Find A Thing Not The Thing

I am in an Uber on the way to Dallas Fort Worth Airport to go back home to Austin, and I wanted to share with you an insight that an audience member shared with me as I walked offstage at the Capitalism Conference about an hour ago.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world-makers, and creators of all kinds, those among who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will.

We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. Instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent positive human evolution, and we always will be.

The Capitalism Conference today in Dallas was so much fun. Over 500 entrepreneurs, capitalists, the people I call family, and Ryan Moran is just such a class act. He put on a really good conference. He had some great speakers there. JP Sears, who I recently met at his home in Austin, was there, so JP and I hung out for a few minutes. He introduced me. It was a lot of fun. I shared some insights about the entrepreneur personality type and our need for momentum, and then I shared the Billionaire Code.

I talked a lot about how when we're moving forward, when we're on the hunt, as evolutionary hunters, when we are pursuing something is when we grow, and when we expand, and when we learn. I was walking offstage, and one of the audience members came up to me and said, "I feel so lucky that I was here. You changed my life today." I said, "Well, tell me why." I always want to know why because I want to know what is it that I said because, sometimes, people will share with me, and then it's not even the thing I was trying to say that was important to them.

Sometimes, I'm surprised by the things that people get out of the entrepreneurial personality type. It's humbling, and so I asked him, "Tell me why." He said, "Because I realized as you were speaking that I've been trying to figure out the perfect thing to do, the ideal move to make, and it clicked while you were talking that I just have to do something instead of trying to do the thing." I smiled, and I said, "Dude, that is such a game-changing insight for you to have gotten that in that presentation today because it's so crucial because here's what's amazing about us as evolutionary hunters, as the entrepreneurial personality type, when you're in momentum, when you're on the hunt, when you're in pursuit of something, that's when you grow. That's when you develop. That's when you create. That's when you expand what you are capable of."

It's just like the podcast that I had that money isn't the only metric. Well, you might not just be growing in money. You're growing in your experience, in your abilities, in your capacity, and you're growing emotional intelligence, and you're growing a better perspective and a greater understanding of the world. If you do things in the right way, you're also learning to analyze data, and you're understanding people better, and your leadership abilities, and you'll learn to understand yourself way better when you're in momentum, pursuing something.

When an evolutionary hunter is on the hunt, that is when we understand who we are. That is when we understand what we're capable of. That is when we understand what truly drives us in the world, and that is when we evolve who we are on this planet. I think that far too many of us are not in momentum, are not doing the thing, not chasing something. Here's what's so crucial about understanding that doing something is important and pursuing something is important is that momentum anywhere in your life will give you momentum anywhere. That cuts both ways. Constraint anywhere in your life, pressure and noise anywhere in your life creates pressure and noise everywhere.

You can't compartmentalize the pressure and noise, and in that same way, we have this gift that if we create momentum anywhere, it will create momentum everywhere. I shared with the audience member today that we have coaching programs where one of the first disciplines we teach, one of the first things we ask our clients to do is to get radically hydrated. We have them all go through the 10-day Natural Thirst program, the same program we give away at gethirstynow.com.

I told them here's why because if you create momentum anywhere in your life, like physiological momentum through hydration, it starts creating momentum everywhere else in your life. If you have more presence, more awareness from hydration, it improves everything else. We look at the keystone things that we can do to improve everything, everywhere. Even pursuing an outcome as simple as hydration will change your perspective on your entire life.

Here's what's so crucial. If you can get into momentum in different areas of your life, they will work together to create radical periods of growth, and radical periods of evolution, and radical periods of gain for you as an entrepreneur. When I look back at my life, I grew more, I understood more, I learned more, I gained more, I created more deep relationships when I was doing something big, when I was in momentum.

The times in my life where I wasn't moving things forward and where I wasn't looking at the right things, and I wasn't creating momentum, I wasn't holding myself accountable to having clear outcomes and clear accountability, knowing what I was going to do and what those around me were going to do, and clear scoreboards that I looked at and adjusted around, the times where I didn't do those things in the right way, those were the times where I had massive challenges. I felt stagnant, and I can't remember a lot of those times.

For people like us, the faster you can get into momentum with anything, the faster you're going to create it everywhere. Even if you just set a physiological goal, like I'm going to be more hydrated, or I'm going to lose X number of pounds or drop so much body fat or whatever it is, I can't tell you how often I've worked with an entrepreneur where we get them to set a physiological goal, and it starts straightening out everything else because when we're in momentum, it is contagious to the rest of our lives.

If you've been on the fence, thinking like, "What's going to be the perfect thing," or if you're an entrepreneur who has a business, and you're trying to make a huge move that's going to fix everything, here's what's so crucial to being an evolutionary hunter is that it happens one step at a time. You can compress steps. You can make them go faster. You can get way more of them done in a much shorter period of time than those around you, but you still have to go through those steps.

If you wait for another six months or a year, or two years, or three years to start pursuing something, then you're going to take all of that time, and then you're starting at square one, six months or a year or two years or three years from now. If you pursue something that you can get excited about and something that you feel can actually work out and something that you feel can happen for you and get into momentum and start looking at a clear outcome and know exactly what your role is, and the role of people around you, and have a scoreboard, you will create momentum everywhere. You'll have all of the metrics, and possibly some money, but you'll have all the metrics that I mentioned other than money.

