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Business, Bourbon & Cigars
Working Harder Than Ever and Loving Every Minute: Here Is What Actually Changed
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There's a very specific kind of growth that has nothing to do with revenue headcount or your market position. And it produces more of all three than almost any business leader can make eventually. Most people who build serious businesses, they figure this out. The ones who figure this out with intention and then pursue it with the same rigor that they bring to their P and L, they build something that compounds in ways that even catches them off guard. The before and after on that one, that belongs to me. And the starting point wasn't a strategy session or wasn't our business pivot. It was a LinkedIn message that I almost deleted. Today I'm going to take you through a shift that happened to me. I knew this shift needed to happen, but I had no idea how to do it. And I wasn't intentional about finding out how. In fact, I almost didn't allow it. But I did allow it. And today I'm going to show you exactly what it produced on the other side. Not in abstract terms, but and real outcomes with business ventures, partnerships, my overall energy, and the way I show up every single day. Then I'm going to give you four things that any leader can start doing right now to move toward that kind of clarity. Because it doesn't require two weeks in Costa Rica, it requires a willingness to ask the right questions and sit with honest answers. Welcome to business. Bourbon and cigars. I'm Scott Joseph. Over three decades in business, I've been building companies, acquiring assets. I've navigated restructures, and eventually, you know, built me plus ultra. I've had a front row view of what separates leaders who build things that they're genuinely proud of from those who build things that they look good, let's just say, from the outside, but they leave them feeling unfulfilled on the inside. That distinction, it's critical and it matters more than most business conversations give it credit for. And that's what this show today is all about. The clearest way that I can show you what I mean started about three years ago, at least for me, and I'm going to share a version of it that I haven't fully told on the show before because it's the most honest version. Then I'm going to explain the four things that actually move the needle on clarity and what it produces. A few years ago, if you would have looked at my life and what I had built on paper, most people would call it a successful life. I had multiple businesses. They're all cash flowing well, had financial security. Most of these businesses I had and still have they have managing partners handling all the day to day operations, which meant that the majority of my income had become largely passive. You know, I created a lifestyle that I genuinely could not have imagined growing up. But I'm telling you, sitting inside all that, I was not satisfied in terms of how it all felt. I didn't have a clean word for it at the time. I didn't know how to articulate it. Empty's close, but it's not quite right. It was more like a. There was a quiet awareness that, you know, something I was supposed to be doing wasn't getting done. That makes any sense. I'm not talking about like a task or a business initiative. It was something deeper that I couldn't put my finger on as to why. Like there was a version of me that was more aligned towards what my real purpose was supposed to be. And I just kept finding reasons not to become that person. And around that time, you know, I get this message on LinkedIn from a woman named Jay Tepley for those who tune into the show. I've mentioned this story briefly before. You know, we had never met or even interacted with each other at this point, not even on LinkedIn. Just to give you a little context to this, you know, Jay, she works with men to cut through drift, you know, clear out the hidden that accumulates over years of building and achieving, and she helps them get real clarity around purpose. So I have to tell you, I get bombarded on LinkedIn with these types of messages and normally I just delete or ignore them. In fact, I can't stand that process. I'm just not someone who responds to unsolicited outreach. Right? And at that time, I would have told you, I didn't even think I needed that kind of work. I had coaches and advisors. Hell, we had good results. But there was something about her message that hit me. You know, I don't know if it was the words she used or the alignment between what she was describing and what I was quietly feeling, or maybe it was just the timing of it landing when it did. Whatever the reason, you know, I responded. But I want to be clear about something because this is the part I don't always tell. I wasn't ready to work with her yet. My honest reaction was, you know, I'm sure a lot of people feel what I was feeling. I should have her on my podcast so she can help them. And then I figured, you know, and while I'm interviewing her, obviously I'll learn some things as well. Right. So that's what I did. Had Jay on Move Crush Count. That was my former podcast, it's my old show. And I told my wife I wanted, you know, make sure you tune into this. I used to stream those live so she could watch it as it happened. It was a good episode, a genuinely good conversation. And when I got home that night, I remember asking my wife, you know, so what did you think? And she goes, wow, she really hit home. My wife is extremely perceptive. And she goes, you know, I think you're going through a lot of this stuff. And then she turned it back on me. She goes, you know, ask me, what do you think? I remember saying, you know, wow, something tells me that I need to work with her. I don't know what it is. And that was the real moment. You know, it wasn't the LinkedIn message or the podcast. The moment my wife held a mirror up, you know, without even meaning to, and the reflection was honest enough that I couldn't walk away from it. So, you know, that same night might have been the next