Introduction: What You Need to Unlearn to Make Real Money
There are a few things that you need to unlearn if you really want to make that kind of money. I’m talking about core ideas that used to work but just don’t anymore. Advice everyone’s following that keeps them stuck. I’ve coached thousands of business owners, and the ones who do the best are the ones who totally reframe how they think about making money. So, we’re going to talk about six things you need to stop believing. And let me tell you, the last one ruins most people without them even knowing it.
Point Number Six: You Need a Good Plan
Starting with point number six, you need a good plan. Most people think, “I need a solid plan before I start.” They sit down, and they talk to people, and they research, and they get ready. It’s kind of like the person who cleans the house before the cleaning lady comes. The point is for you to just take action. No business plan has ever survived first contact with the customer. Never. I still remember when I wrote my first business plan. Not only did I follow none of it because those were all just guesses, but I later found it on my hard drive years later. And when I opened it, I laughed at how different my life was than what I wrote down there. That’s usually what happens in business plans. Instead, you should realize that the only plan is to do anything that gets feedback from the customer. Everybody wants to start perfectly. That’s the wrong strategy. The plan is to start messy. When you’re creating content, post 80% good enough. Post anything. An imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time.
Point Number Five: You Need to Work Hard
So now you’re taking action, but if you’re doing it the old way, you’re still going to burn yourself out because the next thing you need to unlearn is point number five. You need to work hard. Everyone says work hard, grind harder, put in the hours, and bad work scares. That’s the answer. Work hard. That’s for people who never move forward. What they mean to say that most people don’t hear is to do the thing that you’re avoiding. I believe our fear is a perfect compass for where we should be focusing our time. Cuz fear stands for false evidence appearing real, which means on the other side of that is everything you’ve wanted. Just because you can grind for 18 hours doesn’t mean you’re making any progress. Don’t confuse movement with progress. Stanford actually came out with some research that said that if people work more than 50 hours, there’s a massive decline in productivity. Anyway, someone working 70 hours usually gets the same amount of work done as someone working 55 hours. It’s just the person that sits down and does the thing that moves the business forward, moves their life forward in those 50 hours are going to get better results. The brain tattoo I want you to put on your brain is that the stuff that scares you is the stuff that shapes you. So, here’s how you can find and tackle the scary work. I want you to look at the next week of your calendar, and I want you to circle the things that you’ve written down that you want to do that you know scare you a little bit that make you uncomfortable. Maybe it’s creating content. Maybe it’s making sales calls. Maybe it’s trying to recruit somebody. Be honest with yourself. Now, frontload your day with those tasks. You want to start with the scary stuff. Number three, tell somebody. Tell somebody you’re scared. Tell somebody that that’s what you’re starting with. Tell somebody to create accountability within yourself so that you deliver on it. Oftentimes, we’ll do more for other people that we’ve committed to than we’ll do for ourselves. So this keeps you from hiding. The last one is you got to celebrate the attempt, not just the outcome. If it doesn’t work, you got feedback, but at least you did it. And I would celebrate that. You’ve got to honor the fact that you tried, even if it didn’t get the result. You either win or you learn. And you have to celebrate the learning moments, too. I know there’s a lot of scary stuff when you’re trying to grow your business, and maybe you’re trying to cross seven figures. But if you want my cheat sheet, I put together a full workbook of everything I do in all my companies to get it to seven figures and way beyond to make it easy and less scary. In it, I teach you everything you actually should learn to go from zero to millions step by step. If you want my copy, just find me on Instagram and DM me the word YouTube scale and I’ll send you a copy right over.
Point Number Four: Learning from the Best
So now you’ve learned how to tackle the scary stuff, not just the stuff that keeps you busy. But the next mistake is when people look around at who’s winning and just blindly copy them. Which brings us to the next thing you need to unlearn. Point number four, learning from the best. See, I know you hear model, model, model, learn from the best. Who’s doing it? Who’s winning? Learn from them. The challenge that most people run into is that they come from a big company. They come from a Fortune 500 company. They come from a winning team. And when they start at zero, they try to copy the playbooks of a Fortune 500, a winning team. When they have a fraction of the market, a fraction of the team, a fraction of the customers, you’re copying the wrong playbook for the stage you’re at. And if you act that way when you’re small, you will kill your company. And there’s data to support this. this I think, was the startup genome that said that like 74% of small businesses fail because they try to act too big way too early because they’re copying the expensive strategies of giant corporations, and they’re just out of sequence. As I said, they have the resources, they have the brand recognition, they have the customers, they have the money, and you have none of that. So stop copying their playbooks. I remember when I was building my company, Clarity, there was a company that got bought by AT&T 10 years prior that did something similar to what I was doing. So, I thought, hey, I’ll just R&D, rob, and duplicate. I’ll go in there. I’ll look at all their sequences, their emails, their conversion funnels, everything. I’ll just borrow that inspiration and replicate it using my product. It turned out the money they were making, and all the funnels they designed was to optimize for people to call psychics. I know, nobody told me that. I couldn’t figure it out. The way I turned it around is I realized I had to start from scratch. Look at who I was selling, how I was selling it, who was paying me, and then figure out who at my stage in the early days was similar, and go borrow their playbooks, borrow their positioning, borrow their ideas for creativity because we’re at the same level. People don’t realize that when Facebook launched, it launched at Harvard. If you’re launching a social network and you’re trying to compete against Facebook today, the same way they built today, you’re going to fail. Don’t copy Tesla when you’re just trying to build an electric go-kart. So, if you can’t copy big companies, who do you learn from? Well, here’s my filter. First, find three companies that are similar to you and your stage that are just maybe 6 or 12 months ahead of you. Number two is then you got to use these really cool tools, similar web, meta ad library, built with Ahrefs. These are all incredible tools to essentially reverse engineer how these businesses were built, their funnels, their traffic, their strategies. You can figure out who their number one partner is, that’s generating 80% of the traffic. Maybe you can reach out to them and get them to send the traffic to you. Once you do that, copy the structure. Take their frameworks, their best practices, but swap in your own offer. This isn’t copy-paste. This is understanding the methodology for how they’ve built the revenue so far, so that you can start with the right blueprint. And finally, run it for 90 days minimum. I can’t tell you how often people said, “I tried that. It didn’t work.” Well, you tried it once. How about you try it for 90 days? You put it in place. You let the offer get eyeballs. Don’t get creative yet. Just do the one thing that you’ve seen work and see if it could work for you.
Point Number Three: Take Your Time with Hiring
So, now you’re taking action and working smart. But here’s one area where old advice will absolutely wreck you if you follow it. And that’s when you hear people say, “Point number three, take your time with hiring.” The old advice was hire slow, fire slow. This is where you had people work for companies for 25 years. Today, that advice is completely wrong. In the new world, it’s all about moving faster. You need to hire fast. You need to test fast. And you need to fire fast. Because if you wait too long to bring someone on, you miss the window. Top talent is only available at certain times in their life where they’re frustrated with a boss, or they got pissed off that somebody did something. And if you just happen to be the person who calls, give them an opportunity; they’re going to jump ship. You need to be quicker in your ability to hire people. And even worse, if you bring somebody on and they’re totally not a right fit and they don’t add any value, don’t prolong the decision to move them on from your team because that’ll drag down your whole freaking team. I remember back in the day, I hired this tech genius at my company. And I was paying them six figures. 