What Successful People Do Differently

Every night I ask my daughters where they failed today.

My thinking is that if they're not failing daily, they are not learning or trying hard new things, and I want to normalize failure and doing hard stuff.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve failed 100x more than almost everyone I know (except those who I believe are more successful and wise).

Look at the image below…

Most people stay in the top bar: idea, then a stack of tutorials.

They read, they watch, they understand, yet nothing changes. They fail to think and act differently, usually out of a fear of failure - sometimes a subconscious fear of success.

The successful ones run the bottom loop: act, hit an issue, learn, try again. That's where the gains come from because they understand that failing is required to actually learn something and get good at it.

Over the past 20 years, my firm Demand Metric sold our 1,000+ DIY consulting playbooks, tools, and templates to 6,500+ customers, and 300K+ members globally.

The ones who got the most out of them weren't the ones who collected the tools.

They were the ones who downloaded something, broke it, got some help, fixed it, got a result with it, and then came back for the next tool to try something new.

The library of best practices doesn't move you forward. The reps do.

Where in your work are you stuck reading instead of doing?

📷 Original illustration from Growth by Visuals