Coincidentally, for episode #22, my wife and I are going on our 22nd anniversary trip. We’ll stay in a CASTLE. I wanted to add that to my bucket list just so I could check it off. What can I say? I’m a high performer, an entrepreneur to the core.
In fact, that list-building, high-performing trait is exactly what I want to talk to you about today. My good friend spotted this in me: “Aaron, you’re always getting ready to get ready. Just start and adjust as you go.” My perfectionist brain did NOT want to hear this. I like to research all of the best possible options.
But since then, I’ve learned that “getting ready to get ready” is really just wasting time on the wrong steps. So now, I’m going to teach you to identify the areas where YOU do this.
This especially happens for entrepreneurs in the professional space. It’s okay if this is something you have to continually work on. But the key is to send out your minimum viable product as early as you can. You can make sure it isn’t embarrassing, but GO. START. Maybe it is just B minus work. But then you collect feedback, and move that B minus to a B plus and then to the A zone.
I’ll show you how this process will save time AND end in a product better tailored to your audience. It might feel brutal at first to hold yourself to an actionable timeline, but soon, you’ll be able to see how getting ready to get ready simply keeps you out of the action, second guessing rather than moving forward.
3 Key Takeaways
- You DON’T need to give your audience a new product that’s already the 100% best option. Let them help you to develop it and instead just move forward.
- Hold yourself accountable to how you spend your time. If the activity isn’t action-based, it isn’t helping in the end.
- Consider your employees and co-workers. As a leader, be SURE you aren’t fostering an environment where they’ll expect punishment if they don’t get it perfect on the first try.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Full Episode Transcript:
Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode. It is, you can probably tell a little bit, if you’re, if you’re watching the video version of this, of the vodcast, it’s a little bit hot in the studio. So you can see that my dome is a little bit shiny at the moment. It’s, it’s hot here in the Pacific Northwest and I’m not complaining at all because we had a very long winter that that kept going through spring into June, mid-June, and it was still cold. So I am perfectly happy with this hot weather. I don’t want it to go away and it’s training me up a little bit because of the fact that in just T-minus, I think, 12 days, my wife and I are going on our long-delayed anniversary trip. We’ve been married for 22 years now, but this will be actually a much delayed 20 year anniversary that we didn’t do for obvious reasons, pandemic. And we’re going to Spain for a week with some good friends and we have this amazing condo rented and there’s going to be all kinds of beach time and hanging out and exploring, and I’m really looking forward to it. And then we get to go celebrate with some amazing friends who we love dearly in Scotland. So two very different climates. But we’re gonna get to go to Scotland and stay in a castle. How cool is that? I don’t think I have that on my bucket list but it’s definitely, I’m gonna put it on my bucket list and that way, I can cross it off real quick because you know, I’m an A-type personality and high performers, we like to make lists and we like to cross them off.
In fact, I want to talk a little bit about that today, because of the fact that fellow high performers, entrepreneurs and business owners: you may have something that is very similar to what I have and I’ve had to work through in the past and I continually have to be aware of. And it is lovingly referred to by me as “getting ready to get ready.” And I’m going to tell you all about this, how to spot it. First of all, what it is, how to spot it, and then how to move past it. So my good friend Margarine, who’s a very, very wise woman spotted this in me several years back. “Erin, you’re always getting ready to get ready,” because I was telling her a story about why I hadn’t launched something and I wanted to do this first. I wanted to examine this and really get into the details of this before I moved forward. She said, “Aaron, you just, you’re still, you’re stuck. You’re getting ready to get ready. Like, just move! Just start. You can adjust as you go,” and my perfectionist brain did not want to hear this. Some of you may relate because of the fact that, that’s “But I need to find out the best option and the best way forward and the perfect software to use and the best funnel system to use and what’s the best template for that?” and all these things, and really just miring myself down and not making as much progress as I could have—or at all, in some cases.
