You get more of what you focus on

“The world is a looking glass. It gives back to you a true reflection of your own thoughts” – Siddhartha

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I may have lost my balls.
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Earlier this year, while I was in the process of starting a supplement brand, I found myself, for the first time in my career… worried.
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Truly, genuinely worried.
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For about two weeks, my daily routine looked something like this:
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Sit down at coffee shop.
Open Claude.
Spend 4 hours overanalyzing theoretical projections about startup capital, burn rate, CAC, TAM, and a whole bunch of other guessed-at metrics that were probably wrong anyway, until my brain felt like applesauce
Repeat in the afternoon, and then again the next day.

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Finally, a buddy of mine who runs a 3M/mo e-com brand sent me a text that turned my mind right-side-up:
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“Dude, you gotta stop finding reasons why it won’t work, and start finding reasons why it will.”
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In my defense, the supplement brand will take a 6-figure investment and ~12 months of brutal work just to find out if it will even work.
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But that makes his advice more important, not less.
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When the stakes are highest, and our mind is full of worry and doubt and all the ways it could go wrong…
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…Is exactly when we most need to redouble our focus on all the ways it can go right.
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It’s a simple principle that is far too easy to forget:
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We get more of what we focus on.
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Our attention is like a magnifying glass that makes whatever we look at larger, until it fills our mind and then our reality.
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That’s why chronically negative people never seem to talk about anything positive:
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They’re so fixated on the negative they literally can’t see anything else, so negativity becomes their entire world.
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Last week, I gave a Q & A at a local business school.
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And, for the 10th year in a row, a student asked:
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“How did you overcome your fear of failure when you were starting your first business?”
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And, for the 10th year in a row, I replied:
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“I don’t remember being afraid of it. All I remember is being excited about what it could be.”
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Truth be told, there wasn’t much genius to it.
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Mostly just hormones and naive delusion.
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But since I was too inexperienced to know what could go wrong, all I thought about was what what could go right.
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And I think that’s one of the biggest reasons why it did.
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• T
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P.S. I spoke about this principle at our retreat this past August. You can watch the full clip here:
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​Stop finding reasons it won’t work and start finding reasons it will​

“Hardly any faculty is more important for the progress of man than attention.” – Charles Darwin