Antifragile's take: The secret to scaling up.

[Antifragile]

The secret to scaling up.​

Imagine a tailor who has little experience with suits making a one of a kind suit for you. Imagine he had to get it right the first time! It's not going to end well. And that's just a suit.

That's how most people approach business. They have this big spark! Great idea that launches them and then they must create this big thing.

---
Let's back up a little

The story begins in 2010, in Shanghai. We are at one of the most expensive seafood restaurants and ordering a fish. Not just any fish but one that was just flown from Hong Kong. The inspected fish is perfect and to ensure this is the one that gets cooked... our host makes a unique cut.

The host of our lunch was a mega successful entrepreneur in his 50s. He not only launched great businesses, he took them public and created perfect exits, not once but 3 times. He owned properties across the world and happened to have one in Canada, which is how we met.

He told me to quit my job and start a business. His advice was "think about scaling up". Does that remind you of anything?

CENTS - see that S?
---
There is a reason why it gets harder to become an entrepreneur as you get older. With age and higher income, you have more responsibilities and more to lose! We feel losses +/- 4x harder than gains, so me being a high earner ...

My host said "quit your job now, it'll only get harder as you get promotions".
---

This thread is for those who have a deep drive to do more.​

Get creative and know that it's as natural to you to think outside the box, as breathing. Kids are a great example. They never give up. It's in our DNA! Remember to lean into your nature.

First, let me address the elephant in the room. On this forum you'll see too many threads dominating about freelance work. Nothing wrong with it. Internet made it a new reality but also a new "job". Competition is fierce. If you don't have niche experience, great skills and marketing know-how: you'll likely be on a treadmill accomplishing F*ck all. Don't settle for a treadmill performance.

Now to real business: Think like a CEO and you'll do better than if you do not.

What does that mean? Say I am 20 y/o and have no experience, money or relationships. What the hell do you want me to do now? Shouldn't I just try to become an email copywriter and produce content? Wouldn't I make some money that way? ChatGPT says i would!

NO. You won't. It'll suck. You'll suck. Your work will suck.

Do this instead:

STEP 1: Pay your bills​

Do you have a way to pay your bills? If not, what is the fastest way to getting some money?
List 5+ options. Jobs, side hustles, everything is on the table.

What irritates your friends/mom/uncle during the day? Whatever it is, can you help them and get paid?

Examples: we had a snow dump. I'd have paid someone to shovel my driveway, but imagine they had a snowblower. Or someone organized a "student" crew and got a cut for organizing?

And yes, get a job, freelance - all acceptable options at this stage.

STEP 2: Get your creative juices flowing​

What unfair advantage do you have?

• Do you speak English?

• Is your family well connected in your city?

• Do you know and have some friends whose parents are entrepreneurs?

• Do you have internet access, education, healthy body?

List all of the things that aren't a given. Take nothing for granted. Every little thing can be your advantage over competition.

​

STEP 3: Lean into your advantages & start...​

Talk to someone who's successful. Face to face! Ask them: "You know me, what should I do? How can I make something of myself? What's your advice?"

Remember, you paid your bills already, so you aren't desperate, you are now moving towards something BETTER.

Example: if you approached me now. I am a RE Developer. I'd tell you that part 9 code applies to smaller buildings. This means that it's cheaper to build and there is an opportunity for a young person to learn. How? Start by getting a Project Manager education & a job, so you know you won't F*ck it all up. That's probably a 2 year investment into a specialized education. It can serve you well to build up either a construction or a real estate company! It's something that can serve you long term.

STEP 4: Think like a CEO when you do.​

Just because something needs doing, doesn't mean it is you who must be doing it.

You only do it yourself for as long as you cannot afford to hire someone to work for you. Each business idea must begin with the end in mind. End is a liquidity event (either soon or when you are 90!) but business that depends on you working there isn't a business - it's a job. Think like a CEO. And remember that during the early days you are both: CEO and the Janitor.

STEP 5: Think big and bigger and bigger.​

If your plan is to make a $10k / mo - then consider what it would take to make $100k/mo. Say you want it in 12 months, now think how to do it in 2.

You will fail.

Why try? Because you are trying to unblock your mind. You'll create ideas you wouldn't otherwise have.

This is an iterative process. Your job is to find something that works, tinker and improve. Then improve again and again. Keep getting better each time. You are building an enterprise.

STEP 6: Many small things​

​

Break down your big and bigger business idea into small "lego" pieces.

One big thing: you go after it for a long time and 11 years later...

You back on this forum "oh shit, I tried this and it didn't work, this place sucks".

Better way: many small things. You've always kept your vision of a huge scale project. But you had realistic expectations, targets and hit them one at a time. You kept building using your "lego" blocks. Each time the block didn't fit, you learned. You tinkered. You changed. Then when it worked you repeated the actions.

Listen, it's so important that I am going to repeat it - the way to scale is to repeat what works many times. You and your team get better at what works and you just keep adding to it.

Eclectic ideas:​

• You like socialization. Show up to every single public hearing meeting in your municipality. Get to know the pain points of the residents of your area. Find a way to monetize.

• Read the local news and what's the latest complaint topic? Go to the areas. Is someone complaining about quality of life going down? Create something for them - events, transportation, whatever. Are you reading that animals got into some building and it took a while to get them out? Was that because the building needs improvements? Is it that animal handling can be improved? How can you benefit?
• Be fearless and disrupt the status quo. You see strollers go for $1,000+ a pop? What if you made a minimalist version for $100? It'll suck but maybe it'll be good enough for just a "mall" visit?!
• @Kak had a great idea he posted for an outdoor playground for kids, assembly, maintenance, insurance, SCALE! +++

Good luck. Look forward to your comments and questions.

P.S. I started my first business in 2012, it still took me two years to heed the valuable advice I got in Shanghai in 2010. Same person introduced me to many others. One became a close friend, later an investor and then I became an investor in his business! I've had a ton of fun "growing up" as an entrepreneur.

P.P.S. Special thanks to everyone who was openly asking for another thread on positive "how-to". People like @BizyDad @Fox @Black_Dragon43 (yes, even you!), @mikecarlooch (dm questions) @JLE (dm too)... @Kak for walking me off the ledge more than once... + @Andy Black for always being the nicest & helpful person on the forum. @MJ DeMarco for hosting this place, books and making recent positive changes to energize discussions. Lastly @Vigilante - don't know you, but glad you are on here again. Place lit up since you came back, coincidence?

 

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[Antifragile]

Wow. I am humbled by how popular this thread became overnight. Thank you all.

But there has been some disagreement, which is healthy! Allow me to push back on "experience is for suckers, I can do this out of sheer will and look at me making money fast, winning winning winning!" nonsense.

How important is experience? How important is slow/long planning?​

Some people think that if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough. That my method is too slow. That deliberate approach to improving yourself is outdated and all the internet businesses are taking over.

Creativity (even in how you make money) requires a muse, not experience, not slow thinking / planning. True/false?

Hmm...

What do the following projects have in common?

• Jaws movie
• Sydney Opera House, &
• Electric Lady recording studio

All projects believed creativity is something mysterious and spontaneous. It cannot be scheduled or planned.

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

And succeeded too.

These sexy stories of projects that had no plan, no budget and …

Somehow they not only made it, but are cemented in history.

Why do planning when you “work best under stress”?

Wouldn’t it be better to let what’s natural just be?

No No NO

Daniel Kahlerman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow that using reference-class forecasting is "the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods".

Let's back up a little ...


The problem here is that projects that fail miserably are forgotten.

Projects that run into trouble but succeed are remembered and celebrated.

Survivorship bias. Overlooking those projects that failed is a bad mistake.

Sydney Opera House story:

The city held an international competition to design an opera house, and it was won by a Danish architect named Jørn Utzon. He was a relatively unknown when he won this competition. The final bill was 1,400% over estimate, one of the largest cost overruns for a building in history!
And the whole thing destroyed Jørn Utzon's career.
Have you heard of his other projects? Exactly.

But you may counter that Jaws was 300% over budget, no experience, no plan and yet somehow box office made more. It made careers. The odds of that happening are 20% based on a sample of over 2,000 projects.

80% chance it’ll be over budget and under expected value. That’s bad odds!

A Canadian story:

Note that all Olympic Games suffer from "eternal beginner syndrome" because they are done every 4 years and in different countries, no experienced team does it often enough. Each country is a beginner.

• 1976 Montreal Olympics, result?
• 720% over budget
• Montreal Gazette said “Olympic stadium cost so much it took 30 years for Quebec to pay it off”

How much worse could it be?

My take remains and is supported by data:

Creative process is *slow*, *painstaking* and intensely *iterative*.

It applies to your small business as much as to the little "lego" parts of the enterprise you are building. It literally applies to everything.

Just like a world class surgeon will always command a $7-figure "salary" after "wasting years getting experience"... but if you needed that surgery, would you rather have someone who didn't train as long? nope.

