What You Don't Need To Learn

This is the Momentum podcast. I wanted to come up and do this to share with you a lesson that I relearned yesterday, it's a lesson I relearned all the time. But man, yesterday, let me set the stage for you. So yesterday we had a member training. We have a membership where we help entrepreneurs, grand scale their businesses. And from about once a month, I get one of my friends were an expert in the world or somebody that I know to come and do a presentation like an exclusive presentation just for our members where they can ask questions. Oftentimes, you know, they're scheduled for an hour. They often go for longer than one. Yesterday did. And yesterday we had John Morreau come in and speak to our members. And if you don't know, John, he is an incredible human being. John's a very good friend of mine and here in Austin, and he runs the company. Smart blogger. He is probably the number one blogger on the planet. He's probably had yesterday. He said he's touched around 200 million lives. And I think it's a little humble because if you go look at the numbers of some of his blogs, the traffic is far greater than that. And he's just an incredible person.

And so he came yesterday and he was teaching our members how to set up content departments in your company so that you can do content marketing. A lot of our members are over a million dollars. They have a team. They're CEOs that are running a business. And at one point, one of our members asked John something about what he was teaching, and they said something like, oh, how do I learn how to do this thing that John had just said? And John said, no, I really would suggest you don't learn. You don't. He said, you know, you should learn this.

In fact, John's at one of the greatest lessons. This is I'm speaking for John in his voice. He said, you know, one of the greatest lessons I've learned in my career is to understand what I don't need to learn. When I heard John say that, I'm like, that is crazy insightful. I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazer, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us 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. And 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. Here's who we are as entrepreneurs, you know this about yourself and I know this about myself, when I have an idea, when I think of something, when I'm oh, I should go make this thing happen in the world, what do I think? How do I do this? And what John said yesterday was so poignant, so clear, so important for us as entrepreneurs to understand what we don't need to learn if we can release what we don't need to learn. Here's what happens. We actually go hire the person who knows how to do what we need to get done. And we don't have to involve ourselves in understanding it. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, I used to have this insecurity around knowing everything that was going on in my company. In fact, in my 20s, I felt like not only did I have to know everything that was going on in my company, this is an immature business person.

I was only in my 20s. I used to think I needed to learn how to do every job in the business. And I did it's not crazy when I was in my 20s, I ran this international consultancy and I literally could have stepped into any seat in the entire company and done the job. And I felt like that's what I needed to do. I felt like that was protecting my company. I felt like that was that was making it safe. That was making it so if anything ever went wrong, I could jump in and fix it. But you know what? It really did. In retrospect, now I'm 48. I'm I've had a long allotted space in between that business and today, a lot of time to analyze, a lot of time to process. And here's what I know without a doubt, my need in my 20s to understand everything that was going on in the business, to be able to fill any role, get that business smaller than it needed to be. Well, maybe it kept us smaller than it could have been. Probably needed to be small. I was I was an immature business owner and probably didn't be much bigger than it was.

It was you know, we had a ton of people working with us, multi-million dollar organization. But my obsessive need to be able to do everything, my obsessive need to be able to control everything, made it so the company didn't grow to where it could. And it's probably sometime in my early 30s when I was running a real estate business and Cadey and I were rehabbing properties. And ah, actually we started rehabbing our first property that we did together and I started painting a wall and I'm like, you know, I don't need to know how to do this. I started painting the wall. I probably got half of it done. It was the worst paint job ever, like already, even though I had barely done anything I already knew was a complete disaster. So I stopped painting. It went and hired people. And no matter what it was in the property, I didn't know how to.

I did not have to know how to do it myself. I knew how I was done, but I didn't know. I did not have to know how to do it. Myself and our real estate company exploded because I just released that entire side of the business. Then we got to the place where when we were acquiring properties, I would always do all the acquisitions, all the analysis, look at all the numbers, be the only person who did it.

Then I got to the place where I'm like, you know, what can I can I have somebody else do this? And I had somebody else start doing that and our business exploded again. It got huge. And I kept going through that company saying, like, what can I release? What do I not need to know? What can I hand off to somebody else? And today in the organization, I run the Cadey and I started a few years ago. This is probably my twentieth business and we've got a couple of the ones on the side. And I can honestly say that I know less about each individual position in my company than I ever have in any business I've ever run. I can I can literally say there is probably only one or two positions that I could jump into and and fulfill adequately, maybe only one or two, because here's what I do today as an entrepreneur. I specialize as a business owner. I am so specialized. Let me tell you where I put my time and focus. I put my time and focus into coaching my team and making sure they have what they need.

I put my time and focus into taking care of myself so that when I get into a meeting with my team, I am holding space for that team. I'm not distracted. I'm present. I'm aware, I'm focused. I understand what's going on. I can I can contribute where I need to today rather than understanding everything. I focus on making sure the entire team is working cohesively together and we're building relationships and that that people are creating intimacy. And when I say intimacy, they're getting to know each other. They understand each other. They have each other's backs, like like a like a professional sports team or like a a group of Special Forces soldiers. They are intimate enough that they know each other. They know what's going on. They understand what's happening. And today, that's where I put my focus. I put my focus on building a cohesive team, a congruent company, and making sure that we all move together and hold each other accountable and that there's lateral pressure, not top down pressure, and that everybody's excited about what they're doing.

And everything that I just listed takes my time. That takes my focus. That takes what I need to do today. Tactically, I do very little in my business other than maybe doing these videos for you. They are leveraging into podcasts and reels into all kinds of other stuff. And so take a lesson from John. Such a good lesson. I actually yesterday I mean, like journaling about it, like what else do I not need to understand? What do I not need to learn? Because if you're willing to let somebody else have the understanding and have them fulfill in your business, you can grow infinitely faster than if you feel like you need to know everything.

And so such an amazing lesson as an entrepreneur. Understand what you don't need to learn and your business is going to grow faster. You'll move forward faster. You have a lot more fun doing it. You'll stay in your zone of genius and grow your company. Thanks for being here with me today. You know, if you're looking for a place where you can connect with other entrepreneurs that are growing, businesses that understand our content are attracted to these type, this type of conversation. We have a Facebook group called the Charfen Community, my last name community. We are a twenty nine hundred and ninety nine members this morning. It might have gone up while it while I was talking to you. But if you relate to this information and you're growing a business and growing a team, go join the Charfen community Facebook group.

Eddie and Stephanie on my. Have some plans for that group are going to be rolling out some new content, some new information, some discussions, and it's going to be amazing. And remember, when you understand what you don't need to learn, what you don't need to know, it's one of the biggest accelerators we can have as entrepreneurs. Thanks for being here with me today.