Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
5 Lessons From The Military That Made Me Rich
What separates successful entrepreneurs from the rest isn't always what you'd expect. After 11.5 years in the Navy, I discovered that the same disciplines that make an effective sailor can build a seven-figure business.
The foundation of my success started with something surprisingly basic: showing up early. While it seems simple, consistently arriving before everyone else set me apart in every workplace. This reliability created opportunities others never saw. Employers could count on me, which led to greater trust and responsibility. The military taught me that mastering fundamentals creates the platform for tackling bigger challenges.
Another game-changing lesson was giving 100% effort to tasks I hated. The Navy frequently demanded performing unpleasant duties for extended periods in challenging conditions. This built mental toughness that transferred perfectly to entrepreneurship. Behind every "sexy" business success are countless unglamorous tasks—following up with clients, writing SOPs, packaging products—that actually drive results. The willingness to embrace these difficult parts with full commitment creates a competitive advantage few possess.
Perhaps most valuable was learning that complaining makes you weak. When faced with unfair situations, effective leaders take ownership and find solutions rather than wasting energy on complaints. This mindset shift grants you autonomy to change your circumstances instead of waiting for others to fix your problems. Organizations value team members who embrace challenges without negativity, which repeatedly accelerated my advancement.
The strategic approach that transformed my career was working 10X harder than everyone else for a concentrated period. By taking every opportunity, working weekends, and mastering skills through volume during my first few months in new positions, I established a reputation that continued paying dividends long after. This strategy propelled me from door-knocking to leadership positions with dramatically increased income—ultimately enabling me to launch my own successful water treatment company.
Want to build something remarkable? Start with these military-tested principles. They're not flashy, but they work. Follow along as I share more practical wisdom from my journey from service member to successful entrepreneur.
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These are the five lessons that the military taught me that made me rich, helped me start my water company. We do now between 800K to about 1.5 million a year in my water treatment business and I just want to continue to grow and put out as much information as I can for everybody, so that way you guys can learn things that maybe took me too long to learn, and I do attribute a lot of my 11 and a half naval career to my success. Lesson number one early is on time and on time is late. This is a very common theme in the military and it's a thing that really set me apart when I actually got out into the workforce, because one of the things I didn't quite realize at the time is how difficult it is for some people to just show up on time. And it seems like such a small thing, but it is literally, and for me as a business owner and as a person that employs people, it is one of the single easiest things you can do to set yourself away from the crowd. Most people can't even show up to work on time these days, and by showing up early, not only do you get your day started on the right foot, but you set a precedent to whoever you're showing up for or working for, that you mean business and that you are a professional. And not only that it allows you to actually get to the places you need to go on time. One of the biggest things that shows me how well a person can work and what a person's work ethic is is how they show up to work, because that is one of the most basic things that you can control. And what people don't realize is and this is something that I learned from this is everything starts from your foundation. Success starts at your foundation. So if you can't do the most basic of things correctly, then it would be impossible and improbable that you could do the big things well. Right, like, how are you going to do big operations? How are you going to do big things in life? How are you going to build a big business? How are you going to deal with bigger clients If you can't even show up to work on time? Right, you probably can't.
Speaker 1:So showing up early has always been something that I have done, and when you do that consistently enough like not just one time, like anyone can show up early one time, but when you do that for six months straight everywhere I've worked. That has been one of the single biggest things where my employers have been like okay, this is my go-to guy, they know they can count on me, they know I'm going to show up, I'm going to get the job done, and that has propelled me in everything that I've done. It's given me more opportunities, it's allowed me to build trust in an organization, so that single skill is one of the easiest things you can do. And then you also start to build pride in yourself, right, when you start showing up early and everyone else is showing up late and you've already gotten your day started and people are walking in. You're also able to jump ahead of everybody in your workforce, right, you're already 10 steps ahead of the people who took forever to get to you, and it feels good to be one of the best people in the workspace. It feels good to be working hard on everybody else, and that pride, that confidence, really does propel you to do even better in your day-to-day. So very basic thing, but showing up on time and, honestly, getting there early is a standard you should set for yourself, and it has helped me so much throughout my not only my military career, but also my professional career after the military.