Still in doubt?

Aristotle said that experience is "The fruit of years" and argued that it is the source of what he called "phronesis" - the "practical wisdom" that allows us to see what is good for people and make it happen, which Aristotle saw as the highest "intellectual virtue".

Next time you fly somewhere, remember that you want the flight attendant to be the optimist, not the pilot. Can you imagine hearing from the pilot "I am optimistic about our ability to get there, I took an online course last night"?

I rest my case.

 

[Antifragile]

Game Excellence vs Excellent Game.​

​

Any game you win is excellent.

Game excellence is when you did everything you possibly could. You trained as hard as you could. You had everything to do and did it all. Even if you lost, you had "game excellence".

That's why odds are important. Excellent game could mean winning a lotto. Game excellence means stacking odds to ensure that you don't need to win a lotto. You'll create the circumstances that attract "luck".

More on planning here: GOLD! - EXECUTION - 8 Steps To Help You Plan for Business Success, a How-To Guide

​

There are no rules.​

Steps 1, 2... 6 are arbitrary. I called them steps because that's what they look like: staircase steps, each higher than one before. Unlike a home where steps are all the same size, these are not. Some are small, others are HUGE.

In Step 1 you may make 2x minimum wage, in step 2 you may make 3x mim wage. Then in Step 3-4 you may make $1 million p.a. And in Step 6 you may be pulling 8 figures like it's nothing.

Life is like that for many of us. For others, cultural hypnosis kills dreams. Life then looks like walking on a treadmill. Busy, tired, no progress.

This thread is for those who want their life to be more like a dream. No rules could explain it.

So when shit isn't working in your business, it feels like the world around you sucks and you are feeling down. Remember: some dreams are bad. You'll have another where like a superhero you do things incomprehensibly amazing. There are no rules in business, you make the rules.

Here's an oldie but goodie:

Q: What do you need to do to make minim wage?
A: Walk into a fast food joint and ask.


Q: What do you need to do to make minim wage + $5/hr?
A: Whistle at the fast food joint job. Your boss will think you deserve a raise because you have the right attitude.


Q: What do you need to do to make $100/hr?
A: Get a bunch of education, become a "professional": lawyer, accountant, engineer, doctor etc.


Q: What do you need to do to make $1,000/hr?
A: Niche specialization? Tax lawyer, surgeon etc.


Q: What do you need to do to make $10,000/hr?
A: ...


Q: What do you need to do to make $100,000/hr?
A: ...

(spoiler: you already know the answer, entrepreneurship, of course!)

Accepting mediocrity kills your future!​

Leverage is key to your success.​

​

We all want to get to the highest level of financial and personal success. Blaming the economy, taxes, industry is accepting mediocrity!

To become successful, use leverage! Experience is leverage. Relationships - every single "unfair" advantage you have, is leverage. That's why sometimes it takes time, sometimes it doesn't. Imagine you are building the biggest beam over a fulcrum to lift the largest possible load.



The bigger the beam, the less force you need to lift higher loads. Think about it, Elon Musk can raise $10+ Billion fund with one phone call at 3AM. That's leverage! But 20 years ago, he could not.


With Game Excellence, you get the highest and best use of your time, effort, passion... You build the highest lever!

This is so important, that I'll highlight it again and again. Your reality has nothing to do with the economy, taxes, whatever. Your reality has everything to do with how you leverage your time, your efforts and your opportunities. It is that simple.

1. How are you spending your time?
2. How rewarding are your efforts?
3. How well did you capitalize on the opportunities that were right in front of you?

One of the easiest $$ I've ever made was after being in the industry for a decade. I shared that on @Kak radio show once. Short story: saw land play, tied it up for $50k deposit, flipped it for a $600k profit. Without experience, I would not have seen the deal, would not have seen the opportunity, and no amount of effort would have led to this result. The thing about it is that once you get your "leverage", you'll be able to pull off "lucky" breaks like that with reasonable frequency!

My made up timeframes are fluid too. Some will get there in 3 years, others in 20. The point is to get there. With Game Excellence, everyone gets there eventually. You've created circumstances that make it very, very likely! And even if it takes longer because I am the unluckiest SOB our there, I'd rather be rich and old than old and poor. This is clearly not as sexy as the latest YT guru (or some forum members preaching), but it works. It works exceptionally well.


@mikecarlooch does this help answer your question?

Edit: formatting

 

[Antifragile]

Think slow, act fast.​

Most people do it in reverse. There is this hype from YT gurus (and some forum members too) that odds don't matter. You just need to wish it hard enough, sacrifice family, friends, trade body parts - all if it. If you want it bad enough, you'll make 7-8 figures in your early 20s... and why? Well... just because.

Even after reading all of @MJ DeMarco books most people still do not think before they do. They act and then hope it all works out for their "Lambo" dream. That's a huge problem. Our brains are capable of running great "simulations" without spending any money. Worse yet, most fail to run real life simulations too!

Is it any wonder most people fail? Ironic. Those who scream the loudest "I am the next American Idol" are the blooper material. Same with business.

But some succeed! I applaud them.

In fact, some readers may accuse me of conflicting advice:

• A: Do small things. Figure our what works, do more of that.
• B: Dream, plan and go for HUGE things! Do not settle for mediocrity, it will kill your future.

Doesn't A conflict with B? Which one is it? Should I try for a massive success in my early 20s or settle for education, job, freelance and build experience?

I am not sure what is harder, to create a successful business or to write on how to create a successful business. Seriously. @MJ DeMarco - maybe you can shed some light. And worse yet, I am not even that great a businessman. I your average guy that doesn't quit. It's really that simple.

A & B do not conflict. Do both over and over again.

What does that look like in real life?

Real Estate​

Long ago I wrote out plans in my notepad to create a mega company. But what industry? How quickly? How?

Answer 1: cosmetics. King crab on the east side of Canada was and is a huge business. Legs are sold to restaurants but there's too much waste of the body shell. Shell dried can be crushed into powder. Powder is used in makeup! Huge, massive business opportunity. And I was in my early 20s... full of piss and vinegar. Confident little F*ck.

So I called all friends and found a buyer for the said dry shells, in China. Volume would be almost unlimited.

Next challenge. Called up a few businesses and learned that they pay to dispose of the "waste". They'll gladly give it ALL to me if I just arrange someone to pick it up.

Listen, I just won a lotto. I am about to become a mega millionaire. Free shit that's worth a fortune if I just dry it and ship to China! How much more luck does one need?

That's why I am so rich today and wiring to you all my advice from a private jet plane!
Nope. That's not how the story ends, but it is a good story. I totally f*cked up the execution part. I was such a little "brilliant" confident F*ck that I didn't think "process is king", I thought my idea was worth a F*cking billion dollars. Oh looking back, was I ever wrong. I F*cked it up. I made zero.

Answer 2: shoes. Bruised but not beaten, I leaned further into my "entrepreneur" self. Still in my 20s I come up with the next billion dollar idea. I'll beat Nike in shoes. A classmate from Asia happens to be from a family that owns a factory making sneakers. We were going to be partners. I am great at sales + numbers. Weird but mighty combo. I called retailers, lined up the Bay (they were huge back then, now struggling like most). We had manufacturer on standby.

That's why I am so rich today and wiring to you all my advice from a private jet plane!
Nope. Boy's parents decided their son was going to "grow up" and do it himself. They bankrolled him under a condition of no partners. He was beyond useless and I wasn't going to work FOR him. It all fell apart.

Answer 3:... I won't bore you with the many others. I aimed so high.

The bottom line is this. I feel I was born to be an entrepreneur. I imagine success like standing in a line up. As long as you don't quit... Eventually your turn comes!

Imagine if throughout all that, I didn't do anything else? I'd have nothing. Instead, I kept reflecting. Kept writing plans and thinking back. Eventually when I found (wish it was sooner) MJ's Unscripted book, it was perfectly laid out. It explained my shit experiences AND my successful ventures.

I continued getting my education, then jobs (yikes, but yes!), side-hustles! then promotions, learning, more side hustles... then first successful business, then the big one.

The key is that I got better. A lot better. Hear me on this: If I had to do it with what I am capable of today, I'd scale the cosmetics company into a giant venture! I wasn't good enough back then. And that's ok.

"Start small and simple, and become an expert over time so that you can lead into bigger, more complex things."

Thanks Andy, this is exactly right. This is what happened to me. I started getting pretty damn good at some things. I realized the real answer for me was Real Estate. I've ran teams, made the right calls, made money on my own properties and it's just been a blast for me. It hasn't been just good, it's been consistently great.

Why is that? Because everything I did before became my "lever". My "Jobs" taught me all aspects of having a larger business that I now use, including relationships (example: bankers knew me before I went on my own). My "side hustles" kept the fire of entrepreneurship alive (and made me extra money).

