Why Losers Lose & Winners Win
Why Losers Lose & Winners Win
You can't hack a losing mindset
The world is… how do you say it?
Accelerating… it seems.
A few weeks ago, when the banks were collapsing and everyone thought the financial empire was collapsing, I noticed something I haven’t noticed in 3 years: ad costs.
It’s hard to get peoples’ attention when they’re glued to a 24-hour news cycle and terrified to go to sleep.
In 2016 we had a gnarly election. In 2020 it was even worse… and my best guess is the 2024 cycle is going to be between 2-3 times as intense as both of those cycles put together.
Welcome to the game…
So you have to figure out a few things:
Why your message deserves being paid attention to
How to position yourself in between “existential” threat-level messaging (CNN, Fox News, Trump on Truth Social)
While maintaining compliance & regulatory guidelines (a lot of people are just getting to aggressive in a bid to win attention — this will backfire)
Long story short: it’s never been more important to know your craft and own your craft.
We publish this consulting memo every month, it’s still very small. Maybe a thousand or so people get them shipped to their home or office.
But one of the topics for next month is how to “speed up” the learning cycles — mark my words on this:
Two exactly the same businesses in terms of quality, expertise & categorical dominance
One learns faster than the other
The slower is out of business in 3 years, the faster is 10x and owns bids on the marketshare
Your SPEED is important.
The rest of the memo covers:
How to “speed up” your growth by tweaking your business’ RATE OF CHANGE
What makes great entrepreneurs great? It’s not intellect or even passion – answer inside (plus ways to ‘hack’ it)
Two levers that I look at BEFORE deciding whether to scale a business or leave it where it’s at (if you violate either of these two levers, you end up with a mess and it’ll cost a lot of money to fix it)
The #1 thing prospects & markets are looking for right now BEFORE they will give you money
My hardwon (and frankly, slightly traumatic) lessons from a prior exit – plus, how to capture my learning lessons without having to pay for them
3 types of firms that you can sell (oh yes, you can sell consulting firms - they just need to fit inside of one of these 3 categories)
Amortizing exits (a framework I came up with that lets you exit your business slowly and profitably, rather than waiting for a bit ‘liquidation event’)
Our 4-step system for DISQUALIFYING clients (it’s more important to select who you’re NOT going to work with than who you ARE – especially if you follow our marketing frameworks)
Time to yield (what it means, why it’s important, and how to properly use this metric in your advertising & sales efforts)
Back to the topic…
I recently did a study on Truett Cathy.
Before that, I taught a series on Theodore Roosevelt.
Before that, Frederick Douglass — and before him Abraham Lincoln & Winston Churchill.
I teach this stuff for a living.
And the thing is? These folks were RELENTLESS. Absolutely, insanely relentless.
The worst stuff happened to them.
They just kept going.
Winners just plod along.
Losers are egregiously easy to demotivate.
Winners are disgustingly difficult to demotivate. They will just keep on waking up and trying again.
A friend years ago said, “I wouldn’t want to compete with you directly.”
No sh*t. I wouldn’t want to compete with myself — and to be fair, I wouldn’t want to compete with the friend who told me this, either. Why?
Because neither one of us quit very easily…
I can lose everything…
Wake up tomorrow morning and try again.
So can he.
This is the way to high performance. You either want it or you don’t… and NOTHING — nothing — is as bad as saying you “want something” badly, and then DON’T do what it takes to make it happen.
That is a terrible place to be.
Some of you need to get yourselves MOTIVATED.
If not, the next 2 years will remove you from the game, permanently.
If that makes you angry, turn it inward. USE it… stoke it and rile it up — then go get busy.
Here’s a podcast on the spectrum between “dark” energy & “clean” energy. I think you’ll enjoy it.