A basketball coach once sat me down and asked a question that stuck with me for years.

At the time, I was obsessed with basketball. I practiced roughly four hours a day on top of team practices and games. But I also wanted to be in a school play.

The rehearsals didn’t conflict with basketball. The performances didn’t conflict with basketball. I simply had another interest I wanted to pursue.

My coach sat me down and asked if I wanted to become a “jack of all trades and a master of none.”

I felt ashamed.

So I quit the play.

If you prefer to listen check out the link on Youtube. If you prefer reading skip down and keep going.

Within a month I injured my knee and spent most of that fall and winter doing rehabilitation exercises anyway. Ironically, I ended up doing neither.

Years later I learned that the quote was incomplete.

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

For years I thought this article would be about proving my coach wrong.

Now I think it’s about something entirely different.

As an employer, I’ve learned that the people we hire and the people we end up valuing most are not always the same people.

When businesses hire, we tend to look for specialists.

We need a salesperson.

We need a technician.

We need an accountant.

We need a dispatcher.

We need a marketer.

We hire for a specific role because we have a specific need.

But reality rarely stays inside job descriptions.

Customers ask questions we’ve never heard before.

Technology changes.

Markets shift.

Competitors appear.

Opportunities emerge.

And suddenly the most valuable person in the company is not necessarily the person with the deepest expertise in a single area.

It’s often the person with multiple competencies who can adapt to a new challenge.

To be clear, I’m not arguing against expertise.

In fact, I believe almost nothing is worth pursuing unless you’re willing to become at least somewhat good at it. Good enough that someone would pay you to do it. Good enough that your opinion carries weight because it is backed by experience.

The goal is not to know a little about everything.

The goal is to become competent in multiple things.

There is a huge difference.

A dilettante collects interests.

A specialized generalist builds competencies.

One collects experiences.

The other builds capabilities.

One of the great misconceptions about expertise is that elite performers are often less specialized than they appear.

Some elite surgeons are accomplished pianists. Others spend years playing video games. Both activities can improve dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and fine motor control.

Some professional basketball players take ballet lessons because balance, flexibility, coordination, and body awareness improve performance on the court.

The public sees the surgeon and assumes surgery.

The public sees the athlete and assumes basketball.

What they don’t see are the reinforcing competencies operating beneath the surface.

Most people think of skills as additions.

I think of them as multipliers.

Sales becomes more valuable when combined with psychology.

Leadership becomes more valuable when combined with communication.

Technical expertise becomes more valuable when combined with business knowledge.

The magic often isn’t in the individual skill.

It’s in the combination.

One of my biggest pet peeves as an employer is hearing someone say, “That’s not my job.”

Now, there are times when it’s perfectly appropriate to explain that you aren’t comfortable with a task or don’t yet possess the expertise to do it well.

But “that’s not my job” often communicates something deeper.

It communicates a devotion to a lane rather than a devotion to solving problems.

The employees who become indispensable are rarely the ones who only know how to do one thing.

They’re the people willing to learn.

They’re the people willing to apply what they already know to new situations.

They’re the people who understand that businesses do not encounter the same challenge every day.

A heating company may never be asked to build a rocket.

But it may be asked to cool a facility.

It may be asked to heat a greenhouse.

The employee who understands heat is useful.

The employee who understands heat, customer needs, business, and a little botany becomes far more valuable.

Reality demands more than one thing.

That’s why I’ve noticed that employees who are only comfortable inside an extremely narrow lane often become less valuable over time. Not because they aren’t talented, but because real world problems rarely arrive packaged inside a single discipline.

The people who thrive are often the ones with multiple reinforcing competencies.

They can pivot.

They can translate.

They can adapt.

And adaptation is becoming increasingly important.

Artificial intelligence is already replacing specialized tasks that once required years of training. Software can now perform work that entire departments used to handle.

The employee who understands only that task becomes vulnerable.

The employee who understands the broader system can move to wherever value is being created next.

For much of my life I felt pulled between different worlds.

I love literature and philosophy.

I love sports.

I’ve been invited into rooms because I could sit down at a piano.

I’ve made a substantial portion of my living through real estate and business.

The company I’ve spend the most time in required me to understand a lot of applied physics.

And in another life I’ve spent hours talking with everyone from homeless individuals to CEOs and elected officials because of my work in journalism.

For a long time I wondered if those interests were competing.

Now I think they were compounding.

I obviously don’t use my study of basketball to make a living, and yet, there are so many things that I’ve been able to understand deeper than my non-team sports colleagues about where to find opportunities in business because of those specific experiences. And its because I can see the problem, not necessarily as “itself” but as a set of patterns that I’ve seen before in a different context. I can see that pattern has shown up on the basketball court, maybe dealing with angular momentum or maybe dealing with how to bait a defense. Either way, I can borrow from how we resolved those challenges on the court and overlay that same resolution onto that same parallel pattern in a completely different context. Sometimes someone who’s been stuck in the same industry their entire life doesn’t realize that a certain problem has already been solved, but for a different industry. All they need is to translate it into their own.

The world consciously celebrates specialists because specialization is easy to understand.

But I’ve come to believe the world quietly rewards people who can connect ideas, transfer knowledge, and adapt to changing circumstances.

The future will always need specialists.

We will always need surgeons, engineers, scientists, and master craftsmen.

But I suspect the future will increasingly reward specialized generalists.

People with multiple reinforcing competencies.

People who can solve problems that don’t fit neatly into a single category.

People who understand that value is created where their abilities intersect with someone else’s needs.

And the more places you can create those intersections, the more valuable you become.

Subscribe now

Five Practical Takeaways

1. Become genuinely competent in every skill you choose to pursue.

2. Learn skills that reinforce one another rather than collecting random hobbies, but don’t be thrown if your interests do not, at first, appear to have connection. That will come in time.

3. Look for opportunities outside your job description to expand your capabilities.

4. Study adjacent fields that might strengthen your primary expertise.

5. Measure your value by the problems you can solve, not by the title on your business card.

   

   Leave a comment

I have met very few people who would openly describe themselves as arrogant. Most of us assume we see ourselves fairly clearly, assume we understand our strengths and weaknesses reasonably well, and tend to believe that if pride exists, it is usually somebody else’s problem. We don’t walk around thinking we are better than everybody else. We might even use self-deprecating language and jokes. Yet the older I get, the more convinced I become that one of the great struggles of adulthood, whether in business, marriage, politics, fatherhood, or faith, is that many of us are fighting reality without even realizing it.

If you prefer to listen, follow the link below to youtube. If not, skip down and keep reading.

The businessman who believes he is a visionary when he is actually disorganized. The employee convinced he is perpetually overlooked when, in truth, he has not yet earned greater responsibility. The politician who sees himself as persuasive while exhausting everyone around him. The father who believes he is deeply present because he pays the bills, while his children increasingly feel disconnected from him. The spouse who insists they are easy to live with while everyone else adjusts their behavior to keep the peace.

What if humility is not thinking less of yourself?

What if humility is simply accuracy?

The older I get, the more I suspect humility has less to do with lowering yourself and more to do with seeing yourself honestly, your gifts honestly, your flaws honestly, your place in reality honestly, and then adjusting your behavior accordingly.

To put it more plainly, the closer your self perception matches reality, the more humble you are.

This matters far more than most people realize because inaccurate people tend to leave so much damage behind them. Think about the worse villain in your favorite childhood story. The good ones aren’t “evil” for evil’s sake. They are victims in their own minds. They’ve been slighted, even if it’s by accident, or overlooked for some promotion and therefore they take vengeance out of the world. They are completely cut off from the reality of the fact that they just weren’t that good, or that nobody even noticed the slight, it wasn’t malicious.

Some people dramatically overestimate themselves. They think they are wiser than they are, more disciplined than they are, stronger leaders than they are, and because of that they refuse correction, dismiss criticism, and continue charging into walls while blaming circumstances, difficult people, bad timing, or almost anything except their own blind spots.

But underestimating yourself can be just as destructive.

I have known remarkably gifted people who convinced themselves they had little to offer, avoided responsibility, turned down opportunities, or buried their strengths because insecurity somehow felt holier than confidence. But false humility is still inaccuracy, and reality does not reward distortion simply because it sounds modest. This is often the hero in your favorite story. Overlooking what must be done and they they must be the one to do it until some catalyst pushes responsibility onto them and they step into their destiny where they learn an honest perception of themselves and that’s how they defeat the ungrounded villain who is committed to an alternate reality. But without that catalyst they both do damage, on passively and one actively.

The insecure person and the arrogant person often suffer from the exact same disease.

Both are misreading reality.

One inflates himself.

The other shrinks himself.

Neither sees clearly.

This becomes intensely practical once you move beyond theory.

Take marriage.

If your spouse genuinely has better instincts in a particular area, humility may mean acknowledging that honestly and adapting without resentment. If one spouse handles finances better, reads people more accurately, communicates more effectively, or simply possesses stronger judgment in a particular arena, wisdom is not pretending equality where it does not exist. Wisdom is recognizing strengths honestly and leveraging them for the good of the family.

The reverse is equally true.

Humility does not mean pretending weakness where there is strength, nor does it mean diminishing competence to avoid making others uncomfortable. If you are stronger in a certain area, pretending otherwise is not virtue. It is still a refusal to tell the truth. God can insist upon glory and honor and praise for Himself as awesome in ways that we would call arrogant if it were insisted upon by a president, a king or a Caesar precisely because He actually is that awesome. His insistence on praise in that manner is in line with reality.

The same principle governs business.

The leader who cannot honestly evaluate himself eventually builds a weaker company because he hires poorly, delegates poorly, and compensates for insecurity by controlling too much. Meanwhile, leaders who understand both their strengths and limitations tend to build healthier organizations, surround themselves with people who compensate for their weaknesses, and become far harder to destabilize because they are not exhausting themselves defending illusions.