Speaker 1:Second biggest lesson I learned is give a hundred percent to everything you do, even when you hate it. And I will say this has also been one of the biggest things that I've I have been able to take out of the military, because when you're in the Navy I can't tell you how shitty life was at certain times, especially when you're a brand new. When I was like an E1 to E3, which is like bottom of the barrel, 18 year old, getting into the military I would stand a gate dealing with drunk people for 18 hours a day, no breaks, and a 100 degree heat, literally getting pooped on every day, just hating life. Your feet hurt, all this stuff hurts, but you got to do the work right. The work's not going away and, I kid you not, it builds that gear inside you. They're like, okay, I can work really, really hard and I'm not going to die. And a lot of people in these situations will bitch and complain, which is going to lead me into another thing in a little bit later on. But if you can just do the work at 100%, especially when you don't like it, then that allows you to actually build something big in the long run, because everything is especially because of social media.
Speaker 1:Everything is looked at like so sexy. Now, right, building businesses are looked at like the sexy entrepreneurial journey. Selling can even look like it's sexy because you can get these big commission checks, breaking cards, you know, flipping houses, whatever it is. Everything looks super sexy but it's not, and a lot of times, the growth and the place where you actually make the biggest difference is in the work you really don't want to do, right. So, like for the sales organization, the work is in following up with your clients. It's sending reminders, it's touching base, it's giving them educational links, it's answering questions, being available when things go wrong. It's writing SOPs. It's all these like small little things that you don't want to do.
Speaker 1:I can tell you right now, I freaking hate sitting down and writing manuals and SOPs out. I don't like writing blog posts out to make my SEO better. I don't like doing these really remedial tasks. I like closing deals. You know what I don't like doing Driving to people's homes and doing appointments for two and a half hours and then just answering the same question over and over. Right, these are things we don't like to do, but you have to do it to get to the goal that you want to do. You know, when doing auctions or selling cards on whatnot, I don't like packaging and shipping everything myself which I do because I don't have a team, right, brand new to this but you got to do it because I like the actual part of selling. I like actually talking to the community, I like all of those other things, but that's not what gets you to where you want to go. Right, if you send packages out that are terrible, people won't come back to your shows. Right, if in sales, your organization can't fulfill on an installation and you can't do good customer service and things go wrong, you'll get bad reviews right? So there's all these things that you don't want to do that, if you do it with a hundred percent effort, actually make a difference in the business. Right, making this content right now, like this, is a perfect example today.
Speaker 1:You know it's been a long week and it's only Wednesday, but it has been a long week in my business. You know sales are down a bit. Leads are coming in. Weird. We've had some insane calls, which I have a video on the record of this insane call that my AI agent took today. But it's been a weird week and today I looked at my my calendar and I had it slotted that I was gonna be doing the podcast episode today.
Speaker 1:But when I rolled out of bed I did not want to do this episode today. I was tired. I'm just like, yeah, I'm sore from from my workouts the previous couple of days. I have. You know, all these things I want to get done. I got deals I want to get closed. The last thing I want to do was hop on a camera and do a podcast episode today, mainly because in my mind there's not an immediate return today. You know, especially with podcasting and making content is a slow burn. But I said no. I said I'm going to do this thing, so I'm going to stick with it. I'm going to stay dedicated to the thing I said I'm going to do and I'm going to do it with 100% effort. So I pulled up my phone. I said all right, what are we talking about today? I knew this was a topic I wanted to cover and I wrote out my notes. And here we are today doing the podcast recording, making shit happen, right, that's what we're doing and that you know.
