4d • General discussion
You're not stuck because you're not smart enough
A while back I became friends with someone who was doing about a million a month in revenue.
One day he showed me his bank account. He had close to eight figures sitting there in cash, completely liquid.
I thought seeing a number like that would light a fire under me. Instead it did something I wasn't expecting.
It forced me to confront the actual reason he was that rich and I wasn't. And it had almost nothing to do with how smart either of us was.
Let me explain what I mean.
He was the first person I'd ever been close to who was operating at that level, so I walked in assuming he was playing some game I couldn't even see yet. I figured I'd sit across from him and feel completely out of my depth.
That's not what happened at all.
The more time I spent around him, the more obvious it became that he wasn't any smarter than me. The gap in our bank accounts was enormous, but the gap in what we actually knew was tiny.
I'd ask him how he scaled, what his next move was, what I was missing. And nine times out of ten, his answer was something I already knew.
He wasn't hiding some secret strategy. There was no clever tactic I'd never come across. He was just doing all the obvious stuff at a much bigger scale, and he was betting far more aggressively than I ever was.
That was the entire difference between us.
It came down to risk, and how fast he was willing to take it.
In the early days of my agency, a perfect example of how not taking enough risk was holding me back is that It took me almost two years to commit to running paid ads to scale my agency.
I knew the whole time that it was the right move. I'd heard it said a hundred times. I just wasn't willing to take the risk, so I sat at 20 to 25k a month, stagnant, telling myself I was being smart and disciplined about it.
Then I finally pulled the trigger and launched.
I scaled to a seven figure run rate in three to four months.
It was the same me, with the same brain, sitting on the exact same knowledge I'd had that entire time.
The only thing that changed is that I stopped flinching and did the thing I'd been avoiding for two years.
And this is what I really want you to pay attention to.
Every big jump I made after that followed the exact same pattern.
Going from spending 3 to 4k a month on ads to routinely spending 20 to 25k a month felt insane at the time. It turned out to be the single biggest lever I ever pulled.
Taking on more responsibility and bigger monthly expenses before I was certain I could cover them felt reckless. It ended up forcing the growth that paid for all of it.
It happened every single time.
The move that felt the most risky, the one I felt the most resistance towards, was almost always the one that unlocked the next level of the business.
The resistance wasn't a warning sign. It was pointing me straight at what I needed to do next.
I got reminded of this all over again just this week.
I was in my weekly meeting with my operations manager.
He'd just been flown out to New York to help run a mastermind for business owners in our space who are all doing at least a million a month.
That was the minimum just to be in the room. Nobody in there was doing less than a million a month.
He came back and told me the same thing I'd worked out for myself years ago.
He said I know just as much as those guys do, and the only reason they're doing bigger numbers comes down to two things.
The first is that they take more risk.
The second is that they have serious urgency about fixing the constraints they already know exist in their business.
That second one is worth sitting with for a second. It's not that they can see problems nobody else can.
They just move on the obvious problems immediately, while most people let those same problems sit there for months.
And that brings me to the thing I actually want you to take away from this.
The risk that feels enormous to you right now is genuinely tiny. Compared to what the people ahead of you are taking on, it's almost nothing.
I felt sick going from 4k to 20k a month in ad spend.
There are guys at the top spending that much before lunch without blinking.
That launch you keep putting off, that ad budget you won't increase, that hire you keep delaying, the people above you made those exact moves without a second thought and were already onto the next thing before you'd finished weighing it up.
You're not being careful. You're being slow. And being slow is still a risk, it's just the quiet kind that doesn't feel like one until you look up a year later and you're sitting in the same spot.
So here's what I want you to do.
Think about the one move you already know you should be making. The one you keep circling back to, keep researching, keep telling yourself you'll get to once you feel ready.
That resistance you feel around it isn't a reason to keep avoiding it. It's the clearest signal you've got that it's your next unlock.
Because here's what I've learned after almost eight years of doing this.
The uncertainty never actually goes away.
It doesn't disappear at 10k a month, or 50k, or even a million.
You never get more certain. You just get more comfortable taking action while you're still uncertain.
That's the real skill. It's not about getting rid of the fear, it's about learning to move anyway.
Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you already know everything you need to know, because you don't, and neither did I.
But you almost certainly know your next move.
The only question left is whether you're finally willing to take your chips off the sideline and put them on the table.
Food for thought,
Liam (:
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You're not stuck because you're not smart enough
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