And that’s why humility matters. It’s not just some virtue you signal to others so that they admire you for how noble you are. That’s far too abstract for humility to be the number one most important trait you can have. It’s because the amount of humility to you have is exactly about how much aligned with reality you are. And the more aligned with reality you are means the clearer you see the world and the more accurate your decisions about how to interact with it. If you’re humble you’ll be less in love with your own product and more in love with how it can solve your customer’s problem and they will feel that. If you’re humble you can ask your husband for how high to set the oven to make his mother’s signature dish because you care more about the enjoyment the family will get from it cooked well than proving that you’re just as good a cook as she was. Humility lets you focus on the result out in the real world and not worry about how highly you or others should esteem yourself. Humility asks, “who cares?” when it comes to your self esteem, and instead it reminds you that you should esteem yourself exactly as highly as the true fruit you bear. Envy is not a bad virtue that humility is so holy that it must expel. Envy is a waste of time as far as humility is concerned. But then again, so is making sure you get the credit.

Reality is undefeated.

Sooner or later, businesses expose incompetence, marriage exposes selfishness, parenting exposes impatience, politics exposes ego, and life itself has a way of humiliating people who insist on arguing with what is true.

Perhaps this is why humility matters more than intelligence, talent, charisma, or skill.

After all, what good is talent if pride blinds you to your weaknesses? What good is intelligence if you cannot accurately assess yourself? What good is charisma if insecurity keeps you from receiving correction?

Humility may actually be the skill beneath all other skills because it determines whether we can interact honestly with reality.

And reality, unlike our egos, does not negotiate.

Five Practical Ways To Grow In Humility

• Ask trusted people where your blind spots are. If three wise people consistently tell you the same thing, pay attention.

• Separate identity from correction. Being wrong about something does not make you worthless, it makes you human.

• Stop confusing insecurity with humility. Diminishing yourself is not virtue if it ignores reality.

• Pay attention to where life keeps pushing back on you. Repeated friction in business, leadership, or relationships often reveals inaccurate self perception.

• Practice admiring competence without envy. When somebody genuinely surpasses you in an area, learn from them instead of competing with reality.

When you think about your own life, where have you most misread yourself, either overestimating or underestimating who you really are? Leave it in the comments, I suspect many of us have learned some painful lessons in ways that might help somebody else.

Leave a comment

Not subscribed but want to join the conversation? The free subscribe option lets you jump into the comments, no paid membership needed. I’d genuinely love to hear your perspective.

Subscribe now

Some people seem to attract younger leaders almost effortlessly. Their calls get returned, their opinions are sought out, and even when they speak bluntly or challenge somebody directly, people somehow lean in rather than recoil. Others, meanwhile, spend years frustrated that nobody seems to listen to them, perpetually offering ideas, warnings, and critiques, while wondering why the room keeps moving without them. And often walking right into the warnings they were trying to give.

For a long time, I assumed the difference came down to intelligence, clarity, or even charisma. I do not think that anymore.

If you’d prefer to listen, follow the youtube link below. If you like reading, skip down and keep going.

I know two older men who have spent much of their lives deeply interested in business, politics, leadership, and their communities. Both are intelligent men, both successful in their own right, both genuinely interested in helping younger people avoid mistakes, and both possess insights that are often remarkably valuable. Yet the way people respond to them could hardly be more different.

The first man is perpetually frustrated.

He sees bad decisions being made by aspiring politicians, business owners, church leaders, and community figures, often spotting weaknesses or unintended consequences before others do, and to be fair to him, his criticisms frequently have real merit. Sometimes his ideas are genuinely brilliant. He notices inefficiencies others miss, diagnoses problems quickly, and sees patterns many younger people simply do not yet have the life experience to recognize.

Yet almost nobody really wants his counsel.

The strange thing is, it is not because people think he is foolish. Frankly, many of his ideas are excellent, and if someone objectively evaluated them on paper, they would probably agree.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, he unintentionally communicates something else. His advice often feels less like, “I want what is best for you,” and more like, “You should have done it my way,” and while I believe he truly does care about people, what often comes through is frustration, criticism, mockery, or a subtle sense that he is more invested in being right than seeing someone else flourish.

Wanting to see something done correctly is very different from wanting what is best for the person doing it, and people can feel that difference far more than most of us realize.

Then there is another older man I know.

He certainly has regrets and things he would redo, but he also seems at peace with life in a way that quietly changes how people experience him. When it is time to work, he works hard. When it is time to laugh or enjoy himself, he actually allows himself to do so. When credit belongs to somebody else, he gives it freely, almost lavishly. And when reflection is needed, he is honest enough to engage in it without becoming consumed by bitterness.

Ironically, his advice is often more direct than the first man’s, sometimes even brash, yet people actively seek it.

Why?

Because they know in their gut that he is for them.

He does not seem emotionally attached to whether people follow his exact blueprint, nor does he appear personally offended when someone chooses another path. He genuinely wants good outcomes for people, and if they succeed by a route he never would have chosen, he celebrates anyway because the result matters more to him than ownership of the method. In fact, you often get the sense that he hopes your results are even better than those he got.

That posture changes so much about how people perceive advice.

People, especially younger people trying to find their footing in business or politics or leading their families, are remarkably perceptive. They are not merely evaluating whether you are intelligent, experienced, or successful. They are asking deeper questions, whether consciously or not: Are you invested in me? Do you actually want what is best for me? Or do you mostly want the satisfaction of being proven right?

Fruit matters too, perhaps more than we would like to admit.

People naturally hesitate to follow advice from someone who appears perpetually dissatisfied, overly inward focused, unable to enjoy life, or disconnected from peace. That’s because, fair or unfair, they silently wonder whether following your wisdom might eventually lead them to the same destination. Meanwhile, people tend to trust those who appear grounded, reflective, joyful, and emotionally steady, not because they expect perfection but because they see evidence that this person’s way of living has produced something worth learning from.

Here is the part many frustrated mentors miss.

Eventually, things go wrong.

They always do.

Businesses struggle, campaigns fail, churches divide, children become wayward, and sometimes even good decisions produce disappointing outcomes. But when that inevitable moment comes, the mentor who spent years making it obvious they were genuinely for the younger person rarely receives much blame, because people understand life is complicated and trust the motive behind the advice, even when the result was imperfect.

The other mentor, however, often gets blamed for things far beyond what they actually influenced. When relationships already carried an undertone of control, criticism, superiority, or self interest, people begin telling themselves stories, convincing themselves that the mentor sabotaged them, manipulated them, or cared more about getting their way than helping them succeed.

Often, that accusation is unfair.

But perception matters because trust matters, and people forgive bad outcomes much faster than they forgive motives that feel self serving.

If nobody listens to your advice, it may not be because people think you are unintelligent, disrespect your ideas, or dislike you personally. It may simply be that they do not yet believe you are for them, and until people trust your heart, even brilliant ideas struggle to land.

Five Practical Ways To Become Someone People Actually Listen To

• Ask more questions before giving advice. People trust counsel more when they feel heard and understood first. Cutting someone off mid-sentence because you’re convinced you know what they are about to say will not make them feel heard.

• Detach your ego from your recommendation. Want the person to succeed more than you want them to do it your way.

• Invest before correcting. Encouragement and genuine support build credibility that criticism alone rarely earns.

• Pay attention to your own fruit. Joy, peace, relationships, gratitude, and fulfillment quietly signal whether your wisdom is worth following.

• Make it obvious you are for people. If someone genuinely believes you want what is best for them, they will forgive imperfect advice and remember your care long after they forget the details of what you said. When they have a win, acknowledge it and praise them for it.

Leave a comment

If you’re not subscribed yet but want to weigh in, the free subscribe option lets you jump into the comments. I always enjoy hearing people’s stories and perspectives.

Subscribe now

”

Most people don’t avoid action because they are incapable. They avoid it because they are afraid of how it will feel to fail. Embarrassment, rejection, the possibility of being seen trying and falling short. So they wait, they hedge, they play it safe. What they don’t account for is that fear trades a short-term discomfort for a long-term weight that compounds over time.

I didn’t understand that fully when I was younger. I thought I was being wise, measured, even strategic in certain moments. In reality, I was just avoiding discomfort.

If you prefer to listen then follow the youtube link below. If you’d like to keep reading then skip down and keep going.

I remember being in Los Angeles with my brother when an acting agency wanted to meet him. We had gone all the way there, and while we were being prepped, the woman looked at me and casually asked, “Are you auditioning too or is it just the one?” I said no. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to look overeager. I didn’t want to risk being rejected. I half expected her to push me, to say something encouraging that would give me permission to step in. Instead, she nodded and said, “Okay, just the one. I’ll let them know.” And that was it. Opportunity closed as quietly as it had opened.

I carried that moment with me for years. Not because I believed I would have become an actor, but because I knew I had made a decision out of fear instead of conviction. I wasn’t willing to act on what I wanted in that moment.

That pattern shows up everywhere if you look for it. Someone once told me, decades after the fact, about a piece of land they had the chance to buy. They had the money. The payment would have been tight, but manageable. They passed. Thirty years later, they drive by that same property regularly, now worth many times what they could have purchased it for. It haunts them every day on their commute as they look out at the high rise condos and cashflowing units on that property, making somebody else rich. Somebody else who wasn’t owned by fear, but faced it, and now isn’t owned by regret. The numbers mattered, but what really stayed with them was the decision itself. They knew they had chosen comfort over conviction.

When you know what you want, your decisions become cleaner. You either go for it, or you consciously decide not to and accept the outcome. What creates regret is not failure, it is hesitation in the face of something you secretly wanted.