And here I am, just getting started! How can I turn this into a multibillion dollar company?

But this thread isn't about me. It's about how to succeed for young forum members like @mikecarlooch

​

Mike - the Video Guy!

Let's dive into specifics! Hopefully others can help too (calling @Kak, @Vigilante on top of already engaged contributors).

Mike, how do you make money? What is working? What is NOT working?

Applying CENTS, what are you most worried about?

You clearly have the finger on the pulse of how social media works. But your execution (from what I've seen on LinkedIn) isn't great. You failed to get many likes on most of your posts. How do you reconcile that with your plans for expansion? Are you listening to what the market is telling you? What is it telling you?

And what is your main business? Video editing or teaching how to go "viral"? How can we help you get there? What parts of this (or other threads) are most useful? And more importantly, what changes have you made to your process?

 

[Antifragile]

Thanks so much for this @Antifragile - Looking forward to using this as a framework for making things happen.

I noticed that I've had some mental "rules" that have stopped me from thinking bigger. For example when you mentioned instead of thinking about 10k think about how to get to 100k, that's a total game changer when you ask yourself that question..

I have a question for you regarding something you said, which is "Be fearless and disrupt the status quo.".

I was honestly hoping someone would ask a question about that.

I have a hypothesis for something (regarding an opportunity I found thinking abstractly and just being all in on making social media work for myself and others), that no one else is doing..

And I'm wanting to figure out if the reason no one's doing it is because no one has put together what I've put together or because the idea simply doesn't work (i basically sat for a couple hours writing about the idea and ended up with 50+ pages on google docs, lol)

First, ask yourself: where am I on the STEP 1 through 6 above? Am I paying my bills? Do I have the luxury to tinker with ideas or do I need the cash flow NOW?

However obviously a hypothesis is a hypothesis, and my question would be how do you go about an idea that is disrupting the status quo, in terms of testing that hypothesis?

Experience is key here. I'll quote myself: "Imagine a tailor who has little experience with suits making a one of a kind suit for you. Imagine he had to get it right the first time! It's not going to end well. And that's just a suit."

A project is far more complicated. A business is a combination of projects... so even more complicated.

I love planning. 50 pages of planning is excellent - for the long term. But if you are in step 2, it'll take time to iterate through your ideas to make them viable. Nothing ever goes according to plan anyway.

How can you break it down to the simplest value proposition and test that? Again, think lego-blocks. Small tiny pieces that can assemble into a huge structure. Thousands of them.

The answer often comes down to experience. What can you do with that? Do you have that specific experience? If you don't, it's not a disruption, it's lunacy! Doomed to most likely failure. Unless... you partner or hire talent to give you that experience.

Who has done something similar? To me disruption isn't ever "brand new", it's just different value skew.

• Better quality
• Better price
• Better service
• Faster
• Nicer
• ... whatever

That means that whatever you are thinking of doing has likely been done before by someone. Maybe not as well. Maybe not as efficiently etc.

PayPal replaced cheque payments on eBay! It wasn't "new", it was just faster and better way to pay.

Do you feel that spending TOO much time on an unproven concept could be limiting for it not to work out?

And when do you know to throw a hypothesis out the window as something that probably won't work?

Thanks!

How quickly can you get to a time when you start to iterate doing something that pays you?


There is another way to think. I've willed deals to life after they died 1,000 times. Exaggeration? Sure. But just like Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", I have a gut feeling when I see a good deal. I won't let it go.

Are you an expert enough to recognize a good deal? Or are you tinkering with the hypotheticals in a world you know little about? An Amateur trying to compete at a Pro-level? Be honest with yourself.

Be fearless and disrupt the world in Step 6! Because you'll have iterated enough to be the "expert" in whatever you are doing.

This whole thread can be summed up:
1) Most people go after a HUGE ONE BIG THING and they always fail and get frustrated
2) Success is going after many small things that together become a huge business

Have a vision, and iterate, tinker, tweak it. As soon as you see profits - the market tells you to keep going! If you don't, the market tells you your idea sucks.

 

[Antifragile]

I may steal a little bit of @Kak thunder from another thread:

Do I think you should use your hard earned job savings to fund a business? Not really. Your business, at least in my opinion, should reach outside of any resources you will likely amass from a job over a couple of months or even years. I understand I differ on that from a lot of people.

This is another "Secret" to Scaling Up - leverage outside resources!

Resources come in different forms:

Capital / money.

If you need more money, who says it has to be yours? Seriously. That's a limiting belief.

• A family office that's managing a billion dollars isn't going to care about investing $1MM with you! Why? Because it's too small of a number to even other underwriting a deal. Unless you want $10M+, it's not with it for them to even look at your deal. Let that sink in.
• A retired grandpa who's living on fixed income may invest in a REIT because he has no access to deals that are available to accredited investors. But the yield/return on such deals is much better. The world isn't fair. It never was and never will be.
• People with money have a problem - they need yield on their money! It's hard to find good yield.

If you need experience...

• You should bring something tangible to the table, you must be great at something. But that does not mean great at everything!
• Say you are building a company, your product is kick a$$ but you suck at sales/marketing. You are an engineer type. Get a partner who is nothing like you! Think Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak.
• You now have something that works, but you want to scale it - great, hire people who are better than you. Yes, do not let the ego of "I must be the smartest guy in the room" stand in the way of success! That's stupid. Yet how many people end up hiring dumbasses just to make themselves look good? Too many.

Network, contact etc.

• The whole world is there for the taking guys. I've met a few billionaires. How? The most recent example is simple: catching up with a banker who's been working with me for a long while. He mentioned a famous local billionaire and said that we'd get along. Without skipping a beat, I said "Introduce me, send him an email and copy me now please". Yes, dear reader, no time like the F*cking present! Now. Now it happened. When I got back to the office, I picked up the chain email and invited him for a lunch. Auto reply came from his EA. I called her and booked a time.
• The point is simple but profound: whatever you are lacking, it's available somewhere. If you are introverted, you must have at least one friend who is not and can help you get through to whoever you need to get to.

Lastly, about pitching and getting investors... you may wonder "how". The process is simple (not easy!).

Having done this well for over a decade, I noticed a pattern. Big ticket investors look at only three (3) things, in this order:

1. The people.
2. The deal itself.
3. The numbers.

People first. If they do not trust you, you are shit out of luck. You heard me. If you are an asshat who thinks moral compass is for losers, you are a loser. Good business is done by good people and its key element to the Secret of Scaling Up. And note that Trust means a lot of things: trusting that you are an honest person, trusting that you are experienced enough (or your team/company) to know how to deliver the results etc.

The deal is 2nd. If you are pitching a real estate deal to a small PE firm, you won't get anywhere. Know your audience, the PE firm probably wants a small "boring" business, not a RE deal. The deal must match the audience appetite. Do your homework.

The numbers. What are the returns on the investment? People with money (theirs or managed funds) all have the same problem. They are looking for yield. Here is the funny part... everyone I talked to over the decade + of doing this says the same thing "if you got 1 & 2 right, 3 is always right". Meaning if you have people you trust, and the deal you like, numbers always work. Why? Because good people wouldn't bring you a good deal that doesn't pencil on the numbers.



PS. @BizyDad sorry to disappoint with no "new" thread. It's a big part of getting scale. Think of Elon Musk. He's where he is because he leveraged public money, engineering talent, relationships etc. It is truly part of the "Secret" of Scaling Up.

 

[BizyDad]

What types of questions would you ask yourself when choosing through a list like this?

We have three constraints as business owners.

Time.
Money.
Knowledge.

Most people say you should go after the idea that has the biggest possible return. That is certainly one way to go. But it also often leads to analysis paralysis. Especially if you don't have the requisite knowledge to be able to birth it.

That's @Antifragile 's crab story all over again.

Personally, I asked myself things like...

Which one of these ideas am I capable of executing on today?

Which one of these ideas will take up the least amount of my time?

Which one of these ideas can I execute on the fastest?

Which one of these ideas will tie up the least amount of my funds?

Which one of these costs the most money to start? The least?

Which one of these ideas will make enough profit that I bring people on board the fastest?

After asking myself a series of questions like that, I usually take a look at the answers and the choice becomes pretty clear.

Worst case, then maybe you at least have it narrowed down to two or three ideas.

And then I start talking to some people. Doing some market research. Coming up with a game plan in my head for stage 1, stage 2, stage 3 of the company.

And remember this, you don't need all the stages in order to start executing on stage 1. That's what that MJ post is all about...

Hope that helps.

 

[Antifragile]

I'd say the biggest mistake I've ever made and still do, is not take action on the biggest thing thats going to move the needle in the business at that time.

What will you do differently (if anything) starting today?

You know the definition of insanity - doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

I've read most best selling business books and biographies of successful business people. I've got all the knowledge I'll probably ever need to make a lot of money right now, but if you spend time doing the wrong things or nothing at all you end up like me.

