#288 – Lessons From Expressions – Things Learned In Business And Life
In episode 288 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim talks about:
- 04:00 – Tim’s Southern Expressions
- 05:00 – How These Expressions Influenced His Life
- 06:15 – “Measure Twice, Cut Once”
- 07:30 – For You To Speed Up, You Have To Slow Down
- 08:00 – “If You Do It Right The First Time, You Only Cry Once.”
- 08:40 – A Lesson From Tim’s First Private Label Product
- 13:00 – “You Can’t Put A Lipstick On A Pig.”
- 14:10 – Making Decisions Based On Emotion And Not Logic
- 18:20 – “Rivers Don’t Run Straight.”
- 20:00 – Rivers Take The Path Of Least Resistance
- 24:00 – Here’s The Truth…
- 27:30 – Small Businesses Are Changing Commerce
- 29:00 – Learn From The Mistakes Of Others
Transcript
Tim Jordan:
A lot of people say I’d like to write a book one day. And we think about things we might write a book about. We think about past experiences, we think about anecdotes. We think about stories that have happened to us. I wish that I had been jotting down expressions, these funny little quirky little sayings that I’ve heard, especially in the south. Some of these are funny. Some of these are sometimes inappropriate, but a lot of them have stuck in my head as valuable lessons. In this episode, I’m gonna be sharing some of my favorite expressions with you, what they mean to me and why they should be considered when you’re figuring out how to run your business. It’s gonna be a good episode. Listen to the end. Here we go. Hi, I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous, and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.
Tim Jordan:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the episode of the AM/PM podcast. I’m your host, Tim Jordan. And today it’s a solo episode. I know a lot of you like solo episodes, but I have to be honest with you. It was not supposed to be a solo episode. I had two or three people scheduled to record in the studio this week. And I ended up having to come to sunny Los Angeles. So I’m here in LA and I’m here for an event and needed to put a podcast together. And I had a list of things that I was going to talk about and things that I could talk about and things that would be valuable. But last night I was at dinner with a bunch of other Amazon sellers and service providers, just people in the industry. And we’re sitting around about 12 of us having dinner and we’re having great conversation.
Tim Jordan:
And several people laughed at something I said, and I said, what’s so funny. They said, what did you just say? And I realized, I’d use an expression, an anecdote. And apparently, some of my expressions are fairly lively. They’re fairly colorful, I would say. And a lot of the expressions that I have that I use even on a regular basis, come from people in the south, right? People in the Southeast US, those of you in the US, you know what I’m talking about for those of you that may be listening internationally, we have our own little flare, sometimes little hillbilly ish, a little bit redneck sometimes. And some of those expressions are hard to understand if you don’t understand the context. And sometimes I catch myself explaining those, but I have heard a ton. I used to work for the fire department fire station for 10 years.
Tim Jordan:
And I would sit around with a bunch of older Southern guys. And some of the stuff that they’d say is maybe some of the funniest things I’ve ever heard in my life, but some of those expressions and anecdotes were used as learning or as a reminder of something, or to help me understand a concept. And my old grandfather, old grandfather had some of the best expressions that have stuck with me for all 36 years of my life. And when I was sitting at dinner last night, thinking about these expressions, I started to think, these have had an impact on me. These have had an impact on the way I think about things, the way that I handle relationships, and the way that I approach problems, I thought I should do a podcast episode about expressions that help shape our lives, right? These expressions and these lessons that come from them.
Tim Jordan:
So in this episode, I wanna share a few of my favorites. I’m gonna talk about why they have been important to me and the lessons that I use from them on a daily basis almost. And they are definitely lessons that a lot of you could maybe take note of. I won’t say you need to learn these lessons. You need to do these things, but there are things to ponder and there are things you consider. You know, I get to run around in this crazy entrepreneurial world and talk to a lot of people. And a lot of us are the same, right? We’re equally passionate. We’re equally ambitious. A lot of people are much smarter me, but we all often run into the same problems. We make the same types of mistakes. We have the same struggles. And I feel like if I could maybe share some of those lessons and struggles that I have encountered and learned over the years, that maybe it’s helpful.
