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Leadership is the single most important skill because if you know how to do it, you can lead people who handle everything else. All other skills are additional, whereas leadership is the only skill that multiplies. If you can lead a department, you can grow it. If you can lead a company, you can grow it. If you can lead people, you can grow them.

Everyone wants to lead the way, but nobody wants to be alone. The first time I promoted one of my sales coaches to a sales manager, I remember getting a call from him about three weeks later. I had texted him asking, "How's the new role? You really wanted it. I'm just curious - how are you feeling so far?" He replied, "It's actually really tough." I knew he was going to say that. I asked, "Why is it tough?" He said, "I just feel really, really lonely." I wasn’t expecting that. I said, "Let’s take a look at this. You are no longer on a team; you lead a team. The things you do every day are not the same as what they do every day. You do different things, and you do things alone. You also do things before others, so you're not in lockstep with them - you’re leading the way so they can follow. "You also have fewer peers now. Before, you had 15 peers on the team. Now you have five. The price of leadership is loneliness. You can’t lead the way unless you’re a few steps ahead. When you lead, people aren’t beside you anymore - they’re behind you. Even if it’s just a few steps, you feel those steps."

When I think about how I used to speak to myself versus how I do now, I realize I was constantly beating myself up, worrying, and questioning things. I wasn’t cheering myself on. Once I recognized that this was why loneliness was so painful, I asked myself, “How would I speak to myself if I were my own best friend?” That sounds lame, but I swear it has made the process so much less painful. Leadership is a game where the last person standing wins. It’s not about achieving one goal; it’s about staying in the game. It’s about being the kind of person who can endure hard things and stand tall when you do.

Loneliness will happen no matter what, but the suffering it causes is compounded by how you speak to yourself. Do you want to grit your way through the journey, or do you want to make it easier on yourself - even enjoyable? If you want to enjoy it, you must change how you speak to yourself and the thoughts you allow yourself to focus on.

A great leader surrounds themselves with people who make it easier to achieve their goals, not harder. It’s about having people in your life who support your mission, personal goals, and what’s important to you. It’s about engineering an environment that makes success easier, starting with the people closest to you. A leader is only as good as the people they surround themselves with, both inside and outside the business. I can almost always correlate the highest performers in my businesses with people who have the highest level of support outside of work. One of the easiest ways to rid yourself of self-doubt, limiting beliefs, and conflict is to ensure the people around you outside of work don’t create any of that.

The sad truth is we often let people who’ve given up on their dreams interfere with us achieving ours.

As a leader, you don’t demand respect; you earn it by being trustworthy.

Companies die from the inside out - they implode more than they explode. It often isn’t an issue with the market but with internal operations. If you can’t get your team to operate at their best, if you don’t have great people, operations, marketing, or sales, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a great market. In the beginning, some companies survive because they’re first to market. It doesn’t matter then that they lack the best people, culture, or practices. People stay because there’s nowhere better to go. But eventually, competing companies emerge, their best talent leaves, and these competitors take over with better cultures and more trustworthy leaders. The root issue is often a leadership approach that demands respect without earning the trust of their people. The irony of leadership is that many say, “I’ll act respectable once they respect me,” or, “I’ll act trustworthy once they trust me.” They expect more from their teams than they give to their teams. I’ve always played the opposite: you must give before you get.

When I see something from my team, when I see them act in a way that is not in accordance with the values of my company, or when I see them act in a way I wouldn't want them acting, I ask myself: In what ways have I exemplified this?

Respect is earned; it's not demanded. All of these things are given first by the leader, not by the team.

"I've got your back. We're in this together. I will tell you when something's up, and I will tell you when something's not up." Because of that, we can move fast in areas that are slow. With people who move slow, there's typically not enough trust, and most of the time, that comes from shortcuts in communication.

I hired someone to be an operator in one of my companies. I thought there was value in the fact that this person was constantly pointing out problems and talking to me about them. There is value in bringing up problems and identifying what isn't going well, of course. But this person was overly fixated on it. What was really interesting is that I looked at where this person's time went. They talked about problems more than they talked about solutions. Why is it that leaders don't talk about problems as much as they talk about solutions? Why is it that leaders are optimistic? It's not because they're delusional; it's a skill. Being optimistic is a skill. When you are in a company where bad things happen all day, every day, it is a very necessary skill. Here's the thing: If you're focused only on problems, how do you grow your business? If you're focused on negativity, how do you grow the team? What I recognized is that if you allow problems to steal your attention, you take that attention away from finding solutions. The best leaders do not complain; they solve. They acknowledge the problem and its impact, then get busy solving it. The best leaders, in my experience, spend about 10% of the time discussing the problem and 90% of the time on possible solutions.

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. The leader gets to solving the problem.

I had a company in the portfolio that started strong. In the first year, we 11x'd the results—it was crazy. I thought, "Wow, this company is doing really well." I didn’t double-click into the CEO's personal life or choices at the time. Along the way, the company kept growing, but the CEO started making poor choices. Employees began messaging me, saying, "I don’t know if you know, but this person is doing drugs, skipping meetings, showing up disheveled, or talking to customers about a rave they attended." They’d say, "It’s been a week, and they haven’t been in the office." I realized I was partnered with this company, but I wasn’t the CEO’s boss. I had to use soft influence to see what could happen. Despite the poor behavior, the company kept growing—until it started to crumble. Leaders on the team began calling me, saying they didn’t want to work for the CEO. It wasn’t about how this person showed up in business but about who they were outside of work. You cannot compartmentalize life. Whether people like it or not, what you do in your personal life affects how people see you at work. People often lie to themselves about this. I don’t want to take advice from someone who doesn’t have their life together. Even if someone says, "I grew my business to $10 billion," if they’re cheating on their spouse, doing drugs, or drunk half the time, I don’t want advice from them.