Wondering generalist vs meaningful specific

Books are good for becoming a wondering generalist. But to become a meaningful specific, you need experience. One can read 100 books on swimming, but the only way to become a good swimmer is to swim… and swim a lot… and tinker with technique to improve, always getting just a little bit better than the time before.

So you did a few “wrong things” or “nothing at all” - that’s in the past. The “end up like me” sounds like a voice of frustration (rightfully so!).

But is this just a self reflection or a call to action in your own mind?

I liked the other thread aimed at younger forum visitors saying give up social media, I myself wouldn't say I'm addicted to social media but I'd certainly say I've now built up an addiction to "consuming" irrelevant information.

Dopamine addiction … all too common.

There's also a tendency to over analyse things, as Mike said further up in his post that if he sees another competitor doing the same it kind of pisses him off and invokes negative thoughts. I'm the same.

Analysis paralysis … yes, all too common as well.

I think that there's a lot that can be said for experience in business but that can sometimes work against you, the experiences I've gone through have eroded a lot of the self belief away that my younger self used to have.

This is good stuff. Are you saying that you are so experienced that you are now seeing clearly why something is about to NOT work? How could you turn that around? Because I am here to tell you there is something far worse than “too much experience” and it is “no experience at all”.

You'd think I'd be eager to make amends to past mistakes, even a few days ago I went the shop with my Wife to buy something and I knew there was only £27 left in my account, thankfully what we put in the basket came to just under £26 as I was praying I wouldn't have to suffer the embarrassment of my card declining.

I'm down on what I need to be earning each month, stress levels are through the roof with it and its causing issues with her. Does it make me go out and get a part time on the side? or even get back in front of a computer and start doing outreach? Cold Call maybe? Send an email? Send someone a DM?

Nope, i get back in the chair and tweak something on my website, or try and make the outreach message better. I'll occasionally get a referral from one of my clients and pick up and extra client or two but thats it.

Honestly, it sounds so stressful to live this way that it brings back memories to when I had nothing… I hated it so much, it’s impossible to put into words. I feel your pain reading your post. I feel you as if there was this pressure on my chest. It’s so awful.

And since you aren’t a young buck anymore… you should be in your prime earning years!

One of my higher paying clients wanted to delay her new campaign last week and start it in June, meaning her payment I was expecting was delayed. I'd have probably earned more money working at Mcdonalds this month now. I've literally had to tell her that I have another client in her area who wants to work with us (they don't) and if she could pay at least 50% now. Shes said yes and last night I emailed her the invoice, still no payment but I don't want to sound too desperate but really need to get it paid.

That’s not entrepreneurshIp, that’s STEP 1 in my thread. There is a better way. There is a better life. And YOU can do it and get it.

An 18 year old kid could probably take over my company and build it up to £10k a month in no time, does he have more experience than me? nope. He does have no fear, he'll take action on what he needs to do.

Can you elaborate? What do you do? Why would someone so young with no experience be able to seemingly run circles around you? I am confused.

At this moment it feels like the only thing thats going to jolt me is a health scare where I get told I've got something bad to get me out this rut. It's bizarre, it's like my hand will not move the mouse to do what needs to be done.

Mindset.

Decades ago I was a boxer. Not a great one but my father was able to pull strings and get me in withe best coach, a coach that trained two world champions. He wouldn’t take on kids like me without my dad’s connections and favours … but I got lucky. If you consider it luck that I had to train 2-3 hours a day, with no breaks and feeling literally feverish. Never before and I don’t think ever after… have I done so much with my body or was in that much pain. But I progressed fast and within months, I was in small competitions.

I asked my coach “How did you manage to train two world champions?”
He said the trick is in picking fights that you will win but with some difficulty. Then build up on those, one after another and so on...

Just like that, you need some wins! Small wins will do, but a whole bunch of them in a row. It’ll build up your momentum. Momentum will create the desire to do more, you won’t hesitate and like a snowball…

Sounds crazy but its lasted years now, at least when COVID was happened I could hide behind that as excuse.

In 20 years time I still want what I always have, freedom. I'm 42 never had a job working for someone and I'm completely against trading 5 days for 2 of a weekend and waiting for retirement. My actions say the opposite though.

It seems you are self aware. Now the hard questions:
- Do you feel ”free” today in spite of never having a job? I am going to guess “no”.
- What are you going to do today, after reading this post to change your life’s trajectory? Anything?
- Lastly, how can this forum help you get traction?

42 isn’t 20, but is Not 80 either. It’s just a bloody number. It’s what you do today, the decisions you make today that’ll define your next 40 years! Oh shit… did my inner voice just get out unfiltered again?

 

[Andy Black]

I will do my due diligence and try to find the best resources I can to further my education in this direction.

I spent a few K on a project management course a few years ago. The guy teaching it was retired and full of stories.

The only thing I remember was him saying at the start that a project manager's job is to pass a test. He even said we could leave now if we wanted as that's all there is to project management.

Find out what the test will be and on what date. Then pass it.

If the test is to deliver 100 blue widgets on 15-Apr-23 and you deliver them on 16-Apr-23 then you failed.
If you deliver 100 red widgets on 15-Apr-23 then you failed.
If you deliver 99 blue widgets on time you still failed.

I asked "But what if the business needed 100 green widgets and not 100 blue widgets?"

To which he replied "That's not the job of the project manager. Sure, you could explain that they should really be green but at the end of the day you have to pass the test on the day it will be applied."

 

[Vigilante]

I've had a glimpse into @Antifragile's business and the new offices they just constructed. If you had any idea who this guy was, you'd stop waiting for Elon Musk to stop by, and you'd go back in the forum and read every one of his posts like I am going to do over the next week.

What I can promise you from what I learned is @Antifragile is here with a pure motive to give back, and you and I are the recipients. Drink it in while it lasts and ask him questions while you can.

 

[Antifragile]

Hmmm, I'd have to say that my opinion is completely the opposite. Starting is easy; growing a large business with little to no prior experience is damn near impossible. That comes from having met a couple hundred successful entrepreneurs over the years including a handful that had IPOs or were acquired. It was notable that basically ALL of them had started one more earlier businesses (usually several) with varying degrees of success along with having an early mentor who provided some kind of guidance.

The problem is the entrepreneur is *always* the weak link. Without experience, you have a hard time even deciding what direction to take or who's advice to take. As you grow the business, it's inevitable that you'll have made operating decisions that work for a certain size company that are completely inappropriate for the next stage. Many times it's just too difficult to change systems at that point and it stagnates.

Simple example: You've grown a burrito shop to ten locations. Most excellent. Along the way, you've developed internal systems, hiring procedures and vendors that can provide product to ten locations. After getting excited about opening 25 locations, you realize the internal systems can't handle it, the existing vendors can't supply enough product and the established management team knows nada about operating a 25 unit business much less building it.

That leaves you with tearing out everything and effectively starting from scratch building out new systems, developing new relationships and hiring people capable of building and operating a 25 unit enterprise. Doing that is pretty painful - financially and emotionally - and is a major reason that many "pretty damn successful" entrepreneurs settle for status quo. The only way of avoiding that is knowing what the future will require which is the definition of experience. Advisors help, but you'll always hear conflicting advice and you really don't know enough to make an informed decision.

It would be interesting to hear from other people who know entrepreneurs who've broken through the various growth stages.

What you write sounds reasonable because it's close to what most consider to be "truth".

I take issue with this advice. It basically says that entrepreneurship is like sports, it has a linear progression. Meaning that you must learn to walk before you run and when you are running... you'll tap out on speed.

In my experience (and I mean my own businesses, not "having met a couple hundred successful entrepreneurs over the years") that is not the case. Lucky for us, we are not bound as entrepreneurs by the same rules as athletes. We have geometrical progression.

To demonstrate this point, I'll refer to my own thread:

GOLD! - EXECUTION - 8 Steps To Help You Plan for Business Success, a How-To Guide

Planning is essential to the success of any business. But what exactly should you be planning for? And how do you know if you're over-planning? There is no one way, but it is better to have a method than not. Before we go on, I lied in the title - there are no 8 steps, there never are the 8...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

And in particular, this image:

I do not need to experience White-Water to know that I am about to hit it after "fun" stage of my restaurant business. You can already make changes to the team you have, to the systems you are building to accommodate surviving and thriving from White-Water into Predictable Success stage. When @mikecarlooch says he plans to start a bigger business, he doesn't need to start a food truck burrito place first, he can have a goal of creating a chain of restaurants from day 1. Nothing is preventing him from planning this and executing appropriately.

That's the beauty of business. You can prepare for it without having to learn lessons the hard way on your own skin. You can anticipate challenges because plenty came before you, you can learn form them.

Put it differently, the issue I take with your post is what you said here: "That leaves you with tearing out everything and effectively starting from scratch building out new systems, developing new relationships and hiring people capable of building and operating a 25 unit enterprise."

