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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2282 Are You Thinking Big Enough?
00:13:19
If you think the sky’s the limit, you’re forgetting what’s beyond the sky. Too often, entrepreneurs are held back not by market forces or competition, but by self-limiting beliefs.
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Got a 7am meeting on a Monday expensing breakfast because it's in policy wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text. Yay. Free your team from expense reports today.
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Switch your business to ramp.com. hey, welcome to the hundred dollar MBA show, the business podcast that always has your back every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's less we're going to discuss the question, are you thinking big enough? This is a question I have to ask myself from time to time. It's so important and I'm going to challenge you to ask that question of yourself. Sometimes we get laser focused. We focus on the tasks we have at hand, what we got to do, what we got to accomplish. We think of the next step and the next step and really don't make the time to think bigger, to think wider, to think, what is this all for? And how can we get to a higher level in this game we call business? In today's lesson, I'm gonna share with you three stories of three friends of mine that inspired me to think bigger. And then I'm gonna wrap up by showing you how you can start thinking bigger in your business. Because they say if you shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you land among the stars. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. The term thinking big is so cliche, right? It's like you need to think big, you gotta think humongous. You can do anything, anything is possible. The sky's the limit, all, all these cliches, but the mind is very powerful. What you focus on is really what you achieve. And if you focus on something and you don't really think big about it, if you don't think, hey, maybe this is a possibility, maybe I can create something bigger than I imagined initially. We set off on a goal. When you start a business, right, we think, this is what I want, this is what success means. And years go by and we never change it, right? We never actually up the ante or think bigger. So I want to share with you three stories that inspired me to think bigger and then share with you how I like to practice big thinking. The first story is courtesy of Ramit Sethi, who's a New York Times bestselling author of I'll Teach youh to Be Rich. He's a friend of the show. He's been on the podcast several times, and he's recently become a good friend of mine. And I really learned a lot by getting to know him. Yes, this guy has a New York Times bestseller multiple times. It's been on the list. But he started with a very simple blog out of his college dorm room, geeking out on personal finance. Yes, it just started with a simple blog. But he grew an audience. He grew his credibility, he improved his voice, his writing skills, his ability to communicate his ideas and opinions. That became his book, I'll Teach youh to Be Rich, that became an amazing success for the last decade. He then launched a podcast that's incredibly successful where he talks to couples about their financial situations, about their struggles on both sides of the spectrum. People that are in debt, but also people that are wealthy by any objective means, but don't see themselves as wealthy and have a hard time spending money. Burme is constantly thinking big. He's practicing big thinking is how I like to put it. And in a couple weeks, he's launching his very own Netflix series, How to get rich. It launches April 18th on Netflix. And I couldn't be prouder because Remy didn't just say, hey, I got a great blog. It's going well. I've monetized it with some courses. Let me just stay here, stay in my lane. In a couple of months, our mothers will know who Ramit CD is, Right? My mom's gonna know who Amit CD is, even though she's not into business or finance or anything like that. Because he's on Netflix and he's thinking big, you know, how can I reach a larger audience? Yeah, I got this massive blog. Yeah, I have a New York Times bestseller that's in every bookstore. Yeah, I got this amazing podcast. But how can I reach everyday people? And he grew his audience and credibility over the years. This is like 15 years in the making. And now he has his own Netflix show. It made me stop and think, am I thinking that big, right? Am I thinking about how high I can go or how I can reach new people, or am I just getting content and almost, like, lazy with what I'm trying to achieve? These are confronting questions, right? We don't like to question ourselves or hold ourselves, you know, accountable or put our feet to the fire, but that's how we grow when we say, you know what? Maybe I'm not pushing enough. Maybe I'm not pushing myself enough. Or maybe I need to start believing in myself beyond what I've already achieved. The next story comes courtesy of my good friend Jordan Harbinger, host of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Jordan's been podcasting for so, so long, since 2006. That's before the iPhone. It's pretty crazy. His podcast is incredibly successful. Millions and millions and millions of downloads every single month. He's interviewed some of my heroes like Kobe Bryant, interesting artists like T. Pain, and has some real original guests, like hostage negotiators. Yeah, he is amazing what he does. He's an amazing podcaster. He has a great audience. But I never thought a podcaster can get a shoe deal, right? Like an athlete like LeBron James or Steph Curry having their own signature shoes and their own brands backing their brand. And Jordan thought bigger. He thought, hey, I have an audience and people listen to my podcast and I'm a stylish dude in K Swiss, gave him a shoe deal. And when that happened, I was like, oh, that's interesting. That was not even a consideration for me as a podcaster, as a brand. And I started asking myself why? Why did I never consider that? And it's probably because I'm not thinking big enough. I'm not stretching what's possible. The next story comes courtesy of Patrick Campbell, the founder of ProfitWell. Patrick was on the show talking about how he sold his business, ProfitWell for $200 million. When he announced the sale and shared the numbers with me, it really had me taken aback, right? It had me like really readjust myself in my seat. I was like, wow, that is crazy because I know Patrick, I've been to conferences with him, we've, you know, had meals together, chats, video calls, in person meetups. And we're like building our software businesses around the same time and growing and learning from each other. And the next thing I know is he sells for this incredible life changing amount. And I thought to myself, maybe I'm not thinking big enough because a nine figure exit, that's pretty amazing. Even if your goals are not to have a Netflix show or shoe deal even, it's just purely financial. Are you thinking big enough? Are you thinking about turning your maybe $500,000 a year business to a 10 million dollar business or a hundred million dollar business? There's something different about knowing somebody and then seeing an extraordinary result and be like, oh, wow, Patrick is a brilliant guy, he's a smart guy, he's super hard