085. MONDAY MINDSET: Refine in motion

I know for me, I can look back on my first business, my Pilates brand, and how I was so convinced that everything had to be perfect. I look at the amount of output that I did in that time and how in three months. I could do that in a week, quite easily right now. And how I feel like that I, it took me so long to learn lessons. It took me so long to kind of learn things or find a different way to do something. at the same time, I had this real fear of failure.

And I wish someone would've taken me, and been like, baby, you're an entrepreneur and if you're an entrepreneur, you need to get completely fine with failure. And the reason that we need to get fine with failure is we actually can rebrand this as iteration. Because that's what being an entrepreneur does. We rebrand things. We never let things kind of stop us or get us down, and I want us to think about the word iteration. I typed into Google. I was like iteration in business entrepreneurship.

And I love how they have these sexy little AI overviews and it said, in business and entrepreneurship iteration means repeatedly testing, refining, and improving a product or service based on feedback, data market insights leading to a more robust and customer centric offering. We love it. Why I wanted to bring this up is. Failure is part of iteration getting data and it not meeting the standard or the expectation is part of being an entrepreneur.

So if stuff isn't going well, or if you do something, if you spend like a lot of time on a podcast episode, creating content, creating an offer, and it doesn't do as well as you thought. You haven't failed. This is part of the iteration process, so I want you to just sit with that for a second, this is actually like if we look at it under this lens of it's like, okay, cool, we've done something and it hasn't met our expectations. The launch didn't go well.

Whatever it was that that is part of the process of being an entrepreneur. That is part of it. So anytime you do something and it doesn't do well, it doesn't mean that you are bad at business. It just means that you are an entrepreneur, and I think this is why I love entrepreneurship because it gives us the ability to look at so much that's actually happening within our business, whether it's good, whether it's bad, and realizing that all of this is part of the process.

Now, the reason I wanna bring this up quite often working with clients, I see them not wanting to move forward with something. Or releasing an idea or moving in a direction until they have everything figured out, until it's perfect, until they feel like they have this really beautiful, polished version.

what will actually make you a better entrepreneur and give results in business is, you know, if we are waiting until things are, let's just say a hundred percent done, or 90% done for us to start talking about it or releasing it, what would it look like for us to get it to this like 40, 50%? Mark, we can start talking about it. We can start sharing.

We can move in this direction, What we can do is refine in motion because there is nothing worse when we have spent all of our time and all of our resources to create a product or a service or create a video, and then all of a sudden it's met with cricket. And then what happens is we then start to question ourself. Okay, this is part of the process though. Not everything that we are going to do is gonna be award-winning content or shit that people love.

You know, it's always the stuff that we're like, they're gonna love this. That just like falls flat and it's the crap that we just spend two minutes on that everyone is obsessed with. Who knows why? It's always the case, but. If we see this as part of the process and part of the learning experience, instead of us making this mean something against us, we can now see this as part of the process. So you haven't actually fallen off track. You haven't actually failed. This is part of iteration.

And if you look at it like that, you know, yet we can get a bit bummed because we have spent time or we've really thought that this is gonna go well. We overly invest. But it's just, this is how it's meant to be. This is how it's currently playing out. So you haven't failed. It's not all doomed. You haven't wasted time.

We've just currently found an avenue that right now, in this point in time, where the market is with the audience that we have and where they're at, it's currently not meeting the expectations that we thought that it would have. And doesn't that just make you feel a bit better? All right. It's like you've released an offer and there's cricket. Great. You're an entrepreneur. What's next? And I think this is so much about when we get an undesired outcome. What is our next move?

And this says so much about who we're gonna be. And it's interesting because if I have a business owner that wants to work with me and they fall flat on their face after a launch or something happens that is not what they want and they, you know, of course they feel it, but then they pick themselves up really shortly after. It's like that afternoon or the next day, or you know, the next 10 minutes they are just.

They're back and they are looking at a way to do this differently or how can we take data from, from this experience and then refine what we do next time? I can tell that they're gonna be successful in business because that is a key characteristic. It's a key trait of being an entrepreneur. No. If we wait too long to release something and if we wait for it to be perfect, we run the risk of our competitors.

