By Someone Who’s Tired of Watching You Fail

Let me be blunt: You’re stuck because you’re either trying to boil the ocean or you’re too busy overthinking. You don’t need more apps, more gurus, or another shiny system—you need a plan you’ll actually follow. Here’s the no-BS, Dan Kennedy-style roadmap to stop spinning your wheels and start growing by 10%.

1. Grab a Damn Notebook

You can’t make progress without a roadmap. Period. Too many people have brilliant ideas and leave them to die in the ether because they’re too lazy to jot them down. Grab a blank page, a whiteboard, or even a blinking cursor. Whatever it takes. Failing to plan is planning to fail—and if you’re too stubborn to take notes, you’re doomed.

Key Takeaway: Start with a blank page and map out your thoughts. No tools required.

2. Stop Aiming for the Moon

Here’s how the gurus screw you: They tell you to aim for “moonshot goals” that’ll break you. They do this for many reasons, if the value of achieving your goals does not line up with the fee of their program, you wouldn’t pay them for help. The ROI would not be there. Also, by aiming for the moon, it REQUIRES outside help, so you’re only setting goals that require a co-dependent relationship with a coach or guru. Bear in mind, even with their help (and fees) most people fail, most of the time. 

So… If you’re just getting started or it’s been years since you’ve hit a big win, before you whip out your credit card to go “all-in” on 10Xing your life, try to moneyball your performance improvement.  Forget 20% or 50% growth. Focus on 10%. It’s doable. It’s motivating. It’s sustainable.

Examples:

• Need to lose 40 pounds? Focus on the first 4.
• Need to increase sales by $10,000? Start with $1,000.
• Need to improve your relationships? What if you let go of the bottom 10%  gripes you have? You know, the tiny issues that turn into arguments  that don’t matter or often resolve themselves as larger issues are resolved? Maybe it means 1 day a week, where you consciously let that shit go. Give your relational world a free pass – like on Office Space (90’s movie – ask your parents). 

The point isn’t to dream small; it’s to build momentum and prove to yourself that you can win.

Key Takeaway: Aim small, miss small. Start with 10%.

3. Define What Success Looks Like

If you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you’ll never hit it. What does 10% better look like? Feel like? Taste like? This isn’t some woo-woo exercise—it’s practical. If you want more money, what does the extra income mean for your life? If you want more time, what are you doing with it?

Examples:

• What would 10% fewer calories in, and 10% increase in workouts 5 days a week, all year long, look like a year from now?
• Would 10% better be 10% in performance and productivity, and a paycheck with an extra $10K?
• One extra date night a week with your spouse?
• An hour of peace every day where you’re not putting out fires?

Key Takeaway: Paint a vivid picture of what your 10% improvement means.

4. Get Real About the Numbers

Stop lying to yourself about the effort required. Growth isn’t magic—it’s math. How many calls, meetings, or follow-ups will it actually take to hit your goal? Reverse-engineer the numbers and stop cutting corners.

Examples:

• Need one mega client? That might mean 10 conferences, 300 contacts, and 3,000 emails.
• Want to grow sales by 10%? Break it down into transactions, average order value, or lifetime value.

Key Takeaway: Be brutally honest about the work required to reach your goal.

5. Prioritize the Hard Stuff

The hard stuff usually is what and where we define value being created. No one needs help with their adult coloring book, or choosing the wallpaper on their phone. The Formidable work is valuable to you and your customers.  Fun work is for later. Growth comes from tackling the formidable tasks first. The gurus want you to “follow your joy”—and that’s why you’re stuck doing the easy stuff while the real work piles up like the dishes on Thanksgiving. It’s time to DTFW – Do The Formidable Work. Adopt the Heroik mantra and you’ll find yourself improving and advancing the condition of others by default. That’s real value created for you and the world you serve.

Formidable vs. Fun Work:

• Fun work: Playing with your website’s color scheme, improving the aesthetic of your Notion dashboard.
• Formidable work: Cold calls, prospecting, tackling bottlenecks, mapping out and refining workflows in your Notion setup. 

Key Takeaway: Do the formidable work first. Dessert comes after you eat your veggies.

6. Identify and Address Bottlenecks

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Where do you get stuck? What’s the gritty, uncomfortable work you’re avoiding? THAT’s usually what’s holding you back from success. Most people waste years optimizing their strengths while ignoring the bottlenecks choking their growth.

Here’s the hard truth: bottlenecks are often confidence gaps.

Our egos hate feeling small or unskilled, so we avoid the areas we’re bad at—which is exactly where we need to grow. It sucks to be the new guy. It sucks to feel wholly inadequate for the challenge like a librarian holding a sword and shield facing a dragon for the first time. It feels humiliating. Tackling these moment requires embracing humility, focus, and the courage to be bad at something long enough to get better.

Confidence comes from action, not avoidance. Start with:

1. Do Some Homework: Research the bottleneck, just a bit (Don’t distract yourself). Find the leading solution, consider secondary details, and write it all down. Knowledge builds confidence.

