Thoughts, highlights and stories from the week:
(1) What makes someone dangerous is not how much they work but how much work they do.
You don't need to do more. You actually need to get the big stuff done.
If I could make only one thing happen this year that if it occurred would cause the remainder of my goals to become accomplished or irrelevant by consequence, what would that one thing be?
The answer to this becomes your priority.
How you allocate resources to achieve this priority becomes your strategy.
People fail at business because they are unwilling to make tradeoffs. They make their PRIORITY... PRIORITIES.
This means that they never accomplish THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.
Don't be that person. Be the one who gets the MOST IMPORTANT THING done.
(2) Why the f*** are you aiming low?
Big goals and small goals take the same amount of work. And big goals are actually energizing. So why the f*** are you aiming low?
People wildly underestimate the upside and wildly over estimate the downside when they set their goals.
We want to be very BIG in terms of what we want to do.
(3) There is a certain amount of faith you must have that future you will figure it out.
You have to make that first bet on yourself one time and see yourself figure it out, so you can out more and more on future you and believe that:
"I don’t know how to get there but I know I'm not going to stop till I do."
Having that level of faith does come from doing small things early that progressively get bigger and bigger bets on yourself.
You need to go all-in on you. Because no one else is going to. And you are going to get the highest returns that way.
Only you know if your goals are realistic and only time will tell if you're right.
As a rule of thumb: never listen to someone whose dreams for your life are smaller than yours.
(4) There is a certain amount of faith you must have that future you will figure it out.
You have to make that first bet on yourself one time and see yourself figure it out, so you can out more and more on future you and believe that:
“I don’t know how to get there but I know I’m not going to stop till I do.”
Having that level of faith does come from doing small things early that progressively get bigger and bigger bets on yourself.
You need to go all-in on you. Because no one else is going to. And you are going to get the highest returns that way.
Only you know if your goals are realistic and only time will tell if you’re right.
As a rule of thumb: never listen to someone whose dreams for your life are smaller than yours.
(5) If you want high performance teams then the biggest signal you can give, even more than promotions, is who you fire.
Think about the great teams that exist. The elite forced in the military for example get there from a process of elimination. We have to be willing to make cuts. The people who are clogging the business are the mediocre middle. They clock in and clock out. You don’t want that in your business.
Finding your SealTeam6 comes from cutting the bottom more than finding people at the top. If your team average is 140, hiring another 140 will maintain the average. But cutting the 80 will increase the average!
Our ability to judge a human from one or two conversations and a document is limited. But our ability to judge their output by what they do, much much better. So hire slow and fire fast should be the norm.
If someone always seems to have things which go wrong, it’s usually not that luck is against them. It’s just that they don’t know how to create the conditions for success. And they don’t know how to maximize their own livelihoods.
You will have very high quality people if you don’t tolerate mediocre people. Nothing turns off high quality people like low quality people.
And as you continue to win more you will continue to attract more high quality people which also means that what was once good is now mediocre. Which means that people need to grow with you or they need to get out.
Yes this is harsh. But if you want a high performance team it is what it takes.
You need to continuously recalibrate. You have to eliminate. If you want to have the most high IQ per square foot remove everything that’s not high IQ. In sales you need high EQ.
This requires you to be bold. Which is difficult because we want to be nice people. We understand people have family, kids, are trying to make a livelihood. But you need to think that you are doing everyone in the business a disservice by allowing this person to be here.
So do you want to have local or global empathy? Do you want to have empathy for the person or for everyone on the team?
When we shift from local to global it means that you get to deal with the local pain while everyone else gets the global benefit. The reverse is that you get the local benefit and everyone else suffers the global pain.
So we have to be willing to take the emotional pain by doing what’s required to protect preserve and proliferate the culture of high performance that we ultimately want to build.
Despite AI, you are still going to be dealing with humans. It’s the messiness of the emotions that makes it so hard.
You got to honor the individual - do it with respect.
But you also have to honor the rest of the team and make the hard calls because no one else is going to do it. It’s literally our job. It’s our call. And it’s our responsibility.
The high performers will attract more high performers and the average will keep rising.
(6) Success is the best form of revenge. If that kind of energy drives you then channel it as fuel to create the life you want.
Stop. Recharge. Continue... Everyday.
Harsh
I spent sixteen years helping build a business till it sold. Now I'm helping build something much bigger. I share what I learn on the way, on WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and this Sunday Email.