Transcript
Eric Triplett (0:04)
Welcome to the Deep End with Eric Triplett, the pond digger. This is the show for contractors, tradesmen and entrepreneurs who want more from their business and from themselves. Eric brings decades of experience as a seven figure contractor with expertise in leadership, sales systems, and the discipline it takes to build something real. Shaped by years in the aquatics world. His insights are rooted in precision, craftsmanship, and performance. If you're done skimming the surface and ready to go deeper, it's time to dive in.
Eric Triplett (0:45)
What's happening, rockstars? Welcome back to the Deep End podcast. Triplet here and we're building better contractors, better leaders, better human beings, and just better versions of ourselves. That is the goal. That is the mission here. And today's episode comes straight out of our weekly compass call that we do inside the TWT contractor circle. And I think the topic hits really hard. It's basically called push versus Pull. It's the push pull theory, if you will. And if you really understand this theory, it might even piss you off a little bit because it exposes exactly why you might be stuck exactly where you're at. And if you're really getting after it and you're thinking and you're constantly, like, becoming this better version of yourself, you're going to think back to many, many years ago, maybe about someone telling you about having big visions and big dreams and you need to, you know, have bigger visions, right? And then you think you did it, but you didn't really do it. And today, like, you might even realize you sh. You know, you wish you would have started a whole lot earlier by having that big vision or that big dream. And I imagine some of us might even believe that it's time to change the dream to even bigger than it already is. Because the closer you get to your dream, you should be pushing it out a little bit farther to keep you motivated and pulling in a different direction. Have that vision pull you that way. So most people don't move until something hurts bad enough. There's some pain associated with it. They wait until the bank account gets too low, relationships are strained. They wait till they get fired from a job, right? Instead of leaving the job that you hate, they just stick around till they get fired and that pain becomes bigger. And then all of a sudden they're pushed in a different direction. That's the push, because pain forces movement and it works. But, man, it's reactive as hell. And you're not really in control. You're just responding to damage. You're doing damage control, right? But there is another way to live. And I think some of the people that you look up to that are really crushing it in life, they're living the pull. And that's when your vision is so damn clear, so exciting, so meaningful that it literally drags you forward. There's no crisis required to get you to move in that direction because the vision's pulling you. There's no rock bottom necessary. You wake up and you move towards that vision because you want to, not because you have to. And the truth is most people don't want to admit it, but a lot of, of people, people that I know, a lot of them are living in what I call the predictable hell. Like it's, they have a predictable income, they have a predictable retirement, they have a predictable, you know, weekends. A lot of people don't love that. They just, it's just safe. In that format of life, you don't really feel alive, but you just know what to expect. And the idea of chasing an unpredictable heaven is scarier than just living with a predictable hell. And so today we break that down in a conversation with some of my inner circle peers. But it gets you to think about where you're operating from, why it matters, and how to shift from being pushed by pain and being pulled by your purpose. I hope it moves you like I've been moved recently. Let's jump into it. What's up everyone? Welcome to Weekly Compass. 208. I think it's 208. I don't think it's 209. It's getting close. We are loading up on the days. Here's one thing I want to talk to you guys about right off the get go is a push versus pull. Okay, Motivations. Let's start right there. But first of all, let me go back one little quick step. We did change these calls to 9:30. For over three years we've been doing it at 9am and I want to tell you the vision of my business is so compelling that that is why I, I slid our date by just 30 minutes. Okay. You know how everyone knows how important this call is to me and this group is so very important to me. So as you can imagine, three and a half years, like I have not deviated from this. So for me to deviate from this, this call frame of 9:00am Pacific to 9:30 Pacific is really, really important. And so this is going to tie into exactly the, the push versus pull motive or motivation, I should say. So this is, this is, this is going to date back to when I first met Joe the fish guy on the call right now, okay, the very first personal development book I ever read was from Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within. And I remember something very distinctively about that particular book where he talked about the pain and pleasure principle. And we make so many. We make so many decisions in our lives about to either avoid pain or to get pleasure. Like, that's. That's the pain and pleasure principle. And of course, you know, Robbins breaks it down brilliantly, but it's something that has stuck with me for all these years. Now I started thinking about. I've always thought about it as pain and pleasure, but now I want to talk about the difference between push and pull. Like that difference between being pushed away from your predictable lifestyle or having an unpredictable something pull you towards you. Okay, so let me give you an example. We just had an interruption. I'm so sorry. Okay, so listen, people would rather live in a predictable hell than an unpredictable heaven, okay? Because I'll just take a job, for example, okay. And hopefully my employees are motivated enough by me to let this be exciting to them. Okay? If you're in a terrible job, imagine the people in your life that hate their job, but they don't doing anything about it because it's predictable. They make a predictable amount of money. They have a predictable lifestyle, and, you know, they're just. But they're stuck. They can't make these improvements. They maybe complain a lot, this kind of stuff, so that they'd rather live in that unpredict, that