Business is personal. You don’t just become a different person when you come to work. This is something I tell my team: "You bring your whole self to work, whether you like it or not." Trying to compartmentalize and be a different person at work and home is why many people don’t become leaders. They think people won’t notice, but they do.

Values are what you do, not what you say.

I genuinely want to be a person who makes the world better. I start with making myself better. Early on, I liked to drink a lot outside of work. We’d been sleeping in motels, drinking a fifth of Jack, splitting Subway sandwiches. But I realized I needed to change. I decided to stop drinking and didn’t touch it for three and a half years. I chose to change because it wasn’t worth it to me.

People often forget that if you want to go big in business, you’re in the business of people. At some point, it’s all about people. They build the product, do the marketing, and make the sales. All you can do is be a person of character and a great leader to attract capable people who can do those things for you.

Every time I’ve met someone with a company who lacks integrity or doesn’t genuinely want the best for their people, they’ve paid the price—whether it’s in a month, six months, or a year.

People ask me about my goals. Sure, I have monetary goals, milestones, and aspirations for the size of my business. But none of it matters if I’m a worse person for it. None of it matters if my team or customers are worse for it. My moral compass is simple: Leave everyone better than you found them.

One of the hardest things for me was learning how to show up for my team when I wasn’t feeling 100%. I used to wear my heart on my sleeve. If something wasn’t going right, people could tell. They’d ask, "Are you okay?" It was the first time I’d run a business, and the truth was, I didn’t feel okay. I felt stressed, scared, and nervous. But I realized it was selfish to let my feelings dictate how I showed up and how my team felt around me. I put a sticky note on my computer with two words: "Be neutral." My goal was to be levelheaded and steady.

The best people in your life, the ones you rely on, aren’t emotional rollercoasters - they’re rocks for you.

Success is not based on how you feel. Success is based on what you do, regardless of how you feel.

There are days I don’t want to do what’s required for success. But I want to reach the end of my life knowing I did everything possible to achieve my goals and become the person I wanted to be. You don’t lead based on how you feel in the moment; you lead based on the values you’ve set for yourself.

I’m just good at feeling bad. It never goes away. You don’t feel better; you just get better at feeling bad.

How many of your days are dictated by your values versus your feelings? Many people don’t reach their goals because they let a bad day dictate their actions. Stick with the plan.

It's always the right thing that's the hard thing, and the hard thing is the right thing.

I went to an entrepreneurial meetup, and this guy pulled me aside after I told him what kind of business I had. He said, "Listen, when it gets easy is when you hit the gas. If you don't, these guys who are bigger than you are going to come, steal all your stuff, and put you out of business." I have never relaxed the same way since that day, nine years ago. It was true.

Immediately, within about three months of building our business, I started seeing everyone trying to figure out ways to copy us. All the big players were saying, "Oh, we see what they're doing. It's really working. Let's try and copy it." The only advantage we had was speed. Now, I know that speed is a competitive advantage. That doesn’t mean moving fast with subpar work; it means moving fast with good work. Success is not just about having ideas; it's about acting on those ideas faster than your competition.

I used to send surveys to my team and give them a week to complete them. I noticed that nobody did it until the last minute. Why? Because the survey took five minutes to complete. Why give people a week? Now, I give them a day. It’s a good test of how fast the team can move.

You cannot create other leaders unless you let go of control. You can have growth, or you can have control, but you cannot have both. You have to lead in a way that inspires people to become leaders themselves and, ideally, to create other leaders. The best leaders create more leaders, not followers who simply nod their heads.

When I was running my first company, Gym Launch, there was a time I had to be out for two weeks because of surgery. I was anxious and thought, "There’s no way anyone’s going to keep this together." Up to that point, I’d never taken more than a day off. Four days after surgery, I checked in, and everyone said everything was going well. Six days later, same thing. Ten days in, I joined a call and learned that Facebook had shut us down, two people had quit, and another major issue had come up. I panicked, but the team said, "Don’t worry. We handled it." They had solved all the problems without me. That moment taught me I hadn’t been stepping back enough to see who would step up. I wasn’t giving my team room to realize their potential. I had been robbing them of opportunities by taking on all the challenges myself. Now, every time I take time off, I ask myself, "How is this an opportunity to see someone else's potential?"

The root of strategy is knowing what to say no to. It's knowing the big "yes" so you can say no to everything else.

The goal is to hire people who are better than you at what you were doing. If someone can’t outperform you in one specific task you used to handle, you’re not hiring smart enough. Think about it: does this person raise the bar, keep it the same, or lower it?

You don’t need to get better at every task. You need to get better at picking people. Someone once told me, "It's the one job you’ll never grow out of." That stuck with me. It’s more important to pick the right people than to be the right person for the job because your role will constantly change.

Your business will eventually get so big that it’s impossible for you to handle any one job yourself. Instead, you must find the right people to handle all the jobs. If you pick the right people and put them on hard problems or big opportunities, your business grows. It’s not scalable if you’re the one solving every problem or chasing every opportunity. The skill that endures is learning how to pick people. So, how much time have you spent learning how to do that?

Some people are so scared of failing that they refuse to change. But if you don’t adapt, the environment overtakes you, and you become its victim. The ones who got stronger during chaos were the ones who said, "Screw it. We’re changing everything, maybe just for six or twelve months, but we’ll get through it stronger." That experience taught me that our ability to adapt and respond during times of chaos, change, and hardship dictates our success.

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