Tim Jordan:
So with your permission, I’m gonna share three of my favorite expressions, how they pertain to business maybe mistakes that I’ve made by not following those, or maybe the lessons that I had to learn when I heard those expressions. And we’ll see how that episode goes. I hope you guys enjoy it. And I hope that there’s some value here. So the first expression, there’s actually two expressions that fit this same thought, but the expression is “measure twice cut once”. And I remember working with somebody in my family, we were doing in some sort of construction project and I was in charge of cutting the wood, right? So I would be given a measurement 42 inches, go cut this two by four stud at 42 inches, whatever it’s. And I’d go over there and I’d throw the tape measure on at a magma mark. I’d cut the wood.
Tim Jordan:
And a lot of times I would not cut correctly. And if I cut it too short, it was a problem. Cause I wasted this entire piece of wood. So my, I don’t remember who it was. My uncle, my grandfather came over to me and watched me as I did this, I put the tape measure on, I’d make my mark. I cut the wood, put my tape measure, make the mark cut the wood to solve. And he started realizing that I was making little mistakes. I didn’t have the tape measures said exactly where it was supposed to be. I wasn’t taking my time. I was rushing things. And he told me that. He said you gotta slow down. You gotta slow down. You’re screwing this up. You’re wasting wood because if you cut it a half inch too short, we can’t use it. And then we have to try to use it somewhere else.
Tim Jordan:
Like you’re, you’re wasting money. I said, yeah, but you guys are pushing me. Like everybody’s waiting on me to hurry. I have to hurry. I have to hurry. And he says, if you want to hurry up, it’s better to slow down measure twice, and cut once. And basically what he was saying was you have to speed up or to speed up, you have to slow down. Right? And I realized that by trying to shave off one second of this task, measuring and cutting, I was making so many mistakes that I was actually slowing us down. So what he was saying is measure twice, cut once, because you can measure twice without any risk. You’re not losing anything. You’re not actually making a decision to cut that wood. You’re measuring twice. But once you cut it’s definite, the other expression that goes along with this is if you do it right the first time, you only cry once
Tim Jordan:
I love that expression. If you do it right the first time, you only cry once. What that means is if you’re taking on a project or taking on a task and you do it right the first time, it may be painful. It may be frustrating. It may feel like it’s slow. You may cry trying to get it done because it’s excruciatingly painful to do it right. But if you do it right the first time, you only cry once. Meaning that if you screw it up, you’re gonna cry several times, right? If you don’t do it right, the first time, you’re gonna have a, a lot bigger problems further on the road. And these expressions stuck with me measure twice, cut once, do around the first time. You only cry once. And I have not followed that advice. A lot of times in my life.
Tim Jordan:
And many times I forgot that advice. And it’s been painful when I think about actual eCommerce business. When I first got started, one of the biggest mistakes that I made was the very first e-commerce product that I launched. Well, I shouldn’t say first e-commerce product. First private label product that I launched. And it was an emergency car hammer. Some of you heard me talk about that in these little hammers that you put in the glove box of your car that can break tempered glass. So if you get stuck in your car, if your car goes underwater and you can’t break the window out, which by the way, it’s very hard to break a tempered has car window. This little device does that. And I was looking on Amazon. I was seeing people selling a ton of these. I thought this is super easy. Like this would be very easy to produce.
Tim Jordan:
And I used my source engage in China and we found the same factory and we bought these things and I rushed it. I was so excited. I did not measure twice. I measured once. And I measured once in a couple things. One was the competitive reason search, right? Is this competitive? Can I sell this? Is this something that is going to be ridiculously difficult to compete with? I was only looking at the sales volume of the couple leading sellers. I was only measuring one piece of data. I was only getting one piece of information. I wasn’t measuring the entire scenario before I cut or made my decision to actually purchase half a container of these things and ship em in. And I remember thinking that this was going to make me rich. I was gonna make a ton of money on this because I found the golden product, or I didn’t wanna wait.
