MJ Demarcos Great Advice

 

I leveraged my superpower, and that superpower is decision-making.

I'm living a dream, and when I reflect on my choices, it boils down to this:

Hard decisions, easy life. Easy decisions, hard life.

What were some of the hard decisions? Here are just a few:

The hard decision to take the road less traveled and be an entrepreneur where peer pressure, academia, and media promoted a job culture. The easy decision would have been to get a job and pave the way to an unfulfilled life with a seemingly secure paycheck. The hard decision not to get wrapped up in my emotions and get married young to the wrong woman at a time when I was still "finding myself." The easy decision would be to succumb to my emotional impatience and get married fast, only to get divorced years later while enduring the financial turmoil that comes from it. The hard decision to leave cold Chicago for sunny Arizona with no job and no money. The easy decision would be to stay and argue that my friends and family are in Chitown! The easy decision would have eroded my happiness, motivation, and zest for life.   The hard decision to save and invest a lot of my outsized earnings when I was in my thirties. Instead of buying a fleet of Lambos, I bought one every few years. As such, I can still live the same luxurious life with zero financial stress for the rest of my life. The easy decision would have been to spend everything, avoiding tax burdens and the long game. The hard decision to change my diet. After suffering many chronic health issues in my 30s and early 40s, I made the hard decision to change what I shove into my mouth, which requires daily, if not hourly, discipline. The easy decision would be to continue eating whatever I wanted (the standard American diet), while neglecting the consequences. The hard decision to make fitness a priority in my life. The easy decision to sit on the couch and play video games.   The hard decision to continually educate myself. The easy decision would be to binge Netflix and continually entertain myself like the average person.

Every day, you face numerous choices, from the trivial to the complex. However, the hard decisions are the ones that require courage and sacrifice. Ultimately these are the ones that pave the way for a more comfortable life. This may seem paradoxical, but there's tremendous power in embracing the tough choices as they force you to confront your fears, shortcomings, and even your deepest desires. The hard decisions compel you to face reality and take responsibility for your circumstances. Choosing to end a toxic relationship, quitting a job to pursue a dream, or accepting a move to a new city for better opportunities are all examples of hard decisions that initially brought me discomfort but eventually led to personal growth and an easier life.

Hard decisions require courage and sacrifice and pave the way for a more comfortable life.

The power of hard choices lies in their transformative nature. They reshape your life, push you out of your comfort zones and test your resilience. This doesn't mean the path after the hard decision will be smooth, but it ensures that you move forward instead of staying stagnant. In the process, they develop your problem-solving abilities, enhance your emotional intelligence, and increase your adaptability. These invaluable skills make life more manageable with less anxiety and stress. Less of those = better life. The ex-coach of the Phoenix Suns, Monty Williams, always said, "Everything you want is on the other side of hard." Hard is making the hard choices because they often involve risk and/or sacrifice. Risk is a necessary ingredient for growth and success. Making tough choices often means sacrificing short-term comfort for long-term gain. In doing so, we learn to manage and mitigate risk and understand that failure is not fatal but an opportunity to learn and grow.

Failure is not fatal.

Everything you want is on the other side of HARD.

Difficult choices often pave the path to an easier life.

Whether you agree or not, your superpower is your ability to decide.

To choose.

To work daily toward a life you want to live.

I recognized my superpower young— the idea that I was the architect of my life through choice—and it transformed my life into a dream. Making the easy decisions would have made it hard.

Decide to make the hard decisions.

Or let the easy decisions create a hard life.

5 Actionable Takeaways from Mark Moses

 5 Actionable Takeaways

Take 60 seconds to answer one or more of the following questions -- we also highly encourage you to try this with colleagues and/or loved ones! 

1. How can you better turn your most critical business goals into reality?
   There are two key questions to ensure you are turning your business goals into reality:
    
   • Where do you want to get to, and what are the measurable, repeatable, daily activities that will get you there? 
     First, you need to get clear on what success looks like for you. I’ve spoken to many executive-level groups, and when I ask what success looks like three years from now, most don’t know. Getting what you want is about having the discipline to follow a cadence. Imagine you determine what you want and develop your big, hairy, audacious goal. You’ve got your vision statement, mission, and core values. The next step is to determine what you need to do annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily to achieve your desired outcomes. Most importantly, you need to determine and track what are the most critical daily, repeatable, measurable activities that will enable you to get there. For revenue growth, it could be a certain number of new events, that get you a certain number of new prospects, which result in a certain growth level. It is critical to have your eye on the key leading indicators that you can influence daily to ensure you get to your lagging indicators. 
      
