Skill Stacking The Reason you aren't Breaking Through Ep 157

In a compelling talk, the speaker, identified as an entrepreneurial expert, emphasizes the value of skill acquisition and targeted investment in personal growth to achieve success in business. Starting by gauging the audience's entrepreneurial levels, he advocates for the importance of information as an investment and the allocation of time to high ROI activities. He shares his own routine and the concept of 'talent stacking,' illustrating how incremental skill development can lead to exponential returns. Drawing from his experience with Gym Launch, he underscores the significance of mastering one's craft and reinvesting profits into scalable ventures. The speaker also dismisses the notion of saving money over skill investment until a substantial income is achieved. He concludes by reinforcing the idea that entrepreneurial success is a result of continuous learning, self-improvement, and the relentless pursuit of the next skill to master.

• Speaker A expresses humility and surprise that people are aware of their work.
• They mention a preference for solitude, rarely leaving the house, which is atypical for entrepreneurs.
• Speaker A seeks to tailor their talk to the audience's interests and experiences.

"First off, I just want to say I'm extremely humbled to be here. Honestly, just hearing the few conversations that I was able to have with the people who were here, honestly didn't think anyone really knew who we were."

This quote demonstrates Speaker A's modesty and acknowledges their limited interactions with the public.

"I probably don't leave the house for, like, four or five days at a time."

Speaker A indicates a personal lifestyle choice that contrasts with common entrepreneurial practices.

• Speaker A engages the audience by asking them to identify their professional status.
• They encourage honesty to ensure the audience benefits from the discussion.
• The assessment includes categories for full-time employees, entrepreneurs at various income levels, and those earning over a million dollars.

"Who here is still working a full time job? Can you raise your hand?"

Speaker A gauges the composition of the audience to understand their professional backgrounds.

"Who's doing between 100 and a million a year? Okay. Who's doing a million plus?"

By categorizing the audience based on entrepreneurial success, Speaker A can tailor their advice more effectively.

• Speaker A emphasizes the importance of information as an investment.
• They argue that information provides a time advantage, leading to faster achievements.
• Attention allocation to high ROI activities is seen as critical for rapid success.

"My belief in this is that information is the single best investment that you can have, because information is the only thing that buys you time."

This quote highlights Speaker A's belief that information is the most valuable resource for entrepreneurs.

• Speaker A shares personal habits that have contributed to their success.
• They stress the importance of having uninterrupted time for skill acquisition and creative work.
• The concept of "talent stacking" is introduced, illustrating the compounding value of acquiring multiple skills.

"I think it's more important that you can always have four to 5 hours a day of uninterrupted time to yourself."

Speaker A believes that dedicated, focused time is essential for advancing one's skills and business.

• Speaker A provides a brief explanation of their company, Gym Launch.
• They detail the company's impact on gym owners' revenue, churn rate, and profit.
• Speaker A shares their entrepreneurial journey, starting with their own gym chain and evolving to consulting and systems implementation.

"We help small business owners that are specifically gym owners... on average, increased their top line revenue by $240,000 a year."

This quote outlines the core services and results provided by Gym Launch to its clients.

• Speaker A advises investing in skill acquisition over traditional investments like cryptocurrencies.
• They share personal financial strategies, emphasizing reinvestment into skill development.
• The concept of "talent stacking" is further explained, demonstrating how combining skills can lead to monetization.

"My belief is that you should spend all of the money that you have to acquire skills until you can't spend money on acquiring skills anymore."

Speaker A advocates for continuous investment in personal and professional development as a priority over other types of investments.

• The concept of skill stacking involves acquiring multiple skills that synergize to increase personal value.
• Each new skill learned is layered upon existing ones, making an individual more valuable and versatile.
• The combination of skills can lead to significant financial benefits, such as saving businesses money through tax strategies.
• Skill stacking is likened to a "hockey stick" growth pattern, where value and income potential grow exponentially over time.
• Stagnation in income may indicate a failure to identify or learn the next valuable skill.

"All right, now, this is something that is becoming more valuable. And then you learn about tax strategies, right? And then all of a sudden, you're able to work with a business and save them hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year because of your understanding of the tax code."

This quote emphasizes the increasing value of understanding tax strategies as a skill and its direct impact on saving money for businesses.

"And then you learn how to decrease liability with insurance because you continue down this path of stacking your skills."

This quote suggests that learning how to manage insurance effectively is another skill that can be stacked to further decrease liability and add value.