Putting something out there that's not even really finished, where it's just this sperm of an idea where they have the ability to kind of test, like put it out, test, refine, put it out, test, refine. They may be doing this. Six times before we've even had a chance of getting our fully finished product out there. And I see this quite often where people will compare themselves to their competitors, wondering what they're doing. The difference is between you and your competitors.

You are sitting back and you are analyzing what they're doing. They're actually doing, they don't give a fuck about anyone else. They are out there and they are putting themselves out there. They're testing and they're refining, and that is usually why people are more successful. Sure there are anomalies in every industry. There are people that, you know, they are just lucky or something went viral, but a lot of the time we never really know what goes into.

Someone being successful, and I know this, I've got a really random example. Maybe I'm calling myself out here as a stalker, but I am someone that I love to do full page screenshots of people's websites. The amount of times that I will go in there and take a screenshot and then I can't find it, and I will go and screenshot again, and then I'll come back and I'll screenshot it again because I just can't find these files.

And then what I've actually found is that when I, when I manage to find them, the little micro changes that happen within their website, and it's stuff that is really small. It could be the messaging or the language or how stuff on the website is positioned, but what they do is they don't just put out. They're finished their finished sales page and it's like, that's it. Done. Hands are wiped. And then they get to the end of the year and they're like, oh, results aren't what we thought.

Oh damn, we should just give up and like become potato farmers. Like that just doesn't happen. What they're doing is they are refining along the way, and this may be something where if you see people move fast for them, this could be like, you know what? This isn't our first draft. It's not fully perfect, but let's just get it out there because it is good enough. And then what they're doing is they are refining along the way.

you are not gonna get to that end product if you do not get the first draft out there. And what I want you to remember is you are the expert. That is why people are paying attention. So for you, your first draft, because of anything of the offer, of the service, of the content. You are so good at this, that that first draft for a lot of people is what they are aiming for. Your first draft AI could not even replicate because it's your brain.

So if you ever feel like that you are holding yourself back and like that, you need to get things perfect. We have to just fuck that off. Okay? You know, if you get something out there and it falls flat. Who cares? Take the data from it. We are refine and we keep moving forward because what you need to start doing is you need to stack and compound your work. And for a lot of people, they just are not doing enough to get the results that they want.

And this is not about me saying that you need to just work more, more, more. I expect everyone to be like, you know, Gary V and like a team of 50 in terms of output. But you know, I've seen this with looking at clients' email marketing data where they're like, how come I'm not selling? I wish I was selling more. And I'm like, because you've sent 10 emails in a whole year. And they'll come back to me and they'll say, oh, because you know, but that email took me eight hours to write.

And it's like, that shouldn't be taking you that long. Like, what is it? And they're like, oh, I have to make it perfect. That person would be much better off to spend eight hours writing eight emails, having them not as perfect, but being more visible. Because the thing is, and this is again, a fun fact of life. The person that does well is not the person that is doing perfect work every time. They are the person that is visible.

They are the person that is out there that when their audience has a problem or they want a solution, that they are front of mind and it's not because they are doing perfect work and there's no typos, like there's typos. Fucking probably littered through everything I'm doing. That's okay. That is just a fact of moving fast.

I know some of you are probably having a freak out right now, but for me it is more important for me to get something out there and have a baby little typo and just clean it up later than not having something done. Because I want you to think about this while you are stopping in business and everything is pausing, people are moving forward. If you stop and you don't move forward and you don't publish things. Your customers and everyone that you are here to serve, they don't pause as well.

They are still moving forward. So if you are back there thinking about the thing that you feel that you have to make perfect and you haven't published it, and your dream customer is looking for the solution, what are you gonna do? Like if they are looking for the perfect person. You have not published the sales page, and they go to your competitor and there's typos, fucking strewn throughout the sales page.

It doesn't matter because right now you have nothing and they have something, and this is where it is easy to refine something. And, and perfect something on a finished product, right? It's like if you already know how to cook, it is easy to make you a better cook. It's like if you just need to perfect your knife skills, you already know how to know, use a knife, you're chopping. It's gonna be easy to make that a little bit better if you've never held a knife before.

