Odds are if you are listening to this right now, you are or you aspire to be an entrepreneur. You own your own business…or you want to. And I want that for you. But there is a dark side to the world of an entrepreneur that must be addressed. There are setbacks, pain, early mornings and late nights, exhaustion, and failure…a LOT of failure. But at the end of all this darkness is hope. Today is about that hope.
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7 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Live Longer
BOOK – Life is Not a Game of Perfect
Article – Why Men Work So Many Hours
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Previous Episodes of The Affiliate Guy
7 Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Live Longer
Lessons Learned from a Multi-Million Dollar Affiliate Launch
How to Hire an Affiliate Manager
The Surprising Thing That Might be Holding Your Business Back
This Affiliate Program Just Made a Fatal Mistake: Here’s What They Should Have Done Instead
The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship: Overcoming Setbacks, Pain, Fatigue, and Failure
Odds are if you are listening to this right now, you are or you aspire to be an entrepreneur, you own your own business or you want to, and I want that for you. But there’s a dark side to the world of an entrepreneur that must be addressed. There are setbacks pain, early mornings and late nights, exhaustion and failure, and a lot of failures. But at the end of all this darkness is hope.
Today is about that hope. Welcome back to part two of kind of this two-part little series we did. In the last episode, I shared why entrepreneurs live longer. And listen, I love being an entrepreneur.
It is one of my favorite things about my whole life, my family, of course, my health, and being an entrepreneur. But in the last episode, I shared why entrepreneurs live longer. And mainly it came down to good stress. Entrepreneurs are not immune from stress. We have stress. I feel the stress. Like I said in the last episode, payroll.
I’ve been there, done that where I was like, we have two weeks to make the next payroll, and we only got half of it in the bank. That means we have two weeks to earn half of what we need to pay our people. And we might want to, oh, I don’t know, make a little bit more than that.
So we’re not right back in this situation two weeks from now. I know what that’s like, but that is good stress because we have control. Unless you’re in a business where you really don’t have control like you’re in a government contract industry. And yes, who gets elected President actually matters to your business. But we have a clear purpose. We have more impact.
These are the things like, we see these things directly. And so stress is a different kind of stress. But the reality is there’s a dark side. There’s fatigue, there are failures, there’s loss of confidence, and there’s the emotional scarring. I mean, I did an episode a while back about business PTSD, and I don’t mean to diminish.
I wasn’t equating post-traumatic stress disorder to I watched my Comrade die in battle. My brother in law, he’s a firefighter. And there’s a restaurant in town that he can’t go to because it was built on the site where one of his friends died in the training exercise. I’m not suggesting that PTSD is that level, but there is the emotional scarring.
And I shared in that episode about how I went through some stuff in business that just scarred me and prevented me from going to the next level. And it took a long meeting with our team one day to kind of arrive at the fact that, hey, you know what? I was scared. And if you flashback a year ago, actually, even just like 14 months ago when we had that meeting, we were a tiny team of four, maybe five. I think we had five.
We have three times as many people on our team now. And part of what was holding me back was PTSD. That just stress, that traumatic event of me being a terrible leader in my mid-twenty s. And it took my team and it took people like Jeff Walker going, Dude, you’re in your mid twenty s. Of course, you sucked as a leader.
Everybody in their mid 20s sucks as a leader. Don’t let that prevent you from going to the next step. And so today I want to address some of these problems and how to overcome them.
So problem number one is EXHAUSTION.
Just flat-out exhaustion. If you have ever been so exhausted, that you just gave up. You just gave up on a goal or dream that makes you normal. It makes you normal. We’ve all been there, right? And we don’t look back on those and go, man, I love that time. I remember that time. I just gave up. That was so awesome.
Because, you know, deep down inside that the moment when the exhaustion was at its peak, that’s that moment when your goal or dream was within reach. When you let the fatigue become an excuse, you give in to the enemy of your dreams. Steven Pressfield calls it the resistance. In Christian theology, we call it the devil. Whatever fear. It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter what you call it. Whenever you give in to fatigue, you give up on greatness. So when I think of fatigue, I think of childlike persistence. There’s a video of our son when he was learning to walk. And I look back on that and I’m like, you know what? Children just don’t know how to give up.
