Winning Is Unnatural, Try It And See For Yourself!

How Do You Know What You Do Not Know?

There has not been a business leader that I have met in my 40 year career that did not at one time believe they were naturally made for running a business.  Furthermore, most of them also believed they would win naturally. Not one of them went into business for themselves to lose at business.  They all thought they had what it takes to win doing what they thought they were meant to do.  All of them thought they knew how to win running a business.

I have never met a single business owner who did not think they already knew how to win at business.  Unfortunately, most of them lose.  Very few of them win.  That is what the real financial numbers tell us.  That is what the data supports.  Most business owners lose at the financial game of owning a small business.  Even a tougher reality remains.  Very few business owners produce upper middle class incomes.  Very few.  Those are the realities of owning a small business.  That is what the real honest data tells us.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.  The data supports this assumption.

What is natural on this subject is that most business owners will easily deny that they are some of the ones who lose at the business game.  Denial is natural.  That truth is also very common.

The truth is never really easy to accept.  Some people are good at seeing and accepting the truth when it is not so friendly.  Most people are not good at it.  Unfriendly truths are more likely to be swept under the rug.  Most people avoid them at all costs.  Some of the best business leaders do this kind of dodging of the truth more than they should.  The more they dodge the truth the more it hurts their business performance.  I have seen many business leaders do this kind of pattern and operate for years in the pain of never really winning big.  You can lose in business year after year and never really get it right.  This kind of pattern can be practiced and tolerated for a very long time.  I am watching many business leaders I personally know right now do this very exact thing.  They are leading their models into some unwanted losses and they will not win much more than what they already have won until they change the way they operate what they do.  They remain doing what they naturally believe they should be doing.  They do not yet understand that winning in business is an unnatural act.  As a result, they will continue to hold on to the natural things they feel they need to do.  They will keep on losing.

Winning is not natural.  It is an unnatural thing.  Losing is natural.

If you are a business leader and your results have not yet produced some handsome rewards, your business model may be one of those models that needs to shift how it does what it does.  You may need to change the way you lead the business model you control.  You may need to begin doing some unnatural things.  You might need to learn how to do some things you are not naturally wired to do.  Your victories, your business model and your future success may be waiting on you to make some unnatural changes.  You might be the kind of business leader who does not understand how profound this kind of thinking truly is.  You might be the type of business leader who would rather gloss over the truth and avoid making some unnatural changes in how you function when you lead your business model.  If so, keep up the natural stuff.  Just get used to losing more often.

Winning is unnatural.  It is an unnatural act.  If you are not pushing yourself to do unnatural things in your leadership ways, you may be one of those people leading a losing business model.  Nobody naturally gets lucky and wins consistently.  Nobody wins consistently doing natural things.  Accept it and move on.

Winning is unnatural, try it and see for yourself.

How Do You Know What You Do Not Know?

I once shared with the readers in a previous post the business mentor that once asked me this question, "How do you know what you don't know?"  It was one of his favorite reminders.

It is next to impossible to truly know something that is unknown.  Many of us do things we do not know hurts us.  We do not have the depth of that information arranged in our cycle of knowledge, yet.  As a result, we do not know what we do not know.  Therefore we do some things in our leadership ways that do not help our business models and we do not even know we are the cause of those unwanted results we produce.  How do you know what you do not know?

I meet a lot of business owners who function consistently in areas of decision-making where they think they know and understand what to do.  Those business owners remain attached to these kinds of wrong approaches because they can easily define them.  They also remain attached to them because they do not know better.  This happens even though many of those wrong approaches continue to produce failing results.  Those business leaders remain steadfast on doing them because that is all they know.  Those actions become part of what we naturally know.  We do what we know, even if it hurts or fails us.  That is what we do best.  We do the things we know how to do.  We do most the kinds of things we feel are the most natural in doing.  That is why most business leaders continue to lose at what they do.  They never feel comfortable at doing the unnatural things that need to be done.  Instead, they practice doing what comes naturally.  It 'feels' better.  It 'feels' natural.

I love to help those business leaders who want to change the outcomes they no longer enjoy producing.  I step up to the plate and begin to dig in when I bump into a business leader who is ready to make some tough changes.  I like those kinds of business leaders.  They are usually the ones who win more often.  I like to hang around winning more than I like losing.  That is why I am always searching for the next business leader to help.  Unfortunately, most business leaders will convince their mind that they do not need any help.  They do not recognize how badly they love to hang close to the things that 'feel' good.  They do not truly know how badly they are imprisoned by the things they naturally know.  They become sold on themselves, their ways and they accept their results as if they are part of the lot in which they must learn how to endure.  It is one of the most common patterns I witness in 'self-taught' business leaders.  They do what comes natural.  Then they lose.

Getting business leaders to change how they feel about what they do is one of the toughest challenges to perform.  We do not always know the things that we do that are not the best things to do.  We do the things that we do because those things feel right.  We like how they feel.  That is exactly why we repeat doing them.  We like how they feel.  We use our feelings to do the things we like to do.  Unfortunately, that is not how a successful business leader does the right kinds of things.

I hate taking inventory, especially of my leadership and my most recent wrong decisions.  I will often open up the flood gates of criticism to my most trusted associates and ask them if they think my leadership is running on the right trail.  I will have them share with me what they see and believe.  Often times it is not something that comes back very friendly.  Some of them will share some startling observations with me.  They will see some stuff I totally missed.  I can assure you that many times I did not like what I heard.  It did not make me feel very good.  I prefer to avoid that kind of stuff.  So do you.  We all have a line of limits on this kind of inventory.  We do not like to do the things that make us feel uncomfortable.  Unfortunately, many of those uncomfortable things are the right kinds of things to do.  We just learn how to avoid them.  They do not make us feel good.

Feeling good is a natural process.  We know what makes us feel good.  It is a natural thing.  We gravitate closer to the things that make us feel good.  It is one of the most natural things a business leader does.  It is also one of the most common ways we fail to win often.  That is why we can find plenty of support to explain why winning is unnatural.  Winning tends to support some unnatural ways.  Winning consistently means we must do plenty of unnatural things more often than not to produce the kinds of results that land better than not.  Winning is unnatural.  It sometimes comes from the things that sting us.

We learn a lot of very effective lessons from our stings in life.  That is how winning gets its start.  We sting our way to victory.  We sting our way through the school of hard knocks.  That is where some of the best business classes appear.  That is where we discover how we did not know what we should have known.  Winning is unnatural.  It comes from things that do not necessarily feel good.  Unnatural things come to the surface and show their face when we discover the trials they suddenly deliver.  They come to correct how we do the wrong things we thought were right.  They come to adjust how we felt good about doing what was wrong to do, mainly because we did not know it was wrong to do.  Winning is unnatural.  Try it sometime.  See for yourself.  Go find the right ways to operate and do them even if they come unnaturally to they way you normally feel.  Winning is unnatural.

Until next time...