If you’re like most entrepreneurs, especially if you do most of your business online, your entrepreneurial evolution probably looks something like this:
Level 1: Survival
At the infancy of your entrepreneurial evolution you focus only on surviving.
Because you are broke, probably a bit emotionally unstable, and overly optimistic, you throw yourself into the matrix and soon realize that the only way to survive is to work harder than you ever thought possible, and to demand more from yourself than you knew was inside of you.
You tap into your innate, primal Survival Mechanism. It’s powerful.
Milestone 1: $100k
Living from Survival consists of 16+ hour work days (you probably have a second job, in order to make ends meet), a heavy dose of fucking up, quantum leaps in your learning and skill development, and a kill-at-all-costs hustle.
This sort of hustle is what Gary V. has popularized and which we, as a culture, have mistakenly glorified.
If you keep it up at this pace, you eventually reach the first milestone in your entrepreneurial evolution: $100k.
By this point, you have worked so hard for so long that you’ve quite literally reprogrammed yourself: this intense way of being is a dramatic shift from how you once were. (Remember the dreamy days of obsessing over business ideas and never acting on any of them?) This is personal growth on steroids.
Congratulations, you’re now a Warrior.
Do you know what this nets you? The validation, discipline and resilience to push even harder on your way to the second milestone: $250k.
Milestone 2: $250k
You’re a bit smarter now, but you’re working just as hard. The choices you’re making are having a bigger impact. For one, you’re making more money. Now you have a validated business model, or at least the start of one, and you’re honing in on the best ways to serve your ideal customer in a leveraged way through more sophisticated systems of delivery.
You’re now an industry expert.
Level 2: Identity
When you get to this phase (and mind you, this can take many, many years), you begin to identify as an entrepreneur from an honest and authentic place. No more wishing, this is who you are now. You are providing for yourself, building a reputation in your industry, and investing in your business’s future.
You’re probably feeling like a bit of a rock star, too—you’re making $20,000+ per month after all!
That said, because you’ve been doing everything yourself since Day 1, your Survival Mechanism that you originally developed just to get by has now become your Winning Strategy.
→ Pay attention, because here I’m about to blow your mind.
A Winning Strategy is an unconscious formula for achieving success. You did not design this Winning Strategy, it designed you. As a human being and as a leader, it is the source of your success and at the same time the source of your limitations. It defines your reality, your way of being, and your way of thinking. This, in turn, focuses your attention and shapes your actions, thereby determining what’s possible and not possible for you as a leader.
Survival Mechanism → Winning Strategy
Through many years of hustle and conditioning,
your Survival Mechanism developed into your Winning Strategy.
This might sound cool, but I assure you it is not cool.
Living from Survival is not exactly living from your highest potential. In fact, it’s the lowest level of human consciousness. You don’t make brilliant decisions from Survival; it’s not meant for strategic deep dives and doesn’t cater to creative breakthroughs. You make decisions purely to survive, that’s it.
So, that insane drive of yours? That once-indestructible work ethic that propelled you from being a nobody to being an entrepreneur? Your Survival Mechanism is now your Winning Strategy, and is the primary source of your success.
And it’s also the sole source of your limitations. Which is why you aren’t personally growing, even if money is coming in the door.
Which means you are your business’s single greatest limitation.
But it’s worse than that. Your Winning Strategy is like a drug. And the more you use it, the less effective it is. So you use more, until you realize you’re addicted and can’t function.
Although you might try to convince yourself otherwise, there is an upper limit to how much you can work, how much stress you can live with, how long you can endure sacrificing your health and basic human needs before you break.
→ Believe me, I’ve personally tested this theory myself and seen countless others try; it never turns out well.
Milestone 3: $1M
If you’re like the majority of entrepreneurs I work with, your Winning Strategy is the very thing that is keeping you from reaching 7-figures and creating the life you desire. Let me repeat that: What got you here will not get you to the next level of success.
It’s not a marketing thing. More exposure won’t get you the dream. Upticked revenues won’t solve your problems. (They’ll only make things worse: more exhausted, more unhealthy, less of you.)
It’s a YOU thing. You have not yet developed the internal power to transcend the limitations of a hustler in Survival and evolve into an effective leader who has control over your internal environment and external pressures.
That’s why I designed the Evolved Entrepreneur’s Operating System: to help you evolve.
