
decisions from a point of gratitude and contentment and then keep the
expectations driven around process not outcome and if you can keep the
high like keep your high expectations but keep them on process not on
what has to happen because when you reverse it the other way you'll
start making terrible decisions so anyways i hope that was valuable for
you i hope that makes sense like you know subscribe all the all the
dings and whistles that you know youtube folks are supposed to say so
anyways lots of love keep being awesome i'll catch you guys on the flip
side bye