Speaker 1:When you get done with stuff like this man. You feel so much better because you know it needed to get done and when you get into the work and start doing it, it's not as bad as you actually thought it would be. Layla Hermosi has the best quote about this that fear is a an inch deep, but a mile wide, which means the ocean looks super big and and terror and terrifying, but when you actually step into it it's only an inch deep. And I think about that whenever. There's stuff I just don't want to do. It's just just get into the water, start doing it. You're going to feel better and when you're done, at the end of the day everything feels great.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like going to the gym. You know you don't want to go to the gym, but then you get done with that workout, like oh, thank God I went. You know, when you actually keep eating healthy and you don't gorge that night, you wake up the next day Like man. I'm glad I I didn't just stuff my face. Same thing, but I didn't want to do it. But I did it anyway and I was able to because I had to do it so much.
Speaker 1:In the military I have that gear built in. I've just done it so many times. There's so many seven day work days or work weeks excuse me where I didn't want to go in and work and I knew I was going to be facing a 17 hour shift and I knew I'd be dealing with some crazy stuff at work. But I had to do it right? You had no choice. You're in the military, you don't? You gotta go. So that is one of the biggest lessons I've learned and, for anyone listening, try to find those things in your daily, daily life.
Speaker 1:If there's something that you really don't want to do, that should be your cue. Okay, do this even more. I need to double down. I need to go do this because I fucking promise you it is going to change the way you get everything done. And what's insane is the actual work that you think is going to take forever. You think it's going to be super hard. It's not. And then you see what you can create with it and it's like man, I just need to keep doing this. Like, for example, this episode will give me two weeks of content that I can post, right. So it's so so well worth it, right?
Speaker 1:And a lot of times you know life has gotten so easy. We don't actually have adversity anymore? We don't. You know, we can very easily avoid things we don't want to do, which is why, if you guys want to achieve and do big shit, it's never been easier, right, it seems like it might be harder because there's more saturation, but people are so fucking lazy now no one wants to actually do the work and put themselves in these stressful situations. So, literally, yeah, you just got to hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle, be a hustling hamster, just hustle and hustle for longer than you think you need to hustle, because obviously not going to come quickly, but just stick with it and find those hard things. That is why I'm so big on physical fitness, because you voluntarily put yourself into a stressful situation and a lot of times when you're working out consistently, there are days you don't wanna go to the gym. And if you're working out hard and you go to the gym and you push through it, you feel so much better about yourself, about your day. Everything feels so much better. So you have to find those ways to push through and that is why you don't gotta be a bodybuilder. But everyone, in my opinion, should go and get into physical fitness because it just builds that gear. It's the easiest way to find some sort of adversity that you have to push through. Okay, all right.
Speaker 1:Third lesson that the military taught me was complaining makes you weak. All right, Complaining makes you weak. The work still has to get done and I'm sure a lot of you here, who maybe either own a business, work with people, have seen this. Complaining is death. I hate complaining and I complain to myself in my head sometimes and I literally talk mad shit to myself when I do, because nothing gets done. Like complaining literally does nothing for you. Oh man, I really don't want to write this report today. That's 200 pages. I really don't man. John sucks man.
Speaker 1:I came in today and he doesn't think I'm doing a good job and Susie over here is getting all the accolades, right, it doesn't matter, right? And here's what's crazy is it makes you a fucking victim because there's nothing you can do with complaining, even if things are unfair, like, let's say, apples to apples. Let's say you're in like a work environment and John is getting all of these little accolades and these promotions and you feel like you're working just as hard and you're not. You can complain about it all day, but it doesn't help you, right, and it may not be fair, but it is your problem to fix. Okay, everything is your problem, no matter if it's your fault or not. And what's great about that is it actually gives you the autonomy to make decisions and change your, your situation.
