The Sam Ovens Podcast

Scaling a business is an awesome topic, cleaning up the mess and paying back the debt from scaling is not. This is a tricky thing to balance. Most entrepreneurs get it wrong. If you don't grow fast, a competitor might overtake you —but— grow too fast and you'll make a mess and accumulate too much debt for the company to get out of. Finding the perfect balance between these two extremes is an art-form that lies at the core of an ent...

3 Good books in 8 minutes. Need I say more.  

The books are:

1. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins — https://amzn.to/2LqVKZh

2. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston — https://amzn.to/2LtuQzS

3. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown — https://amzn.to/2NakjMa

Full blog post here: https://www.consulting.com/chann...

Do you get distracted by shiny objects? Always looking for something new to replace the thing that was new yesterday? (yes, you're crazy). At its core, shiny object syndrome (SOS) is a disease of distraction, and it affects entrepreneurs specifically because of the qualities that make them unique: High motivation, crave new technology, new developments, and no fear of starting new things. It's called shiny object syndrome because i...

Are you indecisive? Struggle to make fast decisions? History of poor choices? Put things off? Resort to "other peoples thinking" or following the crowd? We are the sum of our choices. Where you are in life right now, your current situation, it's nobodies doing but your own. It's the sum total of every decision you've ever made. We are our choices.

This podcast shows you how to free up time and energy to make better decisions, how t...

Do you get confused? Trouble thinking clearly? Overwhelmed by complexity? Paralyzed by decisions? Emotions contradicting logic?

The brain is humankind's greatest gift and a curse — it depends whether you control it, or it controls you.

In the world of entrepreneurship and business, it's more about mastering your brain, not mastering the tactics of business.

This podcast shows you how to get your thinking clean, and by doing so, win...

Until you make the unknown known, it will dictate your life and you will call it "fate". We live in a world of complexity and chaos — you either drown in it, or you understand it. How do you understand the complexity and chaos? Through the use of mental models.

Mental models are how we understand the world. Not only do they shape what we think and how we understand but they shape the connections and opportunities that we see. Menta...

What are the "ingredients" of success, Intelligence, and skill? What are the constituent parts? The source materials? Most people believe success, intelligence and skill are natural things you're either born with or without and there's nothing you can do to change it. They're wrong. Success, intelligence and skill, like everything else in the universe, has "ingredients". The same way a chemical compound is made up of elements, succ...

Normal people believe in one true "right" and "wrong". Geniuses, billionaires, and scientific revolutionaries believe in "contradiction". Normal people see what everybody else is thinking/doing, and then they adopt that as their own belief of what to think/do. They never think for themselves, they never agitate the crowd, they blindly obey. This isn't a problem if you're ok with losing. But, if you want to win, you need to think di...

What you see depends not only on WHAT you look at but also on WHERE you look from. This video shares how I use distance to think clearly + 7 important things I've been thinking about on my recent Salt Lake City vacation. These 7 things are recurring worries, thoughts, observations, and strategies that are currently on my mind. If you're an entrepreneur starting or growing a business, you'll probably find them interesting, and usefu...

What problem are you solving? For who? With what solution? What makes your solution different? And most importantly: What would the perfect solution look like? These are the things you should be spending most of your time thinking about as an entrepreneur. NOT taking photos of your food, Gucci duffle bag, and shitty snakeskin loafers to get social media followers to think you're rich, and maybe buy your stuff. Right now the entrepr...

Chances are your mind looks like this... It's full of "weeds", there probably is a plant somewhere in there, but you've mistaken the weeds for the plant itself. I talk to entrepreneurs every day, and a recurring pattern I see with all of them is that they've mistaken the distractions for the main thing. The weeds have taken over the garden of their minds.

Today's podcast shows you how to identify the weeds and eliminate them -...

I decided to become an entrepreneur when I was 20 years old, now I'm 30. I've made a lot of mistakes and learned important lessons. This video shares 9 things I wish I knew when I was getting started. If I knew these things back then, my journey would have been less painful and more productive. I would be much further ahead.

My hope is that by sharing this content, others can learn from my mistakes and avoid the potholes that lie o...