Success Is Not About Ideas. It’s About Execution

In this episode of 10 Keys to Thrive, Jim Krigbaum breaks down the critical difference between having ideas and actually creating results. Drawing from decades of entrepreneurial experience, he shares practical strategies for overcoming paralysis by analysis, building momentum through execution, managing focus, measuring progress, and using tools like AI to improve productivity without losing human judgment. This episode is a powerful reminder that success is not built through inspiration alone. It is built through disciplined action, consistent execution, and the willingness to turn vision into measurable results. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome back to Ten Keys to Thrive Podcast. I'm your mentor and host, Jim Krigbaum. Today we're talking about the fact that success is not just about ideas, about knowing when to execute the principles and sticking with a pattern that brings the characteristics of the charm dance into your DNA, makes it part of who you are, helps you grow as an individual to achieve success in business and in life.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Are you sick and tired of spinning wheels, wasting time and money in your business, but getting nowhere fast? With the 10 Keys to Thrive Podcast, it's your masterclass in momentum by International Business Strategist and your host, Jim Kraigbaum.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Most people don't fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they lack execution. They lack taking the idea and converting it into their calendar, converting it into their actions, converting it into who they are. I've always said that an entrepreneur is not done when they run out of money. They're done when they run out of ideas. The problem is, is a lot of people have ideas, but they don't turn them into actions. They don't execute them. I can look back on my career and see a lot of times when I've had ideas and I haven't executed them. I haven't said, let's go after it and let's make this happen. Two years later, six months later, I see that somebody else has done it. So I know the idea was right, but I didn't execute. I kicked myself with not doing it. I didn't analyze the risks at the time, or I did analyze them and I opted not to do it. But if I had converted those into action, I would have achieved the success that others achieved off the ideas that I had developed. People think of a plan and react and talk, but they don't do it consistently. They don't execute. They put the plan into their head and they tell people what they're going to do, but they don't actually do it. Heart of the Charm Dance principles is executing. It's making sure that all the characteristics of charm dance, from communication to execution, actually happen. So that you apply those principles. The reason I want you to execute is because principles are inspiring, but execution gets results. You need the results. You don't just need to be inspired. You need to be inspiring if you're trying to inspire a team, if you're trying to inspire others to accomplish things. But for your own plans and for your own execution, you need to execute. For your ideas, you need to convert them from theory to practice. Some people confuse plans with progress. Some people can get tied up in minercia. They can get caught in paralysis by analysis. They can spend too much time trying to figure things out. And while they figured things out, people are passing them by. People are adapting those ideas. People are discovering the same things they had. You don't want paralysis by analysis, but you do need to make sure that you analyze your risks and the appropriate quality and make sure that you have the market analyzed properly. And those are all part of the things that we teach in the Tarm Dancy principles. To avoid the hard truths, you have to have the hard conversations with yourself. You have to look at things, what if I fail? What if this idea doesn't work? And you can't just stop when the idea fails. You have to, again, as we say, shoot at another target. Adjust, figure out what you did wrong. Use that failure as an experiment. Use it as a tool to grow. There are three critical actions that we're going to teach you today. To begin with each day is to identify the critical actions, identify things you need to do each day. Just three. Identify three things. Not 10, not 20. Don't overwhelm yourself. Identify three things that you want to accomplish, three things that will move your idea and your business forward. I suggest you have one that addresses revenue. What is it that's going to generate the revenue? The second one is what is the system? How do you change things to make things work? And the third one is how do you interact with people? So you have an internal thing where you're looking at how do I generate revenue. You have an external thing about how do I modify the process, how do I change the thing, how do I identify the market, how do I adjust to meet that market. And the third one is how do I involve other people in that process? It includes internal thought, it includes internal analysis and external communication. You need other people to follow in most cases. Very few people can do anything alone. If nothing else, you need at least your family to support you to say, yes, let's go and let's do it. Let's take this risk. They need to understand the risk. If you're over here taking risks that the family doesn't know about, you're playing with somebody else's cards. You need to make sure that they understand what you're trying to accomplish. They may point out things that you haven't thought of yourself. They'll point out things that you need to go, oh, I didn't think of that. I didn't apply that concept. You can set three goals. For example, on revenue, you can say, okay, today or every day, I'm going to contact three potential distributors. I'm going to contact three potential customers. I like to target a market. I don't like to just throw a net out saying, I hope I find somebody. I like to target, I've done my research, I know my product, I know the market, I know