An Alley-Oop subscriber writes:
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Karl,
I’m still an employee at my current clinic but I’m now in a position to take the plunge and go out on my own. I’ve been weighing it up for a couple of months now and (am) struggling to decide when is the right time. What do you think I need in place before I press go?
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Timing your decision is such an attractive concept.
If you can just get your timing right, you can avoid all the downside and only benefit from the upside.
But by and large, timing things perfectly is something that most people almost never get right.
Think about it:
How many times would you strike out if you waited for the perfect pitch?
How many great buying opportunities would you miss if you were always waiting for the market to crash?
How many shots at goal would you never take if you were waiting for an open goal?
Timing anything in life is great in theory and almost always terrible in practice.
It’s mostly a fallacy.
And it’s something that separates business owners from wantrepreneurs.
Because if you’ve had an idea for months but haven’t taken action on it, that great idea of yours is worth sweet FA.
Compare that to business owners that succeed — they are governed by their mission and act even if the timing isn’t perfect.
This leads me to my advice on this:
Burn the boat.
If you’re familiar with the Conquistadors, you may know the story of Cortés and his counterintuitive approach to the conquest of Mexico.
Cortes, the Spanish Commander, arrived with just over six hundred men. Instead of ensuring he had an effective exit strategy if things didn’t go to plan, Cortes doubled down on his commitment by ordering the burning of his ships.
This was a clear message — they would succeed in their mission or die trying.
There was no turning back.
For Cortes, it was do or die and there was no plan B.
Two years later, he would go on to conquer the Aztec Empire.
Throughout history, we can find numerous examples of this.
It happened in the Muslim invasion of Iberia.
And again In the invasion of Italy by Aeneas.
As well as in the Battle of Naungyo (in this instance, it was as a bridge that was burned across a river).
The point of no return more often than not yielded the victory for the commander brave enough to make the do-or-die decision.
And it can be a winning strategy for you too in business.
For me, I walked away from the comfort of my cushy school gig to open up AA in an old residential apartment above a smash repairs.
It was a terrible decision on paper that ended up being the best decision of my life.
In fact, all the best decisions I’ve ever made were when my back was up against the wall with no other choice but to make it work.
In my subscriber’s case, I said that if I was in his position, I’d burn the boat at the earliest possible opportunity…
Because sometimes, the only thing that will get you out of your comfort zone is to draw a line in the sand and cross the point of no return.
You have to “burn your boat” in order to make the jump.
That makes me think of the Alley-Oop.
If you’re waiting for the perfect time to invest in your own self-optimisation, then you’ll die waiting.
There will never be a perfect time to invest in your own self-optimisation.
Because the perfect situation is engineered through action, not by sitting on the sidelines.
If you sign up in the next 24 hours (the deadline is 7:30 pm AEST), I’ll make sure your newsletter gets shipped in this month’s run…
Otherwise, that’ll be another month of opportunity that will pass you by, which is cool of course, but because each edition is unique, you miss out on this edition, forever.
If you want to burn your boat and take the plunge, I can hand on heart say that for $3.19 a day, it’s one of the safest investments you could ever make to get your business on the front foot.
And the best part?
It’s not a do-or-die scenario because if you find it’s not for you, you literally lose nothing but a couple of bucks each day for a month (even though you get to keep all the bonuses).
So while the worst case is essentially risk-free, the best-case scenario is that it could help you make a decision like I did that completely changes the course of your life.
– Karl Goodman
