Addicted to Change and Programmed to Accept Failure

This is the Momentum podcast.

I recently got a question from one of our members that I feel like is such an important question for entrepreneurs that are running teams that I want to share the question with you. And then after the manifesto, I want to share the answer with you. And the question is simple, "What is the impact on the team of a visionary coming in with new ideas daily or outside of a proper system?" And this is such an important question because as entrepreneurs, we feel like new ideas are the driving force behind the growth of our business. And in so many ways they are. But if we're bringing them into our team on a daily basis, there can be massive, unexpected repercussions that I want to share with you.

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 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.

Okay. To kick off this explanation, I'm going to reread the question. So the question that I got from our member, Oliver, is what's the impact on a team of a visionary coming in with new ideas daily or outside of a proper system and sharing them with the team? Well, I want to share with you that this is what I call a five-figure business habit, and it's one of the things that we as entrepreneurs have actually been taught to accept as part of our duty, as part of what our job is. Part of what we should be doing for our company is to be able to bring in new ideas all the time. And we hear things that actually reinforce this belief system, like we need to fail forward, fail fast. So try something, fail, try something, fail, try something, fail. And it creates this condition that I describe in entrepreneurs as addicted to change and programmed to accept failure. And here's what I mean by that. If we as visionaries, and I want you to know where this comes from, let me start in a different way. I want, you know, where this comes from. When you first started your business, what did you do in order to be successful? It's a simple answer. You did everything. And how often where you're coming up with new ideas and new solutions in order to create success in the business? Typically it's on a daily basis over and over again. When you first start a company, it's "Who am I going to sell to?" and "What type of product am I going to sell?". "What type of CRM am I going to have?". "How do I set up the CRM?". "What do I put in each field?". "How do I set up an email list?" "How do I set up the landing page?" "How do I set up a website?". And there's this constant churn of new ideas and solutions that you have to come up with constantly. And so what happens to us as entrepreneurs, is this experience of starting a business and having to do everything and having new ideas all the time creates an addiction to having new ideas and having to do everything. It actually psychologically conditions us to do everything. Here's why. When we start a business, when I talk to people about how hard was it to start your business, the answer I get most often is it was the hardest thing I've ever done. And so if we apply that condition of the hardest thing you've ever done to the time period in which you started your business, what we know is that you are in a consistently heightened emotional state during a consistently accelerated state. Because you are doing the hardest thing you've ever done. And the conditioning that happens to us when we're in an accelerated or emotionally heightened state sticks. It's a lot more enduring than a lot of the conditioning that we have in our lives. And so we have this place where we're starting a business. We're under massive pressure. It's the hardest thing we've ever done. And we're doing everything and having new ideas in order to be successful. And what happens is that habit, that conditioning carries forward, even after we have a team, even after we have an organization where we can create some predictability, even after things are going in the right direction and going well. And as entrepreneurs, we have this compulsion to come in every day with new ideas for our team. And here's the challenge that that creates: When I say addicted to change and programed to accept failure, when we lean into that addiction, that we need to change things every day, that we need to have a new idea every day, that we have to have a new innovation, every day we break trust with our team. Because here's what teams are looking for: Teams are looking for clear outcomes. They want to know where you're going and what you want them to do, and they want to have time to be able to execute on those outcomes to actually make things happen. Teams want clear transparency around how you are judging whether they are successful or not. And teams want clear accountability. They want to know what they're responsible for and what the people around them are responsible for. And what happens when we come in every day with a new idea? Once we have a team and once we have an existing business, especially one that's in the multiple six figures and we're scaling into the sevens or in the early seven figures, we've created an organization where we need to create massive amounts of trust with our team. And when we come in with a new idea every day, we create an environment where our team is constantly trying to figure out what the goal is and we are changing the bar every single day. We're applying a new idea every single day, and when we allow for some type of consistency and execution is where companies massively grow.

