If I could give one key piece of advice to small business owners it would be this: don’t win the moment at the expense of the decade.
In December 2023 I read a book that sent me on a spiral and honestly made me re-think my life.
I don’t say that to be facetious, I actually had about a week-long crisis and spent my Christmas break brain-dumping and re-evaluating my life at a coffee shop every day 😆
The book was Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish.
Allow me to offer you a little snippet of the book intro:
“All the successful execution in the world is worthless if it’s not in service of the right outcome… What happens in everyday moments determines your future… These ordinary moments often matter more to our success than the big decisions… Each moment puts you in a better or worse position to handle the future. It’s that positioning that eventually makes life easier or harder. A good position allows you to think clearly rather than be forces by circumstances into a decision. Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned… No one tries to win the moment at the expense of the decade, and yet that is often how it goes.
This book led me to choose “position” as my word for 2024. My goal was to focus ruthlessly on the everyday ordinary moments to ensure that I was putting myself in a good position.
And what happened in the process, is that I realized the ordinary everyday moments I was living, were not moments I wanted to continue to live for the foreseeable future.
“All the successful execution in the world is worthless if it’s not in service of the right outcome.”
I was successfully executing in my business, but I was not serving the right outcome and I knew it. I was just taking actions on autopilot.
I had to make a big decision to realign myself and open up opportunities for new, different, ordinary everyday moments to take place.
And that’s when everything started to snowball for me.
So many of us are living our life on autopilot. The decisions we make everyday are just the decisions we have been making for a long time.
Even in business.
We speak to our spouse in a certain way by default because it’s just the way we’ve always talked to each other.
We parent our children in a certain way just because it’s how we’ve always thought things are done.
We use freebies to get people on our email list because it’s what everyone has done before us.
We optimize our landing pages for high opt-ins and pour hours into our sales pages because it’s what we’ve always known.
What would happen if we did things differently?
What if we didn’t write our copy the way we always have?
What if we stopped tracking the metrics we’ve always tracked?
What if we stopped focusing so much on sales even though we can’t think of an alternative thing to focus on?
Things would change, that’s for sure. And maybe we can’t predict how they would change, we just know our results would be different.
That might feel a little unsettling at first. AND it’s worth it.
“Don’t win the moment at the expense of the decade”
Here’s what winning the moment might look like for a lot of small businesses:
- achieving a mind-blowing success story of how quickly you scaled your business so you can use it to get people to buy your offer and see you as credible
- getting a bunch of followers on Instagram
- thousands of people on your email list built with freebies
- a funnel with a predictable 3% conversion rate that you can run a ton of traffic to
All great things, for a time.
The only problem with these things is that in a short while, they will no longer be relevant. The market will change, platforms will come and go, and in 2 years you’ll be searching for a new tactic that will help you win the new moment. Shane Parrish calls this “choosing to live life on hard mode” and I totally agree.
Here’s what your life would look like over a 10-year span:
Time amplifies what you feed it. If you feed it momentary, short-term-goal-oriented decisions, it will amplify how short-term the results are. Hence the phrase “winning the moment.”
The opposite is also true. If we feed time compounding, long-term-goal-oriented decisions, it will amplify how long-term the results are. This is called “winning the decade.”
Here’s what winning the decade might look like for some of us:
- a blog post you wrote 6 years ago is the main driver of traffic to your website and growing every month
- you have a solid client referral network because of how well you’ve served your customers. Your audience does a lot of your marketing for you
- someone can take their own unique path from discovery to purchase without ever contacting you because you’ve built out an evergreen world for them to explore
- some people buy every offer you create without even reading about what’s included, just because it’s from you
- your income increases each year, while your required time input decreases, because you took time to focus on quality before quantity
Because you didn’t require an immediate response and return on your effort, here’s what your life would look like over a 10-year span:
Time is the friend of someone who is properly positioned and the enemy of someone poorly positioned.
Your future, the position you hold, is an accumulation of ordinary decisions over time. The daily, seemingly unimpactful moments accumulate to make it easier or harder to accomplish our goals over time.
Don’t try to win the moment at the expense of the decade.
It’s hard, deliberate work but it’ll be so worth it.
If your brain is tingling and you’re thinking you’d like this book, you’re probably right haha. The graphs and business application in this email are mine, but the concept of positioning is all from the book.
Here are a couple articles from Shane to get your feet wet before you decide if you want to jump in:
Playing on Hard Mode
The Small Steps of Giant Leaps
And here are a few articles from yours truly to help bring this concept to life in a business context:
Why I stopped using lead magnets, and what I do instead
What is a Brand World? An intro to worldbuilding for small businesses