An entrepreneurial endeavor, of course, is built on the work you do, but the big catch is that you have to be channeling your energy into the tasks that will allow your business to flourish. Focusing your tasks and energies on only the right activities is possible, but you’re definitely going to need some help. Joining Scott Carson is Aaron Young from the Unshackled Owner Podcast, who shares some of the best ways to defer, delegate, and delete tasks to make room for what’s most important, what’s most pressing. Learn to identify which of these three D’s to employ so that you can put your energies towards the most productive activities for you as an entrepreneur and business owner. Let Aaron and Scott show you the way to a more productive you!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Focusing Your Tasks With Aaron Young

I am excited to be here. We have the man, the myth, the legend and the host of The Unshackled Owner podcast. The main man over at Laughlin Associates, our good friend, Aaron Young, joining us on the show. What’s going on? How are you doing?

We’re having a great time. Life is good on the farm. I got back late from a two-day mastermind event that we put on. I’m a little more casual than I might normally be, but it’s always great to be on the show.

We’re always honored to have you. For those that don’t know what the Laughlin Associates does, they are the premier provider of your entity solutions when it comes to your paperwork, your recording, making sure everything is rock and rolling with your corporate veil protection. They are a phenomenal company, who has done a tremendous job. I sent over a couple of referrals. Brent or somebody from your office had contacted these two students of mine within 30 minutes and they are ready to rock and roll. Raphael, out of San Diego and Robert Lynch up in your neck of the woods too south of Puget Sound in Washington state. They are both excited to be working with you.

Good job to you, guys. I get so much love about my staff and it’s them. We created a culture. We created what the business is, but that’s why I have The Unshackled Owner podcast. I haven’t even been to the office for a few years. The team is phenomenal. For people, if you’re trying to build something that can grow beyond your hours and your day, you’ve got to build a team. Building a powerful team that you empowered to do the work where you don’t have to look over their shoulder all the time is how you become both freer in your time and wealthier in your bank account. I’m glad you told me about Brent, but it could be anybody there. We’ll talk about this, but we’re going through a big transition of becoming a much larger company. I’m excited about it. There will be lots of great stories to tell here as you and I continue our conversations on our shows.

That comes to one thing that we were talking about. One of the big things that you were listening to the people in your inner circle and we listened to our mastermind members when we do the event, it comes down to the three Ds of successful entrepreneurs. The ability to defer, delegate and delete your daily habits.

Everything I teach is basically things I’ve learned over many years of owning businesses. Many entrepreneurs bog themselves down doing stuff that isn’t critical or is out of their wheelhouse and out of their area of competency. They let other people or they let their notifications on their phones control their life. As I was teaching these 40-some people at the Mastermind, as we were working together, I was listening to a lot of the issues that were going on inside of these companies. These companies range from an early stage, people that are well-funded, but getting started to successful tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

 

We’ve got quite the group, but it doesn’t matter because I hear the same stuff. Maybe it’s just different levels or degrees. When you’re an entrepreneurial-minded person, you have this tendency to freak yourself out, to get overwhelmed, to try to be everything to everybody, to try to answer everybody’s question, be responsive and be creative. I don’t know, maybe I’m lazy. Scott, I’ve said this to you at some point over the years. When I was a kid, I read a quote that said, “If you have a difficult task, give it to a lazy man, he’ll find an easier way to do it.” That is my mantra. That is my life. I don’t think I’m lazy, but I don’t like to work that hard.

We’ve had to develop ways of growing. We’ve built lots of companies and good-sized companies. One of those things that I’ve discovered that was screaming loudly in my ears was, “What can you either defer?” A lot of people say, “That’s procrastination.” I say, “It is not if it’s not critical. We want to do it, but not now.” You can put it on the shelf or delegate. In my simple little life, I have somebody that cleans our house and works on the farm to take care of the animals. We have an assistant. I have all these employees. If you have a lead for my company, you don’t call me. You call somebody at the company. That’s all delegated. I have to work on doing big projects and the day-to-day stuff’s got to be delegated, but a lot of business owners like being busy. They get their emotional strokes by being important to everybody. “I can’t do without you or you can’t make a decision without me.” That is a sure route towards either mediocrity or failure.