Tim Jordan:
I didn’t wanna take any longer doing research. I didn’t wanna spend any more time trying to figure out what products gonna be. I knew what product it was gonna be. I had, it was my product. Well, I spent a lot of money Shipp, these things in loaded. ’em Up on Amazon to somebody else’s listing, cuz I also didn’t measure this concept of intellectual property and hijacking and all of these things. So it was the same product. It just didn’t have little brand sticker on it. So of course I started selling these things. I was selling 100 a day, 200 a day. It was going great until the complaints came in. Amazon not only stopped my sales, but they held up all of my money. So they held up like $150,000. Cause although it was my first private label product, I’d been selling wholesale for a long time and held up all my money.
Tim Jordan:
My account was suspended for a legitimate. IP complaint, counterfeit complain. When I look back at that, it’s similar to a lot of other mistakes I’ve made in life. I rush things. And the reason I rush things is I’m excited, I’m ambitious, I’m ready to get going. And I talk to people all the time in this private label, space, coaching students or consulting clients that feel like things are taking too long, right? It’s my second month of doing product research. I just need my product, right? We need to figure out this marketing campaign because it is just taking too long. We just need to launch this thing. Like why should we sit around and try to get more opinions and more advice? And this thing, like, let’s just get it going. And I have to stop some people and I’ve stopped myself and say, listen. And like, we can rush this thing or we can slow down.
Tim Jordan:
And if we slow down and do it now it’s gonna be painful. We’re gonna cry right now. Right. It’s gonna hurt us to spend so much time making sure we get this right. But if we do it right, then we only cry once, and this is it. The rest of the time, we should have a lot better success. I know the, that my analogy makes sense with the, with the car hammers and maybe with a marketing campaign. But I think that it goes with a lot of other things, right? We’ve talked a lot about this podcast about how business is not just selling products. It’s about selling things. It’s about building relationships. Some of the most valuable pieces of information I’ve ever learned and biggest successes I’ve ever had in this space is from relationships. And I see myself a lot of times making rash decisions with relationships, maybe I’ll trust this person instantly, or maybe I’m gonna get really upset or frustrated about this comment that somebody made.
Tim Jordan:
Right? I don’t slow down. I don’t take a breath. I don’t ponder this. I don’t measure the situation twice, but I go ahead and cut that wood. I say something that shouldn’t, I treat somebody unfairly. I miss a big opportunity. I throw a relationship away. I jump into early and trust somebody without measuring the actual value of that relationship and the trustworthiness of that person made a lot of mistakes. So that’s 0.1 Southern expressions. You have to sometimes slow down to speed up because if you do right the first time, you only cry once and you have to measure twice and cut once. The second expression that I love is that you “can’t put lipstick on a pig”. Now I’ve used this expression before, especially with folks that aren’t from the US thing. What are you talking about? You can’t put lipstick on a pig.
Tim Jordan:
And what this expression means is if I take a pig, which some of you may love pigs, but pigs are not always known as cute animals, right? They’re covered in mud. They’re pink, they’re squishy. They’re kind of gross. And if you put lipstick on it, if you try to beautify this pig, if you try to make this pig beautiful, it’s still a pig, right? Like it’s still a pig. And we see ourselves doing this all the time with the products of the services that we sell. I can’t tell you how many times I took a product that was just pure crap. It was junk. It was not something I should be selling. The product sucked itself. It was too competitive. It wasn’t a good opportunity. And I kept telling myself if I just fix one thing, if I get my ACoS down on my PPC campaign, by 5%, if I just get a better marketing campaign, if I get one more influencer, if I get one more external traffic source, if I make the packaging better, I can make this product success.
Tim Jordan:
And what I sometimes learned the hard way is I was putting lipstick on a pig. I was trying to Polish that thing up and make it pretty. And it was never going to be beautiful. Right? And that’s hard for us because we as emotional creatures, I’m saying that as humans, but especially as entrepreneurs, we get dead set on something, right? We get invested in a specific product or specific category of specific service or specific us model or specific business plan or a revenue stream or whatever it is. And we tell ourselves like, this is it. This is what’s gonna be. And we spend so much time at energy and focus and resources trying to make that work. And we become very emotionally attached to it. Become stubborn. We think there’s no way I can walk away from this. Now I’m so close. Let me put a little lipstick on it. Let me pretty it up. Let me tweak this funnel. Let me the copy just a tiny bit. Let me find one more partnership. Let me find one more affiliate. Let me just try another influencer. Even though the first 42 didn’t work.