4 months in, I’m paying this guy, and I get a call one day from Procter & Gamble, number one company in the world. The CTO wanted to personally call me to let me know the guy on-site was causing issues with their team. And I’m sitting there going, “Here’s a guy that I hire that’s supposed to be the expert, supposed to be the genius, and he’s the one messing up.” But I feel like I can’t let him go cuz he clearly knows more than me. He’s technically a genius. I was waiting too long to fire him, which almost cost me that contract, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every week that you have the wrong person costs you twice their salary. So, let me teach you how I hire across all my companies. And we use this five-step process every time. The first thing is that you have to run ads to find a lot of candidates. Most people, when they recruit, just don’t have a lot of people applying. So, they just take the first person who looks decent. We spend about 5% of their annual compensation, the total comp on ads. I’m talking LinkedIn, Indeed, and local. If it’s a local job, the role pays 100 grand. I spent $5,000 on ads. Most people spend no money on recruiting. Number two is to have them complete a one-minute video explaining why they want to join your team and answer some other questions, because that’ll help you sort out way quicker. I can tell in a video based on how somebody’s communicating, what books they like to read, and they tell me about why they want to work there. If they’re even in the realm of potential, cuz I always hire the soul, train for the role, I can see in the video if I got the right soul. If they pass that, then the next step is to have them do a cognitive test or some kind of behavioral test. I use predictive index. You can use whatever you want. There are tons of them. And it’s not a nogo decision, like if they don’t pass a certain level, but it just gives me more data to inform myself and the teams when they’re making the hiring decision. It understands their default, who they are as a person at some levels, their IQ, or their ability to process information, which is going to tell me how they’re going to work on my team. I can even compare them to other people on my team to see who they’re most like. Number four is you pick the three best candidates and give them a paid test project. My whole rule is I can’t work with you till I work with you, which means I have to give them a simulation of how it’s going to work on our team that they have to do before they even join our team. Usually, it’s about a 10-hour project, and I’ll pay them for that if they want. But the idea is for them to get to know us and us to know them, and all three candidates do the same project, so I can evaluate their output against each other. The last one is to let your team make the final decision. I give everybody on a hiring team the veto power to choose who they work with. Why? That allows them to have ownership of hiring. Mean, when they start, they want to see them win because they were involved in it. They don’t feel like you’re pushing people on them, and it’s just the right way to hire. The trick is to move fast at every stage. And honestly, if it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a heck no. Like, just honor your gut.
Point Number Two: You’ve Got to Be Well-Rounded
So, now we’ve got you moving fast, and you’re building your team. Awesome. Next, we need to unlearn something that you’ve probably heard not only in business, but also in life. Point number two, you’ve got to be well-rounded. Everybody’s going to say, you’ve got to be well-rounded. You’ve got to be the jack of all trades. You’ve got to know a little bit about everything. But being good at everything means you’re not great at anything. The world’s best people are tip of the spear great at something. They’ve decided to master a skill. People making real money got really good at one thing. Everything else they outsource, or they ignore. In many ways, you have to almost be willingly ignorant to not learn other stuff cuz you could, so that you have the time to become masterful at one thing. It’s like an OCD focus level of attention. You have to have people go like, “Oh my god, you’re so intense.” It’s like, “I’m trying to be the best at something. And if they give you a hard time, remind them. If I were going for Olympic gold as a skier, you wouldn’t give me a hard time for training. You wouldn’t give me a hard time for hiring a coach. You wouldn’t give me a hard time for studying other people. That’s what I’m trying to do in my career.” It’s like my buddy Tom, a brilliant marketer. And because he could do a lot of stuff, he did everything. He was spending 70 hours a week running his company, but he was stuck at 30K because he was doing everything. And I was like, “Bro, you’re really good at marketing. I dare you to just do marketing to focus on it.” He changed his focus, and revenue doubled 200% in 60 days. His work week dropped to 38 hours a week. He was making way more money working less because he decided not to be well-rounded and instead to go all-in. The highest performers I know know exactly what to be bad at. So, how can you figure out exactly what you need to focus on so that you can be world-class at? Here’s how to do it. First, you have to list everything that you do in your business. Do a full dump and audit every single task that’s taking your time. Then, circle the ones that give you energy that you enjoy doing. I love selling. I love persuading. I love enrolling people into my world. That’s the hardest one to let go. But the good news is, when you’re starting off, keep that one if that’s your thing. Whatever gives you energy and makes you money, keep those. And then number three, everything else. So create a big bucket of that stuff. Get somebody else to do it for you. And I know you’re like, “I have no money.” Find an intern. Stop doing it. Ask for help. Maybe block time so it’s just way more efficient if you actually have to do it. But I really want you to give yourself the space to do the thing that makes you money that lights you up. The goal is to spend 80% of your time doing the things that light you up and make you money so that you have 20% of your time to keep learning and growing to find out other ways you can make yourself better. So stop trying to be decent at everything and be great at one thing. And if you want to go deeper on this, it’s a whole chapter in my book, Buy Back Your Time. But if you just start with what I share with you, it’s going to give you massive results.