While you’re talking about trying to do it themselves, I think back to the tale of two desks. I’m pulling this out of my ass as you think it pops up there. We talked about those that want to be successful, they’re not the ones in law. Back to the first image of Amazon and that famous picture that you see of Jeff Bezos sitting at his desk with a white banner behind that says, “Amazon.” It’s on the front of the step to where it’s at. There’s no way Jeff could have taken the company from where he was originally being a one-man band to where it is now without doing those things that you talked about.

He was selling used books on the information superhighway.

A lot of times, if you’ve ever read The E-Myth Revisited, we all struggle as entrepreneurs with three things. The forward mind thinking, the R&D side of the business and then also the marketing side of the things. You have to learn to focus on what you’re good at and delegate the other two-thirds of that aspect off.

The last one is to delete. I loved it when I heard when Steve Jobs said that the thing he was most proud of was everything he said no to. Sometimes we have to say, “We’re not going to do this anymore. We’ve tried or I’ve evaluated and the answer is no, delete. It’s gone. I’m not going to look at it anymore. Empty the trash.” A lot of the owners believe that they’re supposed to be able and even knowledgeable about all aspects of whatever they’re doing. If we’re talking about notes, there are people who are going to be better at going through the list and vetting the properties. There are going to be people who are better at negotiating with the person in there to try to redo the mortgage. There are going to be people who are better at evicting people. There are going to be people who are better at doing accounting or marketing. To say, you have to be the only person and you have to be an expert at all of it, it is fine. You can be that, but you can only do as much as you can do, which means you’re never going to get big because you can only do so many projects at a time and then you run out of bandwidth. This whole idea of deferring, delegate or delete it’s like a freedom thing for people when they realize you can put something off and that doesn’t make you a bad leader.

You can and I would encourage you to get good at delegating because often you’re going to delegate something you suck at to somebody who’s good at it. I was talking to these people that run a hedge fund. The hedge fund was investing in Airbnb properties and they had a whole bunch of properties. They’d raised all this money and they’d put a bunch of their own money in, it’s millions of dollars. They had all these properties. They were struggling to make it work. They called me and scheduled time to talk to me and we visited. I listened and I finally said, “Based on everything you’re telling me, why don’t you stop doing this?” They’re like, “Stop doing this little thing?” I said, “Stop doing the whole thing.” “Do you mean to stop doing this little thing?” “I’m saying stop the project.” “Do you mean to stop raising money?” It’s like they couldn’t hear me. They were fixated on the thing that they were doing. They’d committed mentally to this path.

Imagine you’re in a forest and you lost in the deep forest. You’re on a path and you say, “If I followed this path, I assume it will lead me out of the forest. I’ll be safe if I stay on the path.” You may be going deeper into the woods. You may be going right towards the bears. You could be going right to the mountain lions lair, but if you can stop for a minute and quit staring down at the path, stop, and go, “I know I parked my car to the west of here. Where’s the sun? The sun is over there. It’s not over there where I’m going. It’s that way.” As soon as you lift your eyes up and you don’t freak out about the path and you give yourself a time to reorient and look around, you may be surprised how many other paths there are going the direction you need to go. It’s not the path you were on, but it’s the right way. It’s the right direction. There’s that old Turkish proverb that says, “No matter how far you go down the wrong road, turn back.” People are always going, “We’re making good time.” It’s like, “Who cares if you’re making a good time doing something stupid?”

That company has since gone out. They’ve completely changed what they’re doing. They got rid of one of the partners who they could not be convinced that there might be another route. They’ve gone out and raised millions of dollars. They’ve reoriented their business. Their investors are happy. They’re making money all because some guy that they called on the phone and said, “Can you help us sort this partnership problem out?” I said, “Stop doing the stupid thing and do something that works,” and they couldn’t understand. It took an hour of me repeating, “You have permission to stop.” “We can’t stop.” “No, you can stop.”

 

We see that a lot in the real estate and entrepreneurship side of things. People invested in something. They’ve invested in a course that’s going to lead them down the road and they keep pumping money into marketing. We see that with most real estate investors. They get started sending out yellow letters or postcards or they go out and buy bandit signs. They’re out in the weekend knocking bandit signs in the corners and some of that works. Don’t get me wrong. I only say that because I’ve used that originally over a decade ago when I got started with different things. Some things work and some things don’t work. A lot of people keep investing in the same old activities that they were doing years ago and they keep getting more frantic because they do not see any leads or any income generated from those things but they keep doing the same thing. When I’m like, “Quit doing that. That’s not making you money. Look at what you made your money from and focus on the Pareto Rule.” I always tell people, “If you could focus on the thing that made you the most amount of money, 80% of the profit comes from 20% of the activities as they say.” If you eliminate the other 80% of activities that are not, you will quadruple your income a lot of times.