We are not born with the ability or the knowledge or the wherewithal to give up to quit. It’s just not in us from birth. If we were, we would never walk. Because learning to walk, I mean, you can watch the videos of little kids. It’s freaking hard. It’s exhausting. It’s painful. You think about how many times kids fall on hard surfaces and how often their knees are skinned up and their hands are bloody.
That was just my kids. I don’t know. Maybe we let them walk on concrete too much. I don’t know. But we fail at it a thousand times before we succeed. Average people. I don’t think those of you listening or average use fatigue as an excuse to give up. And all I’m saying is, just don’t be average. Just don’t be average.
The reality is if you’ve got a goal and it just seems out of reach, it just seems impossible that you’re ever going to achieve it anymore. Then the attempts that you make to reach that goal. They’re just going to get worse and worse. And then you just simply say, you know what? I just want a fresh start. I just want a fresh start, and you’re ready to quit.
But if you quit on that one goal, if you quit on what is right in front of you, you’re quitting on everything in your future. The reality is quitting becomes a habit. It becomes a habit. And if you want to be great, fatigue comes with the territory. Exhaustion is just a normal part of a life of greatness.
You’re going to find time if you’re exhausted every day for two years. Yes, please. Even every day for four months. Please go seek medical attention. Okay? Go to your doctor. That could be a problem. But being exhausted for a few days, even a few weeks, is a sign that you are pushing all of your limits. And then a breakthrough is nearing in our world.
It’s a big product launch, and I’m exhausted at the end of that launch. But I also get to deliver on this amazing product and help hundreds of thousands of people to do something amazing. I wouldn’t have gotten there without being exhausted. And like I said, children, they just know it instinctively.
They see us walking on two legs, and it never occurs to them than anything else is acceptable. They just know I cannot go through life crawling on all fours. That is not an option. So they get up and they fall and they get up and they fall and they get up and they fall and they keep trying and they keep falling, and they keep trying and they keep falling.
They keep getting bruised. They keep getting bloodied. They’re exhausted. I don’t think anybody remembers in the sense that we remember what we had for lunch yesterday, that we remember just how hard it was to learn to walk. But they wake up the next day and they do it all over again, and it’s wake up the next day and they do it again.
And the thing is, they see this success all around them, just like we as entrepreneurs, see success all around us. They see their parents walking on two legs. They see their older siblings walking on two legs. They never doubt that they’re going to achieve that goal. They never doubt it. So they wake up and they fight. They fight and they fight and they fight and they fail.
They might fail all day for days, even, I don’t know, weeks. I don’t know how long it takes a kid to walk, actually. And then they lay their head down at night and they’re exhausted and they dream of waking up and being able to walk tomorrow. If children quit as easily as most business owners do, most of us would still be crawling. That’s the reality.
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We would still be crawling. If commentary on society if children quit as easily as most husbands and wives do in their marriages, most of us would still be in diapers. Do you think potty training is hard on the parents? Think about how hard it is on the kids. It’s not easy. I’ll be honest this morning I did not want to work out.
I just did not want to do it. And Jocko Willink talks about there. Some days you just go through the emotions and by gosh, I went through the emotions. You know what stuck a pretty good workout. But if children quit as easily as most people quit on their exercise regimens, most of us couldn’t even add two plus two.
Learning math is hard. It’s boring. Basic math is harder than more complicated math because it’s boring. You just keep drilling the same thing. Three plus four, six. No, seven, three plus four, eight, no, seven, three plus four, seven. And then you get it right. And you know what? You do it another 500 times. Wow, that’s exciting.
We’re doing that with our son right now and it’s just boring because the reason they keep going is that failure is not an option. Failure is not an option. It’s just not. It’s just simply not. And so I believe that we can get that childlike persistence back. Just failure is not an option for me that leads to problem number two we know the story of Thomas Edison, right?
He failed thousands of times before he finally invented the light bulb. It’s a cute story but how are you applying it to your life? Because problem number two problem number one is exhausting.
Problem number two is QUITTING BECOMES AN OPTION.
I remember back to my very first golf tournament. Let me think this would have been maybe just turned 15. I think I was 14. So we’re talking 28 years ago. It’s burned in my memory. I never knew quitting in the middle of a tournament, let alone in the middle of a round, was an option. And I remember this kid I was playing with. I wish I could remember his name.
