← Business, Bourbon & Cigars
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When was the last time that you had three uninterrupted hours to think about your business? I'm not talking about thinking about it while you're on vacation. I mean a deliberate protected window inside a normal work week where your highest quality thinking gets first access to your energy. And this goes before anyone else's agenda hits you, your inbox or your calendar starts consuming you. If you had to think about that answer for more than a second, that's your answer. And here's why that matters more than almost anything else that we could talk about today. There's a big gap between leaders who consistently make sharp decisions. And I'm talking about the people who seem to always build the right things at the right moments and the results compound over time versus operators who are equally capable but always seem to be reacting. This isn't a strategy gap. I say this often, it's almost always a think gap. And the thinking gap exists because the best thinking requires conditions that most leaders never protect deliberately enough to sustain. Today I want to show you what changes inside a business, specifically and measurably, when the leader at the top starts treating their highest quality thinking time as a non negotiable operating asset rather than some luxury that they're going to get when the calendar allows it. I'll share a conversation that happened while I was in Costa Rica that stopped me completely. A phone call from someone operating at a level I had genuinely never imagined for myself at that point, and what he said in the first 30 seconds of that call that I wasn't expecting. Then I'll walk you through three things that shift inside a business when the leader builds this practice deliberately and what the compound return on that investment actually looks like over time. Welcome to business. Bourbon and cigars. I'm Scott Joseph. Three decades of building companies, working alongside operators at every revenue level and watching what separates the ones who achieve exponential growth from the ones who plateau. That's giving me a very clear view of the variable that most people overlook. It's not the strategy or the team. It's the quality of thinking the leader brings to the strategy and the team. And that quality doesn't show up by accident. It's the direct result of conditions the leader either builds or doesn't. That's what we're going to work through today. So I was in Costa Rica and right in the middle of a two week stretch. Most demanding personal and professional work I've ever done. And up to that point and still to this day, the kind of intense that strips away everything that you've convinced yourself is fine and it shows you what is actually there underneath it. Right before dinner one evening, my phone rings. From someone in my inner circle, high nine figure entrepreneur. This is someone I respected enormously, you know, whose business I had followed for years, had a real relationship. But this wasn't a scheduled call. It was one of those moments where someone reaches out because something is on their mind and they trust you enough to call without an agenda. So he asked, you know, what are you doing in Costa Rica? And I wasn't. I wasn't sure how he was going to receive it because, you know, you never know how someone might perceive something, right? The work I was doing down there, you know, deep personal development, working through belief systems and assumptions and purpose with a mentor. It's not the kind of thing most operators lead with in a conversation. It's personal, you know, it's not the polished version. So I started. I was cautious, right? You know, trying to figure out how much to share. And he stopped me. He goes, I've got a spiritual mentor, a business mentor and a marriage mentor. He goes, you're speaking my language. Keep going. What followed was one of the most honest conversations I've had about what. What it actually takes to perform at the highest level over a sustained period. Not the public version, the private one. You know, when I talk about public, I'm talking about all the posturing people do, right? What he described wasn't unusual for someone at his level. He had structured his days in his weeks deliberately around protecting the conditions that produced his best thinking time that belonged entirely to him before the business had access to him. Specific practices, physical, reflective, restorative, stuff that weren't optional and weren't negotiable regardless of what was on the calendar that day. The business ran at the level it ran, he said, because he had stopped pretending that showing up depleted and reactive was the same as showing up ready. I have to tell you, that call and that setting, it landed differently than it would have in a conference room or over lunch. Because I was in the middle of doing the same work myself. And hearing someone who had built what he built describe the same practice made something clear that up to that point been a little fuzzy. This wasn't a personal development indulgence. This is an operating decision. The leaders at the top of the compounding curve, they're not there because they work harder. A lot of people work hard and they grind. They're there because the quality of their think over time has been categorically different. And that quality Is not accidental. You know, Michael Poro, good friend of mine, one of our founding members at Me Plus Ultra, runs a top 15 Honda dealership in the US is a line that he uses that I've never stopped thinking about since the first time I heard it. You know, he's just. Simple is simple gets done. It's three words. And what those three words require, what has to be true in order for simple to get done, is that the person leading the organization has thought clearly enough about what actually matters to strip away everything else. That clarity doesn't emerge from a reactive day, doesn't show up between all the fires. It comes from time, right? Protected thinking time, where the noise is deliberately removed and the leader gets first access to their own sharpest judgment before everyone else starts competing for it. Write this down. The most expensive asset in your business isn't your top client or your best hire. It's the quality of thinking that you bring to every decision.