   • Who are the people you need to achieve what you want?
     Because most people don’t know what they want three years from now, they rely mostly on their current organizational structure; it’s a significant weakness for many firms. Look at your team—how would you answer the question, would you enthusiastically rehire them again today? In some cases, the answer is no, so the more challenging question is, would you enthusiastically rehire them today to help you achieve what you want three years from now? If the answer is still no, it comes back to you as a leader. Do you have the courage to search properly and find the people to drive the outcomes that you want?
      
2. How can you fully leverage your leading indicators to better plan for times of adversity?
   Hopefully, your business won’t be affected by the coming recession, but there’s nothing wrong with future planning. It’s good to know the issues in your business that are leading indicators, the impact of those leading indicators, and what decisions you would make to change their outcome. 
   
   I like to look at 13 months because that gives you a year over year compared to that one month, but you can also do it quarterly. For example, imagine revenue is down, and you have slight gross margin erosion month over month. What if you can see over the last five months that the average time to close a sale has increased by a few days? Is that negative? Are your customers affected? Are your clients having problems? 
   
   At baseline, we do nothing. At a 5% increase in margin erosion, we take action. More than that, we take aggressive action, and we do something meaningful. At each stage, it’s worth asking why would I not do that anyway, even without the margin erosion? And if I would make those changes when the bad stuff happens, why would I not make them now? What would the impact be if I did?  All these questions lead you to be better prepared for when adversity does hit. 
    
3. How can you ask better questions in your leadership meeting to maximize alignment in your organization?
   Alignment comes back to a disciplined process that starts with the annual leadership meeting. Each team member prepares the following: What went right this past year? What went wrong? What did we learn this past year? How did we do on our goals compared to how we said we would do? How did we do on the measurable activities we said would drive the outcome that we wanted?
   
   This is critical because often, things misfire on buy-in and alignment. People might have different visions, or our assumptions are wrong. Let’s say we achieved 80% of the activities but only 60% of the result. We might have chosen the wrong actions, or we didn’t pick enough of them. I like to ask, what will it take to guarantee we achieve the outcome? Once a year, it’s worth asking the question, if we were to start our business all over again, what are we doing today that we would not do in our new company? 
    
4. How can you use the sensitivity analysis tool to identify the two most important levers in your business?
   When using the sensitivity analysis tool, you pick two essential levers in your business and create a simple two-dimensional graph, and the impact on EBITDA is in the center. That’s the number to focus on. You can see on one end EBITDA is high, and on the other end, it’s low. It’s a very disciplined way to look at your business. I suggest every company take their most essential levers and plot them against each other on the grid. This simple exercise shows you what moves the needle for your business and what you can do more of and less of, depending on your desired outcome.
    
5. How can you better evaluate which executive coach is right for you to unlock your full potential?
   A good coach is three things. First, they’re part coach; a coach is somebody who can ask great questions and guide you to the answer. They also have a lot of industry experience, so they’ll wear the consultant hat. And at times, they are business therapists helping clients navigate between the courage and fear to act.
   
   Coaches often get fired because the client’s perception of the value they’re providing isn’t there. You don’t need a friend or therapist. You’re looking for somebody who can help you achieve what you really want a year and three years from now. Think through if you believe they can help you do that and how they are going to help you do it.

Tyler Cowen Interview and 5 Takeaways

 

1. How can you better identify the key traits of talented people?
   These are the top 5 traits I look for when conversing with any potential candidate for a new role:
    
   • Energy Level & Desire: A person’s energy level is critical. Are you able to feel a surging desire from them to do something, to work, cooperate, to achieve something? 
      
   • Social Intelligence: This is about how well people work with others. If they see a group, how quickly are they able to figure out, here's how the group works, and here's the role I should play in that group. 
      
   • Maximizing the Correct Things: Some smart people work hard but maximize the wrong things, so look for people who can figure out the proper hierarchies of what is truly important.
      
   • Persistence & Durability: How likely is the person to stick through highs and lows and continue performing consistently? 
      
   • Happiness Level: On average, happy people seem to be more productive.
      
