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.