In business, this matters more than people admit. Opportunities do not wait for perfect confidence. Deals do not pause while you sort out your internal fears. Relationships, investments, risks, they all operate on a timeline. You cannot revisit them later with the same conditions. In time your body will change, or your mind, or your money, or the relationship. Those little changes mean the window has closed. The version of the world that presented that opportunity doesn’t exist anymore, and the version of the world that you could have created by going for it will never have the chance to come into being.

I am not fully on the other side of this. I still catch myself hesitating, still feel the pull to play it safe in moments where I should step forward. But I can already see the pattern. The things that used to feel overwhelming now feel trivial in hindsight. Not because they were easy, but because time revealed that the consequences I feared were never as permanent as I imagined. Once you get some life experience behind you, you start to realize most of the things that terrified you were not going to destroy you, but what they caused you to pass up often carried far more weight.

What is permanent, or at least long lasting, is the accumulation of missed chances.

The girl you were too afraid to talk to at the party could be your wife with seven kids right now. Sure, she might have shut you down and that would have stung. But would you even remember now if she had? But what if you did take that chance? What kind of life would you be living right now?

I decided around age twenty that I wanted to be an investor, and that real estate was where I would start. I told some friends who ridiculed me and warned me not to because it sounded risky. And maybe it was, especially when I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did it anyway. Over the years that decision has opened up countless financial doors that I continue to walk through. Meanwhile, those same friends are still standing at the doors that were open to us back then, too afraid to walk through them. Now they see what it’s done for me and call it genius. It’s not genius. It’s simply one area where I accepted short-term discomfort to avoid long-term regret.

My father used to tell me to take every opportunity I could. Not recklessly, but deliberately. He understood something I am still learning in real time: opportunities are not evenly distributed across a lifetime, and they are not guaranteed to return.

There is a practical side to this. Asking someone on a date, signing up for a class, taking a shot in a game, pursuing a deal, these are not abstract ideas. They are decisions made in moments where you either act or you don’t. When you act, you move forward regardless of the outcome. When you don’t, you stand still and carry that decision with you.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” gets repeated so often it almost loses its meaning, but it holds up because it is true in the simplest possible way. You cannot experience the outcome of something you never attempt.

If I project forward, I don’t imagine myself at eighty regretting the times I tried and failed. I imagine regretting the times I stayed quiet, stayed safe, and stayed still when I knew I wanted more.

The responsibility is simple. Be honest about what you want, and what you’re afraid of and act before the opportunity moves on.

How to Apply This Immediately:

• Identify one opportunity you have been delaying and write down exactly what you want from it. Write down why you are afraid to make the move. And then write down the absolute worst thing you can imagine happening if it doesn’t go well. Then think about how much you will care about that worse case outcome in a week, a month, a year and 5 years. Then compare those to how much a positive outcome could change your life for those same time periods

• Make the first move within 24 hours, even if it is imperfect or incomplete

• What are you engaged in right now? A job? A relationship? That you would really like the benefits of, but don’t seem to be getting them? Sit down and write out 5 things right now that you know you are not doing to the best of your ability. That’s what’s contributing to you not reaping the full benefits and those are what will keep you awake at night once those opportunities have left.

• Reframe failure as a completed attempt rather than a negative outcome, and track attempts weekly - See my article on "reps” in

• Regularly revisit past regrets but only for the purpose of noticing and converting them into present day actions when similar opportunities arise.

I once watched a manager lose a contract that never should have been lost.

Those of us on the team knew what happened. He had overpromised. He ignored early warning signs. He delayed a difficult conversation with the client. When the deal collapsed, it was not a mystery.

When the boss questioned him, instead of owning the missteps, he redirected the blame. He pointed to execution failures. He named specific team members. Within weeks, good and needed workers were shown the door. Officially, it was performance. Unofficially, everyone in the room knew the truth.

We did not just lose a contract that day, we. lost trust.

If you prefer to listen, follow the youtube link below. If you prefer to read, skip down and keep going.

Pride is what prevents a leader from saying, “That was my decision.” It convinces him that authority is preserved through deflection. It tells him that survival depends on image management. But the cost of that instinct is higher than most people realize.

Anyone with too much pride eventually pushes people away. Not because they are demanding, but because everyone senses the risk of proximity. If a mistake surfaces, it will not be shared. It will be assigned to whoever is least able to fight back, and underling. Those who, as the leader, are actually supposed to be under your guidance and protection. And the closer you are to the leader, the more likely you are to absorb it.

Leaders who do not own mistakes cannot correct mistakes. That is the operational danger.

In our case, the organization knew what truly caused the lost contract. We knew the pricing should have been adjusted. We knew the communication strategy needed to change. We knew earlier intervention would have saved the deal. But because ownership never happened, correction never happened.

So the same structural weaknesses remained in place.

The impact was measurable. We missed the productivity of the workers who were fired. Morale dipped. Communication tightened. People stopped volunteering concerns early because they had watched what happened to those who were closest to the fallout. Opportunities were handled more cautiously, not more intelligently.

Margins flattened. Performance softened. And the unspoken tension in the room grew heavier.

The dynamic is as old as the account of King David in the Bible. David made a grave moral failure and attempted to conceal it. When the prophet Nathan confronted him and said, “You are that man,” the defining moment was not the sin. It was the response.

David owned it.

Imagine the alternative. Imagine a king who silences the prophet, blames advisors, punishes dissent, and reshapes the narrative to preserve authority. The kingdom would not simply suffer morally. It would decay structurally. Truth would become dangerous. Correction would disappear, and decay would compound.

In business, pride works the same way. A mistake that could have been corrected at modest cost becomes a recurring liability. A flawed hire is defended too long. A bad pricing model remains untouched. A strategic error is doubled down on because reversing course would feel like weakness.

The organization pays twice. First for the original misjudgment. Second for the refusal to repair it.

I explored the cultural side of this in The Ultimate Flex isn’t What You Drive

and the accountability dimension in Nobody Has to Change for You to Win . Ownership expands trust. Confrontation, when directed inward first, preserves credibility. Without both, authority erodes.

Even those who are never directly blamed still suffer. You operate inside a system that knows it made a mistake but lacks the humility to pivot. You execute strategies that should have been adjusted months earlier. You watch preventable losses repeat.

And when enough of those uncorrected decisions accumulate, they do not merely inconvenience the organization. They destabilize it.

The manager I observed eventually retained his title. But he never regained the confidence of his team. Conversations became guarded. Initiative declined. And the best people began looking for environments where truth was safer than pride.

Strength in leadership is not demonstrated by flawless performance. It is demonstrated by taking responsibility.

Pride isolates. Ownership stabilizes.

And the organizations that endure are led by men and women who would rather absorb the heat of responsibility than let it burn through the people they are meant to lead.

Five Practical Ways to Guard Against Pride in Leadership

• Publicly own errors before assigning responsibility elsewhere.

• Audit major losses and identify your specific contribution first.

• Reverse flawed decisions quickly instead of defending them out of ego.

• Protect employees who tell uncomfortable truths.

• Build a culture where correction is rewarded more than image preservation.

  

  Subscribe now

When I was young, I worked for an energy company where the culture was toxic from the management all the way up to ownership. Everyone knew it, but the company had a habit of hiring men who, for one reason or another, were in a place where they had to tolerate it. I was one of them and I tolerated more than I should have.

If you’d rather listen, follow this link to youtube. If you prefer to keep reading, skip down below and enjoy

Some of these men were guys who needed to look cool. Some were just down on their luck and needed to put food on the table more than they felt they needed dignity. Some bought bought lifted trucks, flashy toys, and spent money like it grew on trees. They mocked me for driving a simple old car, one I hadn’t upgraded with rims, paint jobs, or a trade-in to something “impressive” like a lifted truck. I slept in the office to save money, kept my lifestyle lean, and quietly focused on a goal I didn’t let them see: freedom.

While they chased appearances, I invested. I bought a house. Then a rental. Then another. Each property started to cashflow, slowly building an income stream that didn’t depend on their company, or any job at all. Years later, I had enough—not in bragging rights or flashy assets, but in freedom.

Then the breaking point came. I was pushed too far, tested in ways I would no longer tolerate, so I walked away. They expected me to beg to return once I ran out of money, assuming I needed the paycheck. Meanwhile, the men around me—the same ones who mocked my thriftiness—were trapped. No rentals, no side income, nothing that gave them the courage to leave. They wanted out, but fear held them hostage.

Subscribe now

Walking away was a little scary at first. Old habits and doubt linger. But I wasn’t going into a financial freefall. My income had already been replaced by my rental portfolio. The freedom to choose had been earned quietly, deliberately, over years. And that’s the point: the real flex isn’t a bigger truck, designer clothes, or a flashy vacation—it’s having the option to say no. The most powerful man in the room isn’t the one with the flashiest title, biggest bank account, or greatest fame. He’s the one who can walk away without fear.

Freedom changes everything. It allows you to negotiate from a position of power, to prioritize value over vanity, and to walk away when something stops being a positive in your life. It’s the difference between living for approval and living for purpose. Those who chase status without freedom are trapped by their own success, while those who build options can dictate the terms of their life. You have to build and maintain the financial ability to choose dignity, integrity, or plain old lifestyle when places of employment, or contracts, or deals start to forget how to treat you.

Five practical ways to build the freedom to walk away:

• Invest before you spend: Prioritize assets that generate income over liabilities that depreciate. Look at all the things that suck money out of your pocket on a monthly basis, and find things aside from your dad job, that will balance it out and put that same money back in. This way needing to leave your job wont necessarily mean losing that perk from that liability you have.
  
  

• Live below your means: Keep your lifestyle lean so you can deploy capital toward financial independence. Don’t stack those liabilities in the first place. A great rule of thumb is if you can’t buy it three times over in cash, then don’t buy it at all.
  
