Founder of https://xitter.cf/t.co/XCmBB0Oghi - the world's #1 coaching for entrepreneurs w/ 10k+ clients | Former therapist (15yrs as "The Shrink for Entrepreneurs")
New York City
Joined March 2009
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The most dangerous story an entrepreneur tells themselves:
"l'Il go all in... once I finish this other stuff first."
That "other stuff" IS the sabotage.
It's the busywork that lets you stay in the comfortable zone where you never have to find out if your real vision would've worked.
Entrepreneurs protect their potential by never fully testing it.
Fifteen years of sitting across from founders and it's the same pattern that smacks everyone in the face.
"Entrepreneurship" for so many was simply being good at computers when most of the world wasn't.
That's changing though.
E.g. im seeing a lot of e-comm entrepreneurs hit the wall right now.
Feels like a bunch of millennials have lost their early-mover (and digital native) advantages. It's getting competitive.
The fix for this is waiting for you at commitaction.com
Never go entrepreneur alone.
Starting a business will offer you infinity opportunities for Avoidant Procrastination.
It's the final boss of Mistaking Motion for Progress.
Just astounding how many people share hot takes on X but lose their minds when people reply (politely!) with counter examples or alternative perspectives.
Did you come here to be right or to connect?
The ultimate unintended consequence for entrepreneurs:
Success itself making you into a manager you never trained to be.
Nothing creates more misery than waking up trapped (and ineffective) in that role.
Reach out to Greg.
You can just do things.
The CIA's Field Manual for the disruption of enemy organizations is the best startup leadership guide ever written.
Just do the exact opposite.
Loving this new meme format. Speaks to DEEP inner truth.
At Commit Action we see this every day with entrepreneurs creating enormous to-do lists of low leverage busy work.
"ARGH I'm so overwhelmed!"
This Reddit user "quiet quit" their job a decade ago.
Then they accidentally learned how to be an effective knowledge worker. Made $8m. Lived better and easier, too.
Once again, folks:
Productivity is not the same as effectiveness.
reddit.com/r/Fire/comments/1…
The problem with entrepreneurs embracing the warrior mindset of Jocko/Goggins etc is that soldiers get given orders.
As an entrepreneur, the mission is not planned. Sucking it up and embracing pain only works once you have strategic clarity on how to win.
Periodic reminder that the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator is widely regarded as "totally meaningless" by the scientific community.
Founders,
If you're doing all your one-on-ones over Zoom and not old school phone while walking around outside... you are missing out.
Bootstrap business owners make the same mistake over and over:
Hiring people to do stuff they themselves haven't figured out yet.
When you're resource constrained, you simply have to hire YOURSELF for any new, experimental opportunities in the business.
Sales & marketing is where folks screw this up most...
The biz owner knows they need to figure out a new growth channel, but doesn't want to do the uncomfortable work of failing and learning.
They want to "hire an expert".
The problem is, all the real experts are looking for easy opportunities with proven existing channels. Where they can come in and optimize things.
The experts aren't interested in helping a small business crack the code.
So the owner doesn't find real experts. They ends up hiring people who are incompetent. Or scammers.
They try for a few months without success.
Fire. Repeat.
The alternative (and it's a very "bitter pill to swallow") is to hire yourself in the experimental role.
- Do the hard, failure/learning work
- Find a repeatable system that wins...
- Write the playbook, set the KPIs
THEN hire someone to hit numbers and optimize.
No one has more incentive to figure out a role or a channel than the owner.
Once you've done it yourself, you will have a vastly superior sense of:
1. Who precisely you're looking to hire
2. How to measure and incentivize their performance
Every successful bootstrap entrepreneur I've ever met has done every job in their own company. At some point.
A criminally overlooked way for entrepreneurs to onboard and manage employees effectively:
Treat them like an apprentice.
(Think medieval: A blacksmith teaching a kid how it's done)
Instead of documented processes, just have them sit with you while you do stuff. Then, sit with them while they have a try on their own.
Documentation should be a side-effect of doing this. The best apprentices take their own notes and draft the first SOPs themselves.
Manage through the work itself. It's worked for thousands of years.