What you wrote is an example of lack of prior preparation!

That is not to say experience isn't important. I've said it many times, experience is extremely important. As I said (quoting myself here again):

Wow. I am humbled by how popular this thread became overnight. Thank you all.

But there has been some disagreement, which is healthy! Allow me to push back on "experience is for suckers, I can do this out of sheer will and look at me making money fast, winning winning winning!" nonsense.

How important is experience? How important is slow/long planning?​

Some people think that if you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough. That my method is too slow. That deliberate approach to improving yourself is outdated and all the internet businesses are taking over.

Creativity (even in how you make money) requires a muse, not experience, not slow thinking / planning. True/false?

Hmm...

What do the following projects have in common?

• Jaws movie
• Sydney Opera House, &
• Electric Lady recording studio

All projects believed creativity is something mysterious and spontaneous. It cannot be scheduled or planned.

“Necessity is the mother of invention”

And succeeded too.

These sexy stories of projects that had no plan, no budget and …

Somehow they not only made it, but are cemented in history.

Why do planning when you “work best under stress”?

Wouldn’t it be better to let what’s natural just be?

No No NO

Daniel Kahlerman wrote in Thinking, Fast and Slow that using reference-class forecasting is "the single most important piece of advice regarding how to increase accuracy in forecasting through improved methods".

Let's back up a little ...


The problem here is that projects that fail miserably are forgotten.

Projects that run into trouble but succeed are remembered and celebrated.

Survivorship bias. Overlooking those projects that failed is a bad mistake.

Sydney Opera House story:

The city held an international competition to design an opera house, and it was won by a Danish architect named Jørn Utzon. He was a relatively unknown when he won this competition. The final bill was 1,400% over estimate, one of the largest cost overruns for a building in history!
And the whole thing destroyed Jørn Utzon's career.
Have you heard of his other projects? Exactly.

But you may counter that Jaws was 300% over budget, no experience, no plan and yet somehow box office made more. It made careers. The odds of that happening are 20% based on a sample of over 2,000 projects.

80% chance it’ll be over budget and under expected value. That’s bad odds!

A Canadian story:

Note that all Olympic Games suffer from "eternal beginner syndrome" because they are done every 4 years and in different countries, no experienced team does it often enough. Each country is a beginner.

• 1976 Montreal Olympics, result?
• 720% over budget
• Montreal Gazette said “Olympic stadium cost so much it took 30 years for Quebec to pay it off”

How much worse could it be?

My take remains and is supported by data:

Creative process is *slow*, *painstaking* and intensely *iterative*.

It applies to your small business as much as to the little "lego" parts of the enterprise you are building. It literally applies to everything.

Just like a world class surgeon will always command a $7-figure "salary" after "wasting years getting experience"... but if you needed that surgery, would you rather have someone who didn't train as long? nope.

Still in doubt?

Aristotle said that experience is "The fruit of years" and argued that it is the source of what he called "phronesis" - the "practical wisdom" that allows us to see what is good for people and make it happen, which Aristotle saw as the highest "intellectual virtue".

Next time you fly somewhere, remember that you want the flight attendant to be the optimist, not the pilot. Can you imagine hearing from the pilot "I am optimistic about our ability to get there, I took an online course last night"?

I rest my case.

We agree that experience is important. The whole world agrees on that. Elon can say at 11AM "I am starting a new company and need seed money", by noon he'll have a $ billion dollars. If I do that, I won't! Experience matters.

The exception I take (and it is something we discuss often on this forum), that you cannot start a bigger business, start as a freelancer small and "learn the ropes". As you put it "darn near impossible" without prior experience. Sure, that may work for some, but it's not the only way. You can get some of that experience from a job! Other from books.

Most of all... and this is a biggie for me... ready for it? Drumrolls please... revealing the biggest secret in 3... 2... 1...

In all the years I've been an employee & an entrepreneur, I've gotten the experience I needed right after I needed it the most.

 

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[mikecarlooch]

I'm curious what the breakthrough was Mike.

All of the times when I've wanted to create something big, I've never yet put in the time to BE the expert who can create those things yet.

I am grateful for @Antifragile for telling me this twice now, I once got caught up in looking for a HUGE problem to solve and asked him if there were any problems in his industry I could solve.

To which he was real with me and said "Mike, you are not the person for that. You don't have any expertise there."

And it's so true. I appreciate him for giving me that "pattern interrupt" I guess you could call it.

Some people are criticizing @Antifragile for making things too complex, but he's literally (from what I can tell) saying to start small and simple, and become an expert over time so that you can lead into bigger, more complex things.

Once you've spent so much time putting together the puzzle pieces (lego pieces as he calls them), THEN you can disrupt the world with an innovative solution.. Because since you're an expert you know for certain that the idea you've got is a gap in the market that you can fill.

@Antifragile let me know if I got any of this messed up, but that's how I interpreted this!

 

[MJ DeMarco]

All of BlackDragon's comments have been moved into his own "take" so this thread is back on topic and less discord.

IDEA - SCALING - SUCCESS! - BlackDragon's take: The secret to scaling up.

Moderator Note: This is in response to a prior thread, posted here: https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/antifragiles-take-the-secret-to-scaling-up.107711/ @Black_Dragon43 (yes, even you!) Thank you @Antifragile There is some helpful advice here. But most of it is still...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

If you both can abstain from each other's opinion and ignore each other, that would be great.

 

[Antifragile]

Coming up with a game plan

Boom. Do that on paper. Real paper! Old school, not some Google docs or Notion.

Try it. Changed my life.

You can’t write as much garbage by hand as on a computer. Helps to narrow down best ways to get to the end goal.


Edit: also, please don’t be “reasonable” when choosing what venture to pursue. I don’t focus on the most profitable or most likely to succeed. I focus on what I think has the highest need in the market.

OK, you’ll say “but then I’m not the one to do it. Didn’t you tell me I need expertise?”

Who said it has to be your expertise? Leadership solves this problem.

Money? Who said it has to be yours?

You get the point. Lean into the market. Be unreasonable! Aim high. Just never stop doing the little things that already work.

It’s like a barbell strategy. Does it make sense?

 

[Andy Black]

I love how it takes me like 17 paragraphs to say something that Andy can say in five sentences.

You have a gift my friend.

Thanks. That's only in writing. When I talk I ramble and go all over the place.

Declaring that I was going to make X dollars in X time period was a useless goal.

In reality I now realize - the real focus should be this:

1. Find something that works by trying out a bunch of stuff
2. Pick a number of times to do that thing so that you reach a particular outcome
3. Do it consistently, every day
4. Get creative in how you can scale that thing that works (people, software, creative solutions, etc)

Keep doing the right things and the results will follow.

Don't make the results your goal. Make doing the actions needed to get the results your goal.

Go to the gym 4 times a week.

Send 10 outbound LinkedIn messages a day.

Etc.

 

[Kak]

Starting is easy; growing a large business with little to no prior experience is damn near impossible.

Totally agreed.

The details here matter though.

“No prior experience.”

No one. Not one person is born with this mystical “prior experience.”

So where does that amazing & priceless experience come from?

I raised millions for a govtech enterprise business at 23 and had 60+ year old multimillionaire lawyers and consultants on my payroll.

 

[mikecarlooch]

Game Excellence vs Excellent Game.​

​

Any game you win is excellent.

Game excellence is when you did everything you possibly could. You trained as hard as you could. You had everything to do and did it all. Even if you lost, you had "game excellence".

That's why odds are important. Excellent game could mean winning a lotto. Game excellence means stacking odds to ensure that you don't need to win a lotto. You'll create the circumstances that attract "luck".

More on planning here: GOLD! - EXECUTION - 8 Steps To Help You Plan for Business Success, a How-To Guide

​

There are no rules.​

Steps 1, 2... 6 are arbitrary. I called them steps because that's what they look like: staircase steps, each higher than one before. Unlike a home where steps are all the same size, these are not. Some are small, others are HUGE.

In Step 1 you may make 2x minimum wage, in step 2 you may make 3x mim wage. Then in Step 3-4 you may make $1 million p.a. And in Step 6 you may be pulling 8 figures like it's nothing.

Life is like that for many of us. For others, cultural hypnosis kills dreams. Life then looks like walking on a treadmill. Busy, tired, no progress.

This thread is for those who want their life to be more like a dream. No rules could explain it.

So when shit isn't working in your business, it feels like the world around you sucks and you are feeling down. Remember: some dreams are bad. You'll have another where like a superhero you do things incomprehensibly amazing. There are no rules in business, you make the rules.

Here's an oldie but goodie:

Q: What do you need to do to make minim wage?
A: Walk into a fast food joint and ask.


Q: What do you need to do to make minim wage + $5/hr?
A: Whistle at the fast food joint job. Your boss will think you deserve a raise because you have the right attitude.