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And most leaders are giving that away for free before 9am There are three shifts that happen inside a business. You know, when the leader protects their highest quality thinking time deliberately and consistently. Your decisions get made from a completely different starting point. Every significant call a leader makes carries a quality that's determined largely by the condition they were in when they made it. Think about that. It's not the information available, but the cognitive and emotional state that they brought to the pro, that they brought to processing that information. A leader who enters every decision point already depleted, already reactive, already carrying the accumulated weight of 14 things that happened before noon is making their most consequential calls from their worst available position. Think about it like a surgeon. The outcomes in an operating room correlate, you know, directly with the surgeon's condition. Going in could be their sleep, their preparation, their mental clarity. Not a surgeon. Nobody schedules a critical procedure for a surgeon coming off a double shift with no recovery time. It doesn't matter how talented they are. The talent is constant. What varies is the condition in with you know, in which that talent shows up. Your decisions work the same way. The strategic call you make after two hours of protected thinking is not the same call you make after six hours of reacting to everything that hit you since you opened your inbox. Protecting thinking time isn't a personal indulgence. It's a decision quality investment. And the compounding return on consistently better decision quality applied to every hire, every client relationship, every strategic move. You factor that in over 12 months. It's not marginal. It's the kind of number that shows up in your results before you can fully explain why. So remember this. The most expensive asset in your business isn't your top client or your best hire. It's the quality of thinking you bring to every decision. And most leaders are giving that away for free before 9am Your team gets stronger because you stop carrying what they should own. This is one of the shifts that surprises most leaders when they first encounter it. You know, the instinct is that as a leader, constant availability is a service to the team, right? In practice, it's, it's really off the opposite. When a leader is always reachable, always one message away from weighing in, the team gradually stops developing the judgment, you know, that's required to make calls on their own. Just wait, you know, they route decisions upward that shouldn't require it. They optimize for the leader's approval rather than the outcome because the leader being available is trained that way, right? That, that, hey, I'm available. You can always count on me. It's funny, you know, when I started protecting my mornings, I'm talking about doing it deliberately. One of the first things I noticed wasn't what it did for me is what it did for my team. The window where I was unreachable every morning forced people to make decisions they'd been routing to me out of habit. And most of them made those decisions just fine. The muscle they built from actually owning the call, it didn't disappear when I was, you know, available again. It stayed. The leader who is hardest to interrupt during certain hours, not because they're disengaged, but because they're deliberately protecting that time, almost always has a more capable team than the one who prides themselves on always being on. Because the team that can't reach the leader, they have to learn how to lead. Your constant availability isn't keeping your team strong. It's keeping them from having to be. Your energy compounds instead of depletes and the gap becomes visible over time. Have you ever felt stuck trying to
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solve your toughest business challenges? Maybe you're juggling too many priorities. You're struggling to scale or you're trying to grow without clarity.
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It's frustrating to work hard and to
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feel like nothing is moving the needle. The Business Bourbon and Cigars workbook gives you access to the same tools, frameworks and processes that Me plus Ultra members use at our retreats to tackle real business challenges. You're going to learn how to use SMAC mastermind style collaboration techniques and structured problem solving methods to identify critical obstacles, create actionable plans and drive smarter Growth. Even if you're not attending the retreat, this workbook lets you experience the same high level thinking and frameworks that top entrepreneurs use to accelerate results. Download your free copy today at me+rainra.com workbook and start applying the exact strategies that help businesses scale smarter, solve complex challenges and make faster, more informed decisions.
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Professional athletes, when they train, it's not built around maximizing their output every single day. It's built around strategic recovery. Understanding that performance is the product of stress and adaptation and that without protected recovery built into the structure, athletes don't get stronger. In fact, they start breaking down. Leaders operate under the same biology with none of the same structural protection. You know, athletes have coaches who are enforcing that recovery window. They have off seasons built into their calendar, right? Nobody questions whether rest is part of the performance system. It's assumed, it's scheduled. It's non negotiable. Leaders who show up every day to perform with no one enforcing the recovery window and, and often with cultural pressure that, that frames protected thinking time as something to explain or apologize for. The result is a gradual performance degradation, you know, and it's invisible any single day, but unmistakable over a year. The leader who felt sharp and decisive five years ago isn't less intelligent now. They're running consistently depleted and nobody's named it. The operators who keep compounding at the level that the nine figure entrepreneur described, the ones who still feel like they're operating, you know, at their best 10 and 15 years into building, they're almost always people who built recovery and protected thinking into the structure of their week. The same way that they built in revenue targets and hiring plans. Not because someone told them to, because they figured out early that the business runs through them. And the condition, the condition in which they show up determines the ceiling on everything else. Protecting your thinking time. It's not selfish. It's the highest leverage operating decision that you can make because everything your business produces flows through the quality of your judgment. A high nine figure operator on a phone call from Costa Rica in the middle of a conversation he hadn't planned to have told me in 30 seconds that he had a spiritual mentor, a business mentor and a marriage mentor. And then he goes, you know, you're speaking my language, it's not a coincidence. You know, the operators who build something that compounds at that level, they're not getting lucky with strategy. They are almost without exception, people who have treated their own development and their own thinking time is a genuine operating priority, not a personal indulgence, not something they, they do in addition to running their businesses, but something they do because they understand that the business runs through them and the quality of that running depends entirely on the condition in which they show up. You know, I can I go back to Michael Poro's three words, simple gets done. Well, that requires a leader who's thought clearly enough to make it simple. And that leader only exists on the other side of protected thinking time built, deliberately held consistently and treated with the same non negotiable discipline as any other priority in business. The question that's worth sitting with after today is a specific one. What would you change in your business over the next 90 days if you arrived at your most important decisions from your sharpest available position instead of your most depleted one? Most leaders who answer that honestly, they find it's not a small number. It's the number that's been sitting just out of reach for longer than they'd like to admit. If what we covered today is landing somewhere real for you, if you want a structured way to take this kind of thinking and apply it directly to where your business is right now, the Business Bourbon and Cigars Workbook is worth having. It walks you through the same frameworks that we work through at the retreat and inside our sessions. You know the diagnostic questions that help you identify where your business's real leverage gaps are and what a practical first move looks like. It's built for operators, not a self help read, but it's a working tool, you know, download your free copy at me+Ultra.com workbook I'm Scott Joseph. This is Business Bourbon and Cigars. Cheers everyone.