Recently I realized that we live in a world where a clear understanding of your true “I want” is limited by how far you’re willing to go with “I’m done.” Every fundamental process comes with difficulties. And if you set aside perseverance and the desire to achieve, what’s left is the phrase “I’m done.” And where repeating that phrase regularly leads you is a measure of your readiness for real success and harmony in life.
Because what happens to a person’s life after they say that phrase determines what awaits them – success or the abyss.
I had a friend. When everything goes off plan, he says, “I’m done.” After that, he gets the urge to go to another country, club with girls, and drink alcohol until he temporarily blacks out.
I had another friend. When everything goes off plan, he says, “I’m done.” After that, he wants to go on stage – preferably at a huge forum – tell everyone about the injustice of this world, and return to life with social approval.
And then there’s me. I say “I’m done” very rarely. Unlike my two friends I mentioned, they’ve never heard that phrase from me. My persistence is, in places, unhealthy — definitely obsessive, strongly pronounced, and convincing.
But when I say it, I put myself in an even more challenging situation than previously and find a way to fight the challenge facing it. So “I’m done” for me means “I am weak, I have to do 10 times more work to forget about my weakness.” And this also leads me somewhere. In most cases, it leads me to new results I could not have imagined before.
So: Try to see how you act when you’re over something. What actions does it lead you to? Find your own “I’m done” and, if it creates something meaningful, repeat it. If you’re something like my first friend I mentioned, idk, try to work on it or something 🙂
I’ve been talking about the fact that a “founder” is no more considered as a top 1% performing role in society. Mainly because of the latest changes in the availability of tools for startup development and the hype around specific vectors. But if simply being a founder is not a top 1%, then who?
I’ll give a bit of a background on some of my own self-development:
The first half of my career in marketing, I call it the observing stage. In the first few years of launching an agency, I have worked with several company founders, at different stages, with absolutely different goals, around the world. I also met their co-founders, teams, and consultants. A marketing agency was always a wonderful “data collector” at that time.
I will tell you the only skill that determines everything that happens to the company success or failure: the ability to ask the right questions. Such questions as:
Why am I doing what I’m doing? How is it supposed to impact the world? What am I supposed to do for this?
The last one is the breaking point where we have other scenarios:
A person desperately can’t find answers and keeps everything “as it is”. The company shuts down, business fails. A new successful business is born, the results are unbelievable.
All 3 scenarios are very different from each other and might trigger different emotions. And you’d be right to be confused. When a person actually goes from nonstop execution to deep thinking mode, many things may change. The first question is easier to answer because there is always a typical answer like: I like doing this because I love to… The second is harder because what you “love to” might not anyhow impact others, which is sad, but realistic. And for sure the hardest pill to swallow: what if, in order to do something I love and something that impacts the world, I have to become a totally different person? It changes many things at the time.
I remember when I clearly decided to set startups I believe in as my main compass and commitment point. So I have worked really hard, but the goals I set to myself were so high and ambitious that one day I realized, in order to actually achieve, I have to become an ironman. A top 1% performing human.
What I did next to become an ironman:
First of all, I had to make a full commitment.
Set very clear, ambitious but realistic goals. Asked myself 100 times the same questions: why I am doing what I’m doing, how it impacts the world, what I am supposed to do. And all my goals were aligned to this. And no way back.
I woke up every day at 6 in the morning and considered every 15 hours of the day I am getting as the time that I can spend to change my life absolutely. Living like there is no tomorrow. Like you have only the next 15 hours. This influences productivity as nothing else does.
I thought about all my weaknesses, stress, passions, bad habits and diseases, and any external factors that are controlling me, and turned it into an opposite way. Now I was controlling my emotions, needs, and passions. Hunger, sleep, stress. I could control it the way I wanted to and set my own protocol.
I got rid of conversations and relationships with people that somehow influenced me in a bad or meaningless way. No more friends with no thirst for building an impact, no people with lack of collaboration skills. I abstracted myself from thoughts of serving my personal life. No romantic relationship or anything that is triggering stress and controls my realistic view.
Since then I have felt like a different person. Not stopping with a hunger to continue practicing it. My health, business results, environment – everything changed.
You know I like to summarize, so:
Top 1% is someone who is able to fully commit to something to achieve. It is someone who is able to bring senses to other’s people lives by changing their own.
To become an Ironman, you have to change your mentality even if it feels like a hard thing to do. Or just face the fact that you’ll be in the noise and accept it.
Don’t try to build yourself another cash-cow without a view on how you will build game-changing products that will impact the world.
And also, changing the way you commit is not the only thing to do in order to become an ironman founder. There are other, not obvious things to consider, that you can spot only after going through irreplaceable life and business experiences that I am talking about in my blog.