who should be buying it. So how am I going to reach out to them? Second is to fix recurring problems. What is it that's preventing the sale? What if it's preventing the production or the perfection of the product that I'm producing? How do I improve that? And the third is an actual outreach. Call customers, call people on your team, get feedback, and use that feedback to adjust what you need to do. At the end of the day, ask, did I accomplish the things that are most critical? Did I accomplish the things that matter the most? Not just spending time. Again, time is not the objective. Results are the objective. I used to work with people who say, Oh, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. They spent more time telling people how busy they were than actually executing. If they would have spent their time executing, they wouldn't have been so busy, they would have been organized. The second tool is to use charm dance's mirror. It's not just a framework. If you have to look at yourself, look at yourself and reflect on what are these charm dance characteristics, communication, honesty, appropriate quality, risk, markets, details, vantage, networks, and execution. What are those that you actually do? How did they apply? What truths am I avoiding? How is my quality changing? Is it slipping in? Am I addressing risk properly? People don't analyze risk and is constantly analyzing risk. Things change. The risk changes. Your position on the risk changes. Did I negotiate effectively? How does the negotiations align with my objectives? What needs to change? What is it that I've done throughout the course of the day, throughout the course of the week, throughout the course of the idea needs to change. And did I execute? Did I execute at the end of the day? You need to take your concepts and take them away from the whiteboard. Take them away from the concepts and put them into reality. Now, one of the things I do is I develop a list of things I need to accomplish. And it's very specific. On Monday, I do this. On Tuesday, I do this. Now so many people that I outreach to. I had a customer that I taught down in Guyana, one of the first students that I had. And I taught him the course a month later, two months later, I went back to his house. And I had suggested in the course that they put their goals next to their phone or put their goals on their mirror. So every morning when they get up and they look in the mirror, they see their goals. Every morning when they answer the phone, they see their tasks and they make sure they're there. To have them over here on a whiteboard and have them on a piece of paper that you don't pull out, that you don't execute, doesn't accomplish anything. It is good that you start thinking about it, but until you take action, until you execute, thinking is going to get you nowhere. Second is time management. You basically have three different building blocks to work with. My student Guyana was a small operator, it was a one-man operation, a small businessman who had just started his business and was just him. He listened to what I had to say. He took notes and he wrote down the charm dance principles. He posted them down the mirror in his house. And beside his telephone, he posted his goals so that every day when he got up and looked in the mirror, he knew what he had to do on the charm dance principles, refreshed his memory. And then we went to the phone and answered the phone. He saw those goals and set those goals. I went back three months later after teaching him this and went to his home. And he was in Guyana, so his house was up on stilts. We were underneath his home. And he was talking, he got all excited. He says, I remember you told me Adam Smith said dot dot dot dot. I talked to him about how in a transaction everybody benefits. That spire is receiving more value than he's given up, and the seller is receiving more value than he is giving up. So both parties win. And he got excited and he said that. He repeated that, which is interesting because everybody had said, Oh, if you're going to quote somebody, quote Che Guevare, don't quote Adam Smith. People will turn off as soon as you do that. But he got excited and told me that's what they had said. And he learned from it. He says, So when I took these things into consideration, he says, now I have three other employees, and I bought a car. And he was very excited about it. And his neighbors were looking at that and saying, What did he do to succeed? How did he change things? So it's kind of a small success story, but it was big for that individual. He'd moved from doing a single operation to multiple people, impacting multiple lives and improving the quality of his life. So keeping these posted where you can see them and get value from them is important. You have the time, which is current. What is the current strategy? What do you need to answer today? Busyness in your inbox, spending time answering emails that don't get you anywhere doesn't get you to your objectives. One of the problems that I have is that I respond to everybody every day. I make sure that when I go to bed, my inbox is empty. Now, is that effective on reaching my priorities? No. Now I might answer somebody that has nothing to do with achieving my objectives. I need to eliminate that. I need to take the time and I only answer the emails that make sense. Now with AI and technology that's out there, I can use AI to help me sift through my emails. I get hundreds a day. I can sift through my emails and determine which ones I want to answer. I can also use AI to answer the ones that just require a very true generic answer, that require an update or require information or feedback or even a thumbs up. I want to make sure that when people come to me, I respond to them. Even if I just give them a thumbs up, even if I just give them a your email's been noted, your requests have been noted. I hate it when I contact people, I send them an email, and I don't hear from them. You don't know if they've received it. And that is the most frustrating thing. And if you put a notify that you received it, people will ignore that. I've never tell people that I've