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There are a few things that you need to unlearn if you really want to make you kind of money. I'm talking about core ideas that used to work, but just don't anymore. Advice everyone's following that keeps them stuck. I've coached thousands of business owners and the ones who do the best are the ones who totally reframe how they think about making money. So we're going to cover the six things that you need to unlearn. And let me tell you, the last one ruins most people without them even knowing it. Welcome to the Martel Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best selling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter@martell method.com Starting with point number six, you need a good plan. Most people think I need a solid plan before I start. They sit down and they talk to people and they research and they get ready. It's kind of like the person that cle before the cleaning lady comes. The point is for you to just take action. No business plan has ever survived first contact with the customer. Never. I still remember the first time I wrote a business plan. Not only did I follow none of it because those were all just guesses, but I later found it on my hard drive years later, and when I opened it, I laughed at how different my life was than what I wrote down there. That's usually what happens to business plans. Instead, you should realize the only plan is to do anything that gets feedback from the customer. Everybody wants to start perfect. That's a wrong strategy. The plan is to start messy when you're creating content. Post 80% good enough. Post anything. An imperfect action beats perfect inaction every single time. So now you're taking action. But if you're doing it the old way, you're still going to burn yourself out. Because the next thing you need to unlearn is point number five. You need to work hard. And everyone says work hard, grind harder, put in the hours. Ba ba ba ba. Work scared. That's the answer. Work hard. That's for people that never move forward. What they mean to say that most people don't hear is do the thing that you're avoiding. I believe our fear is a perfect compass for where we should be focusing our time. Because fear stands for false evidence appearing real, which means on the other side of that is everything you've wanted to. Just because you can grind for 18 hours doesn't mean you're making any progress. Don't confuse movement with progress. Stanford actually came out with some research that said that if people work more than 50 hours, there's a massive decline in productivity anyway. Someone working 70 hours usually gets the same amount of work done as someone working 55 hours. It's just the person that sits down and does the thing that moves the business forward, moves their life forward. In those 50 hours are going to get better results. The brain tattoo I want you to put on your brain is that the stuff that scares you is the stuff that shapes you. So here's how you can find and tackle the scary work. I want you to look at the next week of your calendar and I want you to circle the things that you've written down that you want to do that, you know, scare you a little bit, that make you uncomfortable. Maybe it's creating content, maybe it's making sales calls. Maybe it's trying to recruit somebody. Be honest with yourself. Now. Front load your day with those tasks. You wanna start with the scary stuff. Number three, tell somebody. Tell somebody you're scared. Tell somebody that. That's what you're starting with. Tell somebody to create accountability within yourself so that you deliver on it. Oftentimes, we'll do more for other people that we've committed to than we'll do for ourselves. So this keeps you from hiding. The last one is you gotta celebrate the attempt, not just the outcome. If it doesn't work, you got feedback, but at least you did it. And I would celebrate that. You gotta honor the fact that you tried, even if it didn't get the result. You either win or you learn. And you have to celebrate the learning moments too. So now you've learned how to tackle the scary stuff, not just the stuff that keeps you busy. But the next mistake is when people look around at who's winning and just blindly copy them. Which brings us to the next thing you need to unlearn before we get back to the episode. If you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martel Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it@martell method.com. point number four, learning from the best. See, I know you hear model, model, model. Learn from the best. Who's doing it? Who's winning? Learn from them. The challenge that most People run into is that they come from a big company, they come from a Fortune 500 company, they come from a winning team, and when they start at zero, they try to copy the playbooks of a Fortune 500. A winning team when they have a fract of the market, a fraction of the team, a fraction of the customers. You're copying the wrong playbook for the stage you're at. And if you act that way when you're small, you will kill your company. And there's data to support this. I think it was the startup genome that said that like 74% of small businesses fail because they try to act too big way too early. Because they're copying the expensive strategies of giant corporations