S2/E30 The One Thing That Matters More Than Money or Strategy

Everyone thinks success is about money, strategy, or the next big idea. It’s not. The real differentiator is something far less obvious—but something everyone is capable of. And it’s the one thing I’ve seen separate those who scale fast from those who stay stuck. In this episode, I pull back the curtain on what I’ve learned working alongside some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world—and how one simple shift can completely change the way you think about business, growth, and momentum.

P.S. After listening if you want to continue you investment in yourself... join my free business expansion training. Spots are limited. Register here: https://10x.cardoneventures.com/bet?utm_source=Podcastndsocial 

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:00):
Welcome to business and the podcast for people making it
all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life,
but I'm a believer that there is still room for
some ands like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion.
On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for
scaling my nine figure business while keeping you up to
date on the latest trends, news and fun finds. This

(00:23):
is a place for business and let's dive in!

S2 (00:26):
The difference between people who try to be successful and
the ones who actually are. It's just this one thing.
And it's not strategy. It's not money. It's not their ideas,
it's speed. As a multi-million dollar business owner, I've worked
with so many successful people, and speed is the one
thing that separates winners from losers. So if you want
to learn how to move faster than anyone else and
become truly successful and have the dream life that you've

(00:49):
always wanted, keep watching. Let's get started. With number one,
you have to follow the cycle of momentum. This is
a cycle of momentum. First decide fast. Second, execute immediately. Third,
review data quickly. So let's dive into number one. Decide fast.
Information is important, but oftentimes I find that people get

(01:09):
stuck in information overload. They want more and more and
more and more information. And with tools like ChatGPT, it
can feel like you will never get to the bottom
of all the information that you need in order to
make a decision. So get comfortable making a decision despite
not knowing. One of the things I recently did on
my ChatGPT account is I told it to stop giving

(01:30):
me additional context. If I have a question, give me
the exact answer because I was wasting all of this
time going through and saying yes to whatever their next
idea was for me to go to the next level
of this concept. Well, instead of making better decisions and
faster decisions, I started having paralysis by analysis. So get
the information in order to make a decision as quickly
as possible. Maybe not having all the data, but making

(01:52):
a decision anyway. When it comes to making a decision,
you have to then move as quickly as possible into
the second step, which is execute quickly. If you just
make a whole bunch of decisions, but you never tell
anybody about the decisions, you never apply pressure in order
to make sure those decisions are moving forward. Nothing's going
to happen. So you make the decision and then you
execute as quickly as possible. And I'm not saying that

(02:14):
you execute next month, next week saying execute today. How
do you prioritize moving the most important decisions forward so
that you can start to make progress? And this is
why the third step is so wonderful because it's okay
to make a bad decision. If you are reviewing the data.
It would be completely irresponsible if I was sitting here saying,
just make decisions, execute quickly, create a mess and live

(02:37):
with it. But that's not what I'm saying. I do
want you to make a decision. I do want you
to execute quickly, but then look at data as quickly
as possible after the decision is made so that you
can know. Was this a good decision and should I
do more of this or was this a bad decision?
Do I need to redirect and then go in a
different direction? I honestly think this is one of my superpowers.
I could care less if I'm right. I will instantly

(02:57):
remove my feelings from a decision, because if the data
tells me that one decision is the better decision, and
I might have thought it was going to be a
different one, I don't care any longer. We're going all
in on the one that worked. You can only get
this confidence if you were looking at data as soon
as you implement and execute your decisions. Think about TikTok
creators who blow up on social media. They don't wait
to be perfect. They start by posting daily and adjusting

(03:21):
based off what works. These are the same principles to
follow in business. Just remember that you should be iterating
relentlessly and making micro adjustments while you're moving forward. Next
is number two. Imperfection is the new perfect. I see
creators online all the time posting unpolished content, and it
still blows up and goes viral. And here's why that works.

(03:44):
People don't want super polished. They don't want super buttoned
up in the final version any longer. They want to
see what's real. People want to see you being messy,
figuring things out in real time, and all the while
they are along for the ride. And when you do this,
two things happen one, you move faster than people who
are still obsessing over every single detail, and two, your

(04:06):
audience becomes invested in your process since they are watching
you build and they're able to give you feedback along
the way. I find that it's easier online to hit
publish when something is imperfect versus having that mentality in
the workplace, because if you know that you aren't prepared
for something, if you know that you don't have experience
in doing something, it actually can reduce people's confidence. If

(04:28):
you're telling them, oh, I don't know what I'm doing.
I remember my very first job when I had my
team who was reporting to me, and they were all
older than I was. They had more experience than I was,
and most of them were men. They were not taking
little 22 year old Natalie very seriously. If I would
have told them in that moment that I didn't know
what I was doing, it would have reduced my credibility.