Speaker 1:Because if I say John's getting all these accolades and I'm pissed off and I start complaining about it, well then what's most likely to happen is John will continue to get these little accolades and continue to do better than me, whereas if I say, okay, this is my problem to fix, maybe I need to figure out what's going on here. Now I can create steps to make a better decision, and that decision might even be leaving that job, finding something better for myself. Whatever it's a decision I was able to move and make something happen. Maybe I go and talk to the manager and I say, hey, why is John getting all these accolades? I feel like I'm working hard. What do I need to do to get better so that way I can kind of start growing in this business?
Speaker 1:Now that person, might you know, you might have thought it might have been some like nepotism or some underlying thing, but he might say actually, the way you complete X and Y tasks isn't up to my standard. Because of this, you can now change it Completely different way to run throughout your life, and this is incredibly good for when things are hard, because you know there again we go back to my last point there's things you don't want to do and if you are working for somebody you complain about, the work is not going to make you look good. And then if you actually have employees, you understand that when you have a guy that will just embrace the suck and do the job, that person generally gets promoted faster and gets paid more and you tend to give them more leeway and help them progress their career, because everyone understands that there's going to be shitty times and no one likes to hear complaining, and complain just drags organizations down. That's why in my business, I absolutely, absolutely destroy complaining to my business, like if you're, if you're complaining about shit in my company, like you're gone right now. If you have a solution to something, like, okay, I don't like this and this is why and this is how I want to fix it completely different right. I always say if you don't like something, come with a solution to it. Different than complaining. Complaining is you just bitching about something and there's absolutely no solution. So, literally, if you can, and it's a trust me, it's a daily grind right.
Speaker 1:There are so many times, like in my own business, where perfect example, we had a system we were selling, so we were having a pretty good month and we had a client come in that we basically sold the system to. Well, a competitor down in a different state had had that unit posted for basically the price that I pay for it and they had it listed as like hey, you can buy this, this, this system, online at this price, which you really couldn't right. It was very convoluted. But my customer saw that price and was like hey, I see, I can buy it from this company in Florida for this price. Turns out he tried to do it and he couldn't, but it completely killed that sale for me because he's like, well, why are you charging me this? I was like, well, this is what I pay for it. And anyway, it became a very bad conversation. So I lost the sale.
Speaker 1:I wanted to complain so bad I got my feelings hurt. Obviously, we were on a heater that month and that completely took the wind out of the sails of that month. So you know, what could I do? Well, what we decided to do was I reached out to my manufacturer who knew that person, said hey, why are these prices posted up there? And then he was able to get on them. I called that guy back, made him a big offer, didn't go through it, but I made an action and then I just said okay, we're going to keep moving and I'm just going to double down on my dials today. So I just called more people and we kept moving, right.
Speaker 1:So you know I wanted to complain about it, but it does me no good. You know, the deal, the deal was lost. I'm not going to get it back. Me complaining about it's not going to bring it back and all it's going to do is piss off my team. It's going to make me feel shitty and we're not going to go anywhere. So you know there was no point. There's really no point. So I'm really, really adamant about that. Guys. It's really helped me long-term, especially when I was working for other companies, the fact that I would do the things that no one else wanted to do and I wouldn't complain about them. People, you know, employers love me and it allowed me to go into bigger and better paying positions, and so I really, really know.
Speaker 1:Tactfully, it's the best way to go. All right, this one is a super, super good tactic. Now, this is going to be more prevalent for when you just enter the workspace. However, if you're already in a workspace, this, if you're trying to get promoted or you want to have a high paying job and be able to coast long-term, this is the number one thing I learned. All right, and this lesson is doing 10 X more in the early days than everybody else for an extended amount of time will allow you to do 100% less than everybody for more than they're making.
Speaker 1:Okay, let me explain. So, first impressions really do matter and there is this compounding effect that people tend to to give more credence to their first impression than anything else. And what I learned in the military, the way the military works, is when you get there, you get assessed and you get evaluations, and those evaluations will basically determine on if you can get promoted. And if you get promoted, you make more money, you get better job opportunities. Well, the way, in the Navy at least, you're ranked on is one on your quality of work, but then also on outside things. Like are you taking college classes? Are you volunteering? Like how many puppies are you petting? Are you in the community doing things? Do you have extracurricular qualifications that no one else has?