Point Number One: Follow Your Passion
So now your focus is awesome. You’re getting really good at one thing. But none of that matters if you’re going in the wrong direction. Which is why the last thing you need to unlearn is point number one. Follow your passion. Everybody says follow your passion. But here’s what I discovered. You could be passionate about something and still be a failure. You could say, “I want to do this because I’m more passionate about that.” And still never win because you always just default to your passion and avoid the work and avoid the monotonous and avoid being consistent. That doesn’t work either. Passion without a market is just an expensive hobby, you know, and the data shows this. 42% of businesses fail because they built a product nobody actually needed, because the entrepreneur was passionate about the product. They fell in love with the product. They didn’t fall in love with the problem. See, if you fall in love with the problem, you don’t care about the solution. Then you’ll go find the right solution for the problem. That’s what you should be passionate about. You should be passionate about solving a problem for somebody. The real answer isn’t just being passionate or doing things just for the money. It’s finding the sweet spot. It’s like my buddy Matt. He was super into fitness, and he thought, I need to build an app. And then he built the app. He spent like a hundred grand to build the app and launch the app. Nobody wanted the app. When he talked to the people who said you should build the app, he realized their number one problem was being consistent. He didn’t need an app for that. It’s funny how people get passionate about a tool instead of working backwards from the customer. When you talk to the customer, you say, “What is actually hard about getting this result, and you build a solution for that problem?” That’s how you get rich. So all he did was he pivoted away from the app, and he said, “Okay, I know I spent a lot of money. I’m going to leave that there, and I’m going to go get passionate about creating accountability.” So he created a coaching program where he created accountability as a core cornerstone. That same passion with a different approach was making him 12 grand a month in 90 days. Follow problems, not passions. The money follows problems.
The Framework to Find Your Sweet Spot
So here’s how you can find something that, yes, you have passion around, but that you can actually monetize. The framework is called icky guy. Essentially, you draw four big circles, each one representing a different question. And what we want to find out is what’s in the middle. So the first question is, what do you love doing? You know what I love doing? I love talking to people. I love creating content that I know could be seen by millions of people because it feels efficient. I’m a nerd when it comes to effective. Second question you want to ask yourself. The other circle is what are you good at? What do you feel that other people tell you, like, “Hey man, you’re really good at that.” That’s where you want to go looking. What are the things that you do naturally? You’re just like, “I don’t know. Why do people keep saying I’m good at this?” That’s the answer to that question. The third circle is what does the world need? As much as you have a need to print paper, the world doesn’t want printed paper anymore. And then the fourth big circle is what can you get paid for? And that one’s easy to answer because you can figure out what people are already spending money on. If they’re spending money on it, you can get paid to do it. If you look at those four questions and think about what fits in the middle, that’s your sweet spot. That’s what you should be building your business around. But you need all four. So, I encourage you to scroll back, hit pause, watch it, fill it out, and then come back to find the overlap. That’s your direction.
Final Thoughts: Unlearn the Old Game
You see, none of the other stuff matters if you’re building in the wrong direction. This is the filter for everyone. It gets you alignment. So, all of that will hopefully get you reentered because most of what you’ve been taught just doesn’t work anymore. The world has completely changed, and it changes almost monthly right now, and the rules change with it. But you can still win if you unlearn the old game and play this new one using these new principles. All you need to do is just pick one from this video and unlearn it this week. Maybe it’s taking action. Maybe it’s not trying to copy somebody’s playbook that’s way bigger than you. Maybe it’s deciding to really double down on what you’re passionate about the world needs, and they’re willing to pay for it. Maybe today is the day you start. Whatever it is, leave me a comment below and let me know which of these philosophies you need to hear today to unlearn and get yourself set up for the future. And remember, if you’re serious about scaling your business past seven figures, just find me on Instagram, DM me the word YouTube scale, and I’ll send you my full workbook on how to scale your business and buy back your time. And if you want to learn how AI changed business forever, click here, and I’ll see you on the other side.
