Contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Hey, welcome back to the podcast. On this episode, this is going to be your motivational podcast. You may need to... download this, put it as your ringtone, your wake up alarm clock. I don't care what it is because this is the time for you to start taking action in your business. But you're going to want to listen to this over and over and over again. It all comes down to you guys. You only get one chance at this. You only get one life. There is no redo. A lot of us are watching our life like we're in a movie theater, watching it on. the screen like it's not us instead of actually being the main character in the movie. A lot of you are watching from the sidelines. You're not participating in your own life. This all comes down to what we do, the actions we take every single day from the time we wake up until the time we go to bed. When you go to bed at night and you look in the mirror right before you go to bed, you got to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say, did I do everything that I possibly could today to max out what I was going to do? Did I max out my life today? Did I do everything that I could possibly do? Or did I give up on some things? Did I make an excuse for something else? It's crazy to me. That when our employees make mistakes, we get upset with them. Like they did something personally to us. It's crazy that if we go to a restaurant and the server or the cooks mess up our food and we want to hold them accountable. It's crazy to me that we, whenever the UPS driver doesn't deliver our package perfectly the way that we want it and we get upset and file a complaint, yet we do things every single day that we screw up and we give ourselves a pass. You can't give yourself a pass while criticizing others. That makes you a hypocrite. Are you a hypocrite? Because if you give yourself a pass for not doing everything that you're supposed to do, you are 100% a hypocrite. And you have to look in the mirror every single day and ask yourself, am I a hypocrite? Did I do everything that I possibly can today? We are so consumed as a society with social media and everything that's going on around us, except we don't even look at what's right in front of us ourselves. Most of us can't even look in the mirror because we're ashamed. You may be listening to this and realize that you're not doing everything that you possibly can. You didn't make the 50 phone calls a day that you needed to make. You stopped at 30 and then made some excuse as to why you couldn't do the other 20. I got to get home. They got to take the trash out. I got to get home for supper, right? Whatever it is, you make an excuse as to why you don't have to do the things that you need to do today. You know, I deal with this as well. I need to record two podcasts today. This is the first one. I don't want to record the second one. I'm going to, but I don't want to. It's doing things every single day that we don't want to do that lead us to the lifestyle that we're looking for. A lot of you are living your life on a credit right now. You're trying to get the lifestyle that you want, but you're borrowing against future pain and suffering because you're not doing all the things that you need to do today so that you can cash out later on in life. You're trying to cash out right now and then putting the pain and suffering and hard work on credit. Guess what? When you get older, when you get later in life, it gets harder and harder because now you're paying with interest. Now you're paying for all of the joys you have now. with interest by not having as much money, by having to work harder. This is not a scale based on effort. Some of you think that putting working 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week is giving it a good effort. The problem is, is that your effort is in the wrong thing. Working is not effort, right? Your effort is in just showing up and swinging the hammer or doing the job. That's just a minimum requirement. That's what you have to do every single day. That's not going above and beyond. That's not maxing out. That's the minimal effort required. But you use it as some kind of justification of like, I'm already working 50 hours a week on the tools. It's just too much. I got a break. I got to take a break. I got to have some time off. It's just too much. I got to recoup because I'm working too much. No, you're just working on the wrong things. And then you're making excuses as to why you can't do the things you're supposed to be doing. You're putting your priorities in the wrong place in your business. You shouldn't be the one doing the stuff in your business. That's not what businesses are designed to be. If you're swinging the hammer and you're trying to grow your business, you're doing it wrong. Now, I'm not talking about those of you that are just starting out that are brand new. I'm talking about those of you that have been in business for three years, five years, seven years, and you're still on the tools. And then you use all the excuses that everybody else does. You just can't find good help. You got to do it yourself if you want it done right. You know, customers don't want to pay enough so you can hire people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of the excuses that you want to make. They're just excuses. That's all they are. You have complete control over your destiny. Matter of fact, that's the only thing you have control over is you. You don't have control over your employees. You don't have control over your customers. You don't have control over your vendors. That's make-believe. You may think you do, but you actually don't. The only thing that you have control over is what you decide to do each and every day. When you wake up in the morning, what are you doing? Are you exercising? Are you putting knowledge in your head? Are you doing things that make you better? Or are you just waiting until five minutes before you got to be out the door and you're just jumping up and throwing on your clothes and showing up at the job site, grabbing a coffee at the gas station on the way? That is not what winners do, by the way. Winners don't react to their day. People that are successful don't react to their day. It's planned out. The ones that are uber successful have figured out how to delegate everything that does not benefit them. And then they only focused on the highest level task that they can possibly do. The kind of tasks that you're the only person that can solve. That's what the most successful people on earth do. They don't deal with running to the store and picking up materials. They're not the one who is filing their payroll taxes. They hire accountants. They don't have people. They're not on spending the nights and weekends building their own website. They're hiring professionals that know what they're doing because they're using money to leverage their time. Some of you think you have unlimited time. You're not even aware that you're going to die one day. I used to have a paper on the wall that was how many weeks left to live. And it was based on averages and age that you put in there and your current age. And it would spit out a chart for every week. And there are little bubbles for every week. And you look at it and you see half your life is gone or a third of your life is gone and how many weeks you have left. It puts things into perspective really quick that you're not immortal. You don't have tomorrow. There's no guarantee of tomorrow. Hey, just a quick timeout from the show. If you're a frustrated contractor who's dealing with low profit margins, stuck working on the tools every day, or doing free estimates for people who are never going to hire you in the first place, I invite you to my private contractor community, The Profit Club, where contractors just like you are adding two to three times more profit each year without producing any more jobs and finally getting completely off the tools to never do another free estimate again. So if you're ready to increase your profits, stop doing free estimates and get off the tools, then all you have to do is click the link in the show notes to learn more about the Profit Club and see how I can easily two to three times the cash in your pocket, give you a proven sales process that will convert more jobs with ease and get you off the tools once and for all. And the best part is you can do all of this without having to produce more jobs than you currently are. Click the link to learn more. Now let's get back to the show. Some of you. Think that your life is hard, that your business is hard, that you're trying to just have a good life. You don't deserve a good life beyond what you already have. You know why? Because you haven't put in the effort. You haven't put in the necessary steps each day that you need to take. You don't deserve that. Do you realize that we have the easiest possible life that you can have? As a default, you have air conditioning. You live in a house. You live on a comfortable mattress. You have a vehicle that you drive around. You already have it easy. What else do you want? You're going to complain and cry. Boo hoo hoo. I don't have a Lambo. All I have is a F-250. You already have it easy. You already have the best life you could possibly have. What are you complaining about? You want to make excuses for all of this stuff and you already have it easy. There's nothing else you should be doing but actually putting in the work. Everyone who's lived before us and has gone on and fought wars and created innovation and all the things that's happened prior to us even being born has made your life even easier than it could possibly be. We could still be living in caves. We could still be dealing with heat waves when it's 100 degrees with no air conditioning. That could be a reality for us. We could still be living in dirt floor houses or even living in huts. Guys, you have it so easy right now that there's really no good excuse as to why you don't have what you want, except that you choose every single day to give up on yourself. You choose every single day to look at your family and say, I'm only going to do enough today because I don't want to work hard for you. That is a choice that you make every single day. You have to start doing what's required. Some of you will go up a hill. You'll drive your bicycle up a hill or run up a hill and you get to the top of the hill and now you're going to coast down the hill. And you're like, hey, I put in the effort. Brad, I put in the effort. I climbed the hill. Now I'm going to coast. No, all that hill did was prepare you for the next hill, which is twice as tall. And when you get down that hill, it's going to prepare you for the next hill, which is