"And each talent becomes disproportionately more valuable than the talents all before them."

The quote highlights the compounding effect of skill stacking, where each new skill amplifies the value of all previous skills.

• Entrepreneurs often have a natural ability in sales but may lack other skills necessary for business growth.
• The inability to hire, train, and manage a sales team can hinder an entrepreneur's success.
• Consistency in business performance, such as maintaining stable sales, requires specific management skills.
• The speaker advises recognizing personal responsibility for one's income level and the need to become more valuable through skill acquisition.

"What's the skill that that person lacks? They lack the ability to hire, find, recruit, train, and manage a salesperson."

This quote identifies the specific skills an entrepreneur may lack, which are critical for scaling a business through an effective sales team.

"The biggest piece of advice that I can say is that it's a frame shift, that everything is 100% your fault."

The speaker is emphasizing the importance of personal accountability in entrepreneurial success.

"You are 100% responsible for the income level that you have."

This quote underlines the notion that one's income is a direct reflection of their personal value and skills.

• Jay Z's career is used as an example of successful talent stacking.
• He began with a natural rhythm and built upon it with performance skills, marketing, and eventually creating a record label.
• Each new skill he acquired amplified his success and returns.
• The importance of recognizing the next skill to learn is crucial for continuous growth.

"All he did was stack one talent on top of the other, and for every additional talent he had, he got exponential returns on the stack that was underneath of it."

This quote illustrates how Jay Z's sequential acquisition of skills led to exponential growth in his career.

• Dissatisfaction with one's current situation should be a motivator to learn new skills.
• Allocating time to learn and improve, even outside of standard working hours, is necessary for progress.
• The speaker encourages identifying the next skill to learn and pursuing it aggressively.

"If you don't wake up at 03:00 or 04:00 in the morning and you are dissatisfied, I don't get you."

The quote conveys the speaker's perspective that a strong dissatisfaction should drive one to work towards improvement at any available opportunity.

"Is there any reason why you're not aggressively pursuing it?"

This quote challenges the listener to examine their own efforts in skill acquisition and personal development.

• Discernment is critical for prioritizing which skills to learn next.
• It helps allocate time effectively to the most valuable skills in the context of one's career or business.
• The speaker acknowledges the challenge of teaching discernment but emphasizes its importance.

"The key is having the discernment to know which is the one that you're missing right now."

This quote stresses the importance of discernment in identifying the specific skill that will most significantly impact one's progress.

• The speaker believes that focusing on saving money is less important than increasing income for those earning below a certain threshold.
• Investing in skills and personal value is implied to be a better strategy than frugality for financial growth.
• The speaker expresses a strong opinion against a life of extreme saving at the expense of enjoyment.

"I genuinely believe that there is no point to trying to save money if your income is less than two, three, $500,000 a year."

The quote conveys the speaker's belief that efforts should be directed towards increasing income rather than saving when income is below a certain level.

• The speaker encourages listeners who have not yet reviewed the show to do so.
• A humorous approach is used to emphasize the importance of supporting the podcast.

"If you're a return listener and not rated or reviewed the show, I want you to know that you should feel absolutely terrible about yourself and everything else in the world."

This quote, delivered with a humorous tone, is a call to action for listeners to engage with and support the podcast by leaving a review.

• The right time to look at investments is when there's an excess of money after aggressively allocating funds to acquire new skills.
• An "Alex stamp of approval" suggests reaching a state of financial abundance before considering investments.
• Skills acquisition is crucial before entering investment areas like bitcoin, stock market, or real estate.
• Understanding the competition in any investment space is key to success.
• Deconstructing the path of successful individuals helps in talent stacking and overcoming competition.

"My objective for when you should actually consider looking at investments is when you have so much money coming in that even when you're aggressively searching to find a way to allocate the money to acquire the next skill, there's still an excess and abundance that is coming on top of it."

This quote emphasizes the importance of having a significant financial buffer before considering investments, ensuring that skill acquisition and business growth are not compromised.

• Initial learning yields the highest return on investment in terms of skill development.
• Marginal returns diminish over time, but absolute returns from small improvements at an advanced level can be significant.
• Mastery in skills such as marketing and sales can lead to "overnight successes" that are actually the result of cumulative skill stacking.
• The bamboo tree story illustrates the importance of patience and foundational work in skill development.