Tim Jordan:
And sometimes we have to use logic and not emotion. Now I love emotion. I think that emotion’s amazing for business. I think that entrepreneurs thrive off of emotion and the emotion is what gets us up in the morning, gets us cranked out, gets us rolling, and makes us successful. But we also sometimes make decisions based on too much emotion and not logic. I am terrible about this gut instinct, right? Gut instinct can be good, but you gotta well measure twice and cut once. Oh my goodness, here we go. Back to first profession. But my point is
Tim Jordan:
We also get frustrated and we get frustrated cuz things aren’t working and get discouraged and we get run down and we get worn out because all this effort that we’re putting in isn’t working and we beat ourselves up. I can’t figure out how to write the copy. I can’t figure out the marketing campaign. I can’t figure out this, this, this, this, this. And sometimes we need to realize that it’s not us. We’re just putting lipstick on a pig. No matter what we do, we can dress that pig up. however we want to, it’s still gonna be a pig.
Tim Jordan:
And like I said, it’s tough because we get emotionally involved. But my challenge is to take a step back from all of these tasks, all of these projects, all of these products, all these missions that you’re involved with and ask to yourself, is this going well? Is it a great opportunity? Is it not only a great opportunity, but am I succeeding at it? Sometimes that’s a great opportunity. I have to keep going afternoon and is not working. Right. I was recently talking to Norm a partner, Norm Farrar about a project. And we’re so close. We keep saying, oh, we’re so close. We’re so close. It’s gonna, it’s gonna fire off. It’s gonna be massively successful. It’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be great. Like after a year we’re like crap. We made a lot of little adjustments and nothing happened. You have to ask ourselves like are we lipstick on a pig? Like, are we trying to beautify something or fix something that just can’t be beautified beyond a certain point. We just can’t fix it all the way. Sometimes you gotta let that pig go and you gotta go find, I’m trying to think of a pretier animal, a puppy, go find a puppy, cuddle puppy. Right?
Tim Jordan:
I think that one of the best lessons I’ve learned in life is that using logic to identify if an opportunity for product or whatever it is is actually good or not something I’m never going to be good at. I’m never gonna be able to emotionally make that decision. I’m sorry. Logically make that decision because of my emotion. So one thing I’ve started doing is asking other people, Hey, let me get your opinion. Is this thing a pig? Is this thing dead? Is this a bad opportunity? Is this not gonna work? Like tell me what you think. Logically, this issue that I’ve been discussing with norm lately, like we had a conversation yesterday and said, Hey, you and I feel different about this, but maybe we’re both wrong. Let’s get some outside resources. Let’s find people that are better at this topic of expertise than we are and help us make the decision. Because maybe we’re trying to put lipstick on a pig or maybe we’re both thinking the other one has a pig and we have the puppy, right?
Tim Jordan:
So I guess that’s my challenge from this expression. Ask yourself if something’s not working perfectly for struggling, if it’s not particularly easy and you think it should be, are you putting lipstick on a pig? And if you can’t decide, if this is really a pig or not go ask somebody else, ask a colleague, ask an outside resource, ask a peer, ask the audience, right? Like if you think that your product’s amazing, you just need better packaging and that didn’t work and you better copy that didn’t work , go to PickFu, run PickFu poll, and ask random strangers. What have I got here? Is this good? Is this something you’d buy? Would you pay this price for, do you find value in this? Do you like this? Let them tell you so quit trying to put lipstick on a pig. All right, next expression is that “rivers don’t run straight”.
