Episode Transcript

What’s Up Guys? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

So today I want to kind of diverge a little bit from last episode, from yesterday’s episode I talked about, if Andrew and I started a company over again, how will you begin? And part of it would be with a list of, hey, this is what we’re not doing, and this is what we’re not allowed to do.

And this brings me back to something that Andrew and I and our mentor when we first started, one of the things that he told us to do, which was extremely helpful. And it was create a list and create an outline of everything we will do and everything we won’t do. And we called it our Yes No promises, the promises that we made to say no to, the promises that we made to say yes to the interesting thing is, it is what people say yes to that normally hurts them and in mine and Andrew’s case, starting business, it was the things that we said yes to that hurt us in the journey.

We said yes to things we shouldn’t have. We did things we shouldn’t have. We did work that we shouldn’t have. It’s interesting because when you start business, you are busy, but busy doesn’t mean that you’re productive. And there’s, there’s a whole disconnect there between where people feel busy and they’re moving through and doing a ton of work, but they’re not doing any of the right work. They’re doing all the wrong work. And there’s more opportunity to do wrong work in life than there is right work. Right work is very specific. It is very unique, and it is very important to find because the right work actually propels you towards the vision and it propels you towards the goal. And this is true in any area of life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in entrepreneurship or not.

You need to find the right work when it comes to raising children, you need to find the right work for your professional career. You need to find the right work when you’re moving through life and improving as a person, right it’s like finding the right foods. Cool, you can eat less calories, but if you’re eating crap, that’s what’s going to happen to you long term. Like, think about the long term consequences of that. It’s the wrong work, the wrong food, even though it looks like it might be the way to go.

And so I’m saying all that because having that yes and no list helped us really focus down on the things we need to build and the things we didn’t. It really helped us focus down on, okay, I gotta say no to these things. And one of the more recent additions that we made is Andrew and I are not allowed to be any band aided solution into the company. And we talked about this, I don’t know, year ago, year and a half ago, a while ago. We’re never allowed to be in production for any emergency situation. We’re not going to absolve the necessity of finding a solution and building something long term that fits, doesn’t break. We’re not going to come in and band aid this situation and erase all the urgency that the situation is dictating whatever it is, and so as a result, we are actually stepping out, and it’s forcing us to lead differently. It’s forcing us to build differently. It’s forced us to do a lot of things differently, to where we’re really actually limiting ourselves to the work that’s needed.

The goal in life is, how do I find my work? How do I find the real work and then how do I do it faster? And that’s part of what we’re talking about. But this, yes, no list, and what we’re talking about, what I’m talking about with this, yes, no list, one of the reasons why it’s important is because it helped us stay focused on the things we needed to do. It helped us stay focused on the objectives that actually propelled the company forward, because you can do a lot of stuff like making the websites fake, and you’re like, What are you talking about? Every company needs a website, yes, but if you think about it, the website and the work that is being done is not the actual infrastructure. It’s not the valuable work.

And so the way that you find fake work and real work is like this, what is the most valuable work that I can be doing in the moment? And whatever that work is, is the real work. And anything in less value, it is less valuable and has less return in the company, and less return in building and moving the company forward towards the vision. It has less return in those things. That’s fake work. If you it’s like, okay, cool. I’ll take, I’ll take a $1 bill over $100 bill, or I’ll take gold. I mean, I’ll take silver over gold, right? And it’s, you don’t want to do that. The real work is the gold.

What is the most valuable choice in work that I can make currently that will move us forward? And it’s, it’s a big deal, and it’s interesting, because finding a real work seems to be a problem, universally for people, what is the work that actually needs to be done and executed against to move things forward?

And so the yes, no list and those promises helped us drill down in that like, Oh, what is actually valuable? Where is the value of my time actually spent. And so anyways, that’s it. Guys. Hope it helps. I’ll catch you later. Peace.