  

• Create alternative income streams: Side hustles, rental properties, or small business ventures provide leverage. Your day job is taking at least 8 hours of your day, maybe more. Getting a second job isn’t the answer. That’s just trading more time for more money. The answer is finding something that earns while you’re at your day job doing something else. Real estate is a great place to start but it’s by no means the only place.
  
  

• Know your thresholds: Decide in advance what behavior or conditions you will no longer tolerate.
  
  

• Plan for flexibility: Build a safety net so leaving toxic situations doesn’t equate to financial collapse. Maybe it’ll take you a while to replace your income with another stream. That’s ok, start saving first. That way you at least have a cushion you can draw from if you decide things need to change.

After my kids finished their first speech and debate tournament, we had a conversation that mattered far more than the results. They were disappointed. Not dramatic. Just discouraged. They had prepared, practiced, and shown up, yet the outcome did not match their effort.

If you’d prefer to listen, click on the youtube link below. If you want to keep reading, skip down and keep going.

They were focused on who advanced, who placed, and who beat them.

That moment opened the door to a lesson I have learned repeatedly in business and in life.

Most people enter business believing success is about beating someone else. Another company. Another bidder. Another voice in the room. From an early age we are taught to treat rankings as proof of worth.

That belief creates a quiet trap. When success is defined externally, progress becomes unstable. You can improve and still feel behind. You can do things right and still lose. Comparison slowly replaces learning, and frustration takes the place of momentum.

Many businesses stall not because of a lack of opportunity, but because they chose the wrong opponent.

As I listened to my kids, it became clear their disappointment was not really about losing. It was about believing that winning against others was the point. That belief felt off, because it contradicted nearly every meaningful breakthrough I have experienced.

There is a moment when you realize chasing others never delivers the satisfaction it promises. That realization is often the beginning of real growth.

Subscribe now

I told my kids something simple.

In the long run, your only real competition is yourself from yesterday.

In business, sustainable progress comes from steady internal improvement. Clearer thinking. Better preparation. Stronger communication. Better judgment under pressure. When progress is measured internally, effort always produces return.

This principle shows up across disciplines. High performers focus on mastery rather than rivals. Enduring companies invest in systems instead of shortcuts. Thought leaders in performance psychology and leadership development have reinforced this pattern for decades through research and case studies from places like Harvard Business Review and McKinsey.

When you stop measuring success by external wins, there are seasons where it appears you are falling behind. Others move faster. Others get attention. Others seem to win while you are still refining fundamentals.

This phase tests patience. It is tempting to abandon the process and chase visible validation. I have lived through seasons where progress felt invisible, where effort did not immediately translate into results.

Those seasons taught me that growth often leads results by a wide margin.

The shift happens quietly. When the competition becomes internal, control returns to you. Progress no longer depends on judges, markets, or timing. Every day offers a chance to improve something you own.

Losses become information. Setbacks become refinement. Momentum builds because energy is no longer wasted on comparison. This is why long term performers across business and athletics rely on internal benchmarks rather than external rankings.

Over time, internal gains surface externally. Skills stack. Confidence stabilizes. Results follow. When they arrive, they last, because they are built on fundamentals rather than circumstance.

I have seen this pattern repeat in business, leadership, and now in my own children. The people who endure are rarely the ones who obsessed over beating others early. They are the ones who refused to stop improving themselves.

Imagine running a business without constant comparison. Decisions are driven by clarity instead of fear. Teams focus on execution rather than rivalry. Progress feels steady rather than frantic.

That environment produces resilience. It builds leaders who are difficult to shake and organizations that survive cycles instead of reacting to them.

If you want to win the long game, stop asking how to beat the next person. Start asking how to become better than you were yesterday.

That is the only competition that compounds.

This idea connects closely with our earlier article Why Long Term Businesses Are Built in Quiet Seasons, which explored how discipline outlasts hype and why consistency matters more than visibility.

What they couldn’t see with their 12 year old perspective that I could see with my 40 year old one was, me looking back at them, I didn’t care if they got last place. I saw the skills that they were working on. And that if they continued to work and improve they would put them above 1%-ers in the long run if they worked from the time they were their age to the time they were mine. But, they were discouraged because they didn’t get first place on their very first tournament. That’s the perspective you need to have, and that’s the difference. Sometimes we’re so caught up in our personal and very present competitions that we forget that the long term race is won inches at a time. Because when you are continuing to improve and the other guy who beat you last year decides to quit, over time, you will surpass him. And he’ll be so far in the rear view mirror that he’ll be irrelevant by the time he realizes it. But if you’re the one who quits, then that’s what happens to you.

Five Practical Ways to Apply This Today

• Identify one skill you can improve today and work on it deliberately for thirty minutes.
  
  

• Track weekly progress against your own past performance rather than competitors.
  
  

• After setbacks, write down lessons learned while details are fresh.
  
  

• Shift team conversations from outcomes to improvements in process.
  
  

• Teach this framework to your children or employees so it multiplies beyond you.

Most leadership problems do not explode out of nowhere, they grow quietly and predictably, and almost always because something small was allowed to slide early.

If you prefer to listen instead of read, check out the youtube video below. If not then skip over and keep reading

As a leader, the majority of fires you end up fighting are brushfires you walked past weeks or months ago, a dismissive comment, a missed deadline, a half done job, a subtle eye roll in a meeting. You noticed it, you felt the twinge, and you told yourself it is not worth it right now.

That decision is where most leadership credibility starts leaking.

People and attitude issues are the clearest example. When you allow disrespect toward you or toward others, you are not being gracious, you are training. You are teaching people what the real standard is, regardless of what the handbook says. When you allow underperformance or corner cutting, you are not buying peace, you are accumulating debt, and it always comes due with interest.

What makes this worse is the audience. Leadership is never a private relationship, there are always observers. When competent, disciplined people watch you let one person get away with things they would be held accountable for, two things happen at once. First, they lose respect for your authority, second, they quietly resent you when you later try to enforce standards that were never applied evenly.

This is why leaders who suddenly crack down are often met with resistance. From their perspective, it feels arbitrary or personal, from yours, it feels overdue. The gap between those two perceptions is created by silence.

Avoiding early correction does not make you kind, it makes you unclear. And unclear leadership produces anxious teams. People do not know where the line is, so they test it, or they stop caring, or the best ones leave.

Strong leaders understand a simple truth, it is far easier and far more humane to address small issues early than to deal with character judgments later. A quiet, timely correction preserves dignity, a delayed confrontation often feels like an indictment.

Nipping things in the bud is not about being harsh, it is about being fair. It is about protecting the culture you say you want, and it is about respecting the people who are doing it right by not asking them to carry the weight of those who are not.

If you are constantly dealing with big problems, it is worth asking which small ones you have been tolerating.

Subscribe now

5 Practical Leadership Moves

• Address behavior, not personality, immediately, comment on what happened, not who they are, and do it as close to the moment as possible.
  
  

• Correct in private, reinforce in public, quiet course corrections prevent public power struggles later.
  
  

• Apply standards evenly or do not pretend you have them, inconsistency erodes trust faster than almost anything else.
  
  

• Say the uncomfortable thing early to avoid the explosive thing later, short discomfort beats long dysfunction.
  
  

• Remember who is watching, every non action teaches your team what actually matters around here.

  Leave a comment

When I was a kid, my parents were donated an old upright piano from the church. They had upgraded, and since we had young kids, the piano ended up in our house. My mom signed me up for lessons.

If you prefer to listen, click on the Youtube link below. If you prefer to read, skip it and keep going.

I didn’t hate the piano. I even liked the idea of being good at it. That’s the important part. I just didn’t care about it.

The teacher came once a week for half an hour, and that lesson became the only reason I touched the instrument. All week long the piano sat there untouched. Then, about fifteen minutes before my teacher arrived, panic would set in. I’d cram an entire week’s worth of “practice” into a rushed, frantic session. Fingers stiff. Mind tense. Chair adjusted perfectly. Everything had to be just right so I could regurgitate what I’d memorized long enough to survive the lesson.

She’d come in, I’d play, and I honestly thought I did fine. She’d give me something new or tell me to keep working on the same piece, and I walked away believing I had her fooled.

Subscribe now

The embarrassment came outside the lesson. My mom would proudly tell her friends, “He plays the piano.” They’d ask me to play something, and I had almost nothing to offer. No confidence. No flow. Just fragments that only worked under ideal conditions and immediate pressure.

Here’s what I didn’t understand then: I may not have cared about practicing, but I did care about the outcome. I cared about not looking bad in front of my teacher. I cared about not being embarrassed in front of adults. I just didn’t connect the boring reps with the result I wanted.

That realization didn’t come until a decade later.

In college, I fell in love with the piano. I met people who could do things I didn’t even know were possible. Suddenly, I cared deeply about the outcome—really knowing the instrument. So I practiced four hours a day. Minimum. Thousands and thousands of reps. Painfully small details. Things that felt stupid to obsess over.

Only then did I understand the difference between cramming and mastery.

And only then did I realize there was no chance I ever fooled my childhood teacher. Not for one moment. She could tell instantly. The tension. The rigidity. The fact that my chair had to be exactly right for me to function. There was no ease. No confidence. Just strain and concentration.

When you’ve done the reps, you still focus—but you’re relaxed. The variations blur together into competence. Conditions don’t control you. Noise doesn’t rattle you. A pin drop or a roaring crowd doesn’t matter because you know the material.

This is exactly how business works.

You don’t know your numbers because you reviewed them right before a meeting. You know them because you live with them. Day after day. Week after week. Quarter after quarter. You use them to solve real problems. You calculate with them. You notice when something is off without pulling up a spreadsheet.