We did that in one of the last modules of The Unshackled Owner class. We’ve buried them with all this stuff on how to restructure a business. I say, “Write down the ten most critical things that you need to get done to move your business forward in the next 90 days,” not everything, but the most important ones. If you do this, you’re going to move the company forward in a significant way. They write them all down and then I say, “Pick two and eliminate the other eight. You only get two. You don’t get ten. Those other eight, you’re going to delegate them. I need you to tell me how you’re going to hold people accountable that you’ve delegated to because you’re not going to do them.” People freak out, but when they do it and they see, “The world didn’t come to an end. The work got done. I didn’t do it all. I spent time on the two most important things and that made a lot of progress.” It only takes a couple of months of showing. It’s like losing weight. If you’re going to the gym or you’re eating differently, it doesn’t take long to see positive results. When people start going, “What happened? You look good. You look ten years younger.” You go, “Maybe I should keep doing this.”

When you can walk and not be weary and run and not faint, you all of a sudden go, “I should continue this behavior.” You’re amazed at how your life changes for the better. It doesn’t have to be weight loss or exercise. It can be delegating business tasks. I had a guy at the Inner Circle. He’s a hard money lender and he does something unique. I don’t think there are many guys that do this specific thing, but he’s got a cool business going. I don’t remember if he said 5 or 7 employees, but he said, “The business revolves around me and my knowledge about how to do this. They’re doing work and I’m delegating to them, but some of it is dependent on me.” I said, “Do you believe that in your heart?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “What are you building this all for? What are you doing this work for?” He started to explain to me about his kids and taking care of them and their family values. He goes off on this whole diatribe, which was great stuff. He said, “I’m trying to do all these things so I can build up this portfolio, I can get all these things organized and I can hand it off to my kids.” I said, “What would your kids do?” He said, “My kids will run the business.”

I went, “The business isn’t dependent on you because you think your kids can run it.” He goes, “What an interesting idea.” It took me ten minutes to get him there, but soon he’s like, “I guess that’s true.” I said, “You’ve convinced yourself you’re on the path and your eyes are on the path, but the fact is, you don’t have to be the one doing all this work.” I had a dentist one time that said they make veneers and they are highly paid in Beverly Hills. They make perfect teeth for movie stars and rich people. She said, “I have a lot of other technicians that work for me, but people come to our practice and pay the big money for me to make the veneer.” How do I unshackle from that? I said, “Do you think that Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo had students, had acolytes that we’re learning from them?” “Yes.” “Do you think those people also create great art? Not the same as da Vinci, but great art?” “Yes, I suppose.”

“Why don’t you promote yourself and then get six other people who have learned your methodology, studied under you and they’re half the price that you are? If somebody must have you, let them pay double? You dramatically reduce your workload. You’re still there as Michelangelo, but you can have your whole school full of students doing work under the great master of teeth for a lower price.” She was like, “I never thought of that.” People, you can defer, delegate or delete. Some businesses, we don’t want the business. You want to give me money, I don’t want your money because you’re going to be more hassle. You’re going to be the wrong thing. You’re going to divert me from my goal if I do your thing.

That goes in and hand in hand to something you said. That it’s going to divert me from my goal, my path. The way I want to go, where I want to be. We all know entrepreneurship is a curvy, winding road. Upside, downside, inside and out, but the thing is it’s saying no to some people and saying yes to others. I’ve always found it that if I had a gut feeling that somebody was going to be a pain in the ass and anytime I want to get it out of my gut, I ended up regretting it later on. Our good friend Greg Reid said, “If somebody cancels or wants a refund on my class, my workshop, I refund them. It’s not worth the hassle. It’s not worth the headache. It’s better to go ahead and be done with it and move in a different direction, not have that baggage around you.” That’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