I wouldn’t say it, but I wish I could. We had a weird first name. It was like Buzz or something. Brut was his first name. His first name was Brute. And I just remember thinking that’s a very unusual name, like anyway, he had mentioned that he had quit during a tournament round, and I guess the thought of that never even crossed my mind.
I never knew that there was an option to quit. I just assumed if you started, you were required to finish. And I was playing poorly. So two holes left. I quit. I walked off the course would have taken me 30 minutes to play the last two holes. I just decided to quit. And I remember my dad had dropped me off that morning, and I had no intention of seeing him until that night.
I was going to ride home with one of the guys who worked for him, who was also playing in the tournament. And I walked up that last hole alone, not playing, just quitting. And I saw my dad. The pain of quitting still haunts me to this day. That’s how detrimental quitting can be. My dad had come all the way. He had reworked his schedule to see me finish my first tournament round ever.
He didn’t care how I played, didn’t care what my score was. He only cared that I finished. And as long as I live, I will never forget the look on his face or that ride home. And the problem is that quitting became an option that day. It opened up a whole new world of failure and pain and regret. So problem number one is exhaustion. Problem number two is when quitting becomes an option, you have to just make it not an option. Not an option.
The third problem that we face, kind of this dark side of entrepreneurship, is ACCEPTING AVERAGE.
We talked about giving up. Giving up is ingrained in our culture, right? Well, business just became too time-consuming. Well, my marriage just didn’t work out. My dreams are just too far-fetched, whatever the case may be. Just wasn’t fun anymore. And I get that. Like, if you want to quit playing in your local basketball League because it’s not fun anymore, go right ahead.
I don’t really care. But if you’re going to quit on your business just because it got a little hard, that’s not acceptable. That’s what average people do. That’s the average. The average now is that marriage is into divorce. The average is that most businesses fail, that most business owners quit. And the weird thing is they’ll do something else.
They’ll start another business, they’ll fail at a restaurant, and then try to start a business selling flowers instead of starting another restaurant. If you actually study. There was a book written by Lewis Schiff. I think it’s called Business Brilliant.
He studied the difference between the middle class and millionaires and found that the biggest difference was that when the millionaires failed, they went right back to the thing that they were doing before.
Because when you start a business, your very first business, let’s say it’s an online business and you’re creating courses and you fail at that business, you started at a level zero and you failed at a level six. When you go start a completely different business, you’re starting over at zero again. What do you think the chances that you’re going to succeed are? But if you go back to a similar business, you’re starting at a five or a six. And that was what they found.
Like they found that it was the Carpenter who failed as a Carpenter and then opened another Carpenter business. Maybe what he did was he failed as a Carpenter and then went to work as a Carpenter for two years and then opened a Carpenter business.
Now, he didn’t start at a zero. He didn’t even start at a six. He started at an eight. A pretty good place to start if you’re going to succeed. And so as we talked about fatigue, it’s a sign that you’re close to a breakthrough, right? Exhaustion. A normal part of life, a normal part of greatness.
Those are just normal things. But if you accept average, it doesn’t work. So here’s an exercise for you. Write this sentence down and complete it. No matter what, I will blink and it could be anything. I will lose 20 pounds, I will run the half marathon. No matter what, I will die. Still married to my spouse. No matter what, I will be there for 80% or more.
This doesn’t have to be black or white, by the way. Always or never. So how about this? I know I’m not going to be there for all of my kid’s games because sometimes they have games at the same time in different locations. But no matter what, I will be there for 70% of my kid’s games. If they’re both playing at the same time, I’m going to be there for one of them.
That’s one of my no matter what, I will, no matter what, I will work out every day, even if it’s just to go for a 30 minutes walk. That is non-negotiable. So what are your non-negotiables? Those non-negotiables are the things that take you from average to great.
Accepting average is just accepting that whatever’s going to happen is what’s going to happen. Accepting average is accepting that you don’t have control over the fact that no matter what, I’m going to work out for 30 minutes a day.
Accepting averages. No matter what I say, I’m going to attend. At least I’m going to be at one kid’s game again, I can’t be at every one of each of their games, but no matter what, I’m not going to miss a game time. How about that? And accepting averages? Well, But A client asked me to do something, so I say no and I told them we can’t do it.
Then during soccer season, I don’t take meetings after 04:00 Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Why? Because I coach my kids and they’ve got practice, so it’s a nonnegotiable one of my dream clients is Tony Robbins, and if Tony Robbins said, Matt, the only time I can meet this Tuesday at five, I’m sorry, I really am. It’s a non-negotiable. I would find another time.
