How to Create Massive Momentum in Any Business

For many entrepreneurs, more is always better.

More content, in more places, more often.

More leads, more sales, more growth.

More joint ventures, more projects, more partnerships.

Every entrepreneur’s version of this is different, but the trap is the same.

In the pursuit of more, we commit to more and more, and our To Do list gets longer and longer.

I think that setting a To Do list and checking things off is very stable, predictable path to average.

That will not get us to an extraordinary business or extraordinary life.

Why? Because when you read books like the One Thing, Scale, Essentialism, 80/20 Principle, Simplify, Focus, Rework, etc there’s a breakthrough idea that I don’t think is clearly expressed in any of them.

Before I get to the breakthrough idea, let’s start with a timeless principle: Human beings are really bad at estimating what it will take to hit a goal.

Ask anyone who’s ever written a book, launched a podcast, or started a YouTube channel.

Goals always require more time, energy and resources than we expect.

And yet, as entrepreneurs, when we face the choice - Goal A or Goal B - our first impulse is to say, “I can do both!”

Because in our mind, we have enough time, energy and resources to hit both goals.

So here’s the breakthrough idea that I’ve taken away from all these books on focus and productivity and scale:

To truly achieve our most important goals, we must give up the fantasy that we can do it all. That we can pursue all our goals.

The only place it works to pursue a bunch of different goals is in our mind.

We have this vision of hitting all these different goals, how it’s going to look, how great our life is going to be, and how we’re going to feel.

So we start strong and everything looks great at first.

Then reality pushes back.

We start to miss some milestones along the way.

We start to realize that one of our goals is going to need a much bigger investment of time or energy or resources than we thought.

And again, we’re faced with the choice. Goal A or Goal B.

But now we’ve started on both. We have sunk cost into both. So the decision is even harder.

This leaves us in this position where we hesitate. We’re not sure where to throw all of our time, energy and resources.

That hesitation, that indecision, that lack of aggressive, massive action toward one of those goals means we never really build momentum.

We putter along, ticking things off our To Do list, making a little progress in a bunch of different directions.

Deep down, we know something is wrong. We’re not going to hit all these goals.

Yet we keep up a good face to the outside world, telling everyone things are going great.

That’s a very sucky place to be in, and I’ve been there.

Back in the day when I was chasing the dream as a musician, I joined 4 different bands.

Most of them failed, two of them we played one gig and broke up.

I had the most success with just one project, and that success came in part because I got out of everything else so I could focus.

With that focus I was able to write the best music I’d written up to that point, and we recorded and released an album I’m still proud of, where I played multiple instruments and handled the production of the album.

I repeated that same exact cycle as an entrepreneur.

Got into 4 different ventures while also producing podcasts.

And each one needed more time, energy and resources than I expected - even with partners involved to split the work, still more was required.

I was scattered and unfocused and unhappy. I walked away from every meeting with an ever growing To Do list.

I didn’t really make progress and build momentum as an entrepreneur till I got out of all those other ventures.

I focused on my agency, building better systems, delivering better service and results to clients, and the business tripled in one year. I finally knew what it felt like to hit real momentum. Where progress gets easier, you start to get carried along rather than feeling like you’re pushing everything up hill.

In order to drop those other ventures, I had to give up the fantasy that I could pursue and achieve a bunch of different goals at the same time.

That’s the breakthrough idea I’ve pulled from all these books.

In the abstract, we all love the idea of being focused.

But when it comes to making the hard choices, Goal A or Goal B, most of us still give into the fantasy. “I can do both!”

The ability to step back, recognize that for the fantasy it is, and make a different choice - that’s the key to making the content in all those amazing books work for us.