The Hardest Skill To Master As An Entrepreneur

Summary

Optimism is a deadly emotion in the business world. If you want your small business to survive, you must learn the hardest skill to master as an entrepreneur fast.

Transcript

In this video, I'm going to show you what is the hardest skill to master? And more importantly, what practice can you start doing to bypass all the years of experience that are normally needed to mastery in your domain of expertise? Let's get to it.

Hey, I'm Leon Castillo founder of Selfmastered a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their solid bottleneck, their own performance, which transformed the unproductive, overwhelming focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

Today, I want to talk about the hardest skill to master as an entrepreneur. And this, there's no doubt about it that if you master this in your area of expertise, everything will become easier. And that is the skill of the Sun is the ability to understand reality, to the fullest to gorge first, second and third order consequences to understand what is in front of your eyes, which on 27th of June, he said, is one of the hardest things to do understanding exactly what it is that you are facing.

Because it is very easy to fool oneself it is very easy to think emotionally. And optimism and enthusiasm are deadly in business. The problem with this the problem with discernment is that it takes decades to write you need experience. And oftentimes you need mistakes, you need to have made mistakes. In the past, we've developed a pattern recognition skills to understand what is the decision you're not facing, and try to build some sort of coherent framework that leads you to choosing more wisely to start. So it is very expensive, both in terms of time, because it takes years and decades to master and also in terms of capital, because oftentimes, those mistakes are really expensive. But what if there was some sort of way of shortening your logical? What if you could develop the sermon way faster than the average entrepreneur? What if you could learn how to see reality effectively how to make great choices have to always come on top you didn't need to wait to make mistakes that can give you that skill turns out there is by doing something that I learned from Keith Cunningham from a book called The Road Less stupid, which is a book that should be around here somewhere.

This book, The Road Less stupid by Keith Cunningham, which is one of the best business books that I've ever read a limit, let me tell you, I've read a lot. And essentially what he says is that in order to avoid the dump tasks, which is as he calls all the time, and capital that is go wasted when you make decisions that are not rooted in reality, they're essentially emotion driven decisions, the best thing you should learn to do is to think and he has this specific practice called thinking time that he does three times a week. And in that thinking time session, what he does is to ask himself an important question and spend 60 minutes thinking on that question, uninterrupted, no distraction, no technology around just him the question and pen and paper. And he does that because in order to develop this discernment, you need to train your mind to create hypothesis, future scenarios, probabilities, possible outcomes over time. And that can only happen if you make a conscious choice of thinking every time you rush into a decision or to just let your emotions make the final call, you probably Doom yourself to incur some sort of dumb tax. And the goal of this book is to teach you the ability of find the unasked question and devote time to understand first, second and third order consequences, separate the problem from the symptom, find the root cause and create an action plan that is actually rooted in reality. And the kind of questions that you can ask yourself are infinite, right? But since you're an entrepreneur, you're in business, oftentimes, you're going to be reflecting on business questions, business questions that must lead to quality reflection.

So if you acute cavalcade the question, if you just ask us this question, a dumb question, then you will not get the benefit of thinking time you need to be mindful about what you spend 60 minutes on an example or whose questions might be why are not my sales doubling this quarter? Or what new counters should I target if I want to double my revenue in the next three months? Or what does the competition have that I don't which is why they are winning? And the question might be, what pillar of my business is lacking the most and what can I do about it?

If you spend 60 minutes on any of those questions, so many good ideas are going to come to your mind and you're going to develop this skill of discernment because you're going to devote good deep work and need and flow to solving things you care about within your business. Now, don't expect all thoughts to come to your mind to be valuable.

In fact, Keith Cunningham says that you start having like good insights after about 30 or 35 minutes into the thinking session in my experience, may come before minutes, 15 or 20. But there's not the first thing that pops into your mind by committing to 60 minutes of thinking, you essentially bypass your brain's tendency of throwing bad ideas to you. If you commit to those 60 Minutes Overtime, you're going to be refining the questions you give yourself. And how have I applied this.

Well, before I tell you how I use it in self mastery, I want to like subscribe and hit the bell. So you never miss out on any of the videos that we release every week. For people like you to scale their businesses by mastering the performance and execution. Well, as you might imagine, as soon as I read this book over like three or four years ago, I started applying it on all domains on my lap for the end, this past months or years is restarted submaster. I've been doing this quite often.

Although Keith Cunningham suggests three thinking time sessions a week, I don't have as much time to do so. But I always try to do one, especially on Sundays, right now we'll sit down for one hour and go through keys framework trying to come up with new insight that I can apply in the next weekly sprint in my business, right. And examples of questions that I've asked myself in the past, regarding this business will be how can I make the product service and community size of this muscle accelerator? As you know, we have three sides of the same product 10 times better than the competition? Right? It's a huge, huge question that has motivated some of those incredible changes that we have been implementing lately. And our question might be, what is the best type of clients that we have served at surf master? Because after all these years we have we have served hundreds of them right? From SAS businesses, info businesses, freelancers, solopreneurs professionals, even students who have got the best results and why right, because we accelerate someone's execution on performance, right? So oftentimes, we've helped professionals write books, but that's not essentially peanut butter. What we really want to do is to help people implement a strategy and accelerate the execution of performance, right. But among those entrepreneurs who are the best suited for our product, right, this is a very important question. Because once you reach a conclusion here, everything else changes, all the marketing is adjusted, or the marketing asset or sales script, everything adjust to serve that best type of clients that I identified.

So as you see, these type of questions are very productive. And I like to do at least one session every week, I asking about everything and anything that I might be working on in the business. So this video is really important. Please apply everything that we've discussed because it really pays off to not wait decades to develop good judgment, discernment in your business. And if you can definitely buy this book is one of the best books I've ever read. I this is not the first time I buy it, because I bought it like four years ago. And I don't want it every time I change houses and stuff. I move I normally like lose some books. So this one I've lost a couple of times already.

So read it, read it because it's going to give you a different perspective on how to manage yourself and your business, the better you become at thinking the easier is going to be for you to make the right call every day and as you know, in the long run, you are the product of your decision so it pays off to master the hardest kill which is discernment as soon as possible.