Tim Jordan:
Now, this is actually a topic that I recently covered in a high level mastermind talking about product roadmaps, right? And they asked me to come in and talk about the roadmap to build a brand for my product. All right, you’re an Amazon seller. How do we build a real legit brand off of this? What are the steps? What are the 42 steps to go from Amazon product to real legitimate brand? And when I did this presentation, I had to go to them and say like, you’re not gonna like my answer, but you need to hear the answer. It’s not the answer you want, but it’s the answer you need. And at the end of this entire thing, basically, the answer I gave was there is no roadmap. I can’t give you a roadmap. Every product is different. Every seller’s different. Every amount of resources is different.
Tim Jordan:
Every skill’s different. Every market is different. There’s no way to tell you how to take an Amazon product and turn it into a real brand. You can’t do it. It’s impossible, there’s not one roadmap. But when I was actually going through this whole concept and I was doing a lot of research myself, figuring out, well, why can’t you? Can you, it like, am I crazy? Or am I onto something? But if I’m onto something by making a statement that you can’t specifically build a roadmap, like why is that? What are the components of this whole scenario that make it impossible to build that roadmap? And one thing that I learned was this expression or this analogy about rivers and the analogy basically says that a river is transporting water, okay. A river’s water’s running through it. There’s some sort of goal that’s being accomplished.
Tim Jordan:
Moving that water from one point downhill to another, and those rivers don’t run in straight lines. They don’t. And the reason they don’t run in straight lines is because they need to take the path of least resistance. A river is going to run around Hills. It’s gonna run around mountain. It’s gonna run around things. It’s gonna move downhill, not uphill. Right? So if I look at say the Tennessee river that runs from Knoxville all the way to the Mississippi river, that thing takes all sorts of crazy terms and jives and moves. Look at the largest river in the US, the Mississippi river. I fly over that thing all the time. And it’s huge. And it takes back loops and loopy dues and figure rates. It seems like there’s nothing straight about that river, but it flows. And it flowed that way in that shape because that was the path of least resistance.
Tim Jordan:
I think that a lot of times in business, and I guess you could say in life in general, we forget that and we try to make river straight. We try to make our tasks, our objectives, and projects linear. We try to build that out road and we try to make it as straight as possible. And sometimes using the road analogy, the building road analogy, we have to bore through a mountain. We have to build a tunnel. We have to go up steep Hills and we’re dead set on looking at that point in the farthest distance and saying, I’m gonna go there in the shortest route possible, no matter what it takes hell or high water, I’m getting there and I’m going straight there. I don’t care what obstacles in my way and don’t care what challenging I’m getting there. And what I’ve learned in business is sometimes that’s brutal.
Tim Jordan:
It’ll beat you down. We can still get to that point. We can still get to that endpoint. And it might take a longer route. Because we’re gonna make some curves and we’re gonna make some turns and we’re gonna round obstacles. We need to run like a river. The path of least resist since sometimes seems daunting. It seems like it’s gonna be forever. The Mississippi river. If you stretch that thing out in a straight line, it’s probably twice as long as we think it is because of all the different backtracks and routes and curves it takes. But it got there. We can use this analogy for a lot of things in e-commerce. We can use it for building brand roadmaps. We can build it for our actual success, right? Like how do we succeed in e-commerce when we find a product and we start selling it and we find a second product and we start selling it.
Tim Jordan:
A lot of times, we make the mistake of finding our first product. That’s in demand with low competition, we start selling it. We get some tracks and we think, all right, this is it. Here’s my road. I’m gonna take this product. I’m gonna move it to brand with 12 products in the category and D to C website, and I’m gonna sell this brand in the, then we get dead set on boring through that mountain, right? Or going up that hill or going through that difficult terrain by adding a second product and a second product and second product, or second, third, fourth, fifth product in that brand. And we try to build that straight line. When the end of that road is not necessarily having a brand with 12 products in a D to C website, maybe the end of that road is just making money, right?
