Today on The Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast, I am going to talk about making things better by destroying them. I am walking with Des and Troy today. For those who have been following this podcast for a while, the Luna Meister is somewhere up back at the house but Des and Troy are here with me; and together, they destroy.
That is pretty much all they do. They don't even really guard the house. They are just destroyers. That is all they do and they literally tear up everything. But that is okay because it is very similar to what we are going to be talking about right now.
Overview & Episode Content
- Getting Used too the Destruction
- Growing Up in an Unchanging Environment
- Breaking the Unwanted Things to Make Way for Improvements
- Sometimes, You Need to Break Things to Get to the Next Phase
- Changing and Breaking Old Systems to Help You Succeed
Getting Used to the Destruction
We have a lot of construction projects going on at the house. I made the end of 2021 the time to do everything my wife wanted us to do for the last 5 years at our place. I've compressed it down into the last few months as a way of saying, “I love you, Hun. Please don't ever leave me. Please don't ever think of going anywhere else.”
Not that she ever would. She is trapped with our eight kids going on nine so I got her. She's mine forever — just kidding.
I was motivated to give her what she wanted for our home because she has been so patient with me and business. Now is the time to do it!
One thing I have learned is that destruction comes together with any type of construction project. That is right, destruction. Destroying! (Des and Troy had just looked at me as I said that word.) And destruction was something that took a while for me to get used to.
When we moved into our first home in Orange County, everything looked great. I thought, “This is great. We’re married and we are living our life now. And we get to do things that we always wanted to do as a couple.”
Then my wife told me, “I just want to make a few changes. I’d love to have my dad come over and change things a little bit, is that cool?”
My father-in-law is a general contractor and he is an expert at this stuff. So I'm like, “Yeah, no problem.”
The first thing that happened was they tore down all of the drywall. It was just crack, crack, crack. Done, and gone. I almost went full-on insane at that point.
I'm like, “I've never…”
Growing Up in an Unchanging Environment
In my 20 years of living in our family home as I was growing up, I don't think we ever changed anything. If we did, maybe it was just a kitchen countertop or something like that. In fact, we still had the oven from 1979 in that place. We never changed anything!
When I go back to visit my grandma at her place, most of the stuff is still exactly the same as I remember it. That is just the way we were. We did not change much. It was just not something that we did as a family.
So when I got married and my wife, bless her heart, wanted to make a few little changes here and there I was thinking, “No problem. We can change the forks and spoons, or change the tablemats. No problem.”
But when I saw a big gaping hole on the side of a wall, I immediately stressed out. Immediately and completely stressed out! I thought, “How are we going to fix this? I've never seen this before! What is it? What's going on?”
But as I got used to it, I started seeing that in order to make things new and in order to change things sometimes you actually have to destroy what's there. That's the way it is over here at our acreage.
When we moved in, the house that we have was amazing. By that time, I had already gotten used to all the destruction. So when my wife wanted to rebuild a wall or destroy another wall there I have gotten used to it already.
Break the Unwanted Things to Make Way for Improvements.
The exterior of our home was a different story. The outside of the house was rocky and our kids would get hurt all the time. More importantly, we did not want anything like a slip and slide because the house was surrounded by jagged rocks. The house also sits on the hills. Every time we would walk around in our “backyard, immediately there was a 4 ft wall of dirt and rock. We had to climb that in order to get to the flat bush area.
Over the past year, we hired a really cool guy named James who came in with an excavator that I rented out. With that excavator, he flattened out everything in the backyard. He also flattened out pretty much everything in the front yard and made roads through our 20 acres.
The roads allowed us to actually get from one place to another safely. When guests came over, there would be no place to go other than inside the house.
So today, there is mass destruction all over the place. We ended up breaking one of our leach lines, among other things we managed to break during construction — with all the many things that are happening with our many construction projects.
Currently, we might have poured cement over one of the outlets for our septic tank. The guys knew where one outlet was and thought it was the only one. That sucks because I’m not sure what this means now. I’m not sure if we can still pump it or not.
Sometimes, You Need to Break Things to Get to the Next Phase
So, why am I saying this? There would always be moments where things are going to be destroyed. Sometimes, in order to get to the next level, you have to destroy a lot. You might need to destroy the way you think, the way you do business, the way you’re comfortable with.
With Pro Sulum for example, we are doing very well and I never expected to find myself in this position. But there was a time where our progress was at a plateau. I had to get advisers. These people were much smarter than I am and had been in this particular situation. Their role is to help me organize everything in the right way.
One of the things that had to happen first was to break things. A lot of these things were systems that I had set up — whether it was with employees or with my systems. I had to break these things because financially, it wasn’t making any sense. I had to destroy what I had built because if I had kept on going with the path that I was going, Pro Sulum would have gotten screwed over.
The thing with building anything — your home, businesses, productivity, or family — is there are so many blind spots. I want to give a lot and I have a very big heart and I want to give a lot to my VSAs and I want to give a lot to my partners. I want to give a lot to people within my community.
But a lot of times, when you give too much, this can put you in a bad situation. So, I had to break all of those habits so that I can have Pro Sulum continue to grow in the long run. Otherwise, things would simply not work out anymore.
Change and Break Old Systems to Help You Succeed
We get scared when things do not go the right way. And we get scared when we step out of our comfort zone. When we tend to like things to happen ‘right now’ then that is an indication that something is going dreadfully wrong.
In fact, if you hire a consultant and they are starting to break some of your systems, they are trying to tell you that you need to change some things. And usually, those changes need to be made. Without those changes, then your business would be all over in the long haul. You will see a lot of problems in the near future.
When you have things that you need to change in your business and it hurts or it does not feel good, that does not mean that it would not be effective. Most of the time, those changes are exactly what you need.
You need somebody to show you where things are going wrong and help you to reorganize so you can get to the next level. This is one of the reasons why we have our Virtual Systems Architects where they can come in — they are the best virtual assistants with superpowers — to document your systems.
Consultants — and even people like out VSAs — might ask you to change some of your processes especially when they find better ways to do things. It can be uncomfortable for most business owners — to work with people who are there to help make the business better.
Questions like, “Why do you have these processes? Or why do you perform a task this way?” can be very uncomfortable sometimes because of pride. So It's important to understand that discomfort is not always a bad thing — whether in business or personal life.
Conclusion
The more uncomfortable you are, and the more you break things to fix them, then the more likely you can get at the root of what actually works and what doesn't. You will quickly find yourself better off in business and the better person you are going to be over all.
Right now, what's something you are doing where you can bring in another set of eyes who can help you to break through to the next level despite the pain and the discomfort?
I challenge you to bring somebody in who can help you to take your business to the next level no matter how much it might hurt.
Resources and Links
This is Dean Soto, founder of Freedom In Five Minutes. Go check out FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com especially if you want a Virtual Systems Architect who can document everything that you are doing by dedicating just 5 minutes of your time each day to provide the Process Videos for the VSAs to document. You never have to do them ever again once those processes are documented.
Go check those out and keep on listening to the Freedom In Five Minutes podcast. I hope you find this valuable because I just love doing this. And if you want more, please let me know. If you have any questions, email me at Dean@ProSulum.com and I’ll catch you on the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode.