3 Traits of My Most Successful Students

hat’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the podcast. So I was on a coaching call the other day with a couple students, and they asked a really interesting question, which is, what is the traits or the characteristics? What are the patterns of behavior that you see in the students that you have the most success with? Like the, the people that you’ve worked with in the past? What, what’s the through line characteristics that they have, the reason why they are so successful? Whereas maybe other students have not been so, like, what’s the, the pattern that we can take away from this? What are the trends? I thought that was a really interesting question because I’m always, you know, like, success leaves clues and we want to take, take a stock of any patterns that might be obvious if all we had, if all we did was stop and reflect on it. And often we don’t reflect on it. We just keep trudging forward, doing the same thing over and over and over, expecting a different result. So this is a really good question. I was really impressed with it, and, and I thought about it for a second, and what I determined was that there’s really three things that dictate whether a student is going to be wildly successful on a long enough timeframe or if they’re eventually going to run out of steam, if they’re going to give up. So they are in no particular order. The three things that I see that separate or separate the very successful from the less successful, number one is overwhelm.

The, the really successful students that I’ve worked with over the years, they have the ability to manage the overwhelm of all the different things that are in front of them at any given particular moment. There’s so many things that you could be working on in your business. You have your marketing, you could be getting more leads. You could be trying to convert those leads. You could be working on the product, you could be working on the delivery of that product. You could be working with the banks and on your financial cash flows. Like, there’s all sorts of things that you could be working on at any given moment, and it can feel overwhelming. And one of the issues is knowing where to start.
You’re like, what is the highest priority thing? Where should I be spending my time right now? And this actually ties into another question that these students asked me, which I’m going to get to in a different podcast. So stay tuned for that. Which is, which is about, should you start marketing first or should you build the product first? And it’s like a chicken and the egg situation, but so much of entrepreneurship is juggling a thousand different chainsaws simultaneously and having the moment by moment judgment necessary to discern which chainsaw you need to grab next and throw back up into the air. And this is where we talk a lot about the theory of constraints, where we talk about prioritization systems so we can have a way of systematically working through what is in front of us and what is the highest and best use of our time. Now, the students that I find to be the most successful, though, they don’t get overwhelmed. Maybe they feel the overwhelm, but they still manage to make forward progress. They identify what’s the smallest step that I could take forward in this moment, and then they do it. They take that step, and they just keep doing that over and over and over, because momentum is the cure to overwhelm.
And that is one of the most obvious characteristics that I see in the really successful students versus less successful students. All right, the second trait is overthinking. So this is, again, paralysis by analysis. We all struggle with this. There’s so many different things that we could be putting our time and energy into, and it’s very easy to spend too much time researching and collecting the information and trying to get everything just right before we launch the thing. And as a result, the thing never ends up getting launched. And in business, speed to market, speed of interactions with customers, like speed wins the day more often than not. And overthinking is just one of these spirals that leads us into never ending procrastination, and nothing ever ends up coming up as a result.
Or when it does, it’s taken so long to make that decision that, you know, your competition or, you know, your. Your clients have already moved on. So the ability to over execute, like, to execute more like faster, faster, faster, is. Is one of the. The through lines that I see in the most successful entrepreneurs, most successful, successful students, is that they don’t overthink it. You know, when we sit down in a strategy session, we lay out, here’s the blueprint, here’s exactly what you’re going to do by next week. They don’t keep thinking about it. There’s a time for strategizing, and there’s a time for executing, and they don’t get those two mixed up.
They do the strategizing with me, and then when it comes time for the executing, they just go and do it. They don’t question the plan anymore. Now it’s just about following through, and they do that very, very well, whereas the other students that maybe don’t have as much success. They sit in the strategy session, we come up with a plan, and then they constantly tinker with it. They second guess it all throughout the week. Next time we sit down, it’s like, what have you done? Like, oh, I tweaked this and this and this. Okay, you spent all week tweaking the plan that we had already created, but you haven’t executed. You haven’t implemented the plan.
As a result, you have nothing to show for. I see that this is a very common trait. The third trait that separates the very successful students from the less successful students is just consistency. Consistency beats intensity in the game of entrepreneurship, because this is not a game that has a singular peak that we are striving for. There is no end. There is no finish line. You know, better has no finish line. The goal is just to continue playing the game for as long as possible, to increase our capacity, to increase the abilities of our team and of our business.
But there is no end state. And so with that in mind, it’s not about running as fast as you can, it’s about running at a sustainable pace and maintaining that and not stopping. The students that I’ve had the most success with, they understand this and they are willing to invest 6912 1824 months before they’re really seeing the results because they know that’s the timeframe in which you have to measure these things. The longer the timeframe, the more likely you are to be successful. So those are three of the traits that I see in the most successful students that I’ve worked with. It’s the ability to not overthink, to go and execute. It’s the ability to resist, overwhelm and act in the face of that, to build momentum, and then to act consistently on a long enough timeframe. So, hope this brings you some value.

If it did, let me know. I would love to hear from you guys. If you are curious what it looks like to work with me in coaching, then you should check out beyond theapex.com for the group coaching program that we are launching in June. That is the best program I have ever created. It is. I’m so proud of it. I’m excited. It’s had remarkable results already for a lot of the students that we’ve worked with, and so I’m excited to be bringing that to you.