A running library of the models I steer by, collected from books, mentors, and my own experiments.
The idea of “locking in” and changing the course of your future in a day / week is always appealing but never attainable.
Instead, just focus on getting 1% better daily. This begins to compound and the same way index funds do.
This is a similar concept to having a weekly growth goal at a startup.
My heart is at ease as whatever is meant for me, will never miss me and whatever misses me, was never meant for me.
There is usually one key single constraint in the business that’s holding you back. Your job as the founder is to find it and fix it. Everything else is a distraction that deceptively makes you feel productive. But there’s nothing less productive than doing that which didn’t need to be done in the first place.
Tasks should have clear actions and deliverables. There should be a documented alignment on what "success" looks like.
The documentation should include:
Instead of having a short sighted frame of mind - where you try something for a few hours, struggle and give up - count in hundreds. How many hundreds of hours have you invested into something? How many hundreds of essays have you written?
Counting in hundreds is another term for having higher standards but I feel it's more concrete. The latter feels wishy washy while the first feels more practical and motivating. Like I know what my next step is.
Fail fast and often. There's this feeling that seeps in every once in a while that if you try something and fail it means your doomed. No it does not.
Fail fast and continue failing fast until you succeed. Don't get stuck trying to fix a failed thing. Or feeling paralyzed to take action because you're worried of failing. You are getting no where.
This is linked to losing in a startup
Working on a startup has these benefits:
The only way someone is a loser while running a startup is if at the end of it all, is if they have poorly learned the above. That is the ONLY scenario where you have truly lost.
And if you have a higher standards: you are a loser if you don't know WHY your startup failed.
Hormozi's more, better, new framework:
To grow:
An example in terms of customer acquisition: 1 - Do it more: Look at how you're getting customers now—what's working the best? You can likely do more of that thing. If 1:1 calls have a high close rate, you should do more of them. If your ads funnel is profitable and driving new leads, you should run more ads. If your IG Reels are driving new leads, you should publish more Reels!
Find what's working and simply do more of it. This doesn't require new solutions or new creativity—just discipline to turn up the dial. It's the fastest, lowest-effort, highest-impact direction to go.
2 - Do it better: If there's no obvious answer to the "more" approach, then look at how you can improve your existing systems. What's getting results but could be working a little bit better? A little bit more efficiently?
Think:
There are likely areas of your business that are "working," but inefficiently. Start looking at the data and do the hard work to increase the baseline effectiveness of these systems.
Then, go back to doing MORE of it....
3 - Do something new: Only once you've exhausted more and better should you look at new. New means creating new things, such as new products or systems. This is slow, high effort, and inefficient to start.
The irony is that, as creators, we often default to "new" as a solution for more customers. But in reality, this is the WORST approach in the near term.
Reagan Pugh once wrote, "the magician is no longer impressed by his own tricks." It's why we get "bored" with teaching things over and over again. But if we think the magic is just for us, we forget that it's still magic to other people! And the value we capture comes from the value we create for others.
There's a real argument to be made that the biggest outcomes go to the creators with the highest tolerance for boredom. The longer you're able to do what works—iterating in the tiniest of ways—the more you push towards the outer edge of what is possible. Most people stop pushing once they reach the limits of their own boredom.
So this is your reminder. Those things that are working? You should keep doing them. Take them to their limits or their natural conclusions. If it feels too easy, that's just a sign that you're good at what you do—and you deserve to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Users should be super excited to try out and use your product. They should be "crazy". If your current users aren't then it's either one of two things:
And since you build a product after understanding a user segment's problems, it means your product isn't right... Because if it's the first one, then you're falling in trap of "build and they will come" and that leads to a lot of wasted time.
If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough.
This is another one of those good reframes that shifts your mind from "i suck at life" to something more positive. It's okay to be rejected. In fact, it's great! How sad would it be if you face no rejection at all and get all that you desire (with little to no struggle, i.e. rejection). That means you're not aiming high enough!
In life, your "payoff" is a max function (the best of all attempts), not an average. So why not just have at it and go for something hard.
When was the last time you were rejected?
Scaling a business is NOT about getting more customers. It’s about getting customers to never leave.
This leads to raving fans and referrals…
This is based on the concept that our nervous system considers unfamiliar things as scary. Back in the day, when we were running through jungles, anything unfamiliar to us was scary as it had the potential to kill us. We carry that same instinct in today’s world where 99.99% of unfamiliar things in fact do not have the ability to kill us. So the next time you feel scared or anxious just remember, it’s probably just unfamiliar. And not truly scary (like a venomous snake).
When smart people can't agree, it's because they're working from different assumptions. And the solution isn't more debates, it's better information.
So, next time you want to chuck your laptop out the window… Take a deep breath, and ask the magic question:
This is a much deeper topic that I need to just brain dump on. The idea is linked to positive thinking, manifestation and meditation.
Your thoughts, feelings and actions are all linked. The loop is pretty straightforward but let me give a run down: Thoughts lead to feelings and feelings lead to action. Action then leads to more (positive) thoughts which then reinforces stronger feelings which then leads to more action.
When reviewing an initiative, it's easy to overcomplicate things (especially if you have a technical background) by dissecting the data in 20 different ways and thinking about changing hundreds of variables to see how it will impact things.
To which the response is: We’re not trying to publish a paper. We’re looking for things that are big. If an experiment takes weeks to reach significance, it’s not big. Don’t waste time chasing unnecessary precision - go look for something bigger.
A good question to ask however is: "We thought this would make a big difference, and it didn't. Why not?” When you get an unexpected result, revisit your prior assumptions.
Small results usually stem from three things:
We all drink too much coffee, fall in love with our ideas, and expect they’ll be huge. And then they aren't. The natural response is to push those failures aside, a little embarrassed, and chase the next shiny thing. But if we can take a few minutes to reflect on why we overestimated our idea in the first place, we get better at dreaming up things that actually can be huge.