Tim Jordan:
Selling products, remove the emotion out of it. Remove the fact that you absolutely love crazy cat sweaters. And that’s what you to sell. We wanna make money. That’s being the road. And if we start meandering, sometimes take the path at least resistance, instead of fighting our way up the steep hill, going over the top of the mountain, let’s go around it, going out it may be saying, right, I’m getting off the path of this specific niche. I’m not gonna add a complimentary product. This first one, maybe the path of least resistance finding, sell the product over here and circling around this way. And yeah, we’d love to sell on Facebook, but Facebook ads are tough. Maybe the path of least resistance is run ads on Bing, right? Bing, maybe we run Bing ads and it doesn’t look like it’s the highest amount of success, but it’s easy because nobody else run ads on Bing.
Tim Jordan:
And our product is great for an older clientele and everybody uses Bing, right? That’s an older clientele like it works. And there’s a lot of different detours and reroutes that we can take that seem like we’re going the long way around, but it’s not as heavy of a lift. Rivers don’t run straight and neither should we, when I look at a lot of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made in business it’s cuz I was thinking hardheaded, I was stubborn. And I was then thinking that the shortest path was the best and here’s the truth. We don’t have the resources. Now there may be 2% of you listen to the podcast that do have the resources about something crazy. But the rest of you, listen, we don’t have the resources to mine, tunnels, and crawl steep Hills, go through tough terrain because most of us are small businesses.
Tim Jordan:
We’re solopreneurs. We have to be the CEO, the CTO, the CMO. We have to be the president, the vice president. We have to be the janitor. We have to be the shipping clerk. We have to be the secretary. We have to be everything. And we just don’t have time for it. We also can’t learn everything. We don’t have all the expertise. Yeah. It’s easy to look at a, an objective like selling a product or selling a service, say, oh yeah, I’m gonna run ads on all these things. I’m gonna have faced book ads and TikTok ads. And this, this is in Google ads and I’m gonna do this. And the answer. Look, we suck. Sometimes when I say we suck, like we suck at thinking, we can do everything. And we have limited resources. We have limited time. We have limited skill sets because we can’t do everything.
Tim Jordan:
And we don’t have the muscle to climb that mountain or go through that swamp or bore a hole through that difficult to ring. Like we need to realize that we are not a giant construction company. We’re walking. All right, we’re walking, we’re making a walking path. We’re not building a giant interstate road. And if we’re walking, we need to take the path, least resistance. We need to realize we don’t have all the tools and resources that we need to make that heavy lift. And it’s frustrating because as entrepreneurs, we’re ambitious, we wanna tackle everything. We wanna be able to accomplish everything. And that’s what makes us entrepreneurs. One of the things like it gives us the guts to try things that have never been tried. But I do think that sometimes we have to take a step back, use a little bit of humility and say, can we actually do this?
Tim Jordan:
And if we can’t, if we can’t do everything, if we don’t have a 50 person marketing team and a 20 person OPS like we’re going to have to sneak around, right? We’re gonna have to figure out how to like sneak around these obstacles and do things the easiest way possible because we just can’t make the heavy lift. When I look at e-commerce and I look at digital marketing, kind of the two primary categories this audience is in, it’s amazing what we become. I’ve talked a lot lately to groups and events about how we, the small guys, the small businesses, the ones that didn’t expect to be in these positions that we are, are literally changing e-Commerce changing commerce. I’ll say forever, like 3000 years, commerce has done the same way. Boom, ‘90, 2000’s internet comes out and the world has changed and commerce will never be the same.
Tim Jordan:
And even though I beat us up and I say, Hey, we put lipstick on pigs and Hey, we screw up and we make rash decisions and we make mistakes. Hey, like we have to take the path at least resistance, even if it’s the longer route because we don’t have the muscle and the fortitude and the resources, the ability to make this really difficult journey and the straight line that we want to, I don’t wanna be discouraging on encouraging cuz we are changing commerce. What’s really cool is we are making an impact for selves our lives, the world, by being those small sellers, those small marketers, those small entrepreneurs, but there’s a million of us, millions of us. So I’ll say so I don’t wanna be discouraging and say like, Hey, we suck at being people because we struggle as entrepreneurs. No, let me give you encouragement.