Most people don’t hate this work. They just don’t care about it. But they do care about the outcomes—making fast decisions, not looking foolish, not freezing when questioned, being confident under pressure.

The mistake is thinking you can care about the outcome without caring about the reps.

You can’t.

When you know your craft, you’re not held hostage by missing information. You don’t squirm. You don’t need perfect conditions. You’ve done the reps. A million times.

And when I look back at that old piano, the lesson is clear: I wasn’t learning music—I was learning how to fake it. Mastery only showed up when I gave the boring reps the same respect as the result I claimed to care about.

Share

5 Practical Applications

• Identify the outcome you care about, then work backward to the boring reps it requires. Imagine, “When I see a really impressively skilled person, what must they have been doing with their time for years and years in order to get to this point now?”
  
  

• Treat practice as non-negotiable even when motivation is low. Waiting on motivation and inspiration to get things done is a sure road to failure because motivation doesn’t happen consistently enough.
  
  

• Study your numbers daily so decisions don’t depend on last-minute reviews. Get to where you know what you need to know without thinking about it because you’ve done it adnasium
  
  

• Practice under imperfect conditions to build real confidence. When you think you’ve mastered it a certain way, do it again with one arm tied behind your back.
  
  

• If you feel strain instead of ease, that’s feedback—you need more reps. You may be able to fool the crowd for a bit but deep down you know how fragile your confidence in a certain area is or isn’t. Don’t suppress that. Use it to propel you forward

Most people don’t fail because they lack talent, intelligence, or opportunity. They fail because they make decisions based on what someone they know might think.

Before they ever write the book, post the video, make the sales calls, or promote the business, they run the moment through an invisible filter: How will this look to them? What will they say? How will I be judged if I even try?

So the decision never gets made.

It’s almost never strangers. Strangers don’t carry that kind of weight. It’s a parent who never really supported you. A spouse who rolls their eyes at ambition. Jealous friends who keep score. A grumpy old man at church who mistakes cynicism for wisdom. Whoever it is, you start shaping your moves around their potential reaction.

You delay. You soften. You wait for the right moment. You tell yourself you’ll do it once you’re out of view.

But waiting until people are out of view is letting their proximity control your destiny.

Your dad might not die for another 30 years. That ex will always have an opinion. That friend will never suddenly become encouraging. You cannot make bold decisions in life or business while simultaneously trying to stay invisible to the people you fear. You can’t promote a great idea to the masses and keep it hidden from the one person whose ridicule you’re trying to avoid. You can’t build momentum in secret.

What happens instead is regret.

At first, you resent them. You imagine the ridicule. You rehearse the humiliation. You build a case against people who haven’t even said anything yet, because you never put your work or your decisions out there. Over time, if you’re honest, that resentment turns inward. You realize the truth: it wasn’t them. It was your pride. Your fear. Your need for approval.

As successful as I am today, I spent over a decade trying to hide projects, decisions, and aspirations from a select few people I had allowed to have power over me. It was inappropriate from the start—but I gave it to them. Being young, wounded, losing my dad, and wanting someone to replace a broken family explains the weakness, but it doesn’t excuse the surrender.

They ridiculed my ideas, so I hid them. Or I tried to build where they couldn’t see. I told myself that once I had enough proof, enough wins, enough success, I could finally reveal it and they’d have no ammunition left.

That’s a lie.

You never get there that way. You can’t market something and keep it in the dark. You can’t make life-altering decisions while constantly scanning the room for approval. You can’t practice courage in private when the people closest to you are the very ones you’re afraid to disappoint.

I thank God that there were still many areas of my life where I pushed through anyway. Real estate. Investing. Long-term plays where execution mattered more than commentary. Those are the places I succeeded—because I acted decisively, publicly, and without waiting for permission. Those wins didn’t come from confidence; they came from moving forward despite the noise.

Eventually, you have two options. You either remove yourself when you’re weak, or you stop caring and do it anyway.

Let them laugh. Let them scoff. Let them misunderstand. What you thought was water meant to douse your flame is actually gasoline. If you can perform while people are cheering against you, you’ll be dangerous when they finally cheer for you. And the only way cheering ever comes is by playing through the original jeers that say, “You’ll never make it—so why even try?”

So here’s the question that matters:

What decisions would you make—right now—if you truly didn’t care what the people you know would say about them?

Because that answer reveals exactly where you’ve been holding yourself back.

What I’ve seen experienced investors do—and what I’ve mimicked with great success—is not trying to time the market, and certainly not hoping to “buy high and sell low,” but instead being extremely disciplined.

They know the numbers they will accept.
They pick assets they understand.
They invest consistently.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s real estate, paper assets, hard assets, or businesses. If you pick a frequency—monthly, quarterly, yearly—and simply invest, you will naturally buy at highs and lows. Over time, you’ll pick some things up cheaply and overpay slightly on others, but you’ll accumulate the asset itself. And over time, you’ll win.

Share

One of the clearest examples of this in my own life came when I decided that precious metals were an asset class I needed exposure to. At the time, $100 a month was all I felt comfortable committing. So I made a decision—once.

I found a local dealer and every month I walked in and bought however many one-ounce silver rounds $100 would buy. At first, silver was around $13 an ounce. I’d walk out with a bag full of coins. Over the years, that same $100 bought fewer and fewer ounces, and eventually I adjusted how much I purchased—but the monthly commitment never changed.

That was the key.

Because the amount was already decided, I wasn’t tempted to skip a month because I felt broke, nervous, or emotional. I didn’t debate it. I didn’t negotiate with myself. It was automatic.

Fast forward to today: $100 barely buys a single ounce. Those early purchases have increased exponentially—not because I timed anything, but because I was consistent.

Where I haven’t done this, I’ve noticed a pattern. I hold off. And hold off. And hold off—waiting for the perfect moment. Jupiter aligns with Mars. Conditions are flawless. Five years pass, and I realize I haven’t bought anything at all.

It’s never the perfect time.

I get so worried about overpaying or missing “the deal of a lifetime” that I end up with no deals whatsoever. And in most investments—unless the asset is actively collapsing—the asset itself is almost always better than sitting on cash indefinitely.

When I decide to buy regularly—strategically, but regularly—I come out ahead. I’m not indiscriminate. I’m extremely picky. But I’m not waiting for a unicorn. I define my criteria, and when something meets it, I pull the trigger.

If you stick to solid criteria, you won’t get burned. And if you do get burned, that’s feedback—you adjust the criteria.

But if you’re like someone who refuses to date unless they find a person with the bank account of a 50-year-old executive, the wisdom of an 80-year-old war veteran, and the energy of a 25-year-old—all before the first date—you’ll never date. And you’ll never invest either.

Or worse, you’ll invest once, miss the absolute bottom, feel like you failed, and quit forever.

Invest frequently.
Invest strategically.
Ignore the noise.

You’re not smart enough to time the market—but if you invest consistently, you won’t need to be.

Subscribe now

• Decide once, then automate the behavior. Make the investment decision when you’re calm and rational, not when emotions or market headlines are loud.

• Invest on a fixed schedule, not a feeling. Consistency beats cleverness. Pick a frequency and honor it regardless of fear, excitement, or uncertainty.

• Define acceptable criteria before opportunities appear. If an asset meets your numbers and your understanding, act. If it doesn’t, walk—no second-guessing.

• Assume you will never time the bottom. Build a strategy that works even when your timing is imperfect, because it always will be.

• Measure progress in accumulation, not moments. Wealth is built by steadily acquiring quality assets, not by waiting for a single perfect purchase.

  Leave a comment

Warren Buffett is touted as quite possibly the greatest investor in the world (if you don’t count Thales of Miletus). He was once quoted as saying, “If you don’t plan on holding [stock in] a company for at least a decade, then don’t bother investing in it at all.”

With that in mind, I’ll admit that my 15 years as an investor make me an infant. Nevertheless, there’s an attitude I hear constantly among would-be investors that has started to bother me—an attitude I almost never hear among investors I respect and have watched succeed over time:

“I can’t wait for the market to crash again so I can buy (insert investment of choice) on the cheap.”

Share

I get this mentality. I really do. When I began investing in my favorite asset class—real estate—I had the good fortune of starting during a struggling economy, years before any real recovery was on the horizon. Properties were relatively easy to purchase and almost guaranteed to cashflow. Compare that to today, when you have to be genuinely skilled just to find off-market deals that make sense at all.

It’s tempting to long for the “good old days,” when prices were low and people were struggling—until you stop yourself and ask, What am I thinking? Being an investor, and frankly just being a citizen, is far better when the economy is roaring than when it’s tanking. I don’t hope for an economic crash at all.

Yet many people who want to be investors seem to believe that investing is about being some kind of prophet—someone who foresees calamity, hoards a particular asset while no one else is paying attention, and then lords it over others when times get tough.

There are two problems with this.

First, the people who speak this way—often with great confidence—have usually never done what they’re talking about. Second, and more importantly, they don’t understand what they’re actually wishing for. They are, in effect, hoping for the misfortune of others so they can exploit it for profit.

Now, if you do buy in a down market and make money, good for you. I’ve benefited from that myself. But it was never something I sought out. I was young enough that I had little to lose when the market crashed, so I scraped, clawed, and came of age in a harder economic environment than the one we’re in now. I didn’t predict it. I didn’t time it. I simply happened to be there.

What many people miss is this: investing is fundamentally about helping other people. It means taking something you have—money, time, talent, effort—and placing it into a system that can benefit from it so that system can grow. In return, it compensates you. Sometimes that compensation is financial. Sometimes it’s relational. Sometimes it’s appreciation or opportunity.

Investing is about creating value, not strip-mining it.

