Launching Pros
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Launching Pros
Finding Your Own Success Path
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Why do some people succeed while others struggle? This question sits at the heart of our entrepreneurial journeys, and the answer might surprise you. Beyond luck and timing, success often comes down to momentum and mindset—specifically, how we handle our early attempts and whether we fall into the trap of learned helplessness.
Through a fascinating experiment, we uncover how people primed for failure with impossible tasks became less likely to solve problems they were perfectly capable of tackling. The implications for entrepreneurs are profound. When we experience early failures, we often internalize the belief that future efforts will also fail, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that limits our potential. Conversely, small early wins build confidence and momentum that propel us forward through increasingly difficult challenges.
Social media amplifies this phenomenon by bombarding us with seemingly overnight success stories and inflated income claims. We discuss why comparing your chapter one to someone else's chapter twenty leads to unnecessary frustration and how defining success on your own terms is crucial. What if making $300,000 monthly requires sacrifices in areas you value most, like family time or personal well-being? True success aligns with your personal priorities, not someone else's highlight reel. We share practical strategies for building momentum through intentionally small wins, breaking down intimidating tasks, and celebrating progress rather than fixating on perfection. Whether in business, parenting, or personal growth, this mindset shift can transform your relationship with success and failure.
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Why Some People Succeed and Fail
Speaker 1So I've always wondered why some people succeed and why some people fail. Now, with a lot of success stories, I think there's an aspect of luck, so I don't want to discount that Timing opportunity, got the right place, right time, that kind of thing. But I saw this video that talked about a mindset called learned failure and they didn't experiment, and I thought it was super interesting and I think it applies to a lot of what we do as entrepreneurs, so I wanted to show this to you, okay.
Speaker 3Just do the first one, only Just one. Just rearrange those letters to form a word. Just do number one. When you're done, I need to see your hand raised. Keep your hands up, please. This isn't meant to be difficult.
Speaker 1Let's just go to number two.
Speaker 3Do number three. You were both given two different lists. Left side of the room given bat. What would the word be? The second one? They were given lemon. Both of you were given the third. Would the word be the second one? They were given lemon. Both of you were given the third word, which was the same Cinerama American. Your first two words were not solvable. I want you to think about what happened to you when you saw the right side of the room raising their hands because they already had the task done. I felt rushed.
Speaker 2My confidence was shot.
Speaker 3What you experienced was a term called learned helplessness. They failed one and then they applied that to everything in the future.
Speaker 1So essentially the left side of the room had a list, with the first two words being impossible to solve.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Learned Helplessness Experiment Revealed
Speaker 1The right side of the room had words that they could solve, words being impossible to solve. The right side of the room had words that they could solve. Now, I saw a different video of this that I actually can't find, but it was talking about how, because the people on the left side of the room felt helpless and stupid and rushed, most of them did not get that third word correct, even though both sides of the room had the same third word.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1But the people who were set up for success on those first two easy words, most of them were able to complete that third one that was a little bit harder. Yeah, so they were set up for small successes which made them succeed on something that was a little bit more difficult. The other ones were set up for failure and most made them succeed on something that was a little bit more difficult. The other ones were set up for failure and most of them did not, did not complete that.
Speaker 2Yeah, cause it looked like the one the easier side had bat lemon, and then Cinerama, which would be American Right, right and the middle one would be melon, is what I would assume, lemon, melon, it's just off the top of my head.
Speaker 1Yeah, melon is what I would assume, lemon melon, it just popped out of my head yeah, melon, and then tab right.
Speaker 2So you start with a super easy one, like a quick win, which is tab or bat to tab, and then you look at lemon. You're like, okay, I could get that Melon, that makes sense. And then the last one's actually pretty hard, like Cineron.
Speaker 1Right, You're like uh, I didn't get that one. And then you can.
Speaker 2Okay, it's American Cool, I think if the other side had whirl, which is like, well, that's a hard word.