It’s true. I read this thing and somebody quoted, “If you had many dollars, like $84 million or some longer number and somebody stole or somehow wasted $60 of it, how much would you care?” Your answer is, “Who cares? It’s nothing.” “Why do we let somebody who cuts us off on the road for that ten seconds spoil our day? Get over it. Let it go. It doesn’t matter. There’s too much to do that’s great, exciting, positive and uplifting to get bogged down in junky stuff.” Don’t do it. That was something I observed. I had this intense experience with 40-some people. I was hearing their specific stories, one after another after another. The group is coming together to try to give them the next steps. It is wonderful. You could almost say miraculous, awesome things happened at the event. The overwhelming thing for me, as I observed, was how hard people are making it on themselves because they’re trying to do everything that every guru tells them to do. “You need to have a book. You need to have a podcast. You need to be a speaker. You need to have videos on YouTube. You need to be out at all the networking things. You need to hold events.” All this stuff and all they’re trying to do are to sell a wedding cake to bring in a couple of dollars.

You don’t need to be a speaker, author or teacher to sell baked goods. You can, but you don’t need to and yet they get overwhelmed. “I’ve got to do the accounting. I’ve got to put everything into QuickBooks. I’ve got to do a 30-day evaluation of some employees. I’ve got to clean the hood in the bakery.” I’m like, “No, you don’t have to do all that,” but it’s hard for people to understand if they’ve never learned that it’s the right way. What I’m describing is the right way to do it. People don’t believe it. It’s like a million other things. It’s like the first time I flipped a house. I know it was outside of my understanding. It seemed like a lot of work and flipped that first house. I got lucky on my first deal and we made $400,000. As you’ve heard me say before, I was like, “What the heck? Where was this all my life? How did I not know this existed?”

In 90 days, I’ve made $400,000. It was like somebody exposed me to the world of Avatar. I found out there’s life on another planet. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I am unaware that it had been going on around me. I was ignorant of it. As soon as I saw it, I was like, “I better pay attention to that.” The same thing happens when you start doing things properly in your business, you will get better results and your world will change. The biggest comment I get from people is, “I wish I would have learned this stuff years ago.”

 

There are many things going around us that are positive and things that we are unaware of. You said something too about we have too many voices in our head a lot of times, “You need to do this.” We see that much in their real estate. “You need to be focused on a short sale. You need to be focused on notes. You need to focus on owner finance notes. You need to focus on the commercial.” That’s one of the big things that we tell you, “Pick something, pick one thing and stay in that lane.” One of our biggest rivals came to me, sat down with me and asked me to come and help him do marketing for one of the segments of his company. I was honored.

He was like, “You’ve been in business for a long time.” I said, “I take that as an honor. We may not have always seen head-to-head on things. We have a different way of teaching and stuff like that,” but I was honest. “I take it as an honor that you would ask me to do that. I appreciate that, but I’m still going to say no, not because of our differences, but because the fact is that’s not in my lane. It’s not my business model for that. I know you’re looking for somebody and you appreciate how we market and how we run things. We know how to market and we know how to close deals, that’s great. That’s what we want to be known for, but I don’t want to be known for marketing your stuff. You need to find somebody internally to do that there as well.”

It could have been a windfall for what we did, but the point is, we had not been happy. Secondly, we were taken away from what we need to be focused on directly, which is the most important thing. I know a lot of entrepreneurs deal with things that they’re working on their goals and trying to get them entrepreneurship. Sometimes, they’ve got to lay down that entrepreneurship dream for a little while to go back and get a job to pay for something. I have a guy that reached out to me, “I need your help.” He sent me a couple of notes that he was trying to sell. He came back and offered it. He was trying to broker it and I’m like, “Sorry, your guy that wants the stuff wants too much for it. It isn’t going to work.” He said, “I need some ways to find deals.” I’m like, “Great, jump on LinkedIn and start calling asset managers. He’s like, “I’ve watched that video. I don’t want to do that.”

“I want success but I don’t want to do the work.” You tell him, “Go and buy a lottery ticket.”

That’s what I said to him, “You better go and get a lottery ticket or you might as well stick with your job because anything you’re going to do, you’re going to have to put some work into it. You can delegate things. I get it, not everybody always has excess funds to delegate things out.

That’s not true.

I agree with you.