Q: What do you need to do to make $100/hr?
A: Get a bunch of education, become a "professional": lawyer, accountant, engineer, doctor etc.


Q: What do you need to do to make $1,000/hr?
A: Niche specialization? Tax lawyer, surgeon etc.


Q: What do you need to do to make $10,000/hr?
A: ...


Q: What do you need to do to make $100,000/hr?
A: ...

(spoiler: you already know the answer, entrepreneurship, of course!)

Accepting mediocrity kills your future!​

Leverage is key to your success.​

​

We all want to get to the highest level of financial and personal success. Blaming the economy, taxes, industry is accepting mediocrity!

To become successful, use leverage! Experience is leverage. Relationships - every single "unfair" advantage you have, is leverage. That's why sometimes it takes time, sometimes it doesn't. Imagine you are building the biggest beam over a fulcrum to lift the largest possible load.

View attachment 47942

The bigger the beam, the less force you need to lift higher loads. Think about it, Elon Musk can raise $10+ Billion fund with one phone call at 3AM. That's leverage! But 20 years ago, he could not.


With Game Excellence, you get the highest and best use of your time, effort, passion... You build the highest lever!

This is so important, that I'll highlight it again and again. Your reality has nothing to do with the economy, taxes, whatever. Your reality has everything to do with how you leverage your time, your efforts and your opportunities. It is that simple.

How are you spending your time? How rewarding are your efforts? How well did you capitalize on the opportunities that were right in front of you?

One of the easiest $$ I've ever made was after being in the industry for a decade. I shared that on @Kak radio show once. Short story: saw land play, tied it up for $50k deposit, flipped it for a $600k profit. Without experience, I would not have seen the deal, would not have seen the opportunity, and no amount of effort would have led to this result. The thing about it is that once you get your "leverage", you'll be able to pull off "lucky" breaks like that with reasonable frequency!

My made up timeframes are fluid too. Some will get there in 3 years, others in 20. The point is to get there. With Game Excellence, everyone gets there eventually. You've created circumstances that make it very, very likely! And even if it takes longer because I am the unluckiest SOB our there, I'd rather be rich and old than old and poor. This is clearly not as sexy as the latest YT guru (or some forum members preaching), but it works. It works exceptionally well.


@mikecarlooch does this help answer your question?

Thank you @Antifragile it absolutely does. Had to read this about 6 times to really take it all in.

I never have really understood WHAT leverage is. I've heard it a lot, but couldn't wrap my head around it.

After reading this thread I found this video -

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cBwnr_LVg
which is showing to be super useful

The fact that there ARE NO RULES just shows that creativity and (ABSTRACTION, like i made a thread about the other day) are superpowers.

Maybe the reason I've had so much of a scarcity mindset is because of the fact that I was looking to everyone else for some step by step process.. taking everything so careful to do it right.. As opposed to utilizing my own creativity to come up with unique solutions..?

I actually talk about bringing together ideas from different industries to get leverage and be different on social media in any market (which is a super powerful concept), and now I'm wondering if the same can be leveraged in business..

Now THAT is something. Everyone needs to understand this.. To forget this concept and not use it would be a shame.

Also, thanks for bringing up your planning thread again. I actually have that thread taped on my wall physically lol.

Thanks again for this great thread.

 

[heavy_industry]

I've written goals and always felt let down when I didn't achieve them.

But the reason they weren't achieved is because I had no control over them.

Declaring that I was going to make X dollars in X time period was a useless goal.

This is a very valid point.

There's an important distinction between cause and effect: What you do, and what happens as a consequence.

Getting to x amount of $ by the end of the year is a consequence, it's not something that can be pursued directly. Having this as an aspirational goal can be useful, because it acts like a milestone that can help you adjust the plan as you move forward.

But as soon as the milestone goals are put into place, the actual focus should be the execution of the process. That's the only thing that you have control over.

Here are examples of actual goals that can be pursued directly:

• make 1000 phone calls
• launch 5 products
• create 3 websites
• spend $x on ads
• hire 10 people etc.

Always focus on nourishing the tree.
The fruit will happen.

 

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[heavy_industry]

Thank you @Antifragile for creating this thread!

Steps 4, 5 and 6 are the ones that I found most valuable. Such a wonderful way of thinking about business.

One of my problems is that I have workaholic tendencies, which means that I have the proclivity to add more and more work on my plate, until everything becomes completely overwhelming.

And I know this is a very bad strategy.
More work does not mean more progress. Your job as the leader is to improve efficiency and efficacy of the system. So without promoting laziness or wasting time, the actual goal is to work less, while generating more value.

I am especially interested in this:

Project Manager education

I will do my due diligence and try to find the best resources I can to further my education in this direction.

My timeframe is at least 10 years. This is something that I am willing to invest in long-term, as I believe that strategic thinking and organizational skills are some of the most important abilities in both business and life.

Do you have any specific resources that you recommend for improving education in this area?


PS:
I F*cking LOVE the beginning of the story.
With that special fish, served at the top-level restaurant in Asia, on the other side of the world.

It gives the whole story this amazing vibe, as if it was a legend. "The Legend of @Antifragile"

Congratulations for the life that you managed to build in 10 years!
Thank you for sharing your insight!

 

[BizyDad]

@Antifragile I also have another question that I've only recently caught myself on and have been trying to make a real effort to change - and I'm sure others may have this issue too - Sometimes I find myself falling into a scarcity mindset, and I'm realizing how much impact it's had.

Sometimes I catch myself viewing the glass half empty as opposed to half full, feeling like opportunities are slipping away, and like markets are shrinking rather than growing.

Have you ever experienced something like this? And if so, how did you empower yourself to think in an abundant state of mind more consistently?

I've been there. Forgive me if this is a bit of a ramble, but I've been on a roll today...

First off, trust your gut. Let's say you're probably right. Opportunities are slipping away. Markets are shrinking rather than growing.

So what?

You only have so much time in the day anyway. You're not ever going to catch all the opportunities in front of you. So don't worry about the ones you don't catch.

And maybe markets are shrinking. Your competition's going to start feeling the pinch. Pretenders are going to start shaking out.

Excellence shines easier in times like these.

But what if you're wrong?

Maybe market's growing. But if you get lean and mean as if it's shrinking, you're only going to shine brighter if it's actually growing.

And as for opportunities slipping you by, that's just making more time in your day for you to find the next big opportunity that's coming along. And there will always be another opportunity coming along. That's just facts.

The key to maximizing on the opportunities that come along is preparing yourself.

Continue to work on yourself. Continue to expand your abilities. Don't get stuck. Don't get complacent. Continue to work on yourself.

And practice gratitude.

It is very difficult to enter into a negative mind state when one is full of gratitude. Literally count your blessings.

And before you know it, that scarcity mindset will be banished from you. Replaced with an attitude of being on top of the world. Like @Johnny boy said recently, you'll feel like you're running around with a bucket trying to catch all this money that falls from the sky.

Hope that helps...

 

[BizyDad]

Thanks for this comment Andy!

Here's my answer -

From all of my personal references, all of the videos I've made successful that have gotten millions of views, or hundreds of thousands, it was all inside of the structure, topic, headline, and differentiation of a video that made it successful.

Not the fancy editing.

It is hard to say that anything on a short video in terms of editing beyond a headline (maybe subtitles, but not really), and cutting matter very much.

That service in itself is without a doubt a commodity.

It's much more about the actual context in the video.

However, I have "specific knowledge" in this sector, as Naval Ravikant puts it. I do believe that anyone within the entrepreneurship space, I could grow their brand significantly on social media with a combination of engagement ads and my ways of doing things. With the right amount of time, I'm so confident in that, that I'd be willing to refund any compensation I received from it.

However when I think about that - like @Antifragile brings up - what leverage is in that? (I'd be open to some ideas if you guys have any off the top of your heads) - but a concept like that feels like I'm confined to giving up my own time unless the magnitude of compensation is so big that it doesn't matter.

Therefore, the closest thing there appears to be with leverage in short videos, is services. Editing for people, automating for people, distributing, creating derivatives, etc.

And there's nothing wrong with that, what I've added recently is a personalized gameplan that virtually guarantees some kind of success on social, which uses that plan in order to make the actual service work. I'm just having a hard time seeing the path to leverage.

Like @Kak says - I'm wanting to avoid freelancing like the plague (I still edit videos for clients, and the pay is much better than a job) - but if there's a path to leverage and CENTS commandments - I have no problem giving up personal time at first to make that happen. I guess the lack of clarity on that is a temporary handicap. The goal is fastlane and only that.

Edit:

Some may look at Mr Beast and conclude that editing matters a ton. No. Mr Beast is a master at storytelling, persuasion and psychology and implements all of those things into his videos in order to create an extremely compelling video. Fancy editing or not, it's something people want to watch.

Okay you've built a skill. Why aren't you building a brand?

I don't mean a brand that helps people with their TikTok videos. Loochmedia is a fine idea, but it's not your fast lane.