and they're just out of sequence. Like I said, they have the resources at the brand recognition, they have the customers. They get the money and you got none of that. So stop copying their playbooks. I remember when I was building my company Clarity, there was a company that got bought by AT&T 10 years prior that did something similar to what I was doing. So I thought, hey, I'll just R and D Robin duplicate. I'll go in there, I'll look at all their sequences, their emails, their conversion funnels, everything. I'll just borrow that inspiration and replicate it using my product. It turned out the money they were making and all the funnels they designed was to optimize for people to call psychics. I know. Nobody told me that. I couldn't figure it out. The way I turned it around is I realized I had to start from scratch, look at who I was selling, how I was selling it, who is paying me, and then figure out who at my stage in the early days was similar, and go borrow their playbooks, borrow their positioning, borrow their ideas for creativity. Because we're at the same level. People don't realize when Facebook launched, it launched at Harvard. If you're launching a social network and you're trying to compete against Facebook today, the same way you they built today, you're gonna fail. Don't copy Tesla when you're just trying to build an electric go kart. So if you can't copy big companies, who do you learn from? Well, here's my filter. First find three companies that are similar to you and your stage that are just maybe six or 12 months ahead of you. Number two is then you're gonna use these really cool tools, similar web meta ad library built with ahref. These are all incredible tools to essentially reverse engineer how these businesses were built. Their funnels, their traffic their strategies, you can figure out who is their number one partner that's generating 80% of the traffic. Maybe you can reach out to them and get them to send the traffic to you. Once you do that, copy the structure. Take their frameworks, their best practices, but swap in your own offer. This isn't copy paste. This is understanding the methodology for how they've built the revenue so far so that you can start with the right blueprint and finally run it for 90 days minimum. I can't tell you how often people said, I tried that. It didn't work. Well, you tried it once. How about you try it for 90 days, you put it in place, you let the offer get eyeballs. Don't get creative yet. Just do the one thing that you seen work and see if it could work for you. So now you're taking action and working smart. But here's one area where old advice will absolutely wreck you if you follow it. Before we get back to this episode, if you prefer to watch your content, then go find me on YouTube. I have this episode on YouTube. I'm Dan Martell on YouTube. Just subscribe to the channel, turn on the notification bell because then you'll get notified in real time. It'll tell YouTube to tell you got a new episode, so you'll never miss anything. Now let's get back to the episode point number three. Take your time. With hiring, the old advice was higher. Slow fire, slow. This is where you had people work for companies for 25 years. Today, that advice is completely wrong. In the new world, it's all about moving faster. You need to hire fast, you need to test fast, and you need to fire fast. Because if you wait too long to bring someone on, you miss the window. Top talent is only available in certain times in their life where they're frustrated at a boss or they got pissed off that somebody did something. And if you just happen to be the person that calls, give them an opportunity, they're going to jump ship. You need to be quicker on your ability to hire people. And even worse, if you bring somebody on and they're totally not a right fit and they don't add any value, don't prolong the decision to move them on from your team because that'll drag down your whole fricking team. I remember back in the day, I hired this tech genius at my company and I was paying him six figures. Four months in, I'm paying this guy and I get a call one day from Procter and Gamble, number one company in the world. The CTO wanted to personally call me to let me know the guy on site was causing issues with their team. And I'm sitting there going, here's a guy that I hired that's supposed to be the expert, supposed to be the genius and he's the one messing up. But I feel like I can't let him go cause he clearly knows more than me. He's technically a genius. Me waiting too long to fire him almost cost me that contract. Hundreds of thousands of dollars every week. That you have the wrong person costs you twice their salary. So let me teach you how. I hire across all my companies and we use this five step process every time. The first thing is you gotta run ads to find a lot of candidates. Most people when they recruit, they just don't have a lot of people applying. So they just take the first person that looks decent. We spend about 5% of their annual compensation. The total comp on ads. I'm talking LinkedIn. Indeed. Local. If it's a local job, the role pays 100 grand. I spend 5,000 on ads. Most people spend no money on recruiting. Number two is have them complete a one minute video explaining why they want to join your team and answer some other