You said, “I don’t even want people to hear that and grasp onto it. That is a lie that people tell themselves. You can hire a VA for $4 an hour. This can be someone with a college degree, maybe a Master’s degree to do things for you. You can afford that. I think about the stories of the one I love to tell is Mark Cuban eating ketchup packages from McDonald’s because he couldn’t afford to buy a cheeseburger. He was investing back in his business, even Warren Buffett. Watch that new HBO documentary about Warren Buffett. He has a five-minute drive from home to his office. Along the way, he said, “This is a perfect thing. I’ve lived in this house from the ‘50s. I’ve been in this building since the ‘60s. It’s perfect because I have to drive by McDonald’s on the way.” He has made a choice. He will buy the breakfast sandwich, the Egg McMuffin, the Bacon, Egg and Cheese Biscuit, the McGriddle.His wife puts in the exact amount of money in his drink holder in his little Cadillac SUV for the sandwich that he qualifies for because of the market going up and down.

This is Warren Buffett. He said, “I shouldn’t spend the extra dollar on the more expensive sandwich if the market is down now.” You can prioritize your business from against your personal consumption and the way you stay poor or mediocre is to consume everything and say, “I don’t have money to grow.” All you do is make a choice, but don’t tell Scott and don’t tell me that you can’t do it because that is a lie. You can do it, but you have to cut the cable. You need to get a cheaper car. You need to live in a different apartment or move in with your parents while you build something up, that will make you rich. If you’re going to consume it all and not dump it back into the business, if you’re not going to do what Mark Cuban did and say, “I’m going to keep investing in my business and I will eat ketchup because I know if I make a sacrifice now in my comfort, then I will benefit down the road.” That is a fact. That is the truth.

Also, the biggest truth is that the first assistant you hire, whether it’s in person or a VA, you should be delegating stuff to them that will make you $100,000 extra per year. That’s the biggest thing that we’ve always seen and always taught. If you want to make $100,000, hire somebody to do all the stuff that you don’t need to be doing so you can focus on those two things of the most important to get things done.

I’m running multiple companies. We’re multimillion-dollar businesses. We’re taking a bunch of companies public. I breed horses. I do all these things. I travel over the world, give talks and my virtual assistant, Kelly, who I’ve used for a number of years. I pay her $300 a month and she keeps my life in order. If you can’t pay $300 a month, can you be in business or should you be working at a job? $300 isn’t very much money. My dad used to say $20 isn’t a lot of money unless you don’t have it and then it is a lot of money. I’m telling you that $300 I spend over there helps me make tens of thousands of dollars over here. She keeps up on things. People I meet on the airplane. People that send me some random note and she keeps track of them, reach out to them and schedule stuff and puts things together. She’s creative and on her own and that $300, many things would fall through the cracks without her. She’s not part of the office team. She’s a VA, Virtual Assistant. She doesn’t have a Laughlin email address. She has an Aaron Scott Young email address and it’s $300 a month. Depending on how you’re setting up your household.

My wife works from home. You know Michelle well. I work out. She works from home. We have no kids at home. The house is clean. We have a housekeeper who comes twice a week. The housekeeper does everything, cleans out the refrigerator, cleans the windows, moves the artwork around, decorates the whole house for Christmas and then takes it all backdown. Do you know what it is? It’s $200 a week. That $800 a month allows Michelle to bring in close to $20,000 a month in her business. Is that a good trade-off? People are going, “I’m not making $20,000,” neither was Michelle. Michelle was making $1,500 a month and then she started to delegate. She had the bandwidth to do more. If you’re going to sit there and watch TV all day, that’s different. If you’re going to work, focus on things that make money and delegate the menial tasks to somebody else who enjoys doing it. They want to do it that they have chosen to do it.

The quickest way to get rich is to quit doing dumb stuff then choose your time. Henry Ford or Rockefeller said, “Most people spend much time working, they have no time left to make money.” This is true. You’ve got to move stuff off to other people so you stay working at the highest level, the highest income-producing and the highest relationship building. What you find is the richer people are, the more time they have to talk to you, to change their schedule, to show up at your thing and get on a phone call with you. The people that are working, they don’t have any time to help anybody because they’re a slave. They’re buried. Rich people have a lot of discretionary time.

 

That’s the truth and I always tell people, “Look at what you’re making. Figure out what your hour is worth is a good place to delegate. If your hour is worth $200 an hour, then anything below $200 per hour, you need to be often delegating. As you said, your house cleaner is doing and changing the oil in your car and mowing your lawn, unless it’s something that you enjoy.

Why would you do that? You’d have to love changing the oil in your car.

Some people enjoy that.

If you have a 1957 Chevy, you want to go out and putter in the garage is different. If you need to go through the quick lube with your Ford Taurus, go through.

