Do The Reps: A Call to Action
I wrote this post to inspire people in the trenches - especially entrepreneurs, but not just entrepreneurs. I mean everyone building toward hard goals that won’t be achieved overnight.
First, credit to you for building. For doing thankless, unsexy work behind the scenes. Sexy results are the result of exorbitant volumes of unsexy work - done consistently and with excellence.
Chances are that you’re not just overcoming external obstacles and setbacks. You’re also fighting your inner psychology that wants to stay within the band of homeostasis that forms your identity.
Maybe you told friends and family about your goals, and maybe some showed up to your “grand opening party” in the literal or figurative sense. Chances are, as you got further into your journey, they stopped showing up and faded into the background - now you’re increasingly isolated, and maybe backsliding, flatlining, or oscillating.
If any of that applies to you, then hear my call to action, based on my own experience.
Forget about your goals.
Forget about your goals. Forget about outcomes you’ve achieved (or not) so far. Forget about the accoutrements of success, like dumb magazine awards. At the least, find a way to temporarily set these aside. Focus is as much subtraction as it is addition.
Instead, focus on the activities within the processes that will lead you to your goals.
I frequently tell people that if you’re not seeing the progress you want toward your goals, then change your approach or change your goal. This message is one such change in approach.
People go to the gym to improve their bodies, but no matter how many reps you put in during a single session, you won’t see big changes within a few days. That’s for good reason: you’re too close to the daily grind to see big progress. You’re measuring the wrong thing and forming a reality around misguided conclusions.
Think of yourself more as an Olympic athlete.
Olympic athletes train for four years behind the scenes and without public victories, toward the potential (not the promise) of becoming the best in the world. They’re playing a game that is won by mere inches, seconds, and kilograms. Every day, they show up to their work to put in the reps, facing uncertainty, inner battles, and making yesterday’s personal records into tomorrow’s standards. For example, Michael Phelps once said in an interview that in addition to obsessive visualization, he also religiously trained every day for five years. Any time he skipped a day, he knew it would take two days to get back on track. In many cases, winners hate losing more than they love winning. This is a winning mindset.
I say this not as an Olympic athlete myself (though I have friends for that), but as a national champion powerlifter who lived a slice of that experience. This is what worked for me.
It comes down to perspective and raising your standards.
Shift your focus from outcomes to activities.
Inputs > Activities > Output > Outcome > Impact
You don’t have control over outcomes. You’re not aligned with reality if you expect fast progress in the gym or the office. If you fixate on outcomes, you’re subconsciously asking if you’ve achieved your goal or not, and hearing “no” daily will spin your wheels and drain your motivation. Good questions, good answers - or in other words… garbage in, garbage out.
You do, however, have control over activities.
In powerlifting, the world-class focus on smaller, specific segments of training. Speed triples, deficit deadlifts, band training, mobility work, visualization, targeting sticking points of each rep - not just setting 1RM personal records. Each activity builds another layer of scaffolding that makes the reach goal more attainable, and de-risks the likeliest point of failure in the chain. Activities.
When I was training for a national championship, I scrapped the notion that I knew more than any teammate and simply committed myself to doing the same training program as everyone else. To reach my target 5% body fat, I committed myself to pre-portioning out the meals I’d need to stick to eating in order to hit my goal. Process.
The same principles hold true in entrepreneurship, even with a few more variables. Focus on the specifics, do the reps, and extend your time horizon as far as you can.
If your weakest link is sales, then attend to the health of your top-of-funnel, conversion rates, quality of sales scripts, tone of voice, clarity of business value to your prospects, time to close, and daily call count. These activities form the scaffolding that underpins a clear, structured sales process, which in turn underpins healthy revenue generation, which in turn underpins company valuations.
Some of these metrics are leading indicators, some are lagging indicators - mix and match according to your needs. Adapt, rinse, and repeat for product, operations, and funding.
If you don’t have clear insights or unfair advantages, then commit yourself to volume work - those qualities will emerge naturally as a result of sheer volume. For example, I learned from my work and mentees doing the National Science Foundation’s Innovation-Corp (I-CORPS) approach to customer discovery that it’s natural to notice pattern recognition starting around Interview #20, and maturing around Interview 50 (by the way, this counts quality interviews - ie, you didn’t try to sell them in the same interview).
If these numbers seem high to you, then a simple rule of thumb is to simply reset your internal expectations such that 10x the volume of work is the new minimum standard for deserving success.
On a long enough time horizon, volume tends to outperform and outlast luck.
Of course, some people will ask “What about”:
What about mentorship?
What about the idea that this is throwing spaghetti against the wall?
What about imitating what worked for Uber?
I see these questions as symptoms of underlying avoidance. Sure, find mentors so that you’re more directionally accurate. Read books so you turn ignorance into concrete, actionable steps in your process. When you’re done with all of that, you’ll find that the work still needs doing and there are few if any shortcuts to the work.
You’ll also find that success emerges as a natural byproduct of doing the work. Keep going. Don’t quit.
Forget sexy results. Do unsexy work. Do the reps.
