A couple weeks ago, I was interviewed on my friend and former coach Corey’s podcast. One topic we talked about was the backstory behind why and how I decided to build an online business school this year. One interesting tidbit (or so listeners to that episode tell me) was that I kept the project a secret from my team for 6 months…not because I didn’t trust them obviously, but because I’ve hopefully (finally) learned an important lesson about running a business (that I think also applies to our personal lives): that a business, once established, is more likely to die of overeating than of starvation.
I watched an interview where Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) was talking about this (paraphrased):
I’m an ideas guy – if you put me in front of a whiteboard and I can come up with 100 ideas in half an hour. But early in Amazon’s history, Jeff Wilke (one of my executives and mentors) came up to me and said: “Jeff, you have enough ideas per minute, per day, per week, to destroy Amazon”. And this was such a shocking idea for me… I said: “What do you mean?” He said: “You have to release the work at the right rate that the organisation can accept it”. Wilke explained that every time I released a new idea, I was creating a backlog, a queue, of work in process, and because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating distraction. And so Wilke said: “You have to figure out when to release the ideas at a rate that the organisation can accept”. And this sounds so obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time. And this was a profound insight for me: so I started prioritising ideas better, keeping a list of them, keeping them to myself, until the organisation was ready for the ideas.
When I heard this, it immediately resonated. Our business is obviously way smaller than Amazon, but even at our scale (with around 15 team members), I’ve been guilty of this exact thing: throwing ideas into the business at a faster rate than the organisation can handle them.
In the early days of the business and YouTube channel, I could pivot on a whim. New video series? Great let’s try it tomorrow. Launch a brand new course? Easy, we can do that in a week. Switch website platforms? Sure why not. The cost of a failed experiment was basically zero.
But now our expenses are $2m+ per year, with team salaries making up the bulk of that. We have people whose livelihoods depend on executing well on the things we’ve already committed to. If I get onto a team Zoom meeting and say “Hey, I’ve got this exciting new idea for an online business school!”, suddenly everyone’s focus shifts. The other projects get deprioritised, energy gets scattered, the stuff we’re already doing starts to suffer. Even if I preface it with “but this is just an idea at this stage guys, don’t worry about it, I’m just throwing it out there for a discussion”, it’s way too easy for the team to think: “okay but what does that mean for all the stuff we’re already doing… wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t be investing in project X or Y because this new thing seems to be exciting”. This is all well and good if we end up actually pursuing the new thing, but I’ve often changed my mind on exciting new ideas just as fast as I’ve suggested them to the team, which creates “organisational whiplash” and is a total nightmare to deal with (or so I’m told when I ask team members to give me feedback…)
Maybe this is something you can relate to if you’ve ever had a manager or a boss who considers themselves “an ideas guy” – they have dozens of new ideas every month, but end up sticking to very few of them, which means you end up wasting a tonne of time, energy and mental bandwidth changing direction. Not fun.
So anyway, this time with this online business school thing, I tried my best to NOT introduce the idea to the team until I felt (a) I was solid in actually wanting to do it, and (b) I’d spoken to a bunch of friends and mentors about it, and (c) we’d validated it with a lower-lift experiment. This ended up taking like 9 months: around September 2024 was when I was chatting to one of my mentors, Olly, and said: “hey I think I really want to build an online business school”. Then a few months passed, I noodled on the idea a bit, I signed up to some online courses from other people doing similar things to see if I was still interested in it, I tried out some YouTube videos talking about “how to build an online business” to see if it would be fun. Last summer, we also ran a “$1k Challenge” as an experiment: a 6-week bootcamp that would help people earn their first $1,000 online. That turned out to be quite fun to run, and students got a lot of value out of it, so it was good validation for the idea that would ultimately become the Lifestyle Business Academy.
But there’s another thing I’ve noticed especially in the new year, when we’re all about reinventing ourselves and setting goals etc… we get our journals out, decide to learn Spanish, decide to start a podcast, decide to go to the gym more regularly, run a marathon, do a hyrox (whatever that means), read 50 books this year, and so much more.
And then we wonder why, by February, we feel overwhelmed and haven’t made meaningful progress towards any of these goals.
Just like a business (even one at the scale of Amazon) can only work on a finite number of things at once, the same is true for us as individuals. Our time, energy, focus, attention and motivation are all finite resources. And trying to do lots of things in parallel is often a recipe for burnout and overwhelm.
So the same Bezos principle applies to our personal lives: instead of introducing new goals and habits into your life at an overwhelming rate, it’s probably better to drip-feed new ideas at a rate that we can actually handle sustainably.
I’ve started asking myself a question whenever I feel the urge to start something new: “What am I already doing that this would compete with?”
Every new commitment takes bandwidth. And bandwidth is finite. So if I’m honest with myself, I can only really make meaningful progress on 1-3 things at any given time. Maybe less lol. This is why I often preach the idea of setting a primary “Quarterly Quest” for work and for life – the ONE THING, in each of these areas, that if you did in the next 90 days, would have the biggest impact.
If you’ve read this far in this email, you’re probably like me – lots of ideas, lots of things you want to work on, very good-looking etc. The problem with people like us is that rather than screwing up our lives due to laziness and sloth, we’re actually much more likely to burn ourselves into the ground through ambition, lack of balance, and a failure to show restraint when setting goals.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
