10 Truths About Performance I Learned as an Investor

Summary

I didn't become a top performer nor did I build the world's foremost high-performance training company for entrepreneurs by accident. It took me several years and a few dozen investments to unearth the 10 truths that separate the good from the great and the great from the million-dollar-a-year earners.

Transcript

If you've ever wondered why did I start self-mastered to train entrepreneurs in peak performance after being a venture capital investor for a few years here's the answer

[INTRO] I am the ceo and founder of Selfmastered which is a high performance training company we help entrepreneurs and business leaders and scale their businesses by teaching them eight core high performance skills that allow them to operate at peak potential when managing their businesses.

So what follows are 10 hard-earned truths that i have taken from my venture capital investing career and also business angel in relation on how do the best entrepreneurs actually perform in their daily lives because as you know some people labor through gout decays without having much return on their investment and others have incredibly fast results.

And after a few years investing in entrepreneurs and of course making money and also wasting money i have boiled it down to a few core principles that i'm going to share next the first thing is that execution is strategy for breakfast most people believe that having the best strategy is what's going to give you the upper hand in the market but just not true because winning is not about spotting gaps it's about feeling those gaps.

So only those are able to fill those gaps and really execute at elite level for long enough will eventually make a strategy actually valuable and win over the competitors right so the first idea is that you need to be much better at execution that you are a strategy someone that cannot execute will never out-compete someone that has a bad strategy execution is more important than strategy which leads me to number two execution is important but how can you execute consistently and make sure that you actually deliver on the plan by being your best self by understanding that unless you optimize your own self for maximum performance at some point your execution will falter.

So becoming a top performer is exactly the number one priority for any entrepreneur because if you are consistently focusing on the right thing never have emotional hike ups are always able to think clearly and make good decisions then you will eventually achieve what you want so it's really about performance that leads to superior execution number three your physiology determines your reality we like to think of ourselves as rational human beings are always able to drive effective choices by using reason but that's not true humans are emotional creatures and we are highly dependent on cognitive processes and bodily processes that are not even in our spectrum of awareness so mastering one's physiology being making sure that you are sleeping breathing eating moving and essentially living in an optimal manner is a surefire way of preventing problems and errors and mistakes down the line.

In fact funnily enough soon in my career i realized a correlation between those entrepreneurs that were actually fit that went to the gym or did ironmans or marathons that those that take care of themselves and those that had the best business results and since both business and fitness depends and relies on self-discipline i think that correlation equals causation at this point so if you happen to have bad results in your business think about how well tuned are your physiological processes because if you do not sleep eat move breathe meditate as you should then your business will not perform the way it needs to perform for only the intense survive so actually say as it sounds the devil is in the detail and there's a stark difference between those that give a 10 out of 10 effort onto something and those like even 8 out of 10. so if you really want to move very fast in entrepreneurship and let me tell you speed is a competitive advantage you need to make things excellent and excellence really depends on the intensity that you put in the task if you're willing to do something for two hours but your focus is interrupted every 10 minutes then the quality of your work will not be good and therefore the intensity that you bring to the table will be lock luster and the results will be also lackluster.

So if you really want to move fast you want to be as intense as possible because that's when you will create high quality excellent work as emperor augustus from the first roman emperor said festina make haste slowly which means that in order to move fast you need to do things in a complete fashion you need to be excellent each step of the way so rushing it's really about sequentializing high intensity excellent effort five mismanaged emotions are everybody's kryptonite listen we are emotional creatures that were alluding before.

So if you do not learn to manage stress to keep a good emotional balance to really understand how to prevent high emotions from showing up in your work every day it's going to be very hard for you to sustain your business growth because in the end it's really about lowering your emotional variance and being as objective as you can at each step of the way if you listen to charlie monger he always says that people that are very high accused but terrible investors because they cannot control dirt or pyramid so in other words if you do not work on your emotional management at some point it doesn't matter how successful you are you may risk losing it all so emotional iq is just as important as raw intelligence now if this is resonating for you please remember to like and subscribe so we can keep growing and helping more people six wrong targets wrong performance see aristotle already said that humans are theological beings it meaning that we need goals.

