I’m sure you’ve heard the scary stat that 50% of small businesses don’t make it past year 5. That’s terrible.

You know what’s more terrible? That 50% tipping doesn’t happen until year 5, which means there are a whole lot of entrepreneurs and business owners struggling through those first 5 years. A whole lot more than the 50% who ultimately close up shop.

Yet the reason for the struggle isn’t that those business owners don’t know what to do. Goodness knows there is no shortage of information out there teaching and telling exactly what to do.

But there's the rub: There is so. much. information out there that the point gets missed: the conversation becomes what information is good and what’s bad instead of whether the information is the important thing or not. 

Because guess what? It’s not about the information. If it was about the information, businesses wouldn’t be able to get to year 5. But they do. They sputter to year 5 on that information and then they can’t get any further.

I...

Let's live in a world where we’re all going to run a marathon next year. 

(marathon runners don’t come for me, I’ve been you before, all the respect to you).

But let’s live in that world for a minute because I have a question for you:

If you are going to run a marathon next year, how are you going to train? 

You have 2 options:

1. You will run a series of short, intense sprints 3-4 days a week until the marathon, never running for more than a mile at a time
2. You will run long, slow distances slowly building up your endurance

This is not a perfect example of training plans, I know that, but humor me and choose. 

If you have to run a marathon next year and these are your only 2 choices, how are you training? A or B?

I’m guessing (hoping) all of you chose B.

Which is correct and wildly obvious: Option A is a great option to win a 100m race; Option B is a great option to win a marathon. 

But Option B is a terrible option to win a 100m race and Option A is a terrible option to ...