Why aren't you taking your skills, and, I don't know, selling your own brand of dumbbells or hats or muscle shirts...

Taking that one step further.

I don't know the dumbbells or hats or muscle shirts actually solve any problems that you want to be solving.

But what is a problem that you want to see solved, and you think you can invent a product for it?

Can you invent that product, and then leverage your super awesome social media wizardry to get the word out about your own product?

Being able to grow audiences and generate leads are valuable skills. There's many ways to monetise those skills.

As Antifragile said before:

"Start small and simple, and become an expert over time so that you can lead into bigger, more complex things."

I love how it takes me like 17 paragraphs to say something that Andy can say in five sentences.

You have a gift my friend.

Think slow, act fast.​

Most people do it in reverse. There is this hype from YT gurus (and some forum members too) that odds don't matter. You just need to wish it hard enough, sacrifice family, friends, trade body parts - all if it. If you want it bad enough, you'll make 7-8 figures in your early 20s... and why? Well... just because.

Even after reading all of @MJ DeMarco books most people still do not think before they do. They act and then hope it all works out for their "Lambo" dream. That's a huge problem. Our brains are capable of running great "simulations" without spending any money. Worse yet, most fail to run real life simulations too!

Is it any wonder most people fail? Ironic. Those who scream the loudest "I am the next American Idol" are the blooper material. Same with business.

But some succeed! I applaud them.

In fact, some readers may accuse me of conflicting advice:

• A: Do small things. Figure our what works, do more of that.
• B: Dream, plan and go for HUGE things! Do not settle for mediocrity, it will kill your future.

Doesn't A conflict with B? Which one is it? Should I try for a massive success in my early 20s or settle for education, job, freelance and build experience?

I am not sure what is harder, to create a successful business or to write on how to create a successful business. Seriously. @MJ DeMarco - maybe you can shed some light. And worse yet, I am not even that great a businessman. I your average guy that doesn't quit. It's really that simple.

A & B do not conflict. Do both over and over again.

What does that look like in real life?

Real Estate​

Long ago I wrote out plans in my notepad to create a mega company. But what industry? How quickly? How?

Answer 1: cosmetics. King crab on the east side of Canada was and is a huge business. Legs are sold to restaurants but there's too much waste of the body shell. Shell dried can be crushed into powder. Powder is used in makeup! Huge, massive business opportunity. And I was in my early 20s... full of piss and vinegar. Confident little F*ck.

So I called all friends and found a buyer for the said dry shells, in China. Volume would be almost unlimited.

Next challenge. Called up a few businesses and learned that they pay to dispose of the "waste". They'll gladly give it ALL to me if I just arrange someone to pick it up.

Listen, I just won a lotto. I am about to become a mega millionaire. Free shit that's worth a fortune if I just dry it and ship to China! How much more luck does one need?

That's why I am so rich today and wiring to you all my advice from a private jet plane!
Nope. That's not how the story ends, but it is a good story. I totally f*cked up the execution part. I was such a little "brilliant" confident F*ck that I didn't think "process is king", I thought my idea was worth a F*cking billion dollars. Oh looking back, was I ever wrong. I F*cked it up. I made zero.

Answer 2: shoes. Bruised but not beaten, I leaned further into my "entrepreneur" self. Still in my 20s I come up with the next billion dollar idea. I'll beat Nike in shoes. A classmate from Asia happens to be from a family that owns a factory making sneakers. We were going to be partners. I am great at sales + numbers. Weird but mighty combo. I called retailers, lined up the Bay (they were huge back then, now struggling like most). We had manufacturer on standby.

That's why I am so rich today and wiring to you all my advice from a private jet plane!
Nope. Boy's parents decided their son was going to "grow up" and do it himself. They bankrolled him under a condition of no partners. He was beyond useless and I wasn't going to work FOR him. It all fell apart.

Answer 3:... I won't bore you with the many others. I aimed so high.

The bottom line is this. I feel I was born to be an entrepreneur. I imagine success like standing in a line up. As long as you don't quit... Eventually your turn comes!

Imagine if throughout all that, I didn't do anything else? I'd have nothing. Instead, I kept reflecting. Kept writing plans and thinking back. Eventually when I found (wish it was sooner) MJ's Unscripted book, it was perfectly laid out. It explained my shit experiences AND my successful ventures.

I continued getting my education, then jobs (yikes, but yes!), side-hustles! then promotions, learning, more side hustles... then first successful business, then the big one.

The key is that I got better. A lot better. Hear me on this: If I had to do it with what I am capable of today, I'd scale the cosmetics company into a giant venture! I wasn't good enough back then. And that's ok.



Thanks Andy, this is exactly right. This is what happened to me. I started getting pretty damn good at some things. I realized the real answer for me was Real Estate. I've ran teams, made the right calls, made money on my own properties and it's just been a blast for me. It hasn't been just good, it's been consistently great.

Why is that? Because everything I did before became my "lever". My "Jobs" taught me all aspects of having a larger business that I now use, including relationships (example: bankers knew me before I went on my own). My "side hustles" kept the fire of entrepreneurship alive (and made me extra money).

And here I am, just getting started! How can I turn this into a multibillion dollar company?

But this thread isn't about me. It's about how to succeed for young forum members like @mikecarlooch

​

Mike - the Video Guy!

Let's dive into specifics! Hopefully others can help too (calling @Kak, @Vigilante on top of already engaged contributors).

Mike, how do you make money? What is working? What is NOT working?

Applying CENTS, what are you most worried about?

You clearly have the finger on the pulse of how social media works. But your execution (from what I've seen on LinkedIn) isn't great. You failed to get many likes on most of your posts. How do you reconcile that with your plans for expansion? Are you listening to what the market is telling you? What is it telling you?

And what is your main business? Video editing or teaching how to go "viral"? How can we help you get there? What parts of this (or other threads) are most useful? And more importantly, what changes have you made to your process?

I resonate a lot with what you said here. I recently changed my signature to reflect my path, so that other people can see a job, freelancing, agency, 2 successful businesses (no Cents yet), and the evolution continues.

I just wish I could link to all the threads that talk about each stage... Hrmph.

Answering this question is tough for me because at the core I understand that you've basically laid it out all for me already above, and I don't know what else to ask for.

There is a quote I like that maybe can answer this - "Eliminating friction upfront before revealing the ultimate form of simplicity"

The simpler something can seem, even if it's not simple, seems to be easier to grasp.

If I may be so presumptuous...

It sounds like you lack a greater vision for your life.

Or, perhaps you have a somewhat nebulous greater vision of your life, but you lack specifics for it.

And most importantly, you feel like you need a road map to figure out how to get there.

Without the road map, you don't know what the next step you should take is.

Does that sound right to you?

Hopefully my previous comment might get you thinking in a new direction.

I'm also curious if my hub strategy wouldn't also apply to you. And if I'm right about you feeling like you need to map out a plan, then read the story that I share about meeting MJ.

(Links in bio. I am becoming more like @Andy Black every day... Lol)

 

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[Paul David]

Would you mind sharing your mistakes? Lessons learned?

What is your new plan? How will you succeed? With both mindset and business?

What do you desire for your next 20 years?

I'd say the biggest mistake I've ever made and still do, is not take action on the biggest thing thats going to move the needle in the business at that time.

I've read most best selling business books and biographies of successful business people. I've got all the knowledge I'll probably ever need to make a lot of money right now, but if you spend time doing the wrong things or nothing at all you end up like me.

I liked the other thread aimed at younger forum visitors saying give up social media, I myself wouldn't say I'm addicted to social media but I'd certainly say I've now built up an addiction to "consuming" irrelevant information.

There's also a tendency to over analyse things, as Mike said further up in his post that if he sees another competitor doing the same it kind of pisses him off and invokes negative thoughts. I'm the same.

I think that there's a lot that can be said for experience in business but that can sometimes work against you, the experiences I've gone through have eroded a lot of the self belief away that my younger self used to have.

You'd think I'd be eager to make amends to past mistakes, even a few days ago I went the shop with my Wife to buy something and I knew there was only £27 left in my account, thankfully what we put in the basket came to just under £26 as I was praying I wouldn't have to suffer the embarrassment of my card declining.

I'm down on what I need to be earning each month, stress levels are through the roof with it and its causing issues with her. Does it make me go out and get a part time on the side? or even get back in front of a computer and start doing outreach? Cold Call maybe? Send an email? Send someone a DM?

Nope, i get back in the chair and tweak something on my website, or try and make the outreach message better. I'll occasionally get a referral from one of my clients and pick up and extra client or two but thats it.

One of my higher paying clients wanted to delay her new campaign last week and start it in June, meaning her payment I was expecting was delayed. I'd have probably earned more money working at Mcdonalds this month now. I've literally had to tell her that I have another client in her area who wants to work with us (they don't) and if she could pay at least 50% now. Shes said yes and last night I emailed her the invoice, still no payment but I don't want to sound too desperate but really need to get it paid.