This is something that you want to be able to learn to identify in yourself so that you can start to see where it might be holding you back in your business. It can show up in your personal life as well if you’re, there’s a relationship that you want to pursue or friendship you want to pursue, and you’re still with a perfectionist brain getting ready to get ready. But I see it show up for me in the biggest regard when I’m doing business things, especially when I have had an idea and now it’s time to move into execution. And there’s a couple of different times that this has showed up for me just recently, which is why I want to do this episode because it’s like another, a bad habit that pops up every once in a while. It’s something that I continually am working on and that’s okay. It’s okay that it pops up for me and then it kind of gets quiet for a while because I address it and I can spot it and then it might come roaring back when I start a new project or when my perfectionist brain wants to wait in order to make sure something is perfect before I start doing it. Which can be death in business, right? Especially with how fast paced the business world can be. One example of this would be recently, we were working on some gift boxes and this was in the last couple of weeks. A few years ago, we started doing gift boxes for some of our beloved clients and our marketing side of the agency that does videos with us and that we do more corporate coaching and things like that for. We decided we wanted to do these fun summer boxes and that they weren’t—the whole point of them was just to be fun. I wanted them to be the cool-looking box, and the perfect curated little gifts and things like that that would make someone just like so excited when they opened it and excited about their summer, okay? And just, we needed that right then. And people, I just felt like people needed to have something to look forward to winter, really. There had been a lot of doom and gloom and it was, I just wanted to get them to receive something that just filled them with joy instantly. So my perfectionist brain immediately went towards “Okay, well, I’m going to research the best things to get for the summer. Maybe I’ll look at Oprah’s Favorite Things list and then I’ll also look at like essentials for the summer and top 10 lists and I will compare and contrast. I’ll order some and I’ll test them.” And I’ll see and my wife, my life and business partner who’s an amazing project manager and moves forward on things, she does not have nearly the problem that I do with getting ready to get ready. She helped me get through that and she tolerated a bit of me going through and samplings of things and doing things. We love getting out the door. Now, fast forward to just two weeks ago, when we’re doing this now, I immediately think I would have learned right? I immediately went to “All right, let’s figure out what the new coolest things are. And should we use the same box? I know we have a few left over, but maybe we should order new ones. Maybe there’s a better template. Now maybe there’s a better vendor that makes the boxes, blah blah blah blah blah.” My brain automatically started going down that route.
My wife pulled up her phone, she went ahead, and she looked at one list and then she started an Amazon cart and—I kid you not—in 25 minutes, she had ordered all of it using our corporate card. She figured out what was going to ship when, when it would arrive so that we could have it out the door by the time we went on vacation. So she does not have the same problem that I have with getting ready. And I’ve so appreciate that about her but this, that’s just an example of how that can show up for you if your brain, if you’re like me and you need to find the perfect thing before you feel like you can move forward in your business. For instance, I have another example recently where I wanted to set up a sales page for the new course we’re creating for coaches that’s gonna be this amazing content studio. We ship all of this stuff directly to them and then we have a six week program where they set up their content studio and they have a process for. In less than two hours a week, they’re able to get their content out on a regular basis and it’s not even something we have to think about anymore, We’re super excited to do it. But I got the sales page, of course, and we use a learning management platform called Kajabi and I was looking at all the different options of sales templates I could use. And so I found myself starting to look at the templates and looking at other programs that I really liked. And I liked the way that the sales page looked and I liked the way that the language wasn’t everything, and I looked up and it had been nearly two hours. Two hours of time of picking out a template that I’m not even building. One of our team members is building it. Why did I spend so much time doing that? Because my brain still thinks that I need to be in control of getting ready to get ready. I need to find the best one the best . And so often, what is the best, it doesn’t matter what I think that the best option is going to be because of the fact that I work in an industry that I do, in marketing and sales and in coaching. A lot of times the first option is not the right one. That’s not the one that’s going to convert the best. That’s not the one that… and that’s okay. It’s even more silly that I’m getting ready to get ready because you’re spending all this time trying the first thing just to get the first thing out the door, when really what you want to do much like some of the best technology companies do and we as small business owners and entrepreneurs can do the same thing is get your minimum viable product out the door, your MVP. Get it so that it’s working, and it’s not embarrassing, and get it live, and then start getting feedback, and then fine tune as you go, but go start. Like I said, this, I think that I’m getting it right and that I’m just making sure that it’s the best quality product. I’ve got all these rationales, the best way that I could say it, the best template for my clients, the best things that are in the course that happened in the best sequence, and all of these things that my brain wants to figure out before it gets birthed into the world. And the most successful programs that I’ve launched and the most successful things that we’ve done for clients have been “Hey, let’s just, let’s do the first iteration, get it out the door.” Sometimes it is just B minus work. It’s the first draft. Then get it to the client, get it out into the world, collect feedback from people, and then take that B minus to a B and then take that B to a B plus, and then get it into the A zone, and then fine tune from there.
