I believe in these ideas and try my best to live by them.
They have all added to my personal and professional success in various ways. I hope they can help you as much as they’ve helped me!
Reply back with your favorite points or another principle you live by. I LOVE hearing from you and I'm always trying to improve how I think.
Alright, let's dive in.
1. Add value first:
You gain trust by providing something of value first without expectation. This gets you very far with customers and personal relationships. Don’t squeeze your customers for every penny, especially early. Too many people are tight lipped with helpful advice. Share it. Gain trust and then loyalty and profit later.
2. 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your effort:
Same with profit and customers. Don’t get lost in the weeds. Work in your wheelhouse and continue to double down on what is generating the highest ROI for you and your business. A small number of activities will have outsized returns.
3. Say NO more often:
Early on saying yes is what leads to small wins and momentum. Casting a wide net early on can be a great strategy. As you get more successful, you must guard your time and stay focused. Scope creep is a real thing with all businesses. Don’t be afraid to turn away customers or opportunities to stay focused.
4. Outsource your weaknesses:
Don’t try to be a jack of all trades – you’ll end up being a master of none. Get really really good at what you do best and outsource/delegate everything else.
5. Start small and start local:
You don’t need to reach millions of people to make millions of dollars. Start with 10 great customers. Then 20. Some great businesses can be built with 100 true fans. Don’t try to build your product/service for everyone or it will end up not working for anyone. Customers want you to specialize.
6. The market doesn’t care what you want to spend your time doing:
Build a business based on a gap and a need. Don’t try to turn your passions into business. Be passionate about the game of entrepreneurship. Think with your head, not your heart. Most new idea businesses are targets for passionate illogical people so be careful.
7. Ego is the enemy:
A lot of business is being in the right place at the right time. But an early win can also lead to an amplified failure. Your ego can lead to filtering the incoming information based only on what you want to hear. It can cloud your judgement and cause you to make mistakes.
8. Being right is more important than pursuing your own ideas:
Stay humble. Encourage those around you to challenge you. Change your mind quickly and often if the data points to it.
9. Work on the stuff that is important but not urgent:
Everybody works hard. You can’t succeed by outworking the next guy. You have to work on the things that are important but not urgent. Make the decision that removes a thousand future decisions. Think ahead. Do the uncommon work.
10. It's not about finding great people. It's about simplifying the job:
I know there are exceptions to this but to do anything at scale you need to simplify what you are asking out of your employees. They need to specialize. Ask them to be very good at one or two things and ignore everything else. Set up your systems so NORMAL people can do very well at your company.
11. Keep your emotions out of your decisions:
Be a stoic. Think logically and calmly in the face of stress, uncertainty, anger and fear.
This is the skill that will get you very very far and save you tons in damage control. Read Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle is the Way.
12. Don’t sleep on service businesses:
Choose your competition wisely. It's a lot easier to compete on a local level with the mom and pop down the street than on a global level with venture capital and big tech money.
13. Control your own platform:
Tell your own story and build your own audience and distribution. Apps and algorithms change, but if you’ve built a brand, people will always want to follow you for your unique POV.
14. Know the difference between value and money:
The hard and important work of a successful entrepreneur is understanding value. It’s easy to ignore value because we can’t see it, touch it or count it. It isn’t liquid this very moment. The successful entrepreneurs know it all too well. They know how to recognize it. They know how to measure it. They know how to plan for it and grow it. They know how to invest in it and build it over time.
15. You don’t build a network, you earn a network:
Networking is important, don’t get me wrong. Your network will become valuable only after you bring something to the table. Build your first company. Get really good at something. Then your network will expand.
16. Frugality wins: Start a lean business that can survive change. Keep your expenses variable. Buy things used. The longer you can operate with a lean mentality the better off you will be.
17. Mentorship isn’t about finding a great mentor. It’s about becoming a person great mentors WANT to help.
18. Hiring isn’t about finding good people. It’s about becoming a person good people want to work for and building a business that can thrive without unicorns.
19. Wealth isn’t about extracting value from others. It’s about adding 10x as much value as you want to receive.
20. Winning doesn’t mean others lose. The real winners help 1000 others win with them along the way.
21. People do business with people they like. Become a person others like and want to do business with.
22. The best entrepreneurs aren't busy all the time. They have other people who make them money while they do whatever they want.
23. Business is about booking early (small) wins and building on that momentum. What you do on day one will look nothing like what you’re doing on day 1,000. Just get started.
24. If things aren’t working, have the humility to give up quickly. Time is more valuable than money.
25. Being selfish is okay. Everyone is selfish. Find a way to make sure everyone wins and everyone can be selfish for good reasons. Selfish + abundance = wins... Selfish + scarcity = losses.
26. If you are good at your job you can earn great money. If you can make other people great at their jobs you can get rich. Building and managing teams is the ultimate skill.
27. Entrepreneurship isn’t about grinding in the trenches day and night. It’s about leveraging other humans to do a better job than I could and spending my time doing what I want!
28. Sales is the key to success. Being able to sell yourself and your ideas is how you win.
29. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. That's how you continue making progress. Everything worth doing in this world requires you to get uncomfortable.
30. Being a good businessman and having financial success is a small part of the big picture. The key is finding a way to be a good friend, husband, and father at the same time.
31. Consistency is way more important than efficiency. Anything worth doing gets really tedious 2 years in. Years 2-5 is the critical period to get right. Years 5-10 is when you really compound and grow.
32. Doing boring things for a long period of time virtually guarantees success. Trying to get rich quick is the best way to stay poor.
33. Leverage is the goal. No one person should be able to control the quality of your life. You want leverage and ability to make money with very little effort 10 years into your business journey.
34. The thing that draws the media's attention is rarely the opportunity worth chasing. Sexy, exciting things are often saturated to a point where it's tough to compete and nobody makes any money.
35. Chaos means change. Change means opportunity. Opportunity means wealth for people who can make things happen. Therefore people who can make things happen and build wealth all thrive in chaos.
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A few posts from this week:
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Thanks for reading.
Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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