How to Force Yourself to Be Consistent and Do Hard Things

Hey,

When you start out in business, it is unbelievably hard.

The reason business owners at the highest levels get compensated the way they do is because they were able to make it through that initial meat grinder. They earned the right to make more in a single day than most people earn in their entire lifetimes.

But to get there, you have to learn how to behave in hard circumstances so you can survive the hardships that are inevitably coming your way.

If you want to learn how to force yourself to be consistent and do hard things, you have to stop wishing for things to get easier and start mastering the mental models of endurance.

Here is the exact truth about how the game is played.

The Reality of Growing Pains

Real business growth only comes from a deficiency between where you currently are and where you are required to be. You need to be at a higher tier, but you are stuck at a lower one. That stretch hurts because you are currently inadequate for the next level.

You have to look at yourself in the mirror and be completely honest: You are just not good enough yet.

They call them growing pains for a reason. If you are wishing to grow your company rapidly, you are actually wishing for a tremendous amount of pain for an extended period of time.

The pain of business isn't a visceral, physical pain. The real pain is not knowing what the hell you are doing and constantly feeling like an idiot. It’s looking at other people who are winning and realizing you have to take a massive punch to your ego and admit you aren't that good yet.

If you hit a plateau that lasts for one, two, or three years, it means you haven’t changed. You are behaving the exact same way, so you are getting the exact same outputs.

To break a plateau, you have to accept painful changes. Sometimes that means taking two steps back. It means admitting you built the machine wrong, hired the wrong leaders, or tolerated a toxic team culture. If you aren't willing to confront those immediate inconveniences, you will stay perpetually stuck underneath your true potential.

Expect to be in the game for at least 5 years before you even begin to grasp what it takes to be good. I am talking 5 years of being completely all-in—not just working on it as a weekend passion project.

The Story of the Many-Sided Die

To understand consistency, you have to understand the story of the many-sided die.

Imagine you and a friend are playing a dice-rolling game. You are each handed a die. You can't see how many sides your die has, but you know that only one side is green, and the rest are red. The goal is to roll green as many times as possible.

The rules are simple:

• If you roll a red side, nothing happens, and you roll again.

• If you roll a green side, one of your remaining red sides permanently turns green, increasing your mathematical odds for the next throw.

• The game only ends if you stop rolling. If you stop rolling, you lose.

You start rolling. You hit red after red, but you keep picking it up and rolling again. Eventually, you hit a green. Suddenly, because that red side flipped to green, your green streaks start happening more and more frequently. With enough volume, hitting a green becomes your baseline rule rather than the exception.

Meanwhile, your friend rolls a few times, hits straight red, and stops. He looks over at your green streak and complains that the game is rigged, that your die must have fewer sides, or that you just got incredibly lucky.

What he didn't see were the thousands of invisible red rolls you had to burn through while he was sitting on the sidelines complaining.

Playing the Infinite Game

You have no idea if the die you were handed at birth has 20 sides or 2,000 sides. You don't know if a competitor's success is their hundredth roll or their hundred-thousandth roll.

But if you understand the game, you realize the sides don't matter. A die with a green side always has a mathematical chance of landing on green if you just keep throwing it.

The game of business only offers two absolute guarantees:

1. The more times you roll, the better you get.

2. If you quit, you lose.

The entire global board of players gets completely wiped and swapped every 100 years. The top merchants of ancient Egypt are entirely forgotten today. Business is an infinite game—there are no permanent winners or losers, there are only players and quitters.

If you are struggling right now, you aren't a failure; you are just early in your sequence. You simply have a few more red sides left to roll, and you need to get them out of the way.

As long as you don't lose so bad that you completely die, pick up the die and roll again.

Talk soon,

Alex