I want you to grow as a human being. I want you to grow as a person. I want you to experience what you want in your life. When we, as evolutionary hunters, get into periods of contemplation for too long, it is not healthy for us. In fact, I have a friend that I just had this conversation with this week. I actually did a podcast about him. He has turned around a company, and he's leaving that organization. Now, he has a couple of choices in what direction he wants to go. He can either pursue starting up, maybe, perhaps like an investment fund, or he can go do another startup.

What I told him when we had the conversation that he was making the decision was you can't dabble. You can't dabble. You have to pick a team and run with it. You have to pick one of those two outcomes and go after it because you're not going to do two brand new things at once and get them both off the ground and succeed. You chase both of those rabbits, they're both going to get away, and so you have to get serious about doing one or the other because here's what I know about longterm entrepreneurs, when we don't have an outcome, when we don't have a direction to pursue, things get ugly for us.

We are evolutionary hunters. A hunter who isn't hunting is restless and agitated and confused and frustrated and reactive with the people around them. Doesn't that make sense that you have all of these chemicals in your body as an evolutionary hunter that propel you forward every day? You know your drive for contribution isn't something that you consciously control. Doesn't it also make sense that that drive for contribution, that inability to turn it off, that need to do, that need to make things happen, not want?

It's not a want for people like us. It's a need. Doesn't it make sense to have all of those things also come with what you would expect an evolutionary hunter to have higher sensitivities and reactivity? Getting into fight or flight is not hard for us. Getting out of fight or flight is incredibly difficult for us because we're already predisposed to be the small population of humanity that gets into the fight first, and then takes flight first. We're evolutionary hunters.

When we don't have a clear outcome, and to carry on the metaphor, when we don't have clear prey, when we don't know what we're stalking, what we're chasing, what we are bringing towards us, what we are compelling us towards, so that we can make the kill, when we don't understand it, we are lost. It's not about having the perfect thing, or the exact thing, or the next best thing, or to solve everything thing. It's about figuring out what you're going to do next, what that interim goal is that excites you, that propels you, what is it that makes you feel like you are creating momentum.

I have that right now in my life. I have an incredible team surrounding me. Cadey is amazing. She's such an incredible wife and mother and she does the homeschooling with the kids, and she's an incredible operator of businesses. She's stepped back in and is helping us run our business. We have really clear goals. Our goal for the year, our first full year in business was to hit three million, that would be about ... Sorry, our first full year in business, the first six months in business, we did about 500,000. The goal for the next 12 months in business was to hit three million in that time period.

Right now, we're on our run rate. We're at about 2.8, so we know we're moving towards it, but here's part of the reason I'm in momentum. I know that scoreboard like the back of my hand. I see it every morning in our huddle. I'm open about it, transparent about it. We talk about. Everyone around me knows my goals are very clear. I'm taking this company all the way. The next interim step is three million because that's the next step on the Billionaire code, and we want to get into that net level of three to 10 million.

Not only am I accountable today, I have our scoreboard. I know what our numbers are. Our clear outcome is that we are going to get 147 clients in our coaching products, and that will take us to that number and a little bit beyond. Our whole team knows their roles. In fact, Haley, who's on our team, is clarifying everybody's roles again this week, not everybody's, but a lot of our team's roles again this week. Because we're growing so fast, we constantly are making sure we have the accountability in place so that everyone knows what they're doing.

Then the last thing is we always know what our scoreboards are. Even in my business right now, that's why I'm in momentum, and in my personal life with Cadey, same thing. We're pursuing a net worth goal together this year. We're doing our planning. We know what she's doing. I know what I'm doing. We know our roles both in the business and in the household. We also know where we're getting more help and who we're bringing in to do the things that neither one of us feel are strategic anymore. That keeps us in momentum.

For you, if you have been thinking about it or on the fence, where you don't really have that clear outcome right now, I want you to understand something, it doesn't really matter what you pick, as long as you're willing to go after it with the passion and the drive of an evolutionary hunter, trying to keep the tribe alive. Here's why, because we both know that as you pursue that goal, it's going to mean something to you, but as you approach its competition, its importance to you will start to wane and diminish at the same speed that you approach your destination because that's how every goal is to us.

It doesn't matter what it is now, it's a tool to use to keep you on the hunt and in momentum. If you are willing to pick that target and pursue it with passion and stop trying to make it the thing and just make it the thing, for now, that's when you're going to grow, that's when you're going to move forward, that's where you create your life, and that's where you become the evolutionary hunter you've always known you have been.

Go pick the target, chase it down, crush it, and then do it again because that's what keeps people you and I alive. If you're ready to create even bigger outcomes in your life, if you're ready to get your life in order and know exactly what your outcomes are, understand how to get into momentum and stay there and have systems and routines that will help you stay there longterm, check out momentummasterclass.com.

We've had hundreds of people go through this class and tell us things like it's changed their marriage, it's their relationship with their kids, they now understand how to grow their business faster, they have so much more clarity about their lives, but the things that people tell me that really mattered to me are when I get messages that it's produced anxiety, or people have gotten off antidepressants, or they have stopped bad habits in their life, or gotten out of debt.

When I hear that people have made massive life changes from going through Momentum Masterclass, that's what matters to me, and that's why we put that course out there. Check out momentummasterclass.com. If you join the course, there's a Facebook group my team and I watch so you can get advice and input. I think it'll be game-changing for you, momentummasterclass.com, and we'll help you find the thing that will get you into momentum and keep you there.