questions because that'll help you sort way quicker. I can tell in a video based on how somebody's communicating what books they like to read. They tell me about why they want to work there, if they're even in the realm of potential. Because I always hire the soul trained for the role. I can see in the video if I got the right soul. If they pass that, then the next step is have them do a cognitive test or some kind of behavioral test. I use predictive index. You can use whatever you want. There's tons of them. And it's not a no go decision like if they don't pass a certain level. But it just gives me more data to inform myself and the teams when they're making the hiring decision. It understands their default, who they are as a person at some levels. Their IQ or their ability to process information which is going to tell me how they're going to work on my team. I can even compare them to other people on my team to see who they're most like. Number four is you pick the three best candidates candidates and give them a paid test project. My whole rule is I can't work with you until I work with you. Which means I got to give them a simulation of how it's going to work on our team that they got to do before they even join Our team, usually it's about a 10 hour project and I'll pay them for that if they want. But the idea is for them to get to know us and us to know them. And all three candidates do the same project so I can evaluate their output against each other. The last one is let your team make the final decision. I give everybody on a hiring team the veto power to choose who they work with. Why? That allows them to have ownership on hiring. Mean when they start, they want to see them win because they were involved in it. They don't feel like you're pushing people on them and it's just the right way to hire. The trick is to move fast at every stage. And honestly, if it's not a hell yeah, it's a heck no. Like, just honor your gun. So now we got you moving fast and you're building your team. Awesome. Next, we need to unlearn something that you've probably heard not only just in business, but also in life before we get back to the episode. If you're enjoying it so far, could you go ahead and do me a huge favor and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify Reviews help us get up in the rankings, which gives us credibility to reach out to bigger and bigger guests. We can bring them to you. It would mean so much. Let's get back to the episode. Point number two, you gotta be well rounded. Everybody's gonna say you gotta be well rounded. You gotta be the jack of all trades. You gotta know a little bit about everything. But being good at everything means you're not great at anything. The world's best people are tip of the spear, great at something. They've decided to master a skill. People making real money got really good at one thing. Everything else, they outsource or they ignore it. In many ways, you have to almost like, be willingly ignorant to not learn other stu because you could so that you have the time to become masterful at one thing. It's like an OCD focus level of attention. You have to have people go like, oh my God, you're so intense. It's like, I'm trying to be the best at something. And if they give you a hard time, remind them, if I was going for Olympic gold as a skier, you wouldn't give me a hard time for training. You wouldn't give me a hard time for hiring a coach. You wouldn't give me a hard time for studying other people. That's what I'm trying to do in my career. It's like my buddy Tomorrow, brilliant marketer. And because he could do a lot of stuff, he did everything. He was spending 70 hours a week running his company, but he was stuck at 30k because he was doing everything. And I was like, bro, you're really good at marketing. I dare you to just do marketing to focus on it. He changed his one focus and revenue doubled 200% in 60 days. His work week dropped down to 38 hours a week. He was making way more money working less because he decided not to be well rounded and instead to go all in. The highest performers I know know exactly what to be bad at. So how can you figure out exactly what you need to focus on so that you can be world class at? Here's how to do it. First, you gotta list everything that you do in your business. Do a full dump in. Audit every single task that's taking your time. Then circle the ones that give you energy that you enjoy doing them. I love selling, I love persuading, I love enrolling people into my world. That's the hardest one to let go. But the good news is when you're starting off, keep that one. If that's your thing, whatever gives you energy and makes you money, keep those. And then number three, everything else, you create like a big bucket of that stuff. Get somebody else to do it for you. And I know you're like, I have no money. Find an intern, stop doing it. Ask for help, maybe block time it. So it's just way more efficient if you actually have to do it. But I really want you to give yourself the space to do the thing that makes you money, that lights you up. The goal is to spend 80% of your time doing the things that light you up and make you money so that you have 20% of your time to keep learning and growing, to find out other ways you can make yourself better. So stop trying to be decent at everything