Holding the knife is the first fucking step. So I want you, as you go through your week to rebrand failure and rebrand stuff not working well. As basically being an entrepreneur, this is part of the iteration process. If you wanna be an entrepreneur, you have to be putting stuff out there and getting data and what this is about, it's about. Taking all of the data that you are getting, and I've got, I've got a little tip for you here.

You wanna make sure that you are not micro obsessing about getting results instantly. I feel that, you know, this is, I feel like such a boomer saying this. This is real new generation of business of people that put something out and they expect to be a fucking millionaire by Friday. Get over it. It doesn't work like that. Or putting something out there and expecting virality.

What I want you to look at, and this really helps me when I feel like I'm really zoomed in on a result and I'm almost like strangling an idea. I, you know, those like pixelated images where it's like, if you, if you are in really, really close, it's like every square is a color and it doesn't really make sense. And the more that you zoom out, you realize that it's a picture of something. Everything makes sense when we look at it as a whole.

So what you wanna do is not obsess over every little pixel, okay? You wanna create your plan and you want to go hard. You wanna create the content, put stuff out there, whatever your business is, you know, focus on, on creating that. And you wanna make sure that you are not zoomed in so early and obsessing. Okay. Keep going. Stick to the plan. Give it enough time. And what you'll find is you'll be able to zoom out maybe after like a month, maybe 90 days, and you'll see this beautiful picture.

And then with that, you'll see beautiful results. And if the results are not resulting in whatever way you want, perfect. We take that data and we go and we iterate. We don't do this after a day. We don't go and do our sales reach outs, and then we decide we're gonna fucking close shop because five people left us on red. God, if five people left me on red, that's a good fucking day and we just keep going. This is part of being an entrepreneur and part of that involves failure.

Part of that involves some not so nice things happening, So we're gonna rebrand this, okay. Okay. Anytime something negative happens, if your content falls flat, your launch is quiet, you hear crickets, or you do not get the result that you want, baby, you're an entrepreneur. I want you like, it's like not. This is show you's, baby. This is entrepreneurship baby, and you are an entrepreneur. What you do next though is the most important. Are you gonna wallow or are you gonna move? Prioritize.

Action. Get shit done. Hot stuff. I love this. I love you. Uh, I love you more than we've got The Sexy Boardroom today. We've got the sexy Boardroom. If you are listening on the podcast, know that I'm also putting this on YouTube as well. Uh, we've reactivated the YouTube channel. Who knows? Maybe like YouTube Star is in my future. So I, I love you more than our beautiful setup. It feels very official. You can't really see like the whole thing.

I was like, maybe I could show you, uh, but I'm worried I'm gonna fucking drop something. But I'm sitting in this like big circle boardroom. It's really funny that some people at work are like, oh, the UN boardroom. And I see it as a cult, like I want like some sexy woman in the middle, like dancing with a snake. Like that's how I see it. People see the UN and I see it as like cult. Anyway, so I love you more than that. My hair is like, my hair is herring.

Today we've gone with this like, I don't know, it's just like, it's this nice, sexy, maybe like little seventies esque blowout. It's sitting really well. It's finally starting to get a bit longer. It did for a second start to snap off and fall out. That was not fun. Uh, so I love you more than my hair looks fantastic. We've got a red lip on today. Clearly we are all about the aesthetics. Uh, also, I love you more than what is his YouTube channel? There is this guy and I really love his stuff.

Dan Ko, KOE. He has a great YouTube channel. I really think it's tremendous, the amount of value, the work, the editing, the quality. It is. It is really great. You know, I, I looked him up on Reddit and it was really interesting that there were people who loved him and there were people who were just like, uh, you know, typical fucking people on the internet.

It was so good for my brain to see that, because I think that the quality of work and what he does is exceptional, but I'm like, he still has haters. So it got me in my mind being like, Peter, if people fucking hate you, look at all of the people out there in the world who are exceptional and doing incredible work, and people hate them. Of course they do. It is easy to fucking hate when you are not in the arena, when you are sitting on the sidelines looking at the people doing their thing.

Easiest job in the world to be a fucking hater. But his channel is really exceptional. Hot stuff. I love this. I love you, and I'll see you on the next episode.