predictable hell than to go and take risk for something that is heaven because it's unpredictable. That's where the pain and pleasure comes in. And to help drive this home a little bit is to talk about taxes. We all love our taxes, right? But they're a pain in the butt unless you have everything on lock and you have a great tax person and you've got perfect organizing tools, you have people on your team that work for you. You know, you got to do the taxes. You're like, oh, what a pain in the ass. It's so much of a pain for me to want to do taxes that I'm going to avoid that pain, right? But then all of a sudden, April hits, and you start to get a little bit nervous, and now the pain is starting to swell for you not to get them done on time. And by April 15, the pain of you not doing the taxes is overcoming the pain of you doing them. And that's when you switch. So the pain switches on that point. So one thing that I've been working on tremendously hard since February So it's been a few months. Is creating a big enough vision to there and, and speaking it, not just thinking it, but actually putting it out into the world and talking about it, telling my community, telling my family, telling my friends, telling my employees, telling my customers that I want to build a $50 million brand. I want to hire, I want to hire 100 top tier employees that have beautiful lifestyles. And I want to integrate, I want to be the, the forefront of integrating backyard water features in people's yards and to bring wildlife. I don't have it perfectly done yet, but I want to, I want to be a big factor in, you know, connecting humans with not only nature, but protecting wildlife as well. So that, that aligns with the mission for my wife. Now that's my mission for my business. Now this is going to go to the push and pull principle back to having this job, right? So if someone worked somewhere and they made a certain amount of money and they were living unpredictable lifestyle, the pain would come. If they get fired now, they're fired. You can either wait to get fired or lose the job, the company goes out of business or whatever, and then you have to make this change, right? That's just being reactive to your environment. But if we can create a vision big enough and compelling enough in the future for, for something to pull us towards that, right, the $50 million brand or the ultimate job that you want or you know, you know, living wherever you wanted to do, like, whatever, if you can create a vision big enough that it pulls you in that direction instead of you being pushed into a different direction because you got fired. There's the difference between the push and pull motive, right? And we have control over that, especially as business owners, right? We have control this as like an employee, you have an, if you're an employee, you listen to the podcast, right now, like, you literally have to just create that compelling vision. Now. I've always had it, you know, bouncing around in my brain. I want the brand to be bigger. I want to make more money. I want to, you know, hire more people. I want a bigger truck fleet. I want to, you know, build bigger water features and touch more people's lives with water. And it's always been like this thing, right? But until I put it down on paper and I have it hanging on my wall right here. It's literally hanging on the wall right here. I have it hanging on the wall and in my house as well. So. And then I talk about it and I make posts about it. And the crazy thing is now I'VE found myself in different rooms. People are like, oh, you want that? Some, some people are like, good luck, good luck with that. Like, that's not possible, right? And then I have. Other people are like, finally, bro, that's so sick that you want to do this. I want to do this too. It's really similar now. Like, hey, come and hang out with me. Hey, come and talk to me. Hey, come and get on my podcast. Hey, like, so just by putting it out into the world, it, you know, it, it becomes an accountability thing. Like, I would rather work really hard to make this thing happen. Even if I fell a little short, maybe I only get to $30 million brand, maybe, all right? But hopefully I'll get to 30 million and all of a sudden it'll become 75 million. And then I'll have to push past 30 harder to get to that. And even if I fall a little shy, if I'm constantly pushing forward, I'm getting better than I was today. Something's constantly pulling me because as you can imagine, this, this 50 million dollar brand is probably 10 years away. So what is that? What do I have to do in the next year, in the next three year and five years to get that to happen? There's going to be things that happen in my business that I don't even realize yet. Opportunities aren't even going to show up until I put it out there into the world. So as soon as you make that, it's like the gravitational pull. As soon as you put something out there, a dream big enough to really pressure you to pull, you imagine it's a rope and they got a pulley up there and it's pulling you towards it. Because your brain is constantly thinking about what do I have to do? I'm already thinking differently. How am I going to make this a $50 million brand? I know a $65 million brand what they did. I know a 20, $30 million brand that did what they did. And I know a, a twenty million dollar brand in the same industry that I'm in right now that I know what they did, what am I going to have to do? Which, which of those three different factors is pulling me in the direction that I want to become? Right? Or maybe I'm carving my own path and using some of the theories that I've seen and some of the proven methodologies that have driven companies in more direction. Right? And I'm getting coaching and I'm doing training. And one of the things that is really important to me is moving forward is I Thought a lot about this is what I want to do is have more revenue per employee per year, like their value, right? So every time I hire an employee, I know I'm going to make this much revenue for the season. Right? And I think I've been thinking completely different about this. I've been thinking about this so wrong for so many decades. It's crazy. I just thought we work harder, we work longer, we, you know, create some more value. We get out there, we'll be able to charge more eventually. Right? Well, what I was missing was training my team. So oftentimes, can you make sure that dog doesn't go out? I'll get. Give me his. Give me his leash.