Yes, misfortune creates opportunity—but all that really means is that someone is less fortunate than they would be with the investment. I was less fortunate before a teacher invested in me. Disney was less fortunate before you bought 0.0000035 shares in its IPO for $2.45. That doesn’t mean desperation or ruin; it simply means unrealized potential.

Praying—or preying—for disaster so you can capitalize on it is lame. And believing you’re going to time the market, especially as an inexperienced investor, is silly. Whatever it is you’re waiting for, you won’t see it coming. It will surprise you—just like it does everyone else.

That realization is where real investing actually begins.

—Part II continues with what to do instead.

Subscribe now

Well I’ve had that question too, as a writer certainly but even as an investor. What if nobody wants to live in this rental I just remodeled myself because I’m not skilled enough, lack the correct vision, whatever. What will this person who I’d like to impress think if they realize I’m not making $ 1 million yet, or 20% returns, or don’t have the corner office, or haven’t sold a million units of product yet. We all do this, and we end up being more unimpressed with ourselves than outsiders ever would be. Because of this, we are the biggest hurdles to our own success, so long ago I’ve vowed to myself, whenever I’m conscious of it, to never not (double negative alert) do something if it’s out of fear of what others might think.

I don’t mean do something you’re not proud of yourself and that you know others will disapprove of as well, like something immoral or that is of quality that is below your own standards. That’s a good fear that keeps us out of trouble. What I mean is if you’ve done a work, and it does please you, and you know you’ve done your best, then do not shelve it because you’re afraid that your friends will laugh at you for not having made it big with that work yet. For heaven’s sake you’re just starting after all. If you want to write a book, don’t think you’ve already got to be a Pulitzer Prize winner. No author has won a single award or sold a single story to a magazine before they first were a nobody simply putting pen to paper. No self-made business person ever had a Leer Jet before they first were some schmoe with a dream and a small business loan that they weren’t sure how they were going to pay back. Don’t despise your small beginnings and DO NOT let the fear of others keep you from beginning. Usually what you will find is those who ridicule you for not being richer or more famous are jealous because they wish they at least had the intestinal fortitude to start, like you have. Believe me, they would and will hate on you more, the more success you do get, so right off the bat you need to realize half the people you’re afraid of are a bad measuring stick to begin with. For every dollar you earn their disapproval will multiply. The other half of the people you’re afraid of will actually see you as an inspiration to get off their butt and do that project they’ve been too afraid, or telling themselves that they are too busy, to do.

Now to the meat of this: a few years ago, when I was suffering from this fear of others looking down on me, quite badly, I developed and adopted a new mantra. “If you have a project that you enjoyed and that you’re proud of, don’t be ashamed. Put it out there. You might not sell a single unit the first year, or in five years, or in ten years. And nobody might know your name. But one of these days, if you keep putting it out there, one of your ideas will catch on, and when it does people will want to go back and check out your earlier work as well. Before you know it, projects you haven’t touched in a decade will be flying off the shelves like you wouldn’t believe.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but every once in a while, God likes to do things in my life to confirm that I am on the right track with these sorts of ideas. (And believe me when I’m not on the right track He reminds me of that too.) So recently He has this woman contact me. She’s a fairly well known woman in the city in which I reside and she runs a financial company. Unbeknownst to me, she had written a children’s book that would work as a companion tool to some of the educational work her company does, as well as just function as a cutesy book. Well she had been sitting on hers for over two years, and while she’s a very successful individual in her own right, in this realm she was having some trouble getting illustrations to go with her book.

Well somehow she stumbled upon a book I had self published 3 years ago on a fanciful whim, which I had only really sold to a few friends and family and then forgotten about, being too embarrassed to really market it, thinking people would think me a fool. Well she loved the book, and it showed her that I had exactly the talent and vision she needed for the illustrations in her book. She contacted me. We met. She paid me handsomely in advance and more afterward according the to the contract we had written up, and I illustrated her book for her and it’s now available on Amazon and locally.
So I went from a nobody selling nothing and feeling pretty lame about it, to three years later, being recruited and paid with already some residuals coming in, all based on that earlier Work that I thought was lame. In fact that earlier book that I was a little embarrassed of acting as the literal resume that landed me this job. Because she had already seen what I was capable of producing, she had confidence that I could produce for her. Not only was I able to help her through producing for her but I was able to help her gain the confidence she needed to not be embarrassed of her work and to just get it out there as well. And it’s entirely possible that this book, small and cutesy in its own right, may land me the next bigger one, 5 years from now. And it’s all because I followed the mantra of simply putting it out there, knowing that someday, someone may dig it up. If they are unimpressed then who cares, but if they are, then who knows what doors that will open for you way down the line. I realize I’ve gotten many jobs, gigs, and clients in this same way over the years so whatever it is you want to do but are embarrassed because you don’t think you’re good enough or accomplished enough for others to see your work, it’s time to get over that and put it out there.

.

Share

A lot of professionals operate under the assumption that they’re clever enough to cut corners without anyone noticing. Rush the proposal. Reuse the deck. Phone in the follow-up. Deliver something that technically checks the box. And if no one complains, they assume they got away with it.

They didn’t.

People may not always have the language for what they’re experiencing, but they feel the difference between work that was done with care and work that was done to get it over with. Effort has a texture. It shows up in clarity, timing, thoughtfulness, and restraint. And its absence shows up just as clearly.

When I was a kid, I took piano lessons. I didn’t hate the piano, but I didn’t love it either. I was supposed to practice at least twenty minutes a day. I never did. Instead, I developed a routine: about fifteen minutes before my teacher arrived, I’d hustle through my practice. Fast. Sloppy. Just enough to look like I’d “been working.”

She never called me out. Never scolded me. Never said, “You didn’t practice.” So I assumed I’d fooled her.

Years later—after playing piano in bands, in church, in real settings where preparation actually matters—I realized the truth. I was the only one being fooled. She knew. Of course she knew. Teachers always know. More importantly, the instrument knew. My hands knew. My progress told the story even when my mouth didn’t.

That lesson aged well.

In business, your clients are like that piano teacher. They may not confront you. They may still pay you. They may still smile and say thank you. But they know. They can feel when you rushed. They can feel when you recycled instead of rethought. They can feel when you gave them what was convenient for you instead of what was best for them.

On the flip side, there’s another lie people believe: “No one notices when I go the extra mile.” That’s also false.

Subscribe now

Extra effort compounds quietly. It builds trust before it builds praise. People may not acknowledge it immediately. They may not say thank you in the moment. But over time, they remember who consistently showed up prepared, thoughtful, and sharp. When opportunities appear, those are the names that surface. Not because of charm. Because of evidence.

You don’t need to perform effort. You need to apply it. The market is far more perceptive than we give it credit for. You can delay results, but you can’t hide inputs forever. Sloppy work always sends a signal. So does excellent work done without applause.

In the end, this isn’t about fooling other people. That’s a short game. It’s about whether the work you’re doing would still hold up if you were forced to live with it long-term—like a musician stuck with the skill level they pretended to practice for.

Because eventually, you always are.

Five Practical Applications

• Assume your client can feel the effort. Make decisions as if they can sense your preparation, because they can.

• Stop optimizing for speed when depth is required. Fast work is only impressive when it’s also thorough.

• Do the unseen work well. The parts no one praises often matter most.

• Detach effort from immediate appreciation. Recognition lags behind consistency.

• Ask one honest question before delivering: “Would I respect this if I were on the receiving end?”

The work always tells the truth. Make sure it’s telling the right one.

Share

That statement stopped me cold.

I asked him a simple question: “If number 42 were Kobe Bryant, and the other team had Kobe Bryant on the floor, do you think they’d take him out to give us a chance? Or would they keep him in because they’re trying to beat us? Expect number 42 to stay in all game. Now what are you and your teammates gonna do to execute our plays, regardless of what he and his entire team thinks they are going to do?”

The answer was obvious. And the lesson was bigger than basketball.

Nobody has to change for you to win.

In life and in business, people quietly build their strategy around waiting. Waiting for understanding. Waiting for support. Waiting for permission. Waiting for someone else to move out of the way. Waiting for number 42 to sit down.

But winners don’t wait for the defense to get easier. They adjust their game.

It’s great when people believe in you. It’s helpful when your spouse supports the vision. It’s encouraging when your boss understands your ambition or your market gives you an opening. But none of that is required. The world does not owe you clarity, agreement, or cooperation.

If your success depends on other people changing, then your destiny is already in their hands.

That’s captivity, not leadership.

The most dangerous mindset you can adopt is the idea that once conditions improve, then you’ll perform. Once the competition weakens. Once the economy shifts. Once your critics quiet down. Once your family gets on board. Once the gatekeepers approve.

That’s not how real progress works.

The people who succeed look straight at number 42 and say, “Good. This will make me better.” They don’t see a reason to stall. They see a standard to rise to.

Hard bosses don’t stop them. Skeptical investors don’t stop them. Strong competitors don’t stop them. Lack of applause doesn’t stop them. They don’t interpret resistance as a signal to pause. They interpret it as feedback.

Waiting for obstacles to move is passive. Learning how to score anyway is active.

And this is where most people lose. Not because the challenge was unbeatable, but because they assumed it wasn’t their responsibility to beat it. They outsourced responsibility to circumstances. They mistook difficulty for unfairness.

But the game doesn’t care about fair. It cares about execution.

Number 42 isn’t the problem. Your response to number 42 is.

The moment you stop needing the world to change is the moment you become dangerous—in the best possible way. You stop asking for space and start creating it. You stop waiting for openings and start forcing adjustments.

That’s leadership. That’s ownership. That’s how winning actually works.

Subscribe now

Practical Application

• Identify the “number 42” you’ve been waiting on and name it clearly—person, system, market, or belief.
  
  

• Ask yourself what skill, discipline, or strategy you need to develop to win with that obstacle present.
  