and be great at one thing. And if you want to go deeper on this, it's a whole chapter in my book, buy back your time. But if you just start with what I share with you, it's going to give you massive results. Before we get back to the episode. If you actually want to know what my real life looks like and see the people and the businesses and the companies I buy and my family and just like how I make it all work, go. Follow me on Instagram Dan Martell 2lz and Martell on Instagram. It's where I show the behind the scenes, the real deal, real time. I'd love to see you There. Have an amazing day. So now you're focused. Awesome. You're getting really good at one thing. But none of that matters if you're going in the wrong direction. Which is why the last thing you need to unlearn is point number one. Follow your passion. Everybody says, follow your passion, but here's what I discovered. You could be passionate about something and still be a failure. You could say, I want to do this because I'm more passionate about that and still never win because you always just defaulting to your passion and avoiding the work and avoiding the monotonous and avoiding the being consistent. That doesn't work either. Passion without a market is just an expensive hobby, you know? And the data shows this. 42% of businesses failed because they built a product nobody actually needed. Because the entrepreneur was passionate about the product. They fell in love with the product. They didn't fall in love with the problem. See, if you fall in love with the problem, you don't care about the solution. Then you'll go find the right solution for the problem. That's what you should be passionate about. You should be passionate about solving a problem for somebody. The real answer isn't just being passionate or doing things just for the money. It's finding the sweet spot. It's like my buddy Matt, he was super into fitness, and he thought, I need to build an app. And then he built the app. He spent like a hundred grand to build the app and launch the app. Nobody wanted the app. When he talked to the people that said, you should build the app, he realized that their number one problem was being consistent. He didn't need an app for that. It's funny how people, they get passionate about a tool instead of working backwards from the customer. When you talk to the customer and you say, what is actually hard about getting this result? And you build a solution for that problem, that's how you get rich. So all he did was he pivoted away from the app and he said, okay, I know I spent a lot of money. I'm gonna leave that there, and I'm gonna go get passionate about creating accountability. So he created a coaching program where he created accountability as a core cornerstone. That same passion with a different approach was making them 12 grand a month in 90 days. Follow problems, not passions. The money follows problems. So here's how you can find something that, yes, you have passion around, but that you can actually monetize. The framework is called ikigai. Essentially, you draw four big circles, each one representing a different question and what we want to Find out is what's in the middle. So the first question is, what do you love doing? You know what I love doing? I love talking to people. I love creating content that I know could be seen by millions of people because it feels efficient. I'm a nerd when it comes to effective Second question you want to ask yourself. The other circle is, what are you good at? What do you feel that other people tell you? Like, hey, man, you're really good at that. That's where you want to go looking. What are things that you do naturally? You're just like, I don't know. Why do people keep saying I'm good at this? That's the answer to that question. The third circle is what does the world need? As much as you have a need to print paper, the world doesn't want printed paper anymore. And then the fourth big circle is what can you get paid for? And that one's easy to answer because you can figure out what people are already spending money on. If they're spending money on it, you can get paid to do it. If you look at those four questions and think about what fits in the middle, that's your sweet spot. That's what you should be building your business around. But you need all four. So I encourage you to scroll back, hit pause, watch it, fill it out, and then come back to find the overlap. That's your direction. You see, none of the other stuff matters if you're building in the wrong direction. This is the filter for everyone. It gets you alignment. So all of that will hopefully get you recentered because most of what you've been taught just doesn't work anymore. The world has completely changed and it changes almost monthly right now, and the rules change with it. But you can still win if you unlearn the old game and play this new one using these new principles. All you need to do is just pick one and unlearn it this week. Maybe it's taking action. Maybe it's not trying to copy somebody's playbook that's way bigger than you. Maybe it's deciding to really double down on what you're passionate about. The world needs and they're willing to pay for it. Maybe today is the day you start. Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? 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