Mikey Musumeci is a slightly-built, bespectacled 26-year-old who looks like a harmless mathlete.
But he is in fact a world champion Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter who can choke hold his opponent to submission in seconds.
Much of Mikey’s life is mundane and boring. He wakes up at the same time every day. He eats the same breakfast. He works out. He doesn’t take any days off, ever.
This boring routine, to which he has patiently clung for much of his short life, has given him the foundation of fitness, strength, and technical skill required to be world class.
Which brings me to insight #1 about pursuing big revenue goals and building something that is both worthwhile and world class.
Setting a big goal requires more time than you think, more patience than you realize, and the ability to fall in love with boredom and mundane work.
But that alone isn’t enough.
Because in order for Mikey to be a world champion, he must periodically summon every ounce of power, explosiveness, agility and technical proficiency he thinks he has – and then dig deep for 20% more – then UNLEASH inside the ring for a five minute round of brutal, high intensity work. These five minute bursts will challenge him deeply, make him question who he is, make him want to quit…and likely be among the things he remembers most fondly on his deathbed.
Which brings me to insight #2 about pursuing big revenue goals and building something that is both worthwhile and world class.
You must balance the boring, routine and mundane work with an ability to summon high amounts of intensity when necessary.
There is a word in the English language that perfectly describes the ability to balance both a nun-like acceptance of the boring and mundane WITH a Wonder Woman-like ability to channel bursts of fierce intensity.
Grit.
Over the last few years, my team and I have gathered thousands of data points about how women entrepreneurs set, commit to, and pursue business goals related to growing revenue, reach and impact.
Over the next month or so, I’ll be sharing some of the most significant insights emerging from our research – and how they are shaping the future of Safi Media. Today I’m focusing on just ONE ASPECT of what we’ve learned about how we as women entrepreneurs pursue our big goals.
We have observed a frequent sense of frustration and disappointment in the mundane, boring, endless and long-term reality of pursuing a big and worthwhile goal.
In short, we noticed a pattern in which roughly half of the women entrepreneurs we followed routinely underestimated the compound effect of showing up day after day, month after month.
When confronted with the reality that big goals usually take more time to achieve than they initially believed, some women entrepreneurs will tell themselves “I’m doing it wrong, and my proof is that this is taking too long.”
At best, this adds unnecessary heaviness to the process of achieving their goal. At worst? They either prematurely abandon their goal or switch their strategy, without ever giving either adequate time to work.
Second, we have observed that a meaningful proportion (roughly 25%) of the women entrepreneurs we followed will overestimate the pain associated with the short term bursts of intensity that are required to create something world class.
Our culture is obsessed with “not getting burned out.” Burnout is real! But something else is real: if you are pursuing a big goal, you will absolutely need to put in the work.
So if a woman entrepreneur who experiences the pattern I note above has a goal that requires a two-week period in which she needs to GRIND…she will sometimes recoil from putting in the grind session.
Because in our culture, grinding – even for a short period of time – is WRONG.
Discomfort – even for a short period of time – is WRONG.
If the goal requires her to step way out of her comfort zone for a short period of time, she might tell herself “Oh no, my mindset guru told me I need to move toward the ease and flow. This isn’t ease and flow, I must halt the operation immediately.”
And thus, the unwillingness to summon short burst of high intensity robs her of a critical component of big goal pursuit: big surges and quick wins.
As we began observing these patterns, we started to ask ourselves deeper questions about HOW we coach and support women entrepreneurs to pursue big goals and actually achieve them.
Most world class performers – from Beyonce to Mikey Musumeci to Sarah Blakely have a team of people who advise on strategy and approach. As a company, this was a role we traditionally fulfilled with our clients.
But in order to systematically implement strategy and approach, humans require structure, accountability and support. It’s not enough to have “internal discipline”. World class performers become world class because they know when to outsource discipline.
Everyone mentioned above has a team that provides the structure and accountability required to show up day after day for the mundane work WITH the ability to bring short term intensity. Think about it. No world class performer does this alone.
And yet, as women entrepreneurs running small businesses, we often expect ourselves to do this work…alone.
As a company, we were always more focused on WHAT to do – we advised our clients on strategy, positioning and building not simply a business but an ecosystem. If you want to learn how to build not simply a business but a lucrative ecosystem, download our free resource, The 7 Figure Ecosystem. We focused here because that’s what I personally found to be more fascinating, and it was a huge part of what our clients needed to scale. After all, as an advisor, my job was to help co-create a growth strategy for my clients.
But what our research told us is that, in order to truly support women entrepreneurs to build Jewel Businesses, we needed to focus also on HOW they were pursuing their goals and WHAT THEY REALLY NEEDED to successfully implement the strategies we laid out together. (And it’s more than checklists!)
We had to help them break their big goals down into small projects. We had to dramatically shift how they looked at their work as entrepreneurs. We had to create a program inside which we normalize failure AND success – in order to support self-efficacy, experimentation and innovation.
We needed to provide a culture of accountability that ensured they did the boring work every day. And we needed to create a space where women who embrace periodic sorties into a hard core grind were supported and celebrated, not crucified or admonished for being “obsessed”, “all about the hustle”, “unfeminine” or “anti ease and flow.”
In short, we needed to redefine what our work actually was, and innovate the way we delivered it. This has been a deeply meaningful project that required daily mundane work and, you guessed it, a few bursts of all hands on deck intensity.
To recap the key points of this article:
- World class performance requires that we fall in love with the mundane and boring, and accept that our biggest goals take time to accomplish.
- World class performance also requires bursts of intensity that force you to dig deep and challenge the limits of what you think you can do.
- Our work with women entrepreneurs has revealed that many underestimate the compounding impact of the boring, daily work and overestimate the pain of the “short term grind.” This can lead to judgment errors that impact their ability to pursue a growth strategy and accomplish their goals.
- In response, the team at Safi Media has been making significant innovations on how we coach women entrepreneurs to enable them to more consistently achieve their biggest goals.
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