Getting ready to get ready is so self-defeating because it just keeps you in inaction and it keeps you second guessing and wondering. And I don’t want that for you. I want you to be better than me. Be better than me, people, okay? So don’t get caught in that trap of getting ready to get ready.
Now, I’ve told you what it looks like and that entrepreneurs, especially business leaders, people that love a good process, this is something to absolutely watch out for. If you are a leader, make sure again, spotter, you got it, make sure that you are not creating an environment where getting ready to get ready is expected. Because if people expect that you are going to be looking at them and expecting them to get it right on the first try and that they’ll somehow get punished if they don’t—so funny, right? As leaders, we have to be aware of that because if we start modeling that and they see us doing it, they’ll start doing it, too. And it will really slow down the results in your business. We want to watch out for that as leaders as well.
Getting ready to get ready might sound like different things for you and your business. I told you some examples of how it sounds for me. For you, it might be “I need to see which option is best for this specific software choice.” Maybe you’re doing a project management software for you and your business and you’re looking at teams. You’re looking at, you know, all these different ones that you could, you could use and do Trello or whatever, air table or whatever, and you just, you stay stuck in comparing and contrasting and looking at all the features and everything like that past a reasonable amount of time. Choose one, get going, and then if you need to change, you can like give yourself a deadline. A really, really small deadline. Like two hours. “I’m going to look at what’s out there, compare and contrast, maybe ask a couple friends who have used it a couple time, and then in two hours, I have to have made a choice and signed up for either month-to-month or for the annual pass. Really be brutal with yourself. At first, it will feel horrible because you’ll want to still get ready to get ready. Your brain will be like “No, is this going too fast,” but it’s not, it’s not too fast. Just make the decision and adjust as you go. It’s all fixable. This might, if you’re a marketer or a sales person, this might look like “Well, I need to include more personas in my marketing and sales funnels. I need to write more sequences before I start sending them out to make sure all my bases are covered.” Do the first one. Who’s the first persona? Is it small and medium sized businesses who are sales leaders? Is it enterprise training and enablement people? Is it something completely different? Pick one, get started, test, then do the second one. Don’t wait to get it out into the world. That will just slow you down. Again, I know that I’m telling you not to do what my brain wants to do all the time, but I want to save you from the pain that I’ve had in the past of not getting any results because I haven’t started yet, all right?
This also might look like (again, all of these examples are me): okay, so a little bit of a vulnerability here, but buying another course in order to be more perfect at something. But it’s theory-based and not action-based. For example, a program on marketing tactics versus a program that helps you get done marketing tactics and techniques, and that you have to implement it and get it done in X amount of time and they hold you accountable for it. So if you are going to take a course or something, and something is going to give you a result, make sure that it’s not just theory-based and then you have to figure out how to execute it on your own. Make sure that it’s action-based and that there’s accountability with it so that you get a result that you want in X amount of time. That’s a way to keep you out of getting ready to get ready and stalling with taking courses and things like that, that just create more work for you that’s undefined afterwards. Okay, definitely done that in the past. That’s how I evaluate the coaching that I want to get and how I evaluate the different court courses and new things that I learned. Is there a tangible, time-based result and where they’ll be accountability for me on that side of it, so that I get it done, and I get a result in my business or in my personal life? Look for those things as well.
So That’s it. I’m gonna go ahead and end there because I need to get out into this heat and I need to start getting a little bit of sun on this dome up top so that I am not someone that needs to hide from the sun when we leave on our trip in less than two weeks. My friends, thanks for spending a little bit of time with me today. If you are having some feelings about, like, “Oh, I think I get ready to get ready” or if you’re doing it right now, it’s okay. You’re human. I get you. If I could give you a hug right now, I would. Just know it’s totally okay but that you can change it right now, just by making yourself uncomfortable and giving yourself a deadline to make a choice by that’s ridiculously small, time-based, an hour, and you have to move forward after that.
All right. I’ll talk to you next week, my friends. Until then, no getting ready to get ready. Just moving forward, even if that step is super small. Talk to you soon.