taller than that. There is no coasting in life. You can do that when you retire. Your job now is to put in as much effort as humanly possible. And at the end of the day, be exhausted. Because you did every single thing that you're supposed to do, which includes spending time with your family. This isn't about just working from sunup to sundown. This is about intentional effort every single day towards your business, towards your employees, towards your customers, towards your neighbors, towards your friends, and towards your family. And towards yourself. Some of you listening to this completely neglect yourself. You're an alcoholic. You smoke. You eat like crap. You're overweight. That's a choice you made. That's a series of choices that you made to get there. Nobody else's fault. You're in control of yourself. Start acting like it. Some of you are chasing two rabbits at one time. It's physically impossible to chase two rabbits at the same time. Yet that's how you live your life. You're trying to do too many things at once instead of getting laser focused on the one thing you need to be doing, what you know you should be doing. Yet you fill your days and times with quote busy work. A lot of us will take and use important tasks and make them urgent when they're not urgent because we don't want to do the urgent thing. We don't want to make the cold calls. We don't want to tell our employees the difficult conversation we got to have that we're going to fire them. I'll put it off until next week. I'll give them six, you know, six more chances before I have to fire them. Because I don't want to create conflict. If you don't want to create conflict, what the hell are you doing in business? Because business is nothing but conflict. You have to become an expert conflict person, you know, at resoluting conflict. You have to be an expert at that. You have to learn how to communicate effectively. If you can't sell, learn how to sell. If you can't do marketing, hire someone to do it for you. This is about doing the things that's required every single day to show up and then be exhausted at the end of the day. You have to put in the work, guys. No one's going to do it for you. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Everyone would be successful. The cemetery is the richest place on earth. That's where all the people go with their great ideas without anything because they don't execute. There are billions of dollars worth of ideas in the cemetery that never came to fruition because those people didn't go in on themselves. They didn't execute. They didn't take action. They made an excuse. They let somebody else talk them out of it. They said, woe is me. You know, this is too hard. I can't do it. Nobody wants to pay my prices. I can't find good help. Customers are too cheap. That's all the lies. That's all the word tracks that we tell ourselves on a regular basis. And it's just not true. You are not doing the right thing. If you wake up a year from now in the exact same place that you were, you did not do what you needed to do that year. Period. It's not the economy. It's not global pandemics. It's not COVID. None of that. You chose the easy path. Straight up. You decided, I'm going to be lazy every day. You woke up and chose lazy. And you are reaping exactly what you've sown in the past. If you are not where you want to be today, it's because you did not sow what you needed to sow in the past. This is on you. Stop blaming everyone else. You have to take action, guys. You have to do the things that's required. You have to wake up and go work out or eat healthy. or do what you need to do in order to get to where you want to go. There is no alternative. I guess there is an alternative. It's to live a miserable and weak and unsatisfactory life. Every time that I've done things that I did not want to do that were extremely hard, on the backside of that, I had the most fulfillment and enjoyment of doing it. Being in the military is one of the hardest things that I did or have done, at least physically and probably mentally. Since I got out, many things have not even come close. A lot of us are seeking that high and that toughness that we had when we were in the military. It's hard to replicate that. In some ways, I've gotten soft because I don't work as hard as I used to. I'm not immune to what I'm saying here. I'm actually looking at myself in the camera, holding myself accountable for not doing everything I need to do each and every day. I have no one to blame but myself. for the current position of where my coaching business is, for not achieving goals that I had set. It's my fault. And I've used those excuses that I've told you. This is not lost on me. I'm talking to myself. We have to do this every day. We have to choose to wake up and make a conscious decision every single day to do what we have to do, even if we don't want to. I hope you take this. Put it on repeat. Listen to it over and over again. Find some way to motivate you so that you take the action you need to take every day so at night you can look and say, I did everything I possibly could. I left it out on the field. There's nothing else I could have done today. That's when you know you did what you're supposed to do. Guys, you know where to find me on socials. Just search for the Hammer and Grind Podcast. Remember, until next time, profit is not a dirty word.