And I kind of have proof of this in my experience as a coach. I've been working to help businesses grow for most of my career. And when I haven't been coaching other companies, I've been running my own businesses and I've been able to grow them to the point where we're on the INC 500 list, three times as high as number 21. The 21st fastest growing company in the country. And here's what I can tell you consistently, companies that I've worked with have had these weird phenomena happen where they're growing. They're in the high six figures, maybe low seven figures, and something happens to the visionary. The visionary has a family crisis or a health crisis or a crisis with their parents or something that takes them out of the game for a period of time where they can't be fully present and do everything they're normally doing for the business for 30 days or 60 days or 90 days or even longer. And consistently, those have been the times where the business grows the most. When I've seen companies double or triple in a short period of time, and the visionary is not there. It's so counterintuitive, but in so many of those cases, what was happening was the visionary was changing the goal, the goal line every day. The visionary was changing the outcome every day. The visionary had ideas every day. The team never had time to actually execute and to focus on refining and cleaning things up and making sure that they worked. And when the visionary had to step away, companies grow like, grown like crazy.

Not in all cases. And it's not every time. But man, there's been so many examples of exactly that happening. So if you're a visionary, here's what I want you to think about when you have an idea. Does it have to absolutely happen right now? Is it something that you can add to a priorities list and hold until the end of the quarter while you and your team finish the projects that you have so that you can then propose a new project? And here's what's happened over and over again. When we bring people into our system, into the Simple Operations System (SOS), they start planning on a quarterly basis. Everything that they're going to do for the quarter is decided at the beginning. And then they execute on a monthly and weekly basis with their team. And as visionaries, once we put that plan in place for a quarter within a week or two, we have an idea that absolutely has to happen. And here's the process that I've asked our members to go through. If you have an idea that you feel like absolutely has to happen, you ask yourself, can it wait till the end of the week? Because we're in a weekly execution cycle right now and 99.99% of the time. I can then I ask them, can you wait until the end of the month because you're in a monthly execution cycle? And 99.99% of the time it can. And then I ask, can it wait until the end of the quarter so that you can put it on the priorities for next quarter? And this is where I get a ton of pushback and conversation. And I don't want the idea to die and I don't want it to go away. And I assure them if it's on the priorities list, it will never go away. It's not going to die. Let's put it on the priorities list and leave it to the end of the quarter. And I've created enough trust and enough of a track record of success that our members are willing to trust me and say, okay, I'm not going to implement this right now.

And here's what happens over and over again at the end of the quarter. We go look at that priority list and the project that had to happen. The thing that was going to interrupt all the execution that was happening, the thing that had to happen on a day is no longer relevant. And I've had visionary after visionary tell me, I'm so glad I didn't implement this on the day I had the idea. I can't imagine how much less we would have gotten done this quarter if I had come in and tried to change everything up right away. So as a visionary, I never want you to think like you you can't innovate. I never want you to think that you can't have ideas. But when we are willing to work with our team in a structure, when we stop this habit of being addicted to change and programmed to accept failure, and when we're willing to give our teams time to execute, that is where we see massive growth and that is where we see the progress that we've been wanting to make.

And as visionaries, here's what I believe. We all want to run businesses where we don't have to be there every day. We all want to run businesses that will grow predictably without us feeling like we're doing everything. We all want to run businesses where our team is growing the business. They're out in front of us, they're ahead of us. They're charging down and taking down our goals one at a time and making the business grow and make a bigger impact and a bigger income. But if we create the habit of being the person who's changing things on a daily basis, here's what I want you to remember. You are tactically tying yourself to the day-to-day tactics of the business. And if you changing things every day is what actually creates success, then you will always be involved on a daily basis. There's a better way. Give your team some time to execute. Stop being addicted to change and programmed to accept failure and you will see your company grow in an entirely different way.

And if you want some help with this. If you want to have the operations system that is going to help you and your team actually grow your business. That's what we help people with. We're Simple Operations and we help people install the Simple Operations System that is the tools and the tactics and the process and structure to help you consistently and predictably grow your business as you step away from the day-to-day, work less tactically in the business, put more focus on strategy and grow the company you have always known you should have. Go to simpleoperations.com. Sign up for a call with my team. You'll click on the link on the homepage, answer a few questions, get a calendar, and let's get a call on the books so that we can help you discover how to grow your business without feeling like you have to do it all yourself and know that every idea that you have that should be executed will be. And you're no longer in that place of addicted to change and programmed to accept failure. Instead, you and your team have predictable, consistent growth, impact, and success. Simpleoperations.com. We're looking forward to talking to you.