received it. That's not my job to tell them I received it. I don't necessarily want them to know that I received it. So the flip side of that, I want people to acknowledge that they received it. I need people to give me a response that yes, I've received it. If I haven't, I need to use AI to tick on myself to go back and say, wait a minute, I sent this quote out, I sent this email out, I sent this request out three days ago. I've got no response. Do I want to do it again? Consistent communications is critical and making sure that it works both ways. One of the tools that you should use is block out 45 to 60 minutes a day of thinking time. No interruptions. You can set your computer on, do not disturb, set your phone down, do not put your phone where you can reach it or get distracted by it. Same thing with your computer and focus. Spend some time and say, okay, let's dig deeper into this idea. Maybe you do it at your computer because you want to get some immediate answers to questions. Maybe you do it sitting in a lounge chair, as your favorite beverage, but you need to set schedule. You need to schedule 35, 45, 50, 60 minutes a day of just thinking. A lot of times people are so busy caught up in the daily actions that they're not able to move forward. That's one of the things that consultants do a lot of times is a consultant can come in at the 30,000 foot level and focus and say, because you're dollved in the daily crisis and daily management of your business, you're missing the big picture. If you take the time, 45, 60 minutes a day, if you take the time to analyze the business yourself, you don't necessarily need to bring in somebody from outside to look at it from above. You do need to make sure your crises are addressed, but you need to make sure that you have the systems in place that avoid those crises in the future. Having the time to sit down with yourself and your team if necessary and say, okay, let's brainstorm, let's figure out where we need to be, what changes do we need. Do it on a daily basis. If you can't do it on a daily basis because you're busy, do it every other day, but you need to make sure you do it. Do it on the weekend, if nothing else. And use that time to change things in the future. Use that time to make your systems more effective. Use that time to refine your ideas. The fourth tool is to have a weekly scorecard. If you don't keep track of it, you don't know how you're doing. One of the things when I work for other people is say you need to contact 25 customers a day. And you need to contact this many in this industry and this many in that industry. You need to follow up, you need to enter so many invoices or so many phone calls. And you keep track of it. You set goals. If I'm gonna in a smile and dial situation, I'm gonna say, okay, I need to call 25 people a day. And I set the goals and I track it. And I track it for my team. If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. If you have to have key performance indicators, you have to have steps that can say, here's what I've done and here's what I've accomplished. Only by doing that can you say, wow, we've done the right thing or we've done the wrong thing. We need to change our perspective, we need to change our view so that we can accomplish our objectives. Follow-ups are important. Make sure that you follow up on everything that you do. Too many times people offer a product and they don't follow up. Or they'll ask for a quote and they don't follow up. And again, you don't get a sale if you don't ask for the sale. You don't get answers to your questions if you don't ask them. So take the time and ask them. Take the time to request the follow-up. Momentum is measurable. You need to be able to measure it. You need to be able to keep track of it. I'm always amazed when people say, oh, our kids' soccer match, they don't keep score. The kids do. Because if you don't keep score, nobody knows who wins. What's the sense in playing if you're not keeping score? You want to just play, that's fine, but you still want to keep score because that allows you to improve. I hate it when people say, oh, we don't want the kids to feel like they're losers. We don't want to feel like they've lost. The thing about it is if you lose, what happens next time? You try harder or you find something else to do. If you're not keeping score, you may think you're the best soccer player in the world, but you gotta keep score. You gotta keep measuring your achievements, you gotta keep measuring your accomplishments, and you gotta keep a score of here's what I need to accomplish every day. Like I say, my list here has so many phone calls that I'm supposed to make every day, so many outreaches that I need to make every day. And I keep track of that. And you need to keep track of keep a scorecard. Another tool that you need to do is break your year into four different sections. Each quarter you need to accomplish these objectives. And during those sessions and during those objectives, you say, What am I gonna do? You need to break it apart. You can't just set a long distance in a future goal. You need to set something that's achievable now. You need to make sure that you can make it across each step up each level. Think of your strategy as sprints. Have four sprints in a year. So three months. So figure out what you're gonna do in the next three months. If you set a target that's a year out, that becomes a dream. It becomes a vision, which you want to strive toward, but you need steps along the way. You need to make sure that you have something that's achievable today. Otherwise, you'll lose track of that vision in the future. You will lose motivation and you'll lose momentum. If you're able to set the goals within a three-month period, here's what I need to do in the next three months. Here's what I need to do in the next six months. One of the things we talk about is how a family-owned business like Cargo or a large business like Mitsubishi has a 300-year business plan. Nobody knows we're gonna be 300 years from now. Nobody even really knows where we're gonna be six months from now with all the AI happening out there. But by having