What Are You Accepting?
At the end of every quarter, I set aside time to look back at what went well and then look at the areas of my life that matter most and ask:
What do I want to be different 90 days from now?
It has been a really beneficial process for me because it forces me to decide what actually matters instead of trying to accomplish 32 things simultaneously and half succeeding at all of them. As I went through that process this week and I was really happy with where I was in most areas of my life, with the exception of 2 areas: Revenue and Weight
Around this time last year, my business went through a significant change. It has been great long term, but it required rebuilding a large part of the business and developing a new revenue strategy. Earlier this year, I met with our CPA and told him I would probably finish 2026 about $30–$40K below 2025 revenue. Credit to me, it was a hell of a forecast, the problem is that somewhere along the way, it stopped being a forecast and became the story I accepted.
I had plenty of good reasons to accept the story too, revenue was significantly better than Q1 and Q2, growth had been really strong, and the new strategy was working. I think anyone could look at my financials and say that the trajectory is strong and I am on the right path.
At the same time, I'm really proud of where I am from a health standpoint. I'm faster and stronger, I completed a HYROX, and hell, I even improved my golf game. I'm also about 5lbs heavier than I was at the beginning of the year and about 20lbs from where I'd like to be. For a while, I justified some of that with “muscle weighs more than fat.” That's partly true and it's also true that my pants are a little tighter than they were five months ago.
Regardless of all of the above, I still went through my normal quarterly process, set some goals, made my plan and moved on. Then I went for a run the next day and found myself thinking about it again.
I realized I was accepting the result before the game was over.
I had basically given myself permission to finish the year behind last year in business because I had a perfectly reasonable explanation for why. The explanation wasn't wrong but rather incomplete. What really pissed me off was realizing I was using it to justify not doing some of the uncomfortable things I knew I could do to change the result.
If one of my clients told me they wanted to make another $40K this year, I wouldn't tell them there wasn't enough time. Time isn't really the issue, you can make $40K in a year, a month or a day. You just need to create enough value and find people who would benefit from that value. If someone could legitimately create $200K of value for me, I'd run to pay them $40K. So why should it be any different for me?
For me, the uncomfortable work is getting much better at understanding the value I can create for people and their businesses, making that value extremely clear, and actually making the offer instead of assuming people understand what I can do for them.
The weight is even less complicated. If I want to lose weight, I need to keep moving, probably make some adjustments to my training, and eat less. We're not exactly solving nuclear physics here.
The more I thought about both goals, the more I realized that the explanations I had been giving myself weren't necessarily wrong. I just wasn't willing to use them to accept an outcome I still had time to change.
From there, I asked myself what would give me the best chance of actually doing it. For me, that's having a daily and weekly plan, telling people what I'm trying to accomplish, and surrounding myself with people trying to accomplish something meaningful too. People who can call me on my bullshit, give me ideas I wouldn't have thought of, push me when I'm avoiding something, and make it harder to change the goal when things get uncomfortable.
Naturally, my immediate thought was, I should build something around this. Then I stopped myself because I probably need to join Idea Anonymous. I love coming up with ideas and building things, but I also have a tendency to spend a bunch of time and energy creating something and then ask a fairly important question:
Does anybody actually want this?
So this time, I'm doing it the right way. I don't know exactly what it would look like, what it would cost or what the commitment would be and before figuring any of that out, I want to know whether it would actually be useful so I am asking all of you a simple question:
If I built something to help you reach a revenue and/or health goal before the end of the year, would that be of service to you?
If the answer is yes, reply and tell me what you're trying to accomplish. If enough people raise their hand, I'll figure out what it should look like. If not, I saved myself from another trip to Idea Anonymous.
Whether you're interested in doing it with me or not, I think there's a question worth asking yourself as we head into the final part of the year:
What are you accepting because changing it would require you to do something uncomfortable?
See You Next Week