Well, that time is not for two months, then we’ll meet in two months, Tony. “You think I’m kidding?” I’m not, because that’s a non-negotiable for me.
Problem number four on this dark side is WORKAHOLISM.
Everything I’ve talked about here is like fighting through fatigue, fighting through exhaustion. I want to be clear, that is not a license for being a workaholic. Okay, I read this article In The Harvard Business Review. It’s called Why Men Work So Many Hours. There was this passage totally for me. I’m going to just read it word for word here.
“How do The Elite signal to each Other How important they Are? I Am Slammed.” It’s a socially acceptable way of saying I’m Important. 50 years ago, this was written a few years ago, 50 years ago, Americans signaled Class By Displaying Their Leisure so, as he says, Think Bankers hours, nine to three.
Today, The Elite journalist, Christia Freeland, calls them the Working Rich, displaying their extreme schedules. In other words, Today’s elite are overworked by choice, and they’re proud of it. They wear their 70 Hours Weeks As a badge of honor, like, look at me, I can’t meet for coffee, come to Thanksgiving.
I don’t know Why I’m Talking Like that, but they say it with pride, right? They puff out to their Chest And declare to the World I am Important. My employer, my team members, and my employees need me, our clients need me. I have no time for little things or little people, right?
So they miss out on life and for what are they missing out on? And just to be clear, like I’ve been there, done that. I’ve been in the same boat. I’ve done the same things I used to do that I’m too slammed, too Slam to take a meeting. Love to meet for lunch. Can’t do it, man. I’m just so busy.
What was I really saying? You know, I’m just a really important person. And so this happens because it’s a workload as status symbol syndrome. It’s not about working hard. It’s not about chasing a dream. It’s not about being an important part of your organization’s success. We’re overworked because we have an inability to delegate.
That’s the number one thing we have an inability to delegate. We have a fear of missing out. We have a fear of resting. Some of us just don’t know what to do. How do you rest? That runs in me. I mentioned before, that it’s ADHD. It’s one of the very common things.
I have a counselor that helps me with this, and it’s one of the things that we talked about this week was just like, it’s hard for me to rest. So I had to learn that rest doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing for everybody. Just sitting on a beach, staring off into the distance. That’s not a rest for me. But if I’m on the beach throwing a football, that is rest. That can be rest.
If I’m playing a word game, that can be rest. Just because my brain is functioning doesn’t mean that it’s not resting. But some people have a fear of resting, trying to live up to some sort of, like, unwritten standard. Or maybe it’s a written standard, but like this unwritten standard, everybody gets there before eight and leaves after seven.
If you get your work done from nine to five, then by gosh get there at nine and leave at five. Screw the standard. You know, try to be like somebody else. I love modeling. But maybe you don’t need to be like Elon Musk. Maybe he really is a once-in-a-generation person who can be CEO of four companies, working full time at two of them, and not die.
I don’t know what’s his life expectancy. Maybe it really is 60, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t waste time on him. I’m just saying, what if it ends up that Elon Musk’s story is that he dies at 54 and we all go, well, that didn’t work out so well. And if he lives to be 80, God bless him. 90, 100, whatever. That’s great. But what if he really is one of the very few who can do that?
All of the reasons really can be summed up in one word. And that word is ego. It’s ego. That’s why you work so much. You don’t delegate because you can do everything better. You don’t trust other people. You don’t trust other people. So how about you start delegating some maybe non-crucial stuff I often tell entrepreneurs, like figure out your hourly wage.
You make $1,000 a day just going around math, and you work 10 hours, so you make $100 an hour. I want you to immediately delegate everything under $50 an hour. I’m not even asking you to delegate the $51 an hour stuff or the $60 an hour stuff or the $100 an hour stuff, but immediately delegate everything under $50. Because here’s the thing. A $50 an hour task, the level of the mistake.
I had to learn this years ago. I just decided years ago there’s no mistake that I’m not willing to tolerate that’s under $10,000. Do you know how many $10,000 mistakes anybody in any of my companies has ever made over the years? One. About $25,000 mistake, and that’s it. I think the number of five to $10,000 mistakes is under five.