that plan, they know which way they're going. But they also have steps along the way. They need to know what they're accomplishing on each basis. Now, one of the things to understand too is that investment's not necessarily going to pay off in a short period of time. The greatest achievements was the introduction of red quinoa to the world. I discovered a red variety down on the Altiplano, Peru. It was a mutants from a farm. We had one kilo bag. We took the one kilo bag and worked with the Catholic Church and courts, a whole story of in and of its own. But it took years to go from that one kilo to a global market presence and it now exceeds over $160 million in annual export sales, but it started with one bag. When the quarterly report came out, when that particular project closed, they basically said we brought Jim Krigbaum to develop new crops and it failed. But it was a $160 million annual failure that didn't necessarily fall within timeframe. So you need to be able to look at the investment. Some of the things you do now are investing in the long-term future, and you need to understand that. But you also have to have check marks and goals along the way. Develop check marks and develop a list of what you need to accomplish. Review it regularly. Don't let it go into the future where you're going, we forgot to keep track of it. And you need to make sure that when you hit a roadblock, when you hit a challenge, you go over it, you go around it, you go through it. You don't necessarily stop. But you can also stop and take a different path. You take a different path, you take what you've learned and move to a different challenge. We've seen that as an example in some of the businesses that are out there, how they hit a roadblock and they have to analyze their business. You can go to your grave with a dream that's unachievable. You need to make sure that your dreams remain achievable. So if you get to a point where you can't achieve that dream, what else are you going to do? How are you going to spin off from it? One of the things now is to weave AI into this effort. Weave it into be your executive assistant. Let it review things, let it analyze things and let it organize, let it schedule. Don't let it think for you. You have to come up with the conclusions. It's a great source for doing research. It's a great source for being able to get information, but it doesn't make decisions. For example, I asked AI to give me a review of business laws in Egypt, United States, and Dubai because I was looking at doing a blueberry farm in Egypt. I needed to know how the ownership taxes would be treated and if it made sense to incorporate in Egypt, US, or Dubai. It was a legal question. It was very complicated. I fed it all my information. It spit out details on here's what Egyptian law says, here's what US law says, here's what Dubai law says, and here's how they interact, and here's a recommendation. I still needed to review it, and I still needed to review it with my partners to make sure it made sense. But it helped me. There's no way I could have afforded, as a startup, to go to an attorney that understood those three countries, law and legal structure, but AI was able to do that research. So I asked it questions. You can use AI to do research. You can use a chat bot as an agent to go out and look for things to gather information. Every day, AI is going out to the web and giving me a summary of the top five news stories relating to different topics. It can do that for you. You can set that up. And if you don't set it up, you're wasting opportunities. You just don't have the time to do all the research that it can do. So use it as a tool for doing research. Do not let AI think for you. Let AI be a tool that provides you with the information to make correct decisions. So we have AI at three critical actions. Once you've identified a critical action, AI can help place it on your calendar. It can help remind you that you need to do it. It can help keep track of it. It can actually take something and break it down into summaries. For example, my book, I asked AI to review my book and to give me a summary. Now, I could have done that. It would have taken me a long time, hours and hours to do a summary. Even though I wrote the book, it would have taken me a long time to do a summary and boil it down to one or two pages. AI did it instantaneously. Now, of course, I had to review it and make sure it made sense because some of the terminology that I used wasn't appropriate for what AI was analyzing and what AI was thinking, but allowed me to do it a lot quicker, giving me a summary, giving me a starting point. AI can also trigger recurring thoughts and recurring points and make sure that every morning I come down and there's a notice through me saying, I need to contact five people today. It's Tuesday. I need to review this production flow. It's Wednesday. It can do that for you. And you can use that as a tool. So all these things apply to your personal life. You need to make sure that you execute them. It doesn't make sense to read it and say, oh, these are good ideas and not execute them. In your personal life, you can set personal goals, whether it's a fitness goal, whether it's a marriage goal, whether it's a family goal, whether it's a financial goal. You need to set those goals and you need to constantly review them and adjust them and adjust them based on the experiences that you have, based on the successes and failures that you have. You need to keep track of them. You need to develop a checklist. Now I'm not saying you need to develop a checklist on what chores you did in the house and how you communicated with your spouse or whatever. Sometimes that's an internal checklist. You need to make sure that in the morning you do X, Y, and Z. You need to apply those, but you need to have a structure. And a lot of times, when you don't have a structure, you get up in the morning, you look at your emails, and you answer the first email in your inbox. That's not accomplishing your objectives. You can use AI to help you narrow down those objectives. You can use your own time and your skills and the fact that you've