Speaker 1:So what I learned and what my mentors taught me is when you first get to a command, if you for the first six months just go balls to the wall like, do a bajillion customer service hours, work all the extra shifts, be the best at your job, get all of your qualifications, the first month you're there, go and apply for separate qualifications, you know, right after you get your initial ones and do all this extra work Like I'm talking, you're working seven days a week just grinding for six months Well then you get these high evals early on and it's really hard to lose that once you already have it. And what's funny is a lot of people do a little bit of work for a long period of time and they go nowhere. What I realized is if you do a massive amount of work right at the beginning, it propels you to the front of everybody else and then everyone in your organization has that image of you of being the hard charger, go-getter. So you're gonna build up all this goodwill, you're going to have this trust, you're gonna have that reciprocity. Where I don't, I'm telling you guys, if you're the number one in your organization, you do get treated differently. I don't want any, don't believe anything else. Like, if you're the top guy, you're going to get you know, there's like the loyalty contracts. You are going to get a little bit more for a little, for a lot less. People will give you, like, if you mess up, you're not going to get disciplined as hard, right? So if you can do a lot at the beginning like I'm talking, an absurd amount of work at the beginning, well then six, seven months in you've already established that reputation and you can now just do the normal amount of work that everybody else is doing. But you're already going to be seen as the top guy and elevated and so you'll put yourself in a position to make more money. And then you can really chill. And I'm going to talk about how this happened in real time. So this is kind of my journey on a tactful level on outside the military.
Speaker 1:So when I got in the military I first went to go work for a large water treatment company called Orbit Water. They were in 12 states but they're based out of Jersey and I was in their Maryland office. So when I first went in there, I told my manager. I said I don't care, you know where the leads are, I'll run every lead you send me, I don't care where it's at. And so that happened. Where I would run, it'd be 12 o'clock in the afternoon. He'd say, hey, I have a lead four hours away One way. Will you run it? Yep, I'll run it. That type of stuff I did all the time I worked. Every weekend I ran every single lead. I did everything.
Speaker 1:And what was actually nice is because I was running so much more volume than everybody else. I got better than everybody else, quicker, because I was actually learning in the field how to sell. That's what allowed me in two to three months to start making 30K 20K in take-home commissions right, like real, tangible money. But also I got seen as the main guy there. So I started getting better leads right. And then everybody else started getting mad because they were getting the leads that weren't that great. But again, I was the only person not complaining, taking every single opportunity, doing the work no one else wanted to do. You see how all these things kind of go together. And then I was just willing to do 10 X of volume than anybody else in the organization. So that allowed me to get better leads, four or five months in which was nice, because then I was working like normal schedules. You know, these leads were closer to where I lived and the leads were better, so I was selling more, all because I was willing to do more in that short period of time.
Speaker 1:So then the rest of my six months there were chilling. I was getting great leads, making good money and I wasn't working that hard. Now I did want a promotion, which I didn't get. The manager at the time I didn't think was doing a good job, and so I ended up getting another opportunity to go build a solar startup down in Virginia Beach. One of my good family friends was in solar. He knew this guy named Sam. Sam was building a startup down in Virginia. I said great, I will come work for you, but I want to have an office. I think I'll prove to you I'm worth it, but I want to have an office.
Speaker 1:So, long story short, I go down to Virginia Beach and I started at the bottom, which meant I was knocking doors, which as a well, how old was I then? 29, maybe 28, 29 knocking doors, I was like, oh my God, this sucks. I don't want to knock doors. I was working out of the Pentagon what am I doing? Knocking on people's doors? But I did it.
