As many of you know, I have a beach house in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. Recently, 3 people were attacked by a shark on the same day, and 5 drowned after getting caught in a rip current. The shark attacks were rare, but the drownings due to the riptides here, sadly, are not.
Three of the people who drowned were young men who decided to go out for a late-night swim at dusk, when sharks are most active and aggressive for feeding – just weeks after the shark attacks in the same area where they were swimming. Further, there are warning signs everywhere down here about the riptides, including the double red flags posted along the beach the night of the drownings alerting people to NOT go into the water.
My heart breaks for those who died – and yet a part of me can’t help but recall the Einstein quote “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the universe.”
We ALL do dumb things, screw up and make mistakes – but some mistakes are a LOT worse than others, particularly if they are all part of a series of bad choices made back-to-back and compounded (swimming at night, with red flags, with aggressive sharks in the water feeding, no lifeguard around).
In business (and in life), I don’t think you need to be a genius to win. You simply need to try to make fewer stupid decisions. If you think about it, nearly every bad thing that has happened to you in business can be traced back to a stupid decision or, more accurately, a long list of stupid decisions repeated that piled on top of each other to eventually take you out.
A bad hire won’t end you – but if you KEEP that bad hire around, refuse to manage or monitor them, allowing them more time to entrench themselves, steal from you, push customers away and spread their special kind of toxicity throughout your team, the entire place can be burned to the ground overnight. ALL a series of stupid choices you made. Compound that with a SECOND bad hire because you still never learned the skills of building, managing and leading a team, and you’re setting yourself up for a future of misery, stress, anger, frustration AND less-than-stellar financial performance.
A failed marketing campaign won’t break you – but repeatedly failing to get marketing dialed in to the point where it’s working consistently WILL break you when a bad economy sets in, an aggressive competitor moves in on you, a rash of M&A activity causes you to lose your best customers, etc. Compound THAT bad decision with a lust for easy buttons and quick fixes and/or a childish desire to abdicate responsibility for growing sales and you are lining up a long, cold winter.
I know a lot of people who live paycheck to paycheck and swear it’s because they “aren’t good at math,” but how much of a math genius do you need to be to know you shouldn’t max out your credit cards and buy things on credit that you know you can’t afford? You don’t need a degree in finance to save some money.
On a daily basis, you get up and go to work or to your business and are likely to be doing the same things you’ve always done in the same way. If you’re doing smart things, that’s good. If you’re repeating stupid things, you’re only making life harder on yourself and others, and eventually the house of cards will topple down on your head.
Might I make a suggestion? How about making a list of everything you’re habitually doing on a day-to-day basis and asking yourself whether or not you still should be doing it the way you are – or even doing it at all? Is there a better way? Is there a more strategic approach you can take? A small, incremental shift of GOOD decisions and improvements will compound over time and pay off big – but so does dumb sh*t you repeatedly do.
And by the way, MOST of the difficult stuff has already been figured out and summarized in books, seminars and training sessions (like on our member Dashboard). Why ANYONE would try to accomplish a difficult goal without investing time into learning what NOT to do and gathering data, facts and blueprints for success is beyond me. That truly is the definition of stupid multiplied.
Make the smart decision by joining us at this year’s Roadshow to learn how to get more done with less, avoid common pitfalls and drive your success with proven strategies and insights. Tickets are on sale now.