taken the charmed answer principles and ensure that you are applying them appropriately to the problems that you have and finding the right solutions. I suggest that you develop a checklist with questions you need to ask. What truths am I avoiding? What is out there that's obvious to others that I'm not seeing? What am I risking? Is my risk appropriate? Have a checklist so that you go down through it and you review it weekly. You go down and review it and say, am I accomplishing these? Have I answered these questions? Analyzing your risk, making sure your product fits. Now, a lot of times you'll have somebody that's over here developing a product and a concept, but they don't have the back office to develop it, or they don't have the finances to develop it, or they don't have the sales team to sell it. I had a situation where the scientists had developed a product, and it was an extract of quinoa that became a high was a high protein extract that had the mouthfeel of fat. So it was a great product. It had fat texture, which people like, but it had the benefits of being a protein. So they developed a business plan. This was with one of the universities, and the business plan had no touch with reality. They were going to take it and then they were going to capture 30% of the protein market in a three-year period. Well, they couldn't do that because they couldn't produce enough quinoa to do that. They couldn't produce enough product. And if they did, the price of the quinoa would go through the roof because there's such a rapid increase in demand. So they it made sense on paper, but in reality, it didn't make sense. You had to apply the reality of agriculture in this case and what the restraints were, what were the roadblocks. And when they realized that those roadblocks, they didn't change their plan. They just kept saying we should be able to capture 30% of the protein market. That product, that concept, that scientific breakthrough never went anywhere because they put up these roadblocks in their minds that they should be able to accomplish this percentage of the market. And they couldn't sell that idea to anybody because they're like, that's impossible. There's no way you can make the production work with that. So there's a bottleneck that you weren't addressing. So by having a checklist that allows you to go back through it, you can find those bottlenecks. You need to protect your blocks. You need to protect your blocks of time. You need to be able to say every morning or every evening, depending on whether you're a day person or a night person, every day and every morning, I'm going to do this. I'm going to spend my time doing this and block it out. Like I say, turn off your computer, turn off your WhatsApp, turn off your Instagram. Don't spend your time responding to people. Make sure that you have a time to break away from everything and think. I recommend you do it every day. Sometimes you do it once a week, short periods of time where I'm just thinking about the problems. I'm thinking about the structure of the problems. I'm thinking about the actions that I need to take to overcome that structure or to take that structure and use it to my advantage. So, in closing, in the next seven days, here's three critical steps you should take. Take some time and block it off. Block it off every day. I'm an idol. I could block off between 10 and 11 o'clock at night. I could block off that time where I'm just focused on this particular Particular business. Or I could do it in the middle of the day, or you could do it in the morning, whatever makes sense. But you need to do it in a time where you have few interruptions so that you can focus. And somebody with ADD, somebody like myself, who have all these different ideas, taking the time to focus is tough. You know, I used to have a problem when I'd write a book or write a sentence or write a paragraph. I'd write a sentence and I go, wait, over here I've got to do this, and then I got to do that. If you look at my computer, I'll have 15 windows open. Now, that's when I'm working during the day. When I stop and focus, I go into immense concentration mode. I close those things off. I turn them down, whatever it is so that I can focus on what I need to look at the structural organization, look at the big picture, not just the small details. It's another thing you need to do is spend five minutes a day reviewing the charm dance principles. Have them written by your phone, have them written down. Did you communicate effectively? Were you honest in your communications? Did you have appropriate quality? Did you know the markets? You know what details you need to address? What advantages? You need to say, what advantages did I have today? And do I need to strengthen some of my weaknesses to make them advantages? Networking. Did I reach out to the people? Who did I reach out to today? Did I reach out to the people that were of value to me, that helped my business or helped my personal relationships or helped me achieve my goals? Did I address the customers? Whether the customers are somebody that's buying from you, whether the customer is a bank that you're trying to sell your program to or an investor, whether the customer is your spouse or your family, did I address their needs? How did I address what they needed to help me accomplish what I want? The best way for you to get what you want is to help others get what they want. So did I address their needs and in that process accomplish my objectives? And then finally, did I execute? Did I actually do what I said I was going to do? And you wake up the next day and you say, dang, I didn't execute. I didn't execute these points. So you put them onto your list the next day and you carry them forward and you emphasize them and accomplish those first. Stay tuned with this next week. Be sure to subscribe, share, and like. And we'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

So that's it for today's episode of Ten Keys to Thrive. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. Be sure to head on over to tenkeys to thrive.com to pick up a free copy of Jim's gift. And join us on the next episode.