Archive 1 of Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT)

I realized that the concept of becoming them to money may seem difficult to conceive. There was a time in my life I never would have believed I could become numb to making more money.

For me, like most entrepreneurs, money was the most compelling metric in my life. I did everything I could to make more, and when I made it I tried to make that money make even more for me.

But I can remember the transition from being incredibly excited about money too seemingly all of a sudden becoming numb to making more. It happen much faster than I ever thought it would and did a much lower level of net worth than I ever thought possible.

I had gone through the five stages of an entrepreneur's relationship with money and it just wasn't as important as it used to be.

There is only one way I have found to overcome this feeling but it has worked 100% of the time.

Every entrepreneur in history has felt alone. We have felt isolated, different, and even like a party of one. The systems and structures around us reinforce this feeling of isolation and being different.

I was so different when I was younger that I didn't even know how to access help. Instead of turning to the people around me, I obsessively read about successful people. I read hundreds then thousands of biographies, life histories, third-party accounts, and anything I could get my hands on that would show me how successful people, became successful.

I expected to find magic. People with abilities and skills that no one else had. People who were somehow gifted and able to create outcomes that the rest of us struggle to even fathom. I was sure that I would find some unique properties that these people had that made them who they were.

What I found was shocking.

One of the biggest complaints entrepreneurs have when building a team is that they have to repeat themselves. They feel like their team doesn't listen to them and has a hard time understanding what they want. The issue is one of perspective.

For you things are clear, you can anticipate the future and see where the company is going. For your team is the opposite, they're taking a step off a cliff each day and hoping that it fills in. they will have to have things repeated to them often, especially those that are new. Each time you have to repeat yourself or reinforce something with your team, you should think to yourself that this is the time you're spending so that you don't have to do-it-yourself.

This perspective will help you not only lead a team, the growth of people on your team, and exponentially grow your company.

Keystone habits are life-changing. They're the habits that mom we add them to our lives, they help create momentum everywhere, and they don't cause constraint in any way. When you add one keystone habit, it can be life-changing and you will feel momentum. When you add several Keystone habits at once, everything in your life will feel like momentum.

Your business will grow faster, you will feel better, and you will create the outcomes you want to in the world.

In this episode, I discuss with Annie Grace how her life and business had changed since she started adding keystone habits to her life.

This is one of the most difficult, but most critical, lessons to learn as an entrepreneur. It took me forever. I got caught up in the same traps that most entrepreneurs do, fake it until you make it, never let them see you sweat.

For most of us, it's near impossible to see the correlation between vulnerability and momentum.
How can something that makes us feel so exposed and precarious move us forward?

Entrepreneurial panic is real and it can come out of nowhere. As evolutionary hunters, we are compelled to go forward, achieve, and create new outcomes in the world. We are hardwired to create momentum and anything else makes us feel like we are standing in place. When we don’t create the momentum in progress we want in the world, we can feel the panic of the motivation we naturally have, not having anywhere to go. If you are an entrepreneur and you’ve never felt the panic of not knowing where to go next, you are fortunate. Use the strategies in this podcast to make sure things stay that way. If you have, you will be shocked at how easy it is to take the feelings of entrepreneurial overwhelm and turn them into confidence.

The fourth quarter is a time of year where either due to tradition, habit, or excuse, the crowd has already predetermined that it will lose momentum.

Most people make up their mind in advance that they are going to overeat, drink more than they normally would, and exercise less during the fourth quarter.

There is no other way to look at this than pre-determining that you will lose and lose momentum.

This is insanity because the fourth quarter is a time of year where there is a huge opportunity.

The fourth quarter allows you to exponentially outpace your confrontation.
All you have to do is step out of the crowd.

Many entrepreneurs grow teams and yet each day their lives get harder. For some growing the team, which was supposed to help them, only feels like it has slowed everything down and made everything take longer.

It is common for entrepreneurs with million dollar plus businesses to feel like they should just go back to doing it all themselves. Things felt so much easier back then, there was so much less complication.

We dream of being responsible only for ourselves and getting rid of everyone. Each day that goes by, you have less hope of making your life easier as everything around you feels harder.

Almost immediately animosity towards the team sets in. Each pay period grows more frustrating as you write checks bigger than you used to pay yourself to a team that isn't doing everything you want.

This is when some entrepreneurs actually do fire everyone, hit the reset button, and try to figure out what went wrong.

There is a better way.

The most important asset in building your business is your time. The challenge we all have as entrepreneurs is that the second we start building our business, everyone wants our time.

There is an endless stream of requests that lower the time we have available to grow the business. If you aren't careful, these requests can take over your schedule.

It is subtle at first…

You accept a meeting request from a sales rep that has been really persistent.

You set up a call with someone from Facebook, in a similar situation to yours, who asked if they could pick your brain.

You join in educational membership and almost immediately other members want to connect and get to know you.

Before you know it, these requests for your time have taken over your schedule and you are fighting for productivity.

As entrepreneurs when we are growing our businesses, we must to do everything. In order for an entrepreneur to successfully start a business, by definition, they have to do everything.

The challenge with this dynamic is that if we successfully grow a business, we become conditioned to doing everything. Most entrepreneurs do far too much in their businesses. They don't slow down enough to look for areas where someone could help.

Here is a simple rule that I share with entrepreneurs…

If your days are getting tactically harder, you are building a house of cards.

There are no exceptions to this rule, only brief periods where we get away with it. Eventually, if your days continue getting tactically harder you will have a breakdown.