2. Lean on Faith: Your MBA and ego only get you so far – and create the bottlenecks in the first place. So, get humble, say a quick prayer to the man up stairs (Jesus, give me courage) and take the leap. Faith bridges the gap between our ego, our preference to change as little as possible, and aspirations to achieve our goals. When confidence is lacking, faith can make you brave. Spiritual technology in action baby!

3. Get Uncomfortable: Growth demands you face new challenges. It’s time to starve your ego and embrace humility. Let yourself be the new kid or the underdog. It’s time to show up to bat like the new kid on The Sandlot, know the Lord is on your side, crank up “Baba O’Reilly” by The Who (ask your grandparents), buckle up – and get in the game.

4. Acknowledge Your Favorite Forms of Self-Sabotage: We are masters at sabotaging our own growth efforts. We love to get stuck in visioning, planning and preparation. We pretend to lack focus, discipline, and clarity, and we feign ignorance as to how to cultivate these things. The sooner you call yourself and teams out for all the forms of sandbagging and self-sabotaging the sooner you and they can stop doing it. 

Key Takeaway: Your bottlenecks aren’t barriers; they’re your biggest growth opportunities. Get gritty, get humble, and take them down.

Common Bottleneck Examples and Tips to Address Them:

• Junk Food Consumption – You can’t outwork a bad diet. I know I’ve tried for years. Isn’t it time you addressed this bottleneck and committed to get just 10% better? Eat real food, from the produce section. Get a rotisserie chicken instead of Chick-Fil-A. It makes it easier to ditch at least some of the carbs, fats, and unhealthy sides and beverages. 
• Social Media – Digital Junk Food Consumption – Your phone tracks and breaks down your screen time usage. Examine your digital diet, where is the true bottleneck? Social Media? YouTube? Rumble? Telegram? If you hate on people playing video-games wasting the days away but use social media 6 and a half hours per day – I’ve got news for you. It’s the same dang thing. 
  Pro-Tip: Remove the least valuable apps from your phone. If you’re using “I need it for work” as an excuse to allow those social apps to linger on your phone, first, I call bullshit. Second – switch to only using your desktop or laptop to perform your social media functions for work. In fact, get a web app like SocialPilot or HootSuite to schedule the outbound activity, and set a time on your calendar to respond to inbound activity. This weeds out the bullshit really quickly. 
• If your product or service is excellent, but you suck at sales and marketing – stop improving the product. Having a great product but no audience is just as bad as having a bad product.  The good news: 10% better than nothing is an easy bar to clear. All you have to do is get started.
• A lack of pragmatism is often a bottleneck for dreamers and thinkers and “big picture” people. Big picture is easy – it’s fun. The obstacle in front of you, leaves little to mystery and much to physically “Do”. Big goals are easy to think about because they seem so far away. Determining what to do with the day in front of us becomes an opportunity to procrastinate and over analyze. If you’re an over-thinker – focus on execution, if you’re a do-first plan-later type, focus on framing the plan first. 

Pro Tip: Focus on the bottlenecks. The obstacle is the way. Face the dragon standing in between you and your goals. Learn to battle it – your goals are worth it.  

Pro Tip #2: Social media is fake AF. If your social energy tanks are empty, it’s because you’ve been training in zero gravity— a fake world where you can mute, block, and scroll with no resistance. Cut back on the fake interactions and train for the real world: sales programs, cold calls, or door-knocking. Build real social skills and grow real resilience.

Pro Tip #3: Remember what focus is – FOCUS = Fixed on Course Until Success. And it requires daily application of will to resist temptation to get distracted or sidelined.

Key Takeaway: The bottlenecks are where the real growth happens. Get gritty and tackle them head-on.

7. Look at the Edges

Sometimes, it’s the small, extemporaneous changes that make the biggest difference. Look for the tiny things that streamline your life and increase continuity. Imagine living by default has left you feeling like you bear hugged a porcupine and now there are hundreds of needles stuck across your body. Hundreds of tiny, stressors and hindrances all dragging your performance. You probably tackled the critical ones, and learned to just roll with the rest. Addressing those edge annoyances may give you a larger performance upside than you might think. 

Examples of Addressing Edges: Little Tweaks to Make

• Turn on the browser sync feature in Brave to access open tabs across devices seamlessly. Now you can pick up where you left off on your phone, from your work computer and vice versa. Now those phone browsing sessions can sync up with those desktop sessions, and you’re no longer left feeling like you’re living separate lives between your phone and work setup.

• Turn off noisy notifications and keep only the ones that matter. Take 10 minutes, and turn off the notifications you constantly grumble about. There’s probably a lot. Limit it to the important stuff. This way, if your phone buzzes, dings or vibrates- it’s likely to be meaningful to you.

• Create a secure, password-protected note using the default NOTES app on your phone with critical business information (like tax numbers, SOS, EIN). No more scrambling to call your accountant for basic forms.