2. How can you better leverage the talent that’s already in your orbit?
   Someone with a single excellent idea can be worth so much more than a perfectly good worker who doesn’t have a comparably valuable idea. Because of increasing globalization, remote work, and AI, a good idea is now multiplied many times more than it used to be. By our best estimates, 20% to 40% of American economic growth has come from better allocating talent since the 1960s. 
   
   To unlock this value, we need to start by looking for creative input from a greater number of people, as well as from different types of people. More people are energizers, creatives, and winners than we think. Talent includes renowned CEOs, people running startups, world-famous athletes, and cultural figures like Paul McCartney. But you can also find them on a micro level. I run a podcast, and the sound engineers contribute extremely useful ideas. They are creatives and energizers. In part, they energize me; and they also see things that I do not see. Train yourself at ‘talent appreciation’, the way you might train yourself at art appreciation or music appreciation. It starts with the wake-up call to be fully aware that the creative acts of your individual talent and their judgment are truly central to the future of your institution, more so than ever before. 
    
3. How can you better position existing talent inside your organization to maximize their impact?
   The research shows people don’t change that much over time, so if you’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, it probably won’t work. At times, I succeeded in having people switch divisions; so it’s important to have an open mind about what part of your institution the person could work in. People are capable of learning, that’s a positive fact, but most people stay who they are at their core. If someone is introverted or disagreeable by nature, they will stay that way. Either figure out how they can fit in, or you need to move in some other direction.
    
4. How can you ask the right questions to identify creatives, energizers, and winners?
   Get prospective hires into a conversational mode on topics they care about but are not prepared for. Find out what they’re interested in and get them talking–baseball, The Beatles, Star Wars, whatever it may be–it will help you see how they think, and how they interpret social structures. Everyone will come prepared with an account of their own strengths and weaknesses, what they learned from the last time they made an error in their previous job; It’s fine to ask those things. You will learn something but you won’t learn what makes that person tick.
   
   Here’s an example of the ideal question I like to ask people: “What are the open tabs in your web browsers right now?” What are they interested in? What do they care about? The key is not so much to judge the content of the tabs. It’s the level of enthusiasm, detail, and involvement that you’re looking for.
   
   When it comes to assessing durability and persistence, what I tend to look for is simply people who started endeavors when they were fairly young and were truly interested in them. It’s not proof of persistence, but if they’re 19 and started something at 14, you’re going to see five years of persistence. It’s a sign they might be on that campus of people who just keep on going forever. I look at the earliness of the start. Even if someone is 45, maybe they’ve been out of the workforce. What projects did you start when you were 16? It’s something I would want to know. Highly imperfect on my wishlist. If I could judge the persistence of young people much better, that would be the number one thing on my wishlist.
   
   All good interview questions spoil within five or ten years, so it’s not about memorizing the best questions. Instead, it’s about thinking through how you bond with people during a conversation—to have a meeting of the minds.  If you’re good at that, the questions will come to you because you are conversing. You don’t go out with a list of questions in your everyday life. Most of all, as the interviewer, be trustworthy; it’s important people trust you. If they perceive you as responsible, your conversations will be much better. That’s more important than a list of best questions.
    
5. How could you better assess talent in political leaders?
   I find it striking how hard it is to predict good political leadership. For example, if you read the Charles Moore biography of Margaret Thatcher, it was not obvious earlier in her career that she would be a significant political leader. I’m not talking about whether you like what she did or not. Clearly, she became Prime Minister, she was very influential, including internationally. She was a chemist, which is great, but I don’t think the best interviewer in the world would’ve seen that in her. 
   
   I would say when it comes to political leaders, indeed, almost everything else, the importance of keeping a truly open mind, the human capacity for self-improvement is one of the best things you can do, and it will make you happier, more optimistic, and more productive. I find political leadership the hardest thing to forecast. Still, I think at the end of the day, a political leader can only do so many things, and you need to focus on how they communicate with the public. What two or three ideas are they trying to bring to the discourse, even if they don’t succeed with them now, those ideas might happen in 10 years. 
   
   You need to throw out so many of the other signals you are getting. It’s hard to do because you’re used to looking for more signals, more information to put together a more complete picture. Still, often for political leaders, you can be a bit more accurate by throwing out a lot of the information you’re getting because how good they are, just doesn’t matter. They’re constrained. They have little time, and many tasks, it’s not really a job that makes any sense. The presidency is a job for 17 different people. So I’m not saying we can actually run it that way. It’s really going to mess with your normal intuitions. And I would just say, “Please keep an open mind, all the more.”