morning, I reach out to Jay, we start doing virtual sessions. You know, she lives in London a couple times a month, right? This is going on about an hour each. Several months of that work eventually led to something I didn't see coming, you know, when we started. And that was a two week trip, just her and I in Costa Rica. These two weeks were an intensive one on one deep dive into every belief empowering and limiting, you know, every pattern, every assumption about who I was and what I was building and why. Now I'm going to tell you what those two weeks were practically. You know, every morning I was up, 5:30, I did my prayer, I'd hit the gym, we'd have breakfast together. You know, it's overlooking the ocean. I mean, it was beautiful setting, which if you've ever never had coffee, looking out at the Pacific while doing the most intellectually demanding work of your life. I highly recommend the setting. So literally each day we spend several hours with the kind of conversation that we're having right now, you know, where she's asking questions and I'm writing pages of notes. And I'm slowly realizing how much of my own thinking I never really, I guess, fully examined in those two weeks, I uncovered things I didn't know were buried. Beliefs I'd been carrying since long before I started any of this. You know, I'm talking assumptions about what success was supposed to look like, about what I owed people, you know, about what I was allowed to want and I always thought, you know, I was a risk taker. I didn't have a comfort zone. Right. Jay showed me very specifically where my comfort zones were, and they were not where I expected them to be. By the second week, you know, I had my, what I call an aha moment. And what came out of that clarity almost immediately was a business plan that I wrote on my tablet. Looking out at that ocean took me about three days. And it was a plan for something that didn't exist yet. It was a mastermind built around the kind of conversations and the peer level experiences that I'd been craving for years but couldn't find anywhere. That plan is what became Me plus Ultra. Now here's what I want you to really hear, because it's. It's the part that matters most for today's conversation. When I came home from Costa Rica, I was working harder than I had in 15 years. I felt like I had just started J and L marketing again and everything that came with it, right? The long days, the long nights, sometimes all nighters. But something fundamental know there was something fundamentally different. The work didn't feel like weight. You know, I wasn't grinding towards something that I convinced myself I was supposed to want. I was building something that came directly from who I actually was, aligned with what I actually cared about. The outputs, achievements, you know, since that clarity arrived, they're real. I'm talking, you know, new real estate ventures, high level partnerships with genuinely influential people. You know, the Retreat series, this podcast, a community of leaders that I'm proud to be associated with. Not because I suddenly became a, you know, smarter or worked a better strategy, because I finally stopped doubling down on who I was up to, you know, to that point. And I started showing up as the authentic version of myself. And I want you to write this down. You can spend years optimizing a business built on a version of yourself you've already outgrown, or you can do the harder work of figuring out who you actually are and build from there. I want to be direct about something. You know, I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to go to Costa Rica. The specific mechanism. That's not the point of this. What I'm saying is that there is a version of you, a clearer, more aligned version, you know, that your business is waiting on. And the gap between who you are being right now and who that version is is one of the most consequential gaps in your entire operation. More consequential in my experience, than your sales process, your team structure, or your go to market strategy. Because all of these things get better when the leader gets clearer. Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you work, your business isn't moving forward? You're juggling tasks, trying new strategies, maybe you're pushing your team, but the growth you know is possible still feels like it's just out of reach. You're frustrated, exhausted. You feel like all you're doing is spinning your wheels. Limitless growth is your roadmap to break, break free from that cycle. This is a free ebook that gives you actionable strategies and real world examples to overcoming scaling hurdles. Clarify your priorities and gain the momentum you need. You'll learn how to stop working harder for the same results and start making real progress in your business, in your leadership and your Life. Head to me+Ultra.com growth so you can download Limitless Growth and take control of your growth today. Let me give you four things that move a leader towards this kind of alignment. Things that you can start with this week regardless of where you are. And the first is to separate what you've achieved from who you are. For most high performing leaders, identity and accomplishment, they've kind of been woven together for so long that pulling them apart feels destabilizing. Your company's performance, right? Your, your team's perception of you, your reputation in your industry, all of these have become part of how you understand yourself. The problem is that when identity is anchored in external performance, the internal compass stops working the way you need it to. You start making decisions based on what the performance version of you is supposed to do, right? Rather than what the actual version of you genuinely believes is the right move. The question, you know, that starts to untangle. This is pretty simple. If nobody could see what you'd built and talk about your past success, if you didn't have your reputation, no recognition, no scoreboard that anyone else could read, what would you still want to be working on? And what would you quietly walk away from? What would disappear? Those are probably better questions. The distance between those two answers tells you something important about how much of your current direction is genuinely yours. The second is to name what you've been avoiding. You know, examining. Every leader has a set of assumptions that haven't been stress tested in a long time, maybe ever. I'm not talking about business assumptions, I'm talking about personal ones. About what you're capable of, about what you deserve, you know, about what's actually possible, you know, for someone who started where you started, about whether the thing you actually want to build is realistic or reasonable. Those assumptions, they don't sit there and announce themselves. They operate in the background and they quietly shape which opportunities that you're going to pursue and which ones you talk yourself out of. Getting honest about them requires someone or something outside your normal frame of reference. Because the people who know you well, they've usually shaped by the same experiences and often reinforce the same assumptions that you have. You know, for me, a journal works, right? I, I think it works for a lot of people. And ever since that Costa Rica trip, I journal every night a trusted mentor, you know, who won't protect your ego. That works even better. But the important part that I want you to understand is that the specific mechanism matters less than the commitment to actually look. The third is define your personal mission in terms of impact, not activity. One of the first things that Jay had me do was write a personal mission statement, not a business mission. My mission statement, this was all mine. What am I here to do? Not just in my company, but in the lives of the people I lead, the leaders I invest in, the communities I'm part of. You know, most leaders haven't done this work or they've done a version of it that's really just a polished description of their current business model. A genuine personal mission statement. You know, it describes the impact that you want to have that would still matter if your current business disappeared tomorrow. It's a different kind of writing. It takes longer, but when it lands correctly, it restores your entire decision making process because now there's a filter that wasn't there before. A leader without a personal mission, it's just a very busy person. When you have a personal mission statement, every decision gets easier because you already know what it has to serve, man. The fourth is to build the first three hours of your day around the clearest version of yourself. This is probably the most practical thing I took out of Costa Rica, and it's the thing I've maintained the most consistently since. You know, sometimes I got to catch myself as I relapse a little, right? My first three hours, they belong to me physically and mentally. Not email, not the business, not decisions about, you know, other people's priorities, prayer, the gym, whatever form of reflection or mindset work is genuine for you. And the reason this matters is that how you enter your day determines the version of yourself that makes every decision that follows. Most leaders spend the first hours of their day right in reactive posture. They're responding to emails, you know, or text all the sits that's already waiting for them, which means the clearest Version of themselves never actually shows up to run the business. Someone else's agenda does. I don't work out early in the morning because I loved working out early in the morning. I pretty much hate, you know, getting out of bed to exercise. I like it when I'm done, but that's about it. The I can't stand getting up early. I do it because it's the only part of the day that belongs entirely to me. And protecting that is how I show up as the right version of myself for everything that comes after. So write this down. The version of you that makes your best decisions needs to show up first, before the emails, before the fires, before anyone else's agenda gets there. The businesses that got built after Costa Rica, you know, the ventures, the partnerships, the community, the show, none of that came from a better strategy. It came from a clearer operator, from someone who finally stopped optimizing a version of himself that had already run its course and started building, building from an honest understanding of what he was actually here to do. Man, I wake up excited. That's not something I would have said three years ago. Not because my life was bad, wasn't. But because I was running the wrong race with genuine effort. Once the race changed, everything else changed with it. That's available to you. Not someday, now. It starts with being willing to examine, you know, what you've been carrying, separate it from who you actually are, and build from that clear place. If that sentence made you feel something, lean into it. That's the sign you're looking for. If today's episode is hitting, you know, somewhere real, if something I described about that before and after resonated, you know, with where you are right now, here's where to go next. The Me plus Ultra sessions are small, structural, virtual working sessions where experienced business owners bring a real decision or challenge, and they work through it with a group of peers who've operated at a serious level. We put one leader in the spotlight. We're dealing with one problem, you know, and this is a group that slows the thinking down. They challenge the assumptions underneath it, right? And they help surface what's actually going on. We open a limited number of observer seats each month for leaders who want to see exactly how this works before deciding if it's the right fit. You sit in, you know, you watch one of these sessions, you drop one takeaway in the chat at the end. There's no pitching, there's no pressure. It's just a firsthand look at the standard of conversation inside the group. If you want one of those seats, go to me+Ultra.com hot seat and you have to request access. I'm Scott Joseph. This is business. Bourbon and cigars. Go build something worth talking about. Cheers, everyone. Sa.