• If your Google Drive looks like your bedroom when you were 10 years old (a mess), it’s time to get it together. Stop waiting for AI to file it in folders for you. Start using Notion or AirTable and learn to organize your life digitally, with relational databases. Learning how to keep your thoughts, notes tasks and work connected and available at a moment’s notice is a HUGE leap forward for most people and businesses. 
• Enough with the hand-written notes. At the very least, deepen your use of that Notes app that’s synced with the cloud so it’s available on your phone, desk, wherever you are. 
• If you’re using an undersized keyboard, this is like wearing shoes that are a size too small. It can create performance drag and stress you out, though you might barely notice it in comparison to the stress from the rest of your daily life. 
• Buy that second ultra-wide monitor. I said second, not fourth. There are decades old studies that prove productivity goes up with screen real-estate. So, consider this permission to upgrade. 
• Orient the stuff on your desk to suit your flow. Move stuff to the other side of your desk. It can be a game changer. Suddenly, files make it from the inbox to the outbox, or you stop spilling your coffee. Commit to a more optimized habit. I’m left handed,  and rizzin’ em with the ’tism,  and I catch myself playing victim to things I can EASILY change in less than 10 seconds. One less thing to whine about or get distracted by, means a little bit more energy and courage to focus on that formidable work you’re so afraid of facing. 

These small adjustments add up, freeing your mental bandwidth and keeping you focused on what matters.

Key Takeaway: Don’t overlook the little tweaks that simplify your workflow and boost productivity.

8. If you tend to slack, or be a laggard, Establish the Floor: Fortify Your Position

Not every goal has to be about growth. Your minimum viable goal should be to protect what you currently have for the next 10 years. Ask yourself:

• What changes do you need to make to adjust for inflation, remain competitive, and keep your current market share?

• How will technology and your industry evolve?

• How will your market and customers change over the next decade?

Reflect on these questions and set goals to maintain your current customer base. Keep in mind: it usually takes years to implement and fully integrate new initiatives or technologies. Waiting until there’s an emergency is a surefire way to lose your position. So if you or your business is slow to change, this activity gives you a reality check and stop watch, and disabuses you of the illusion that you don’t have to change just to keep what you have. Reality Check: Just to keep what you have  for the next decade WILL almost certainly require embracing changes, investing to address new challenges, and developing new skills and methods. 

Examples:

• In business, this means fortifying your revenue streams, maintaining competitiveness, and adapting to industry shifts. Look to see customers in your industry have changing expectations or behaviors. For example, they once used email and the phone, but now they use apps, shop online, they don’t “request” a demo or a quote, and they DEFINITELY do not want to call you, then it’s time to at the very least, adjust to the new normal, if you’re going to hang on to your position. 

• Personally, it means staying ahead in relationships, health, and relevance—because the whole world is in a fight for AIR (Attention, Influence and Relevance).  Even your spouse might notice if you’re not keeping up in a world where the trend is split between steroids and Ozempic. Sad but true.

• Fortifying your position can be as simple as staying fit, pretty, or relevant – and noticing if the rest of the world is raising the bar, and stepping up accordingly. Keeping your position requires that you keep up – odds are that means increased effort in one or a few key areas. 

Key Takeaway: Fortify your current position to protect what you have, or risk losing it when the next big disruption hits.

9. Track Progress Like Your Life Depends on It

Plaster your key goal at the top of your primary workspace and dashboard. Track your data daily, but only plan weekly. This isn’t about perfection—it’s about consistency and daily alignment to your goals. Keep your KPIs in front of you every day, but don’t let the minutiae derail you. Daily planning just messes with your head and just becomes a new way to procrastinate. Don’t do it for more than 5 minutes. Weekly reviews keep you aligned without bogging you down.

Examples:

• Make a weekly plan of your goals, tasks and activities. Use a KanBan board view with days of the week, so you can adjust as needed throughout the week.

• Find something quantifiable to track that matters, and track daily: steps, outbound communications (calls made, emails sent),  volume content published, number of social posts, meetings attended, etc. You’re more likely to get shit done if you focus on your goals and efforts each day. 

• On Fridays or Sundays, review your plan and your results, and spend 20 minutes THINKING about any adjustments or refinements to improve results for the following week.  

Key Takeaway: Plan weekly,  track daily, and review weekly. Track the data that matters.

10. Simplify Without Lowering the Bar

Making things harder doesn’t make them better. What can you automate, defer, or delegate? Use AI if it’ll save time, but don’t get distracted by shiny tools that don’t move the needle. Focus on efficiency that delivers results.

Key Takeaway: Optimize your approach without cutting corners on the essentials.

11. Clear Space for Growth

Growth requires room—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Declutter your workspace, your schedule, and your mind. Stop wasting energy on toxic materialism, endless social media, and pointless distractions.

Examples:

• Remove non-essential apps from your phone.
• Create boundaries for work and personal time.
• Stop wasting time scrolling and start building real relationships.

Key Takeaway: Clear out the noise and focus on what directly supports your goals.

12. Just Start

You’ll never feel ready—so start anyway. Pack your bag, say a prayer, and take the first step. Confidence isn’t a prerequisite; it’s a byproduct of action.

Key Takeaway: Stop overthinking. Start moving. Growth favors action, not perfection.

This isn’t theory. This is what works. Stop overcomplicating, stop chasing moonshots, and focus on doing the work that matters. Your 10% growth is waiting—go claim it.