Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hey, real quick, guys. If you know somebody that this podcast would help, it would either help them put food on the table or help them have a better life Would you share this with them or would you help me out and rate and review the podcast? It would be so greatly appreciated. And also, as always, thank you guys for being a part of the tribe and being a part of this community. And I really appreciate y’all listening. And I hope that you’re getting something out of this.

Anyways, guys, I want to talk about today about being journey focused. And I want to talk about this because one of the biggest mistakes I made early on was being outcomes focused. And What does that mean? That means I’m focused on the final outcome of where I want to go and What I want to be, or where we want the company to be. And I thought focus on that to a point because it is very important as you’re building a company or business, or you’re moving through life, like with your family, that you have a vision in mind of where you want to go. And you’ve just decided this is where I want to go. And this is What I want to do. The problem is, is it’s very easy to get wrapped up in that like I did, and you just focus on that. And then you never actually focus on the journey at hand.

And so I’ve talked about this before, the analogy I’ve used is hiking, like you’re hiking from the bottom of the base all the way up to the top of the mountain, right? And all you do is think about like, why am I not the top? Why am I not the top? And What that does is that actually creates an atmosphere for you to quit. Because if you are not journey focused, it is so very easy to get discouraged and wonder why am I not there? And then if you’re wondering, why am I not there, then it becomes why am I going to do this? Why am I supposed to do this. And then as a result before you know you’ve quit, and you’ve actually made it already halfway up the mountain. And if you quit and turn around and walk back down, which is What you’re going to do, you would have walked the whole length of the mountain anyways. So if you just continued on, you would have made it to the top in the same amount of time it took you to get back down after you quit.

And I’m saying this because anytime that I have been focused on just getting to the top of the mountain, it has opened a door for discouragement and pain and all these other things to be induced in my life. And impatience because that’s one of the things I struggle with is impatience. I want things to move quicker than they actually do. I want to be there yesterday versus tomorrow. And I don’t want to have the patience to actually really sit and focus on the steps I need to take today. And so that’s been one of my personal journeys there. And I want to talk about two, What does it mean to be journey focused and it really means being focused on progress, rather than the outcome. Okay, so it means to be focused on like, cool, I’m walking up, I’m going past this plateau. Hey, right now, we have to overcome a cashflow problem, right, we have an accounts receivable problem, we don’t have to collect from our customers to actually increase our, our cash flow. So we’re focusing on this and overcoming this versus cool, everything’s perfect the business is done, I never have to work a day in my life, which is also a myth, and I’ll talk about that later.

But the point is, is you’re focused on overcoming the challenge at hand, you’re focused on climbing this part of the mountain first, you’re focused on walking up this path and going over this boulder, once you get to the top. That was great, small wins, medium sized wins, and then you keep going. And I personally believe that focusing on progress is greater than focusing on the outcome 100% of the time, like 100% of the time, because we were actually made in their studies about dopamine release and different things we were made to be on a journey. And the way that we think the way that our bodies and brains function is journey based. And so oftentimes we find ourselves focusing on the outcome, and it violates and breaks how we’re made. And then we wonder why it’s so easy to quit, or why it’s easy to get discouraged. Because we’re not focused on making progress on the steps we’re taking every day to get to the top of the mountain. We’re just focused on Oh, why am I not at the top of the mountain yet?

And I think it’s very important to know too, like my business partner, and I’ve talked about it, we have a Harvard degree in stupidity. And one of the reasons why we are still in business is simply not because we are super smart and overcame every problem in the most amazing way and all these other things. It’s simply because we didn’t quit. And it’s I attributed it to our stubbornness, and we’ll talk about how we’re stubborn in a lot of things. And it was one of those things that we simply didn’t quit. And when I think a lot of other people would have and I think that’s a huge part of the battle if you’re willing to just continue to fight and move forward and not quit. I don’t I don’t see how you’re not going to win. If your heart is really to learn, grow and if your heart’s really to be focused on the journey and on the progress, not the top of the mountain.

Anyways guys, I’ll catch y’all later peace