So total mistakes made over the years is maybe $100,000 out of 30 some odd million dollars in revenue over the past 20 years. Was it really worth me keeping control and overworking myself, killing myself over what’s the math on that one 10th of 1%? No, it wasn’t. That would be stupid. It’s stupid. So delegate more immediately anything under half of your hourly wage. Delegate.
It is the second reason. Fear of missing out. Fear of missing out. What do you fear missing out on? Who’s it going to actually go to affect if you miss it, what is the cost? Missing out is usually not as bad as you think. I talked about those standards, right? The cultural code is that you’re expected to work X number of hours, and the culture dictates that you drive to work in the dark.
You leave work in the dark. Everybody commiserates about how miserably overworked they are, how pathetic their lives are, and what a pathetic attempt to sound important. And so those standards. Here’s a tip there. If you get like I said earlier, if you get your work done in two less hours and everybody else leave, you might actually become an idol of sorts to the others.
If you’re modeling your life after somebody, whether it be Elon Musk or your dad or your mom or your neighbor, they have a nicer house, they drive a fancier car. They’re overworked. Perhaps your mentor, the person who’s helping you is overworked. “I realize this isn’t very profound, but stop trying to be like somebody else. Do your thing and do it well. Just do your thing and do it well. It’s important.” Just misunderstood, right?
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Believe it or not, most people would rather feel important than actually be important. And we have to understand, we have to realize that being overworked is not synonymous with being important. In fact, it often strips our importance away.
The fifth problem that we encounter as entrepreneurs is, PAIN.
Just abject pain, the kind of pain that paralyzes you. I remember years ago I had a team member who was constantly late, and it got to the point where I felt like I could do nothing. I was stuck with him on the team, and it reached the point where I forgot how frustrated I was. I no longer saw his fault. I no longer felt the pain, and my team suffered as a result.
I remember I shared this, I think, in the last episode that I had a job that I just hated. And I kept telling, it’s not that bad. Just kept telling myself, it’s not that bad. Eventually, I was numb to the pain. And finally, as I mentioned last episode, my wife said, no, you got to leave, or something else has got to change. I have allowed the pain, the potential discomfort.
This isn’t even actual pain. The potential pain that I would probably experience during a much-needed conversation with a team member about bad behavior. To paralyze me, this awkwardness. There was an awkwardness and a potential conflict paralyzed me. So I did nothing. And over time, I became immune to the complaints from the other team members.
They would come in and just be like, yeah, I hear you, man. And I would do nothing about it. In all of those cases that I just mentioned, I suffered from a thing called mental leprosy. There’s a guy named Paul Brand. He’s a doctor that studied leprosy, and I read this story about him that just caused me to realize what a gift pain actually is for entrepreneurs.
Pain is an acknowledgment of something that is out of place, something that is out of place in need of repair. And Paul Brand, Dr. Brand, wrote this book called The Gift of Pain, and it’s all about what the people with leprosy, the pain that they would go through were signals that were saying that there was something wrong.
I thought the disease caused things like loss of limbs and disfigurement and blindness in actuality causes, none of those. What does cause leprosy is the inability to feel pain. And so these lepers will unknowingly sabotage their bodies. And he tells the story of this one guy in India who once decided to race the other patients, the other leprosy patients.
And he started running, and he didn’t have the crutches, which he had previously put all of his weight on. And as he watched the patient run, Dr. Brand knew something was very, very wrong. He was running in an odd way, and the bandages were just soaked in blood. His left foot was hanging from his leg, and blood is just pouring out. The man felt no pain.
He had begun the day with a dislocated ankle with no pain at all, and ran nearly 100 yards, basically running on his tibia bone. And I’m like, I read that. I’m like, oh, gosh, I’m going to throw up anybody sick. But there’s, like, small stones and twigs that are up in the marrow cavity.
They had to amputate the leg. And what happens is people with leprosy ultimately die from self-inflicted wounds because they can’t feel the pain. And so I was thinking about this mental leprosy because pain is not the problem.
The problem is the problem. The perpetually late team member that I mentioned earlier, the bad job that I had, and the team members’ bad behavior. Those are the problems, not the pain that might result from addressing them.
“So pain is a gift it shows you that something important is broken. Things would not be that bad if you did feel some pain.” – Matt McWilliams
So don’t wish the pain isn’t there if it wasn’t you might never know what to fix use the pain. Fight through the pain. Every time you do, you’re going to get stronger. Every time you have that uncomfortable conversation, the next one gets easier.