In order to function in the world if we do not have goals then we do not achieve anything that seems obvious enough right but if you think about it how many people set the wrong goals how many people do not know how to set goals that propel the performance forward i would say most of them in fact people are still teaching smart goals as something that is actually desirable to get the best performance out of people and that's just stupid smart goals are dumb what you need are stretch goals things that take you outside of your current scope of your abilities and actually help you summon intrinsic motivation because that's exactly where peak performance lies is slightly outside of the current level of your abilities and throughout my career I've noticed that low performers have smart goals that don't really motivate them and the best performers I know are always looking to get so far ahead that the goals they said are just engulfing them with passion which is what we all want right.

So remember if you set the wrong target you're gonna get the wrong performance find the exact goal that motivates you that scares you a little and excites you a lot so that you can get ahead at peak performance seven wrong priorities wrong progress listen how many times have i seen entrepreneurs receiving well intentional advice by someone who they respected an investor a co-worker a family member whatever that had led them down a path that they intimately didn't want to pursue only to find themselves a few months down the line miserable for having wasted months doing what should not have been done at all what i'm trying to say is that running at the castle in the wrong direction is a very dumb move.

But every one of us from time to time can fall into that trap never deviate from the path that you have selected for yourself that you know will help you grow self-fuel growth is exactly the number one priority of all top performers it's not linked in fame it's not raising roundup around it's not impressing the jonases it's nothing outside of self-fueled growth both on the personal and on the professional side of things i know this to be true because we train people in big performance that is one aspect of self-fueled personal and professional growth eight high standards years old listen the key to success is very simple and you already know this just be better than yesterday if you keep upgrading your standards week on week you will eventually get where you want to get if you keep refining your personal protocols.

If you keep understanding the feedback that the market is providing you with your business and you keep being better than yesterday and last week you will eventually get there so you need to design standards and enforce those standards for yourself and your organization every single week so that it doesn't take you that long to get where you want to get it's just as simple as that nine

it's all about the now me hi let's see me highly who is the psychologist that coined the term flow but also abram maslow i'm sure you're familiar with his hierarchy of needs already said that the key to happiness is focus and this is important because happiness leads to success so if you want to be happy and therefore get good chance at achieving your goals fast you need to focus focus on the task at hand and really get into flow which is that non-ordinary state of consciousness that allows you to feel your best and perform your best in my experience investing entrepreneurs those that were unreachable for most of the day meaning that you cannot get a hold of them you cannot call them you cannot expect them to text you back because they were focused were those that had the best results so if you really want to be your best isolate yourself through during the day and focus on the highest leverage things that you can those are the two markers of success is really about the now it's really about what it is that you're doing at this very moment and everything else is just noise because i assume you are always working on the signal that would help your personal professional growth so it's all about the now.

In fact it's never been about time management if you think about it it's about value management it's about being super focused on the highest leveraged task available it's about value it's not about time time management is for low performance top performers know that managing your time is a given the challenge is make sure that you're actually employing that time to the highest value which is focus and leverage that's how you make great strides in the world by working fewer hours and number 10 by design not by default i have yet to see someone who conscientiously designs his or her life both on the professional on the personal front and fails to achieve the goals.

On the contrary quite often I see people that they never design their lives and they leave their lives by default and they end up getting nowhere near what they wanted to go so if you really want to make things happen in your life you need to take responsibility of it and start designing the systems and protocols and goals that will give you what you want with our clients and my team members i always tell them to devote time to design system create goals and institute protocols that allow them to get their goals by design you were not born to be a drift in the world you were born to make a difference and that difference can only be made if you are conscientious about how you want to live that life.

I hope this was useful please let me know in the comments if you learn anything these are 10 hard earned truths that i learned as an investor entrepreneurs that led me to become now an entrepreneur in the peak performance niche so i hope you can use these 10 hard-earned truths to drive progress and growth in your life