This Fear is Limiting Your Potential

What’s up, all you beautiful people? We are still down here in Cancun after spending a couple days speaking at my boy Hunter Thompson’s mastermind. Fantastic time. But there’s a couple of lessons, couple of things that kept coming up throughout the workshops that I want to share with you guys that I think can bring you an immense amount of value without having to spend literally tens of thousands of dollars to get inside of a mastermind group like this. There was some really high level people here, and it’s been an honor to be able to speak and present and to share the things that we’ve learned over the years. So hopefully, this can bring you a little bit of. A little bit of value as well. Fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. Okay, so this one is interesting.

I did a breakout session that was only supposed to go 40 minutes, and so many people came to it, and so many people were asking fantastic, engaged questions that we ended up going for two and a half hours. That’s a lot longer than I intended. And this was on the topic of storytelling, specifically, how to tell your origin story as a business, as an entrepreneur. And there were some fantastic conversations that came as a result of this. I think storytelling is the most powerful skill that you, as an entrepreneur can have. At the end of the day, given two similar products, identical products, the customer is going to choose the one that has a story they identify with the most closely. That’s going to be the decision making factor there. So the better we can tell our story in a compelling way, the more likely we are to grow and influence and impact more lives.

So one of the gentlemen in the group, he tells this story, we go around, and I’m giving people feedback, hey, tell me the first 30 seconds of your story and give some feedback. He took the feedback and he ran with it. I love this. He went back to his room that night and he said he spent 3 hours rewriting his origin story. Because going on podcast Tours is a primary lead generation vehicle for them. They use podcasts and telling the story on those as a means for getting more business. So it’s very important to him. And the fact that he was able to go and that night spend 3 hours on it and then come back with a wholly new story was really cool.
So he comes to me after my second breakout session where we were talking about LinkedIn and sales and different other things around storytelling, and he said, hey, I got my story reworked. Is it cool if I share it with you? And I said, yeah, let’s do it. After lunch to come tell me your story. So he comes and he’s already, he’s all psyched. He’s like, okay, here’s my story. Pulls open his laptop, he pulls open this big word document, and he starts reading from the word document. And I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop.
Stop right there. I go, okay, so you haven’t memorized your story yet. You haven’t practiced telling it enough that it’s second nature. Like, that wasn’t part of the 3 hours you spent last night. You just wrote it, you haven’t rehearsed it, right? And he goes, no, I haven’t. I didn’t do that. And I said, okay, well, part of the problem here is that it’s not just the words that are said, it’s how you say them. That often is what makes for a compelling story.
It’s in the delivery. And I’m not going to give you feedback right now on this word document, because those are just words on a page. If you haven’t yet done the work of telling that story 50 times to the mirror, to a camera, then you’re not ready to tell me that story and actually get meaningful feedback. And he goes, well, I didn’t want to waste my time putting in all that time and energy reps of telling the story over and over if I was just going to come back to you and you’re going to tell me right away, oh, that’s wrong. And this illuminated a limiting belief or mindset that I see holding back a lot of entrepreneurs, which is that I don’t want to waste time doing something that might end up, in hindsight, having to throw away all the work and what I tell people. And I told this gentleman, I looked at him, I’m like, listen, I’m not going to review this right now because you’re telling me that your time is more valuable than my time is what you’ve told me. You said, I don’t want to waste time getting this dialed in and making it what I believe to be great. If you’re just going to tell me that it’s not good, I’m going to have to go back and rework it.
So what you’re saying is, hey, I’m, you sit through this thing, which is a vomited first draft, effectively take a look at it, give me feedback on it, so that I can save time, and then I can go do the thing. So you’re saying that you would rather waste my time on an unformed story than waste your time getting this story dialed in and practicing rehearsing it, so that when you first tell it to me, it is as good as you can make it. And now we’re taking the good thing that you’ve made and make it great, instead of giving me a turd and asking me to polish it. Do you see the disconnect here? And this isn’t just a round story. This is in so many different areas of our business and our lives. I see people who are afraid of taking action for fear that they’re going to have wasted time. They’re going to walk down the wrong path. But the truth is, the only action that guarantees a result is inaction.
And the more powerful truth here is that the work works on you more than you work on it. And so the true value of doing the first draft and then doing those iterations and doing those reps is, in doing that, you become better. And then you can isolate the issues, you can identify where you might improve it. You do all those repetitions, you do it hundreds of times. And then by the time you share it with people, you have something that you believe is good, and that now you can take to great, rather than handing me a turd and asking me to somehow leapfrog good to great. You don’t get to good without the reps. I think there’s this fear, this belief that everything that we do in business needs to be hyper efficient and built to scale, and that we need to maximize every unit of our time. And sometimes the thing that maximizes our unit of time is to do things that don’t scale.
It’s the hand to hand combat. It’s the putting in the reps that you might have to throw away the work. I’ll tell you this, when I wrote passive investing made simple, this is a book that still, after three years, it’s still top ten on Amazon for commercial real estate. When I wrote that book, I wrote three completely different versions of it. Threw away each version before any other human ever saw it. I wrote draft one. I wrote it, I went in, I edited it. And then in the editing process, I realized it wasn’t good enough.

So I scrapped it, started over, got to the editing process again. I actually got to the second pass of editing, so I’d gone through it twice, and I said, okay, this still isn’t good enough. I can do it better. I threw it out. And it was on the third go round that I finally had a first draft that was worth molding. And from that molding, we eventually got to the place where I was ready to share it with my beta readers and my editors. But it was only after I had thrown away tons of work that nobody would ever see that it was ready for somebody else to give me feedback on it. And I want to encourage you to rethink how much work you’re willing to put in and how much work you’re willing to throw away, how much work you’re willing to waste in pursuit of doing something great.

Because a lot of times, that’s the difference between great and meh. It’s the amount of work that you don’t see. It’s that mountain of work that was discarded in pursuit of greatness. So hope this brings you a little bit of value. If it did, let me know. Share this with somebody that you think could get some value out of it. Tag me in that post on Instagram. I’m the Anthony Vasino.

We’re trying hard to grow the podcast this year because I believe that entrepreneurs are catalysts for change, that they are making the world a better place through their products and their services. And I am on a mission to help as many of them as possible maximize their return on life. And so if you share this podcast with them, that goes a long way towards helping us spread the word and help more people. I appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.