  

• Stop tying your effort level to external validation or approval.
  
  

• Build systems that assume resistance, not cooperation.
  
  

• Measure progress by adaptability and execution, not comfort or encouragement.

  Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Be extremely flexible with the plan. Be ruthlessly rigid with the goal. The world does not care about your spreadsheet. Markets move. Customers change behavior. Regulations shift. Technology makes yesterday’s best practice irrelevant overnight. Capital dries up. Talent leaves. Supply chains break. If your plan assumes a static environment, it is already wrong. That doesn’t mean the goal was wrong. It means the route you chose no longer leads where you intended.

The goal is the value. The plan is just a tool. You didn’t set out to “run Facebook ads” or “hire three sales reps” or “open a second location.” You set out to increase revenue, gain leverage, buy back time, or build something durable. Those intermediate steps only mattered because, at one point in time, they seemed like the best way to get there. When evidence shows they no longer are, emotional attachment to the plan becomes self-sabotage.

This is where disciplined leaders separate themselves from amateurs.

Amateurs fall in love with their plans. They defend them. They explain them. They protect them. They keep executing them long after feedback is screaming that the environment has changed. Then, when the plan finally collapses, they conclude the goal must have been unrealistic in the first place.

Disciplined operators do the opposite. They interrogate the plan constantly. They test assumptions. They expect resistance. They look for signal in the noise. And when reality proves the plan wrong, they change it without drama, apology, or loss of identity. What they do not change is the objective.

Difficulty is not disqualification.

Most people become “flexible” with their goals at exactly the wrong moment: when the goal starts demanding a higher price than they anticipated. When it takes longer. When it costs more. When the environment removes the easy path. They tell themselves they’re being prudent, adaptive, mature. In reality, they’re renegotiating with themselves to escape discomfort.

If the goal mattered when it was easy, it matters when it’s hard.

Rigidity belongs at the level of purpose, not process. The plan should feel provisional. Temporary. Replaceable. The goal should feel non-negotiable. Anchoring. Heavy. That’s what keeps you moving forward even when the map keeps changing.

Businesses don’t fail because plans change. They fail because leaders quit on goals the moment the original plan stops working.

Share

Five practical steps:

• Write your goal in outcome language, not tactic language. If it includes a method, it’s not a goal. I always focus on what I actually wan to to happen, then reverse engineer how to get there.
  
  

• Review your plan quarterly and ask one brutal question: “If I were starting today, would I choose this approach?”
  
  

• Track feedback, not effort. Evidence beats intention every time. Just because you worked so hard on something or invested so much into it doesn’t mean from this point it is still going to work and is worth investing in more.
  
  

• Separate identity from execution. You are not your plan; you’re the person committed to the outcome.
  
  

• When circumstances change, change the plan immediately—but reaffirm the goal out loud and in writing.
  
  

Plans are disposable. Goals are not.

Leave a comment

Here’s the hard lesson most founders only learn after bleeding time, money, and emotional energy all over the floor:

You have to normalize leaving people in the reality they have chosen.

This isn’t about abandoning people when it matters most. This isn’t about refusing to share truth, faith, or help when it’s truly needed. This is about finally accepting that some people do not want freedom. They want an explanation for why they don’t have it.

I used to believe that if someone just got a real chance—real authority, real autonomy, real responsibility—they’d rise to the occasion. That gratitude would flip a switch. That potential would finally activate.

That belief cost me years.

What I see now, both in my own experience and watching other founders repeat the cycle, is that victimhood doesn’t disappear when you remove constraints. It adapts. Give someone a boss, they’re oppressed. Give them freedom, they’re overwhelmed. Give them authority, they’re undermined. Give them responsibility, they’re unsupported.

They don’t stop being victims. They just find a new villain.

I once had an employee complain that I “started him too high.” I had brought him on at a higher salary than the work I knew he’d do in the first year or two was worth, because I could see once he grew into the role and the company grew around him, he’d be worth every penny. So I started him at that elevated rate a few years before his output matched it. I saw it as paying him a little extra every year until his productivity caught up in an effort to show how much he was valued, even for just his potential. To him, every year without a raise felt like an insult. When I asked if he’d prefer to have started $25,000 lower and “earned” his way to the same number over five years, he said yes, that it’s customary to simply give a certain percentage wage per year instead of starting out high right off the bat. But since I did, then he deserved to keep going up per year, even though he already started at what his 5 year ceiling would have been. That’s when it clicked: it was never about progress. It was about grievance.

This is what so many founders get wrong. They see potential. They see what could be. They project their own hunger, discipline, and ownership onto someone else and assume it’s dormant rather than absent. So they open doors. They hand over opportunity. And when that opportunity gets thrown back in their face, they’re shocked.

They shouldn’t be.

Some people would rather fail with an excuse than succeed without one. Blame is safer than accountability. Victimhood is familiar. Success requires abandonment of the very story that’s been protecting them.

You cannot drag people to the promised land.

Even God didn’t try. An entire generation died in the desert because slavery with a narrative felt safer than freedom with responsibility. Milk and honey meant nothing compared to the comfort of being able to say, “This isn’t my fault.”

If you’re leading, building, or founding something, hear this clearly: your job is not to rescue people from the consequences of who they refuse to become. Stop beating your head against a wall trying to convert victims into owners. Let them keep the story they love so much.

Move forward with the ones willing to walk.

Practical application:

• Stop confusing potential with desire. Talent without ownership is a liability, not an asset.
  
  

• When someone resists responsibility, believe them the first time. Don’t negotiate with patterns.
  
  

• Pay attention to how people talk about their past. Chronic blame predicts future behavior.
  
  

• Offer opportunity once, clearly, and without emotional attachment to the outcome.
  
  

• Learn to walk away without anger. Leaving people where they chose to stand is not cruelty—it’s clarity.

  Leave a comment

  Subscribe now

There are two equal and opposite ways founders choke their own businesses.

The first is obvious: everything needs your approval. Nothing moves without you. Projects pile up at your desk while your team waits. That’s the classic bottleneck.

The second is quieter and just as destructive: you hire people, give them vague goals, little training, no systems—and expect them to magically know how you would do it.

Most founders oscillate between these two extremes without realizing it.

In the early days, you are the system. Your instincts, standards, and shortcuts live in your head. When you finally bring people on, you assume some of that knowledge is obvious. It isn’t. What feels “basic” to you is actually tribal knowledge earned through repetition, mistakes, and context they don’t have.

Share

So what happens?

Some employees freeze.

They don’t want to do the wrong thing. They don’t want to embarrass themselves. They don’t want to create rework. So they wait. They ask questions. They stall. From your perspective, they look unmotivated or incapable. From their perspective, they’re being careful in a system with no guardrails.

Other employees do the opposite.

They charge ahead to prove their value. They make decisions, push projects forward, and fill in the blanks themselves. They’re trying to help. But because you never showed them how decisions are made, they make them in ways you wouldn’t. Then you get upset. “Why would you do it like that?” you ask—forgetting you never taught them another way.

Now the spiral begins.

You feel burned. You conclude people “can’t be trusted.” You clamp down on information. You require more approvals. You insert yourself earlier and more often. Ironically, the very chaos caused by lack of systems convinces you to become an even bigger bottleneck.

This isn’t a people problem. It’s a leadership systems problem.

Employees don’t fail in a vacuum. They fail inside unclear environments. When expectations are vague, training is minimal, and standards live only in your head, every outcome will feel like a gamble. Some people freeze. Some overreach. And you end up frustrated with both.

The real issue is that you’re asking humans to substitute for infrastructure.

The solution is the same as in Part I, but the motivation is clearer now: systems don’t just free your time—they protect your people.

Standard Operating Procedures are not bureaucracy. They are mercy.

They tell someone how to succeed before they have to guess. They make initiative safe. They give confidence to act without fear of punishment. When someone knows the process, the standards, and the decision boundaries, they don’t need permission for every step—and they don’t go rogue either.

This is why “just hire smart people” is lazy advice. Smart people without context still make misaligned decisions. Training isn’t a one-time event. Systems aren’t a document you write once. They’re living translations of how your business actually works.

Subscribe now

Yes, building them takes time. More time than barking corrections after mistakes. More time than approving everything yourself. But it’s the only way out of the loop where you’re alternately disappointed in your team and trapped by your own control.

If you don’t define how work gets done, your team will either stop moving or move in directions you don’t like. Both outcomes are predictable. Both are avoidable.

The goal isn’t blind autonomy or suffocating oversight. The goal is bounded freedom—clear rules, clear outcomes, and enough structure that competent people can win without you hovering.

If your business feels stuck, look closely. You’re probably not just the bottleneck at the end of the process. You may also be the fog at the beginning.

5 Action Items to Break the Cycle

1. Audit where employees freeze vs. where they go off-script—both signal missing systems. Then build those systems first
   
   

2. For each role, document decision boundaries: what they can decide alone, what needs escalation. Decision trees are helpful
   
   

3. Build SOPs that explain why steps exist, not just what to do. I like using the three forms. Text, Pictures, Video all redundant for each task
   
   

4. Replace “ask me first” with checklists and examples of acceptable outcomes.
   
   

5. When mistakes happen, fix the system before correcting the person.
   
   

Your job isn’t to be the smartest worker in the room forever. It’s to make the room smart enough to run without you standing in the doorway.

Leave a comment

The highest IQ on record is actually a woman. I know it hurts my male soul to even type these words. But it’s true. Marylin Vos Savant (ironic surname) of St Louis Missouri is said to have an IQ of 228, making her, on paper, the smartest person in the modern world. I see posts and memes about her every once in a while, typically a woman’s profile gloating about Marilyn’s superior intelligence and invariably, as I read through the comments it’s a bunch of, usually young guys, blasting her with, “How come I’ve never heard of her?” and “What great accomplishment or invention does she have her name on with that big brain of hers?” Now I typically chalk that up to a bunch of immature and irritated guys who need to get over it and get their fragile egos in check. But behind the toxic internet wars they, inadvertently, bring up a good point: Life rewards Action, not Intelligence, and the sooner you get that through your head, the sooner you’ll start to succeed in life.