Every time you defeat fear, it gets weaker. It gets easier to overcome it next time. Every time you overcome a campaign, it hurts less the next time. And so this is an obstacle, but it’s one that you can overcome.
The last problem is DEFEAT.
Defeat is inevitable.
“Defeat is inevitable.
You’re going to get knocked down.
You’re going to lose money.
You’re going to hire the wrong person.
You’re going to choke under pressure.
You’re going to have regrets.
It’s so cliche, but it’s how you get up that matters. It’s how you get up that matters.” – Matt McWilliams
There’s an article I read, I don’t know, like seven or eight years ago. It was in Golf Week magazine. A guy named Jeff Rude wrote this article, and the title was Take Special Player to Bounce Back from Major flub. Major means one of the big tournaments, right?
So there are four majors in golf, the Masters Open, the Open Championship, and the PGA Championship, which is going on right now, actually. And I was like, as I’m reading this article, it’s not just for golfers, it’s for entrepreneurs. It’s really for everyone. But I was like, oh, my gosh, this is specifically for entrepreneurs.
If you look at the major Championships, there are four of them per year. Almost every year, someone chokes, someone leads with 18 holes to go and they blow it. Maybe they lead with like four holes left and they blow it. They find a way to lose. In other words, and as history looks back on these players, there are basically two narratives that emerge.
The first narrative is he never recovered from that defeat. That’s narrative number one, we’ve seen many examples of that in sports. The second narrative is he bounced back and used that experience as a catalyst to success. That’s it. You can choose which one of those you have. And so Jeff Rude, in this article, talks about seven steps to overcoming defeat.
And I’m like, no, these apply to entrepreneurs. These apply to entrepreneurs.
Step one, don’t give up. We’ve talked about that, right. One of my favorite authors, he’s a sports psychologist, who completely changed my life back in high school is a guy named Bob Rotella. I think he’s still alive. He’s probably still at the University of Virginia.
He wrote a book, Life Is Not a Game of Perfect. And one of the quotes in that article that I’ve underlined and reread so many times, and he’s talking about golfers because he’s primarily worked with golfers, said, some guys, “some guys don’t want to get there again. So they don’t want to get in that position again. The easy option is to give up on yourself and be happy with just having a nice life.”
In other words, they blew it once. They don’t want to take the chance that it will ever happen again. Every golfer dreams of winning major Championships. I can’t tell you how many times I sit on the practice green or the practice team. And this putt was to win the Masters. It was to win the US Open. Mine was usually the US Open for some reason.
How many times have I never had a putt to win the PGA Championship, it’s US Open or Masters, at least in the US, at least it was for me. And how many times they had those putts nobody dreams of like, you know, what I’d like to do is be the 100th best golfer in the world. The 100th best golfer in the world right now is making like two and a half million, $3 million a year.
Nobody dreams of that, though, right? But when that dream gets shattered, when they missed that putt to win the US Open, some players retreat. They give up on their dream, and they will never be in that position again. So step one is don’t give up.
Step two, get into the position again. The article quotes Tom Watson, who’s a hall of Fame golfer, and he said, “Get yourself in position again and do better next time.” “He said, I learned to win by hating to lose. That’s the backbone of what it takes.” I went right back to work and took my anger out on the dirt on the practice range. So get in position again.
Step three, use defeat as motivation. Use defeat as motivation. The article talks about a guy named Adam Scott, who at the time of this article is written, was ranked third in the world the year before this article was written. This article was written after he won the Masters and he had led the British Open, no joke, by four shots with four holes left to play.
Basically, if you’re a betting man, not advising this, but if someone’s up to four with four holes left to play and these weren’t particularly hard holes, they were actually so not hard that the guy who ended up winning played them in one under par. So Adam Scott played them in four over par and the guy who won played them in one under par.
So clearly it’s possible if you’re a betting man, you might put the house on this guy. Somebody is leading by four with four to go and ends up losing by one. So he was defeated. He was dejected, and yet he was determined. He said that he used he said, I used that as a positive and a motivator.
Your enterprise takes a real hit and you want to rectify that as quickly as possible because you know you’re capable of more. It’s a mindset of I’ll show them and I’ll show myself. That’s the attitude you’ve got to have used to feed his motivation.