Speaker 1Yeah Well, I mean, apparently you can't, you can't really make it weird anyway, and you're like uh, I don't know. And I they're like I'm not going to be able to figure this out. I couldn't figure the last ones out, and they were supposed to be easy, because the teacher also said this isn't supposed to be hard. Yeah, right, right. So that made them feel stupid, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1Right so often, and it's kind of ironic that we're talking about this on social media. But I think we see a lot of these amazing success stories on social media and we think we are failures. Yeah Right, like, like I and I know I'm a victim of this too Like I. I look at these people and they're like I made. I made $300,000 last month and I'm like well, shoot like what am I doing wrong?
Speaker 2You know Right, yeah.
Speaker 1And so it makes social media content, because, well, first of all, a lot of them just lie yeah and so like.
Speaker 1We're comparing ourselves to something that's not true yeah we just need to be so careful and set ourselves up for small wins. As entrepreneurs like you don't have a lot of people to set up those small wins, so I think you have to yeah, on a daily basis, but also stop comparing yourself, because your success is not somebody else's success. I personally do not want to run this huge, ginormous company. Make millions of dollars I mean millions of dollars every year would be great, but at the end of the day, If you're working 80 hours a week is what you're saying.
Speaker 2I have a family, I need free time and I want to spend time. I want to be a good dad the day.
Speaker 2If you're working, if you're working like 80 hours a week is what you're saying like I have a family like I have time, I need free time and I want to spend time, I want to be a good dad, like it's like so there's certain people and this is not picking on him at all but like alex ramos, he's like you just gotta put in the time, you gotta put in all this. And it's like yeah, dude, your, your whole life is built around work and that's great if that's fulfilling to you sure that's not 100 fulfilling to me.
Building Momentum in Business
Speaker 2I love work, I love doing what I do. But my kids are like that for me, like I feel fulfilled being a husband and a dad and you, that's not your goals and that's fine, like, but you know what I mean? So it's like comparing, like oh man, he's built three, four or five businesses that are all multi-million. It's like, why am I not there? It's like, yes, because maybe you don't have the same priorities, and that's okay right, like you can make a successful business without being to that level.
Speaker 2I think a lot of this has to do with momentum too, like when you look at sports like I'm a huge, I love sports, I love football, I'm a bronco fan, like last year bo nix was a rookie and I think it's really. And Sean Payton is an amazing like he'll probably be a Hall of Fame coach Now he purposely every game would just do small short passes and easy runs to get moving. And once you got one or two first downs, it's a lot easier for your offense to say like we can move the ball. And with having a rookie quarterback, it makes it really important to not get a three and out, which means you do three plays and oh, I got to punt because I didn't get the first down. That's demoralizing, especially after three or four of them You're like, oh, I don't even know if we can move the ball at all.
Speaker 1When you get out on the field, assume we're not going to.
Speaker 2What do we do to get past this defense If you can get some first, easy, quick first downs even just completed passes gets into the head of like, okay, I can throw the ball, I can hit the gaps, I can manipulate the defense, I can read the defense, and that gets you momentum. So as you get going in the game you can start to flow. Same thing with business, like when you get a win or two whether it's like you're selling a product or a service and you get a couple of them it starts to feel good and it feels like okay, I can do this, I know what I'm doing, I can do this. And it was the same thing with my own business when I was doing services. Once I started with one client, you get nervous. You're like, ooh, overwork, like you're doing so much work. For usually, especially on a service business, you undercharge, whether that's plumbing, welding, what we do, marketing. You end up undercharging your first client because you're like do I even know what I'm doing?
Speaker 1right, you know, I gotta get something under my belt you even know what you're doing.
Speaker 2You could be certified as a plumber, electrician. You're like, oh, I'm gonna, just, I just want the job. So you just under underbid and they hire you. But then you overwork it and then, once you get a few in, you're like, oh no, no, I know what I'm doing.
Speaker 2You get a little confidence in yourself and then things snowball right where you can start developing your business more, and I think it's really important to do that. And even with parenting, this actually works really good. If you tell your kid that he's a bad kid over and, over and over again, they're just going to believe you. They're like yeah, I'm a bad kid and it's like oh well, I guess this is who I am. It's like well, yeah, you need some positives in there too.
Speaker 1Even on a smaller scale. If you constantly correct your child for something that doesn't even matter, like all these really small things, yeah, they are going to lose their confidence in their ability to do anything.