Taking that hourly rate and looking at how much you’re spending on activities below your income level, below what your hourly is. Those are the things that the VA is used is to delegate.

That’s interesting. Now, you’ve got me wanting to figure out my hourly rate.

You should take a look at that. Here’s an example, if you wanted to make $100,000 a year, take a $100,000 and divide that by 50 weeks because most people are working 50 weeks a year. That comes down to $2,000 a week. If you’re putting in 40 hours a week, that means your hour is worth roughly $50 an hour. If you wanted to double that to make $200,000, you need to be doing activities that are $100 an hour. Anything below a $100 an hour, delegate it off to your VA, to your assistant that you’re paying $10 or $15 an hour. If you pay him $15 an hour or more depending on what minimum wage is because you can flip burgers at McDonald’s and make $15 an hour these days.

My farmworkers and staff, the guys that take care of the animals and take care of the land, I pay them $20 an hour. It’s all above board stuff is $20 an hour. They’re happy with it. It’s good. They get to do stuff they enjoy doing, being with the animals, being on the farm and doing that. If I was out there other than when I feel like doing it on the weekend, I made a choice. I said, “I’m going to feed them.” I’d been doing this event down in San Diego. I’ve been traveling, we’ve got all these other things going on. I thought, “I’m going to give myself a little bit of space and I’m going to go down. I’m going to check out the herd. I’m going to drive the little Ranger. I’m going to put the hay out. I’m going to feed the grain. I’m going to check on everybody.” We have about 40 goats and 9 horses on the property. It’s more in training. It was almost meditative.

I thought how ironic it was that I was just in a suit doing stuff and look what my mom says, “The faces of Aaron Young.” There is my grandson born and then the event. I was teaching all these people for two days and I came back. I said, “I’m going to go back out and do what I love doing which was playing with my horses.” The long and short of it is I can make a choice to do it, but if I had to do that for two hours a day, an hour in the morning, an hour at night, if I was dedicated to that, I wouldn’t be able to be in San Diego. I wouldn’t be in LA. I wouldn’t be in Spain, Japan, England, and the Middle East because I’d be home taking care of goats. You’ve got to delegate it or you have to give something up. You had to delete it.

In my case, I want to delegate. You can have a big life. People always say, “How do we have a life like yours?” I’m like, “You don’t want to go down the path I’ve gone down. This is not a route that I would recommend for anybody, but what I can tell you is do something people want.” I’ve said this on the show before. Find something people want to pay for and figure out how you can deliver it to them. Charge a decent price and have enough money to stay alive while you’re building the business up. Build systems that can be scalable, duplicatable, so you don’t have to do them forever. Once that’s in place, you can leave and do another thing. You just said, pick one and master that one. Make it work. Get successful there or go, “That one doesn’t work for me,” get rid of it and try a different one, but get one. Get that one dialed in and when it’s working, then do a second one. What most entrepreneurs do is they’re trying to cover all the bases. They’ll do six things badly instead of one thing well, When you do one thing well, you engender confidence in your clients, in your employees and your vendors. People trust you. They like you.

You do what you say when you say you’ll do it. You do an excellent job because you’re working at something you’re good at. If it’s something you’re sucking at, give it to somebody who’s good at it. Surround yourself with people who play at the things you have to work on. If you do that, it seems like a broken record. I get on these things, but I’ve tens of thousands of business owner clients and it’s the same stuff that I have. It’s like going back to Sunday school. We need to teach this lesson again about forgiveness, about kindness, about charity. Here, it’s about to do something somebody wants to buy. Make sure you can survive long enough to get your thing going. Build systems that remove the heavy lifting from you. It’s simple.

You have to take your mindset out of it. That’s the biggest bottleneck that most businesses have is the person in charge, the owner, the entrepreneur or the manager has too narrow of a mindset of what they think they can or cannot accomplish. As we all know, Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re correct.”

Isn’t that a great quote? I love Henry Ford.

It definitely is great stuff there and I love it. That’s the same thing as the defer, delegate or delete. Sometimes deleting off is going to make you happier and less clouded. Take a big rock off your back to make things rock and rolling. One of the biggest things that I found successful that’s led to one of our biggest successes was when I deleted something. A few years ago, Aaron knew this, one of the first phone calls I made was putting on this event in Houston called the Build Your Legacy Summit. We were all excited about it and we dropped all this money in marketing and postcards and nobody was signing up. I thought I was going to have a freaking heart attack. I got to the point, we were a week out and I said, “Forget it. We’re canceling the event. We’re not doing it.” We were all like, “They’re going to hate me.” I called Aaron and I told you. You were like, “Thanks. I got a weekend at home. I love it.”