An 18 year old kid could probably take over my company and build it up to £10k a month in no time, does he have more experience than me? nope. He does have no fear, he'll take action on what he needs to do.

At this moment it feels like the only thing thats going to jolt me is a health scare where I get told I've got something bad to get me out this rut. It's bizarre, it's like my hand will not move the mouse to do what needs to be done.

Sounds crazy but its lasted years now, at least when COVID was happened I could hide behind that as excuse.

In 20 years time I still want what I always have, freedom. I'm 42 never had a job working for someone and I'm completely against trading 5 days for 2 of a weekend and waiting for retirement. My actions say the opposite though.

 

[BizyDad]

Totally agreed.

The details here matter though.

“No prior experience.”

No one. Not one person is born with this mystical “prior experience.”

So where does that amazing & priceless experience come from?

I raised millions for a govtech enterprise business at 23 and had 60+ year old multimillionaire lawyers and consultants on my payroll.

Behold the power of the Fastlane Forum. This man joined the Forum at 21.

Anyone on this forum more than 2 years and not raising millions in capital and hiring well-to-do experts is just straight slacking y'all.

If you need to find mentors and gain experience, there is no better place than right here.

Another lesson... Sell to governments because they don't care how old you are.

Some might think I'm joking... But I'm not. Lol. I wanna get me some of that sweet sweet gubbument dollah dollahs.

 

[Kak]

In all the years I've been an employee & an entrepreneur, I've gotten the experience I needed right after I needed it the most.

Folks. Live your lives this way.

I literally just swapped out the rear air suspension on my wife’s Mercedes. Turned a $5000 job into a $800 dollar job. Did I know what I was doing? I do now.

 

[mikecarlooch]

Be fearless and disrupt the world in Step 6! Because you'll have iterated enough to be the "expert" in whatever you are doing.

This whole thread can be summed up:
1) Most people go after a HUGE ONE BIG THING and they always fail and get frustrated
2) Success is going after many small things that together become a huge business

Have a vision, and iterate, tinker, tweak it. As soon as you see profits - the market tells you to keep going! If you don't, the market tells you your idea sucks.

Your whole response is amazing

This part though is an IMPORTANT breakthrough for me.

 

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[mikecarlooch]

I've been there. Forgive me if this is a bit of a ramble, but I've been on a roll today...

First off, trust your gut. Let's say you're probably right. Opportunities are slipping away. Markets are shrinking rather than growing.

So what?

You only have so much time in the day anyway. You're not ever going to catch all the opportunities in front of you. So don't worry about the ones you don't catch.

And maybe markets are shrinking. Your competition's going to start feeling the pinch. Pretenders are going to start shaking out.

Excellence shines easier in times like these.

But what if you're wrong?

Maybe market's growing. But if you get lean and mean as if it's shrinking, you're only going to shine brighter if it's actually growing.

And as for opportunities slipping you by, that's just making more time in your day for you to find the next big opportunity that's coming along. And there will always be another opportunity coming along. That's just facts.

The key to maximizing on the opportunities that come along is preparing yourself.

Continue to work on yourself. Continue to expand your abilities. Don't get stuck. Don't get complacent. Continue to work on yourself.

And practice gratitude.

It is very difficult to enter into a negative mind state when one is full of gratitude. Literally count your blessings.

And before you know it, that scarcity mindset will be banished from you. Replaced with an attitude of being on top of the world. Like @Johnny boy said recently, you'll feel like you're running around with a bucket trying to catch all this money that falls from the sky.

Hope that helps...

@BizyDad Your posts recently have been a godsend. Thank you.

Regarding gratitude - great tip. I must admit I've been for a long time someone who puts extreme amounts of importance on the future and not looking at what I've got now.

I'm starting to see the importance of it in terms of strategic leverage (getting everything you can out of all you've got in jay abraham's words)

@Antifragile once told me to read The Unfair Advantage. I believe lack of gratitude was one of the reasons I had a hard time finding all of my own strategic leverage (which we all have)..

Now that you mention it here, I plan on putting it on my list of values from here on out.

The truth is, one of the things that's hurt my gratitude is scarcity mindset. It got so bad at one point that as soon as I would see a "shovel seller" for anything remotely similar to what I was doing, it would instantly put me in a bad mood as someone who's "not up to the market and still digging for gold".

I think fixing this limiting mindset could be life changing for everyone.

 

[heavy_industry]

Sometimes I find myself falling into a scarcity mindset, and I'm realizing how much impact it's had.

Sometimes I catch myself viewing the glass half empty as opposed to half full, feeling like opportunities are slipping away, and like markets are shrinking rather than growing.

Have you ever experienced something like this? And if so, how did you empower yourself to think in an abundant state of mind more consistently?

I don't have as much experience as others (yet), so take this advice with a grain of salt.

Each and every single time when I start having negative emotions about the potential future outcome of my work:

• I understand that this is "the scam" my brain is trying to use to sabotage me
• I understand that this is the filter every entrepreneur has to get through. If you fall for the scam and give up, you lose, and you join the 99% club.

I get to this psychological point on a regular basis.
And when it happens, I know that now it's the time to shut up and execute the process.

A few days later, the future is looking bright once again.
The scam has failed. I passed once again through the filter of losers.

 

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[Antifragile]

I saw this clip on YouTube and figured this would be a good thread to share it -

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n6LrehCPOQ


@Antifragile (or others) - What are your thoughts on this clip? Is there anything you'd add to it?

I'm mainly asking because I understand how powerful what Steve is talking about is - but I'm trying to understand it deeply.

Mike, thanks for the tag. I saw this video a few times already. Like most things with Steve Jobs... circulated videos are amazing advice, perfect delivery and I just love the man for such brilliance. On the other hand, I happen to know one of his old friends (yes, small world) and he was a real a**hole in life. He wasn't always like that, in fact back at his early days in the university before he dropped out, he lacked confidence. His mentor (an older student, now a mining billionaire himself) helped him unleash the Steve we all now know.

The point I am trying to make for you is simple. Don't listen to me, Steve Jobs etc. Seriously. You know enough theory already. The trick now is going out there and building that scar tissue. Listen to @Vigilante's latest value bomb of an episode about his worst day. THAT, my friend, builds scar tissue.

Of course I agree with Steve Jobs - consultants don't get that kind of scar tissue as what @Vigilante earned the hard way. Shit, just imagine the pressure so strong, you can't even breathe. You are grasping at air with shallow breaths, it's like it is not you anymore. Sadly, I don't need to imagine. The good news is that once you've been through hitting that "bottom", the fear of doing great things isn't there anymore. You won't be afraid.

People often wonder (and some told me to my face) where I get my confidence! I've earned it the hardest way there is. Steve Jobs did too. Remember... he was fired from Apple!

Now it's your turn - what will you do? How far will you go out of your comfort zone to build scar tissue?

Success, Mike, is often just a matter of hanging on, surviving...

 

[Vigilante]

Wow Dave, you are being too kind. Thank you.

Not really. That’s not what I’m known for. Now get back to work as I didn’t intend to stroke your ego and we have shit to do.

 

[mikecarlooch]

Freelancing is absolutely a path to leverage and CENTS. You're just not thinking of that way.

One of the stories @Antifragile posted above described an "oldie but goodie" about increasing hourly rate. I hadn't heard it before, but it struck me that the steps are pretty much the same for everyone successful. Start anywhere, get motivated, learn new skills, niche down, outsource work, repeat & scale. Each stage is more valuable, but also requires learning an entirely new set of skills at each stage.

If I asked you why freelancing isn't CENTS, you'd probably say it doesn't scale because It's trading time for money.

Yep. But why doesn't it scale? What prevents it from scaling? If the market is willing to pay $100 / hour for a service (ANY SERVICE), freelancing work can be scaled because there are always competent people willing to do the actual work for much less money. The CEO job becomes learning how to find them, recruit them, train them and manage them to deliver a consistent result. Then you can move on to the repeat and scale stage which really is CENTS.

The way I view it is the way @MJ DeMarco describes his experience with being an affiliate marketing hitch hiker in TMF .

He was talking about being in a room for a “motivational pump up speech”, with 3,000 people doing the exact same thing as him.

As he points out, if you jump into a crowd like “digital marketing agency” or “freelancer” you’re fighting stiff odds.

If we’re going to spend our precious time playing this game of business, why should we choose the game that has 1 million other people on twitter saying..

“Drop a comment here and I’ll send you my free guide that will get you 10 clients guaranteed!”

Why not play the game where the payoff is bigger and the odds are way better? And the service isn’t heavily commoditized? (Unless you’re a branding wizard, that’s a whole nother thing and a totally viable option I feel)..

But That’s why I’m not interesting in the whole freelance digital marketing gig anymore personally.

 

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