Speaker 1100 you know you have to let them succeed in their own way and that builds their confidence. Eventually they'll get it right. They'll get it 100 right. But if you keep pointing out stuff how they are supposed, like maybe you're trying to help them out, right, yeah right, you're just trying to help, but that slowly kills their confidence yeah, you have to have a good balance of like being able to critique and also really high praise.
Speaker 2And if you're only critiquing like, it just demolishes their self-esteem, and I'm not into the like self-esteem, like is everything and like like no, you should push your kid and you should make them challenge themselves for sure, right, but there's a balance to it and I I mean, I'm guilty of that of trying to like doing what you said, of like okay, always tweaking and be like hey, okay, but you're like that was really good, but you also can do this, you also can do this. No, that was really great, let's just keep going, because then it makes it fun, right, because they feel like they're getting wins. And if they're getting a win, but then you still have a bunch of critiques on top, it's kind of like, I don't know, it's a little bittersweet, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I think getting momentum is really important in business and pretty much everything.
Speaker 1I think it's important to make sure you set goals for like what. What does success look like for me? Like, not this person that's in there making 300 grand a month. Like, what does it look like for me? And for me, it was a steady source of income to allow flexibility to be able to travel and have fun experiences with my family. Yeah, that does like and and yeah, it'd be great to make 300 grand a month right, yeah, right like who would love to make?
Speaker 1that. But I know that there's trade-offs, like a lot of times there's trade-offs Like you have to give up a lot to get to that point and that's just not me, you know. And so I need to get out of the mindset of looking at other people's successes and then judging my successes as failures and actually start to realize, hey, and then judging my successes as failures and actually start to realize, hey, I'm on the right path for me, this is my story, this is my success story, and just focus on that, because, at the end of the day, why does that other person make $300,000? Why do they even matter to you?
Speaker 2Yeah, you're never going to meet that person anyway, you're never going to meet them. I mean, you could if you wanted to, but most of these people that you see online you're either never going to meet or, if you do meet, they're really not going to be that important in your life. Don't make it like they are.
Speaker 1You're completely different than they are. So set a goal of what success looks like for you and kind of work your way backwards to how can I accomplish this goal. If that goal is to make 300 grand a month, go for it like, yeah, you can do it I think you should definitely set big goals, like you're saying.
Speaker 2And then what?
Speaker 1goals. Can I?
Speaker 2accomplish this week? And what goal? What goals should I have to accomplish today? And every time you, you complete that one thing. It could be so small, as in like hey, I'm a whatever, I'm selling some sort of thing I am going to sell, or call five businesses to try to sell my thing, if I call five businesses even if I don't get a sale.
Speaker 1But today, if I call five, I'm gonna feel like a winner because, like, at least I'm going through the process right and you gotta take steps one way to accomplish that, like there's oftentimes these tasks that we set up for ourselves, and we look at them and we're thinking about all the steps that need to happen before you can complete that one task, and sometimes that leads us to push it off to the next day. Oh, I don't have.
Breaking Tasks Down for Wins
Speaker 2Yeah, I know right yeah so in those instances, break down that one task into three to five smaller tasks and then focus on that one sub task yeah that you can accomplish in the time that you have you usually find out that it takes a lot less time than you put it in your head, like what you're talking about is like putting up a mirror to me, because that's something I struggle with.
Speaker 2For me, it's if I can write out a list of like a to-do list for my day for work I'll blow through it within three hours, versus if I just have it in my head where it's like I got so much stuff to do and then I end up. I end up either not doing the most of the things or I end up getting sidetracked and not actually staying on task. Right, it's like, oh, it's still. Or if I push off to the next day, it just becomes this bigger thing and then I actually finally like I have to do this, I do it and it's like it took me like yeah, it wasn't that, like what the heck?
Speaker 1I think a lot of that stress and the procrastination is really a result of lack of planning. So if you just take a little bit of extra time planning those sub steps, those sub tasks, you can find that you're going to accomplish so much more and you're going to feel those wins and you're going to work your way towards your success and that's just going to bring you the most happiness.
Speaker 2Thanks for listening. Every week we go over news, tips, tricks and best practices to help you grow your small business, so follow and subscribe below For more information.
Speaker 1Check out our website at launchingproscom, where you get access to a bunch of free resources and courses designed to launch and grow your business online. Check out the links below.