Humurous Business Quotes

Found an old book that came courtesy of Ryan Insurance and wanted to have a digital file for these quotes:

• To Err is Human, To Forgive is not company policy.
• Say No, Then negotiate
• If at first you don't succeed, try, try again...Then give up. There's no use being a damn fool about it. 
• Murphy's Law: If anythingcan go wrong it will.....O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law: "Murphy was an optimist."
• If you don't agree with me, it means you havent been listening 
• A billion dollars isn't what it used to be. 
• If you can't convince them, confuse them. 
• An honest executive is one who shares the credit with the man who did all the work. 
• Before you have an argument with your boss, take a good look at oth sides his side and the outside. 
• It isn't what you know that counts, its what you think of in me. 
• Rule of Failure: "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
• America is the land of opportunity if you're a businessman in Japan (Lawrence J. Peter) 
• Nothing is quite as embarrassing as watching your boss do something you assured him couldn't be done
• The mark of a  true M.B.A. is that he is often wrong but seldom in doubt (Robert Buzzell) 
• There is no job so simple that it cannot be done wrong. 
• Law of Destiny: "Glory may be fleeting but obscurity is forever. 
• A business is too big when it takes a week for gossip to go from one end of the office to the other. 
• If it ain't broke, don't fix it- unless you are a consultant 
• The mechanics of running a business are really not very complicated when you get down to essentials. You have to make some stuff and sell it to somebody for more than it cost you. That's about all there is to it, except for a few million details. 
• My decision is maybe and that's final. 
• If it's difficult we do it immediately. If it's impossible it takes a little longer. Miracles by appointment only. 
• Old salesmen never die- they just get out of commission. 
• A committee is twelve men doing the work of one. 
• Business: The art of extracting money from another man's pocket without resorting to violence. (Max Amsterdam) 
• The closest to perfection a person ever comes is when he fills out a job application form. 
• The trouble with mixing business and pleasure is that pleasure usually comes out on top. 
• Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt. 
• Never tell a lie...unless lying is one of your strong points. 
• Marketing is simply  sales with a college education
• A good business manager hires optimists as salesmen and pessimists to run the credit department. 
• No business opportunity is ever lost. If you fumble it, your competitor will find it. 
• Business is like an automobile. It won't run itself, except downhill. 
• It's not whether you win or lose - it's how you place the blame. 
• Rule of Success: Trust only those who stand to lose as much as you when things go wrong. 
• If people listened to themselves more often they would talk less. 
• Some executives call passing the buck delegating authority. 
• The golden rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. 
• If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bit you. This is the principal diference between a dog and a man. 
• A successful executive in business is one who can delegate all the responsibility shift all the blame, and appropriate all the credit. 
• When I first started working I used to dream of the day when I might be earning the salary im now starving on. 
• Anyone who thinks the customer isn't important should try doing without him for a period of 90 days. 
• The typical salesmen is a man with a smile on his face, a shine on his shoes, and a lousy territory. 
• Happiness is a positive cash flow. 
• The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. 
• An efficient businessman who found a machine that would do half his work bought two. 
• A nickel goes a long way now. You can carry it around for days without finding a thing it will buy. 
• There are some men who, in a fifty-fifty proposition, insist on getting the hyphen too. 
• If you want something done give it to a busy man and he'll have his secretary do it. 
• There is nothing more demoralizing than a small but adequate income (Edmund Wilson) 
• Among the chief worries of today's business executives is the large number of unemployed still on the payrolls. 
• Hard work is the yeast that raises the dough. 
• It is especially hard to work for money youve already spent for something you didn't need. 
• Committee work is like a soft chair - easy to get into but hard to get out of. 
• If all the economists in the world were laid end to end it would probably be a good thing. 
• Choose a job you love, and you will never have to wrok a day in your life. 
• I'm opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. (Mark Twain)
• Idealism increases in direct proportion to ones distance from the problem
• I cannot give you a formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: Try to please everybody. (Herbert Swope) 
• There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. 
• Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. ( oscar wilde) 
• Maier's Law: If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of. 
• Buy low, sell high collect early, and pay late (Dick Levin) 
• Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there (Will Rogers) 
• Management is the art of getting other people to do all the work. 
• I'd like to be rich enough so I could throw soap away after the letters are worn off. (Andy Rooney) 
• When they say a man is born executive they mean his father owns the business. 
• Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. 
• Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of alarge research staff to study the problem (Bill Vaughan)