Speaker 1:So I was knocking on doors, sold my first sale, that I got sent to an in-home with like literally no training, which was kind of cool. But I started at the dirt and I knocked what I do Same same lesson. I knocked for 18 hours a day. I'm not even kidding you guys. I would get up at like 5am, I'd be on the doors by seven. I would not be home till like nine o'clock at night, like I was doing absurd shit because I need to learn how to get good at knocking doors. Right, I didn't know how to do it, so I just knocked for three months straight, probably 15, 18 hour days nonstop. And what happened? I got really good at door knocking to the point where I was teaching everybody else how to do it and I was making really good money. I knocked one door and on that sale made $11,000 in commissions because it was a massive sale. Okay, so you know, really tangible shit.
Speaker 1:And then what happened was he saw the work ethic I was able to do. He allowed me to build the office up in Northern Virginia and then, because I was again running all the appointments, doing 10X the work, my small Northern Virginia office outpaced the Virginia Beach office. We then decided to come back to Virginia beach. He wanted to merge the offices together. I then got promoted to the sales director. I then got a piece of the business. I then was basically the number two guy there and he then raised my commissions. He raised, he gave me a base as well. He I was making 10 K a month, plus my overrides, plus an increase in commissions, and that year I made about $380,000 in total revenue or, sorry, total commissions back. So 380K I made into my bank account, which was madness, right, I'd never seen that much money in my entire life. Unfortunately, he got into some things and the business started to fail, which at that point I was like, okay, I'm gonna take all this work ethic that I've been doing for other people and I'm going to put it into my own business. And then that's what started ClearWave and that's where we are today.
Speaker 1:But that is a very tactful and like legit way of how that lesson applies that you can apply to your own organization. And I'm telling you like these opportunities only came because I was willing to do that 10x work and not complain about it for a sustained period of time. That's it. And it's not sexy. And you know, talking back to it, it sounds kind of sexy, I guess, in a way Like, oh, that's cool, but, dude, it sucked. Like I would come home sometimes and want to fucking cry or I'd just be exhausted and pissed off and tired and I was like I never want to do this, ever again, like real mental, like shit, like I didn't want to keep doing it.
Speaker 1:But then when I got promoted, I wasn't knocking doors that much anymore, right, not, it wasn't at all, wasn't getting my, you know, wasn't knocking doors at all, I was managing people now and I'll still make that type of money, right, so it's easy, right, it's easy to do, or I should say it's easy to say it's hard to do. And that's why, if you guys can just crush and put in all that effort, you will destroy everybody. I'm telling you everybody, because no one, literally 1% of people, can work that way. And so that's why, if you can, just will yourself to do it, no matter what industry you're in, you'll dominate. And how fast your life will change is insane. And what's cool is, if you do that type of work and you don't see progress or the organization you're in doesn't appreciate it, cool, you can leave. Trust me, there's a lot of companies that will pay you what you're worth. I'm one of them.
Speaker 1:And then the last one and this is actually one that I tell myself the most. So this is the one that I struggle with the most, similar to how Gary Vee struggles with candor. This one is actually one that I struggle with the most because not because I don't like doing this, but because I am very empathetic to people and sometimes I'm not as strict as I need to be. And the last lesson and this is so true is you got to hold the standard, all right. Excuses will destroy your empire and, man, let me tell you, I struggle with this the most because I will set certain standards in place and when they get broken and I talk to people a lot of times they will have a good reason why it didn't happen.
Speaker 1:Or you know I want to. You know they're working really hard, so I want to be empathetic to the work they're putting in for my company, because you know I want to. You know they're working really hard, so I want to be empathetic to the work they're putting in for my company because, you know, it feels weird for me to be running a business. Um, and I'll be honest, I'm pretty mind blown every day that people work as hard as they do for my company. So when I set these standards and they don't get met, they don't always feel negligent.