(04:49):
And I will never forget when I walked into my
first set of one on ones. And instead of having
a structure, holding them accountable, doing all the things I
needed to do, I just sat there and kind of
shot the shit with them, asked them how their week
was going and got to know their family, and we
didn't talk about anything related to their roles or the business.
Now since then, I have done thousands of one on

(05:11):
ones and I've taken something that I was imperfect at
and became better and better and better to where now
I'm very confident in the process that I use for
one on ones. So if you want my one on
one process, find me on Instagram at Natalie Dawson and
send me a DM saying one on one. The moral
of that story is, if I didn't show up imperfectly
back then, I wouldn't have a polished process today. So

(05:35):
it's okay to have things not be perfect. But if
you can learn from people who are two steps ahead,
it will take your lack of perfectionism and give you
an edge so that you gain experience while not being
a complete mess. Number three is next. The market doesn't wait.
The market moves so fast. So if you take three
months to decide while the people you are competing with

(05:57):
are deciding today, you're already behind. It's a little funny
to me that I'm doing a video about speed, because
if you would have talked to me five years ago,
I would have thought I was fast at everything until
I was around people who did things quickly and was
around people who were incredibly successful. And what I learned
from being around people who are incredibly successful. They do
not wait for anything. And as soon as they have

(06:20):
an idea, they execute on it. In that moment, one
of my favorite times with my business partner, Grant Cardone,
we were thinking about launching this new initiative, and we
had this whole talk about it over dinner. It was
probably an hour and a half long discussion, and at
the end of the discussion he said, great, send me
a link by tomorrow morning so I can start to
promote it. And I was like, send you a link

(06:40):
by tomorrow morning so you can promote it. It's 830
at night. How am I supposed to send you the link?
Our team has to build the page. We have to
set everything up. What are you talking about? Send you
a link by tomorrow morning. And he's like, okay, that's fine.
And I didn't think anything of it. That night. I
went to bed and woke up the next morning and
saw he had sent it to his team, who had
created a full blown page, already had emails, and this
was before ChatGPT existed. He had just bypassed my inability

(07:04):
to move quickly, because he had a team that could
move faster than I could, even though it was supposed
to be my initiative. And what this taught me is,
how do I create a team and create a process
that will allow an idea to move fast, because if
you believe in the idea, it has to move fast.
That's how you gain momentum is the ability to say,

(07:25):
I want to do this thing. How quickly can I
move it into the physical universe? It's no longer an
idea when there's a landing page. And when he promoted it.
The next morning, we found that there were thousands of
people who were interested in this idea. So what did
that do? It added more momentum into this process. We
were more excited about this idea. The speed changed everything,
and today it is one of our most profitable programs

(07:46):
that we've ever launched, all because we moved quickly. So
what's the lesson here? Speed to market beats perfection. Launching
a Minimal viable product, aka a link to a landing
page creates momentum and user investment, making it nearly impossible
for slower, perfect competitors to catch up to what you're doing.

(08:08):
One of my favorite quotes from Sean Parker, the co-founder
of Napster, is move fast and break things. Unless you're
breaking stuff, you're not moving fast enough. Remember that clarity
comes from action, you will never just think of the
perfect plan, you will discover it while you're already moving. Lastly,
number four, the today rule. What I like to do

(08:28):
to make sure I am always following this rule is
to ask myself these two questions daily. What can I
launch or test today instead of next week? And the
second question is what is the smallest step I can
take to get data? Now? Every day counts. When you
think about where you want to go and what your
targets are, you don't get multiple days to take off

(08:50):
where you're just assuming somebody else is making progress on
your goals. So when you think about what you're doing today,
I like to use this hack. I have a list
of all of my core priorities, and I start every
morning identifying what I can do that day to move
the ball forward, even if the ball isn't in my hand. Now,
I'm not much of a sports analogy fan because I

(09:12):
don't know much about sports. I think of it like
a football game. Every down counts. You have to get
closer and closer and closer, even if it's only three yards,
you might think, oh, three yards doesn't really matter when
there's 100 yards that this ball has to go. The
three yards matter. And every day when you wake up,
if you are not clear on what you have to
do in order to move that project, move that initiative forward,

(09:36):
you're going to get lost. And instead of making fast decisions,
you're going to be slowed down by the person that
you think has the ball, when really you need to
take the frickin ball over and start making moves down
the field. So for me, this looks like in every
single meeting I am clear on who is supposed to
do what after the meeting. If the meeting doesn't end,
where there are clear decision points that have to be
executed upon, there are clear notes where people have action

(09:57):
items and everybody knows what the next steps are. It
was a failed meeting. I just wasted my time. The
fastest way to waste your time is to lose control
of what you can do today. So going back to
the today rule, what can you do today to make
forward movement? Today is a day that you have to
make forward movement because you don't have the luxury of

(10:18):
waiting until tomorrow. If you are not making progress across
the most important things of your life, schedule a time
for yourself every single morning to review the handful of
the core priorities and then ask yourself, what am I
doing to move this forward today? Do you have to
follow up with somebody? Do you yourself have to take action?
Do you need to make an outbound phone call? What
is it that you can do today to make it

(10:40):
move forward? Remember that perfectionism is just procrastination with better branding.
So today, take one action towards something that you've been
putting off just because it wasn't perfect.

S1 (10:50):
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(11:10):
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