working. But somehow now it seems more possible for me. I start to see that I'm not thinking big enough. And what I started to realize is I'm not doing things to think big enough. So I want to share with you some of the things I've been doing to try to open up my thinking. A lot of times we meet amazing people at conferences, at meetups, at parties, at whatever, and we have superficial conversations. We get to know them a little bit, and we probably don't become quite close friends. I've made it a point now to start getting to know people more. So after I've met them at a conference or a meetup, I will get their contact, we'll message each other, we'll get on a call, maybe have lunch or dinner if we're local. And the reason why I'm doing this is because I don't want to just have these conversations where we talk about, what do you do? I do this. What do you do? You do this. Okay, great. I want to learn how they do it. I want to learn what they do every day. I want to know what they think about how they set their goals, what's on the horizon, what are they trying to do in the next few years? And that opens up my thinking. It challenges me thinking, oh, wow, you're gonna launch a Netflix show. At least I can do start a YouTube channel, right? Which we have for webinar Ninja. It's been growing incredibly well. So feel free to subscribe if you want to learn more about how to run great webinars and live courses. Shameless. Plug here. But the point here is, is that by having these real intimate conversations about the how and not the what, you start to think bigger. Now, this means you're gonna have to focus more on quality and not quantity of relationships. It doesn't mean you neglect trying to meet as many people as possible. What I like to do is go to as many events as I can. See networking and relationship building as a part of work. That's work, by the way. This is part of what you do as an entrepreneur, because like they say, your net worth is your network, right? But once I've kind of met everybody, I then choose who do I want to get closer to, who do I want to learn from, who is thinking big? And that can inspire me to think bigger. So whatever I do, whether it's the podcast or the software company, or even just launching a little product or course, I think, okay, this is what I'm doing now. But what does this look like if it's big, if it's something that is beyond my dreams and Even though this is just a thought experiment, we tend to get lazy. We tend to be like, oh, no, we don't want to think about that, or that's too hard. There's no work involved here. Right now, we're just in our minds and we're forcing ourselves to push the envelope and say, okay, let's think a little bigger. What's the bigger version of that? Let me give you an example. I have a podcast, the $100 MBA Show. And it's been an amazing, amazing podcast for the last eight years. We've grown an incredible listener, over 250 million downloads. Incredible, right? And I want to continue to serve this audience for as long as I can. But what's the next step for the podcast? Well, let's think a little bigger. Maybe I can get the podcast on airlines so people can listen to my podcast on a flight. Maybe I can showcase some of the success stories we've had through the 100 MBA show, podcast and program through a documentary. And maybe that can be on Amazon. Maybe I can collaborate with other entrepreneurs and create an annual festival. You gotta suspend disbelief for a moment and just think big.
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Got a 7am meeting on a Monday expensing breakfast because it's in policy, wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text. Yay. Free your team from expense reports today.
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Switch your business to ramp.com. so my first piece of advice when it comes to starting to think bigger is meet as many great people as you can. Now, obviously, everybody can't be great that you meet. So again, like I said, first, try to meet as many people as you can. Then go deeper on the ones that you feel like can inspire you and help you grow. Secondly, whatever you're working on right now, just for a moment, just for just maybe five, ten minutes, think about what's the bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger version of that? Where can this go? Don't think about limitations. Don't think about, you know, financial limitations, abilities, you know, connections. How do I know anybody on Amazon? It doesn't matter right now. Let's not worry about that right now. The how is that important? As entrepreneurs, we like to know the how. But right now we gotta think of different ways we can grow. And the thing I noticed is, even in my own journey, as you start thinking bigger and achieving bigger things, it actually gets easier. Like, things get easier, you get introductions, you get connections, people help you out. There's doors that start to open that were not even visible before. It all starts by thinking big. So anytime I start a project, anytime I start even working on something in my day to day, I think to myself, okay, this is what I'm doing. This is how I'm doing it. Why am I doing this? What is the end goal? What is the big version of this end goal? How else can I contribute? How can this be bigger than what I imagine or what I'm doing now? This is what I'm doing now. This is the goal. This is what I'm achieving. This is what I'm producing. But how can this lend itself to something bigger in the future? Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. I hope today's episode was helpful. You learned something if you did share it on social. Let people know that you listen to the podcast. Send them over to 1000- MBA-NET so they can subscribe to the podcast on any podcast app they use. By the way, if you're not subscribed yet, go ahead and do that now. By subscribing, you get access to over 2,200 business lessons in our archive. So go ahead and hit subscribe, hit follow on your favorite podcast app right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I've always said that business is totally a mindset game. It's probably 80% mindset. If you look at the great visionaries of business, whether it's Edison or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Sarah Blakely from Spanx or Barbara Corcoran. If you hear their stories, okay, they think anything is possible. They think big constantly. They're almost delusional, right? But that's because they practice thinking big constantly. They dream big, so therefore their bar is high. And even if they don't hit the mark, like I said, they're still successful to some degree. And eventually you will hit the mark because it's all a practice. It's all something that we do in repetition. It's all something that we do to get better and better at. Just like a muscle, thinking big is a skill. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.
- [14:22]
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Got a 7am meeting on a Monday Expensing breakfast because it's in policy.
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Yay.
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Wasting all afternoon submitting an expense report for that breakfast. If your company used Ramp, you could submit expenses with just a text. Yay. Free your team from expense reports today.
- [14:47]
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Switch your business to ramp.com.