Speaker 1:There are some negligent standards where it's like, okay, you really fucked up, that's a big one. But, for example, I want my guys to put in photos after each job. Now I have a small install team and they're very busy, so they'll take the photos, but they won't actually have it in the job that day and it might take them four or five days to put the photos in the job. And I've been more lenient on that than I should, because I'll say, hey, I need these photos, they'll send them to me, whatever. But as we grow like that's a bad standard to allow, because as we put more people in there, you know, and we sell more clients, eventually what's going to happen is they're going to forget which photo goes to which client, which means there could be a mismatch in photos. So that is an error on my part and if you don't hold those standards.
Speaker 1:Unfortunately, that trickles down to the rest of the business and everything will eventually fall apart and you unfortunately have to be a bit of. You kind of have to be a bit of a dictator in that way where you gotta be okay being the bad guy, and sometimes I struggle with that. I do have certain standards that I really have no negotiating on, but what's funny is like those standards never get broken, maybe because I have more vigor when I talk about them, maybe, like I'm more hardcore on those, or maybe it's because they're just basic standards that, like the hard workers that I hire would just naturally hit right, like have good customer service, show up on time, show up in a clean vehicle, show up in clean shirts, make sure all contracts are signed at a timely manner, things like that. So, and no complaining, that's a big one, but you know I'm getting better at it, right, I'm getting better at holding that standard and what I have found is when you hold that standard, even when you have to be kind of, you know the hard ass it does people actually like that.
Speaker 1:Hard workers especially don't want to work in a place where standards are lax, where things are allowed to slide, even when, like, they mess up right, like I know. You know, when I was in the military, when I would actually respect my leaders more, when I would make a mistake, they would come to me directly and they would tell me the mistake I made so I could get better. And I think, as leaders, sometimes I feel, at least, like afraid to do that because I don't want to hurt their feelings or whatever, because I really love the people that work with me. But that's one of the things that you know. We all have things we have to work on that. For me, that's one of the big ones, right, and you got to understand that if you don't hold that standard, then you're not giving them the opportunity to be in an organization that can grow to its biggest potential, and that is a terrible, terrible thing and as a leader, you should be ashamed of that.
Speaker 1:I know I am whenever I don't enforce it quickly, so you know it's. It's one of those things where you know you gotta. Sometimes there will be valid excuses, but even if they're valid excuses, you still have to let them know like no, this is the standard we set. I get you got busy, I get this happened, but you have to do this and you have to do it this way, and I've definitely been getting better at that. You know some of you guys might be better than I am.
Speaker 1:I know I've worked for people that that is not a problem. They will, you know, be the super hardcore leader. It is not the way I operate. I am very much a. I want you to be motivated by the growth potential and have that mutual respect with me. Be motivated by the growth potential and have that mutual respect with me. The problem is that works now because we are a small team. I had a bigger team at one point which obviously I let a lot of them go and, to be honest, part of that was probably because we were being too lax on certain standards, and you know we were. You know, letting people stay on longer than they needed to. Funny enough, I got really hardcore on my standard setting because I saw what it was doing to my business and unfortunately that meant I had to let a lot of people go. But now my business is doing better than ever. So it's a lesson that I have continued to repeat to myself multiple times and it's a lesson that I hope, if you guys have a business that you take on and do as well, and this can also be applied to just your personal life as well.
Speaker 1:Anytime, I don't hold my own standards for myself.
Speaker 1:Like, let's say, I don't do as good of a job on a project that I know I could do if I don't give everything that I could give to something like this podcast or doing anything the work, the breaks, working out, anything right.
Speaker 1:If I know that I could have done better, then I feel really ashamed of myself and I don't feel good. And so what's really helped me now is I feel so much better about my day win, lose or draw, as long as I know, at the end of the day, I left everything out in the field and I gave it my all and I held my standards and I consistently try to held my standards and I consistently tried to raise my standards every single day. That is one of the biggest things that I've tried to do is to try and chase a certain thing, like chase a number of views or chase a certain outcome. Now what I chase is how can I raise my standards on the work I can do, the quality it can be, and that has actually gotten a better return over everything else, over everything else. So, yeah, yeah, guys. So that is, those are the five lessons.