"The amount of effort, the amount of return that you get from learning a new skill goes down with time. Right. Your first 20 hours of reading about sales, your first 20 hours of sales in general, your first 20 sales consults. You will learn more from zero to then than you ever will in the rest of the career of sales."

This quote explains the concept of diminishing returns in learning and skill acquisition, highlighting the importance of the initial phase of learning where the most significant gains are made.

• Entrepreneurs earning under $100,000 should focus on promotion, marketing, and sales without outsourcing.
• Understanding the intricacies of marketing and sales is crucial to avoid being misled and to maintain control over business growth.
• The goal should be to become the best in a specific area of the business, as self-reliance builds confidence and expertise.

"If you're under $100,000 a year in your business, I'm assuming you're self-employed. You probably don't have anyone else who's working for you. It's probably just you. At that point, everything is going to be about promotion, right? You're going to have to know how to market, know how to sell."

This quote provides specific advice for entrepreneurs at the early revenue stages, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and mastery of marketing and sales.

• Becoming exceptionally skilled in one area is key to scaling a business to a $100 million valuation.
• Referrals and reputation are indicators of reaching a level of skill that drives business growth.
• Entrepreneurs must resist the urge to chase multiple opportunities and instead focus on excelling in one area.

"If you want to get to 100 million dollar valuation type company, in my opinion, the way that you have to do it is get really fucking good at one thing."

This quote outlines the strategy for achieving a high valuation for a company, stressing the importance of exceptional skill and focus in one area to drive growth and valuation.

• Entrepreneurs often believe they need to diversify to make more money, but specialization is key.
• Focusing on one area allows for deeper expertise and a competitive edge.
• Specialization leads to becoming the best in a particular field, which is more profitable.

"The biggest fallacy that you have as an entrepreneur is that you need more things to make more money. When it's the opposite, you need less things to make more money."

This quote highlights the misconception that entrepreneurs need to diversify to increase income, whereas focusing on fewer things can actually lead to greater profits due to specialization and expertise.

• Achieving mastery in a single skill can take years, but it's essential for recognition and monetization.
• Once a skill is mastered, teaching it can become a high-margin business.
• Mastery leads to demand, allowing for price increases and further specialization.

"Once you have your one skill, you can then monetize teaching that skill. Now, you have a high margin business that has high value because you really are good at that thing."

This quote emphasizes that mastering a skill to the point of being recognized for it allows for the creation of a business around teaching that skill, which can be highly profitable due to the expertise involved.

• After skill mastery and monetization, profits should be reinvested into a scalable business.
• The new business should have enterprise value and not be dependent on the individual.
• The ultimate goal is to create a business that can be sold for significant profit.

"First is skill acquisition. Second is monetization of that skill. Third is reinvesting the profits from that high margin business into a business that does have enterprise value that does not require you."

This quote outlines the three-step process of building a profitable enterprise: acquiring a skill, monetizing it, and then using the profits to invest in a scalable business with enterprise value.

• Plateaus in business are often a sign of a need for improvement in a specific area.
• Entrepreneurs should continuously seek to improve their skills through practice and novel approaches.
• Accepting that one is not yet "good enough" can drive the pursuit of excellence and innovation.

"You're not good enough. And if you can accept that and internalize it, then you can create actions around the thing that you need to do and do over and over and over again."

This quote suggests that recognizing one's own shortcomings is the first step towards improvement and that relentless practice and dedication are necessary to overcome plateaus in business and skill development.

• Learning from real-world experiences is crucial for those who have surpassed traditional educational resources.
• Allocating a budget for experimental marketing can lead to unique insights and breakthroughs.
• Continuous creation and testing are essential for honing skills like videography and marketing.

"He said, I take a percentage, a fixed percentage, every month of my marketing spend, and I spend it on crazy ideas that I have with zero intention of making an ROI."

This quote from Ezra Firestone demonstrates the value of dedicating resources to experimentation and learning in marketing, which can lead to innovative strategies and skill enhancement.

• Mastery comes from repetition and experience, not just affirmations or self-belief.
• Certainty in one's skill and business acumen is a result of extensive practice and proven success.
• True expertise is when one's skill level becomes a historical observation, not just a claim.

"It kills me because it gets to a point where you've done it so many times that it's not amazing, it's not fantastic. You're just stating observations of history."

This quote conveys that after repeating a skill numerous times, the level of expertise reached is simply a reflection of past experiences, which instills a natural sense of certainty and authority in one's abilities.