Share

When I was in school, I believed being smart was everything. I watched kids outperform me on tests and comforted myself with the lie that they weren’t actually smarter—they just studied more. “Anyone can do that,” I’d say, sometimes quietly, sometimes out loud. I’m 40 now, and writing that sentence makes me laugh in the painful way that only hindsight allows.

I was a solid B+/A- student who coasted early on because I really was quicker than most of my peers. Then somewhere around that age came the girls, we’ve all known them, that were annoyingly obsessed with how they needed to get a doctorate from Harvard. They would go on and on about their college application strategy, and all this before they were even 12. Wow I thought they were obnoxious, and while we were friends, I could tell they weren’t really all that smart through day to day interaction.

Regardless of what I thought about them they made flashcards, studied in groups for hours, asked teachers for extra credit, and took every possible advantage available to them. Cringe, I thought. Style-cramping. Unnecessary.

Yet they kept getting A+’s.

In my mind, this was an injustice. I was brilliant and barely tried; they worked relentlessly and beat me anyway. I told myself they weren’t truly smart, just artificially boosted by effort. What I didn’t understand then was that effort is not artificial. It’s the whole point.

The next year my father retired, and everything changed. I went from seeing him a couple days a week to having him fully present—coaching every game, attending every event, and putting me to work constantly. Over time, a simple truth became unavoidable: intelligence means nothing if it doesn’t translate into real-world results. Having a clever idea about how to move a rock from point A to point B is meaningless unless the rock actually moves.

Subscribe now

That lesson shows up everywhere. Our education system unintentionally teaches that being smart is the goal, that credentials equal value, and that thinking about things is somehow superior to actually getting around to doing them. It’s why so many people chase office jobs while looking down on working with their hands. It’s why entire groups define themselves as “smart” while remaining bitter, stagnant, and economically fragile. Knowing how to do something is always inferior to actually doing it.

In business—and in life—nobody cares how smart you are unless your intelligence produces results for someone else. And just as importantly, nobody cares how unimpressive you might seem if the job actually gets done. (Think Nikola Jokic)

I used to believe that struggle was embarrassing and that real accomplishment should look effortless. The achievement didn’t matter nearly as much as whether I appeared naturally gifted while doing it. That mindset produces nothing. The truth is the opposite: talent and intelligence only increase your responsibility. The smarter you are, the more shameful it is to do nothing useful with it.

All the people you admire from the past. I garuntee you, as smart as they may or may not have been, you don’t admire them for being smart, but you admire them for something they did. You admire them for what they built, fixed, defended, discovered, or endured. In fact, the fewer advantages they had, the more impressive their accomplishments become. That’s because being smart isn’t a thing at all unless it compels you into meaningful action and life doesn’t care either way as long as you make a meaningful contribution to everyone else in the real and physical world.

Being smart can even be a handicap. The smarter you are, the better you become at crafting believable excuses. You’re used to winning easily, so when effort is finally required, quitting feels justified. Intelligence without discipline breeds entitlement. Just like how the pretty girl who doesn’t know she’s pretty is the best because she doesn’t use her beauty as a social crutch, but actually takes the time to develop a personality is the one you want, in the smarts category, being smart but not thinking that you’re smart is ideal as you learn early on to try hard and grow and put effort into things. The more you actually do, the better you’ll get at doing that thing, regardless of how smart you are.

Intelligence paired with action changes the world.

Marilyn vos Savant doesn’t need defending, and she doesn’t owe anyone proof of worth. But the reaction to her IQ exposes something important. Great intelligence is great power, and power carries responsibility. If people with average ability can move mountains through persistence and trial-and-error, then those with exceptional minds have even less excuse to sit still.

Would you rather be known for being smart, or for having done something that mattered? The best outcome is when people wonder how smart you were—because the work you left behind made the question irrelevant.

Practical Takeaways

1. Stop optimizing for looking smart; optimize for finishing things.
   
   

2. Treat effort as a skill, not a consolation prize.
   
   

3. Measure intelligence by outcomes, not opinions or credentials.
   
   

4. Put your best ideas into motion before you perfect them.
   
   

5. If you know you’re capable, demand results from yourself—not excuses.

   Leave a comment

Sales has been, by far, the most difficult lesson I’ve had to learn in business to date. I think the problem is—and I’ve seen this repeatedly with “creative” type entrepreneurs—that there are two things happening at the same time, quietly, under the surface.

First, we still don’t really consider ourselves business people or sales people. We have a salesperson stereotype in our heads, and that guy is pushy, loud, obnoxious, and a scam artist with a five-o’clock shadow and greasy slicked back hair. Everyone sees through him. People cross the street when they see him coming. All he cares about is selling you on his widget whether you need it or not, and no matter when you see him, he’s got a different widget to sell

.

We want nothing to do with that guy. So we tell ourselves, almost proudly, “I’m not in sales.” As if saying it out loud somehow exempts us from the reality that without sales, there is no business. There is only a hobby with receipts.

Second, we see ourselves as artists. Builders. Craftsmen. Having to sell your work feels like a slap in the face to the purist inside of you. If you build it, they will come. And if they don’t come, then clearly there must be something wrong with the work. If my work isn’t compelling others to come out of the woodwork begging me to buy, then there must be an imperfection I haven’t noticed.

So back into the dungeon it goes.

Even if, up to this point, I’ve been keeping it a secret. Even if nobody actually knows it exists. If nobody is clamoring to buy it yet, then it needs another overhaul before it ever sees the light of day. Nobody is allowed to even know I’ve been working on it. After all, my standards are only a couple degrees below perfection, and once I hit that, oh boy, the sales will just come rolling in.

Both of those notions are foolish.

I’ll say it again, because this is the hinge point of the entire argument: in both of those scenarios—and in any other version you can think of—Nobody Knows You Exist.

Nobody has any idea you have anything to sell. Which means people could be walking around desperate for a solution that you already have in your pocket, and they will never buy it because you never told them. Because you were embarrassed. Because you didn’t want to bother anyone. Because you were “above selling.” And quietly, predictably, your product withers and dies.

And even more than that, the human mind is incredibly forgetful. Even if you told someone a year ago that you had something to sell, and they didn’t need it then, now that they do need it, they are racking their brain trying to remember: Who was that one guy with that one thing? They lost your business card. They can’t remember which Facebook friend you are. They vaguely remember a logo, a color, a half-formed idea—and then they move on.

Here’s another lie that sneaks in at this stage.

Sometimes you feel like people are watching your ad on TV, or scrolling past your post, or driving by your billboard and thinking, “Oh how pathetic. There goes Dominic again, marketing himself, trying to get more business. How sad.” As if your audience is sitting around judging you for daring to be visible.

That voice is not the market. That voice is your own insecurity doing impressions.

In reality, people are not critiquing your ambition. They’re not rolling their eyes at your consistency, and if they are it’s probably to avoid the shame they are feeling at their own inconsistency. Most of them are barely paying attention. And the ones who do notice aren’t thinking what you fear they’re thinking. They’re thinking, “Oh, that’s what he does.” Or, “Good to know.” Or filing your name away for later without you ever knowing it.

The uncomfortable truth is this: whatever you think is a “reasonable” amount of sales or marketing effort, triple it. Triple the ads. Triple the reminders. Triple the visibility. Not because you’re bad at what you do, but because you are living inside your business and your customers are not.

You are thinking about your brand, your slogan, your colors, your pricing, and your inadequacies every single day. You are so close to it that you are sick of it. You feel embarrassed repeating yourself. You feel like you’re bugging people. You imagine an audience that doesn’t actually exist.

Other people are thinking about their kids, their deadlines, their stress, their problems. They are not annoyed by your consistency; they barely registered your existence. Most businesses don’t fail because they were too visible. They fail because they were invisible.

Sales covers a multitude of sins in business. You can have an imperfect website, a clunky process, or a product that still needs refinement, and sales will keep the lights on long enough for you to fix it. But without sales, even the most beautiful product and the cleanest process will sit unused.

Selling doesn’t have to be gross. It’s typically not gross. Selling is not manipulation. It’s not trickery. It’s showing up consistently—day after day, month after month, year after year—and reminding people, “Hey, in case you ever need help with this, I’m here.”

That’s it.

But consistency is the part most people avoid. We treat sales like a one-time announcement instead of an ongoing relationship. We act like reminding people is somehow beneath us, when in reality it’s how trust and familiarity are built. Life is loud. Attention is fractured. Fake solutions are everywhere. Real solutions need repetition.

The biggest shift young business owners need to make is this: stop measuring your sales efforts by how uncomfortable they make you. Your discomfort is not a signal that you’re doing too much. It’s usually just a sign that you’re finally doing enough.

If the phone isn’t ringing, and you have a good product, fair pricing, and a real solution to a real problem, the issue is almost never that you’re selling too much.

It’s that not nearly enough people know you exist.

Share

On-the-ground steps:

• Triple your current visibility before changing your product or pricing.
  
  

• Choose one simple message and repeat it consistently for 6–12 months before you decide it “didn’t work”
  
  

• Systematize reminders so sales isn’t dependent on confidence or mood. If you’re waiting for motivation or confidence you’ll get out there about once a month. You need to create an environment that gets you out there regardless of how you feel today.
  
  

• Assume people forgot you, not that they judged you.
  
  

• Measure progress by reach and repetition, not by how exposed promoting yourself feels.

  Leave a comment