Step four, stay confident, even cocky. Confident, even cocky. And the article talks about a guy named Davis Love, the third if you’re a golf fan you know exactly who Davis love. The third is. He won his first major in 1997 but he’d fallen short every year for like ten years, maybe more. And he said you always take the positive out of it so you keep persevering instead of feeling sorry for yourself you keep telling yourself you have a game.
It’s like a three-point shooter in basketball you keep shooting. It’s a cockiness attitude but you have to take the positive rather than the negative. So Bob Rotella one of the things that he wrote that I loved said “We’ve got to remind ourselves that I know for sure I can win. I know I can handle it mentally and emotionally and get there and I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
So you stay confident, even cocky. There’s an attitude among the greats in anything. One of my favorite Rotella stories he writes about a basketball player at the University of Virginia. He took the game-winning shot. He had missed every shot.
He was like, oh for twelve in the game still one of the ball’s last shots and I asked if he was like why were you so confident?
He was like because I hadn’t made a shot all game. I always do to make one. But what if you’d made every shot? Well, then I can’t miss it. Either way, you have that confidence even cockiness.
Step five Brutella says keep the desire. He said that some players get so much grief when they lose they wonder if they want to even get there again. So it’s crucial. It’s crucial that you want to get back on the Hunt. You have to want to be back in the same spot as soon as possible.
You’ve got to be hungry. You got to stay hungry. You got to relish the chance to prove yourself again. So you failed. Just get back. Be willing to take the chance that you might experience pain again. It might hurt.
Step six. Keep visualizing success. Growing up, I always think when I played basketball, we all know what it was like, right? 3…..2……1…….! I missed. He was fouled. Every time I missed a game-winning shot, I was fouled. Every time I had the winning putt. I never had a putt to tie. That was the funny thing. I never had a putt to tie.
I always had the winning putt when I was in the pudding grade, which meant what if I missed? Then I tied and we went to a playoff. So I still had another winning putt. We never knew what it was like to lose. All we saw was a victory. Every shot was made. Every putt was holed.
Eventually, I always won the trophy. It was like it was just the case. So what happens the first time that that dream is shattered? What happens the first time that it doesn’t play out like it always did in our visualizations what happens then? You just thought this business was going to be successful and it’s not going your way. What do you do now? That’s where Champions are made.
That’s where successful entrepreneurs are made. Rotella writes that you better start visualizing yourself winning. It’s easy to go to bed every night and visualize having lost because that was your reality. But you have to focus on the positive and hang around the right people and visualize getting there next time.
That’s an important part of the puzzle because everybody is going to ask what went wrong? And your crazy uncle is going to remind you that he said it would never work. Your crazy uncle, by the way, has never owned a business and worked in the same job for 38 years, and moped around the house because he hates his job and complains about his boss on every holiday. Yeah. Take advice from him.
Step seven. Work hard. Simple, right? You get up every day. You continue to be optimistic. You work your b*** off and believe that you’re going to get one of those major Championships. You believe that you’re going to succeed with your business.
What keeps you alive is having the challenge. The great athletes, the great athletes, they don’t care. They don’t care what they have to go through to get it. Whether you’re talking about being a great entrepreneur, being a great parent, being a great spouse, being a great coach, being a great leader, whatever it is.
If you remember the song by Chumba Wumba, it’s called Tub Thumping. Most people don’t know the name of the song. Ba I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again And You’re Never Going To Keep Me Down. I’m Not Going To Sing It. But It’s A Great Song. Kind Of A Cheesy Message.
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But That’s What Adam Scott Did. This Article Was About Adam Scott, and There Was A Post That I Wrote About This Years Ago And It Shows This Picture. And he Wins The Master. He Makes The Winning Putt and His Arms Are Up In The Air and His Caddie, Steve Williams, Is Behind Them Going Crazy.
And That’s What Overcoming Defeat Looks Like. And So There Is A Dark Side To Entrepreneurship.
You’re Going To Go Through Pain.
You’re Going To Be Exhausted.
You’re Going To Struggle.
You’re Going To Find That Quitting Becomes An Option.
You’re Going To Go Through Times Where You Want To Be Great, But You Accept Average.
There are Going To Be Periods Where Maybe You Find Yourself Being A Workaholic. How Do You Overcome that?
And You’re Going To Get Knocked Down.
You’re Going To Get Defeated, but You Can Bounce Back if You Follow What I Shared Today.
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