It’s okay with me. We get so convinced that the thing we’re doing is life or death for the planet and it’s just not. You have to realize that whatever you’re doing if it’s not working if it’s not giving you the results you want, even if it’s incremental improvement, you don’t have to be rich the first month. If you see that you’re making progress in the correct direction, things are getting a little easier, a little more profitable, it’s a little smoother. You know how to deal with things. If you’re doing that, great. If you feel that it’s constant drudgery, constant banging your head against the wall, then you may want to consider that this is a bad choice. No matter how much you’ve invested, no matter how many other people you’ve told, and you’ll be embarrassed, let it go. Truthfully, nobody’s thinking about your stuff nearly as much as you are. They will not think of you as much as you think they are.

It also led to us coming up with our online virtual workshops or online Note CAMP, which had been completely successful, had been great and awesome. Without that failure, I don’t think we would ever go that route doing that. We would have kept banging our heads against the wall trying to put butts in seats at events.

Your quality of life went up by not being on the road all the time, putting on events. You made a decision a little while back to do less coaching and do more working in the business. At some point you go, “It was cool when people wanted me to do it. It’s gratifying when people show up and pat you on the back and learn and have success.” Is it what you want to spend the majority of your time doing or is there something else? Let me tell you this last thing. This is one of those woo-woo things I was saying. The company I talked about before, they had the hedge fund that was in the vacation rental business, the Airbnb’s that I finally convinced to stop. They said, “As soon as we came to the understanding that we’d stopped and it took him 3 to 4 days and they made a decision to follow my counsel.” They said that almost immediately after stopping. You’re looking at the path and you look up and look around. We’re no longer fixated on this one thing.” He said, “As soon as we had permission to stop, this other opportunity came up, which has become huge, but we had to clear out some space for something else to come in.” I’ve seen that repeatedly in my career.

 

As soon as I quit beating my head against the wall on something and go, “We’re done with that,” magical new things show up. It’s always the things that we usually get off of our vision. We take our eye off the ball is when we get into situations, we go, “What was I thinking? Keep your eye on the vision and you’re making measurable progress toward the vision.” Not just you’re hoping, but you’re progressing toward it. Don’t take your eye off that ball. Don’t let anybody get in your way. You’re making progress towards that pot of gold. Don’t let anybody pull you off the path. They want you. The more successful you are at getting to your pot of gold, the more other people go, “Wow,” just like your competitor. They looked at you and said, “Scott has got something figured out. Maybe he can teach me how to do it.” That takes you off of your path. It feels nice to be invited. It’s an honor, but it diverts you from your path. Don’t let anybody steal your time, progress and success because they desperately want a little piece of the magic that you have. Believe me, you’ll be able to do lots of good for the world out of the abundance that will be created when you get to the pot of gold.

Aaron, thank you for such great knowledge. Once again, defer, delegate and delete will make you a lot happier. Those are the three Ds of entrepreneurship. It will make you a whole lot more money and a lot of happiness. Thanks, Aaron. We’ll see you at the top.

See you.

Go out and take some action.

Important Links:

• The Unshackled Owner
• Laughlin Associates
• Note CAMP
• The E-Myth Revisited
• http://www.CorpVeilProtection.com
• http://www.GrowIn2020.com
• http://www.LaughlinUSA.com

About Aaron Young

Aaron Young, is a lifelong entrepreneur, trusted advisor to CEOs and business owners and creator of The Unshackled Owner a program for entrepreneurs looking to build a business and not just a glorified job.

Aaron is Chairman/CEO of Laughlin Associates, a 44-year-old company that has helped over 100,000 entrepreneurs start, grow and profit from their business. This has given Aaron an ideal vantage point to observe common mistakes and successes in businesses from Main Street to America’s largest yacht broker from medical professionals to manufacturers to investors. For over 34 years, his experience founding, acquiring and directing multi-million dollar businesses as well as working as an officer for a publicly-traded, multi-national, sets him apart from the crowd as a voice of real-world knowledge and authority.

Aaron has made it his life’s work to arm other business owners with success formulas that immediately provide exponential growth and protection.

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