Tim Jordan:
We are massively powerful as individuals, as humans because the things that frustrate us, the things that make us stubborn and hardheaded and wanna do things the wrong way are also partnered with the things that make us amazing. We’re the ones that think outside of the box, we get creative we’re problem solvers. We take risks. We’re ambitious. And as a whole, and as individuals, we make a lot of change. We make a lot of impact. So I do wanna be encouraging, but if you’re discouraged, if you’re frustrated, if you’re trying to figure out this whole business life entrepreneurial thing, and you’re running into roadblocks, take these two final thoughts. We are changing commerce forever and it’s not the brands. It’s not the giant D to C companies and it’s not the nests and Mattels that are changing commerce forever, It’s us, Now we use big resources like the behemoth of Amazon or the behemoth of Walmart or the behemoth of Google, but they’re not actually making the change. They’re just facilitating our ability to make the change. So here’s the two points. One is you are awesome. The abilities that you have, the creativity that you have, and we as a community, the power that we have to make better lives for ourselves and whatever objective you have, right? Have more time, create more wealth have more opportunities is great. But if you’re frustrated in doing those things, I ask you to ask yourself the three questions.
Tim Jordan:
Are you putting lipstick on a pig? Are you failing to measure twice before you cut once? And are you trying to force a straight line when you should be more like the meandering river and take the path of least resistance? Those are your three questions. I know that this episode’s a little bit preachy almost like I’m kind of getting on some rants here. And maybe I talked to myself in a couple of circles, but I like sharing personal experiences. Right? And many of you love these types of episodes where I just talk, I just kind of pour my heart out. But if there’s value in this episode, if there’s some tips or tricks that you’ve learned from this, I promise it’s not. Cause I’m super smart. I would say it’s because I’ve made all these mistakes, I’ve screwed up. I’ve done some dumb stuff in business.
Tim Jordan:
I’ve had heartaches, I’ve had heartbreaks, I’ve lost a ton of money. And other people around me are the ones that teach me these lessons, right? It’s the other business owners. It’s the other people that I see at conferences or the people in the masterminds that I’m in. But it’s also these old redneck firefighters that I worked with or my old grandpa that are giving me life lessons and I think that when I try to utilize humility and try to exercise is humility and listen to other people and learn from the mistakes of others and realize that, yeah, I’m special because I’m an entrepreneur. Like I’m a hustler, but there’s a lot of things that I’m gonna do wrong. If I can learn from those mistakes from others and take that advice. I think that I am learning to be much more successful because of that.
Tim Jordan:
So I challenge you to do the same thing. Listen to Sage wisdom, read books, listen to good podcasts, go meet people and create peer groups, and surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Understand that when you have a tough day and you’re frustrated and you feel like you’re never gonna anything, right. Everybody else is in that position too. We’ve all been there. We’re there all the time. Constantly, some of the most quote unquote successful people in this business. Talk to me on a regular basis. And sometimes we just cry our heart outs and we complain and we beat ourselves up, cuz that’s just perfectly normal. But we as a community of individuals that make up this amazing cohort, this amazing kind revel evolution of e-com entrepreneurs are making massive changes in the world and making a lot of success for ourselves too.
Tim Jordan:
So again, hope I haven’t been too preachy today. I hope that I’ve given you some good advice. I hope that I’ve maybe been encouraging. Maybe can help you ask some of those questions. That’ll help you fix some of your frustrations in life. If you like this episode, please leave us for a review. You go to ampmpodcast.com and check out all the other reviews. We’re on every platform, whether it’s Amazon music or iTunes or Spotify, all that good stuff. And if you would go to YouTube and we release the video versions of these and leave some comments on YouTube if you have any questions if you have any thoughts, I’d love for you to do that, go to YouTube right now, go to the comments of this video, drop us some questions, some thoughts I’m gonna, I’m gonna watch this video, the comments I’m gonna see what you guys think. Tell me what you agree. Tell me what you disagree on. And if you’ve got any expressions that you’ve heard before, let me know what those are. I sure appreciate it. I appreciate all of you listening as always. We’ll see you guys on the next episode.
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