What 18-year-old Matt would think 🕰️

Every once in a while I try to time travel back to being 18.

Not because I want to go back. But because 18-year-old me would be blown away by things I now barely notice.

I got my first credit card at 18: An Apple card.

I bought a laptop with it…

Then missed my very first payment and put an immediate blemish on my credit. 🤦

An 800 credit score felt ridiculous to me back then. Like a far-off mark of having your life completely together, and I wasn't sure I'd ever get there.

I watched Who Killed the Electric Car around the same time and thought about how crazy it would be to someday own a Tesla.

A $100,000 electric car was the ultimate sign you'd made it.

And bigger than either of those…

I remember thinking about becoming a husband and a dad.

That felt impossibly far away. I remember knowing even then that I wanted to become the kind of man who could do that well. Not just wanting the outcome, but trying to build the character for it.

Which makes it surreal to look around now and realize I'm living in a lot of what 18-year-old me was hoping for.

And it's way too easy for me to forget that.

Today in 3 minutes or less:

✔️ The Gap and The Gain

✔️ Winners and Losers Have the Same Goals

✔️ Why Boring Wins

✔️ Your Move This Week

📏 The Gap and The Gain

There's a concept called the Gap and the Gain, and I bring it up a lot because it frames my mindset daily.

Most of us measure our lives by looking forward… at the gap between where we are and where we want to be. There's always another goal, another number, another level.

The problem isn't having goals or being ambitious. The problem is that the gap never closes. You hit the number and the number moves. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve felt this.

The gain is the same distance measured backwards: How far you've come from where you started.

Same life. Completely different feeling.

Ask yourself what the version of you from 10 or 15 years ago desperately hoped would someday be normal.

There's a good chance you're standing in some of it right now.

🎯 Winners and Losers Have the Same Goals

Here's the part that puts a fire under my butt.

Everybody in your niche has roughly the same goals. Everyone wants more clients. Everyone wants better retention. Everyone wants the business to run without them.

The goal isn't what separates people.

What separates them is whether they can keep doing the small, boring, disciplined things long enough for time to start working in their favor.

Most plans don’t fail because the goal was wrong. They fail somewhere around week six, when you lose steam or get bored.

🥱 Why Boring Wins

18-year-old me had big ideas about what success would look like.

35-year-old me is realizing the coolest part isn't checking those things off. It's that almost all of them came from thousands of tiny decisions that felt like nothing at the time.

Publishing when nobody was watching. Following up one more time. Fixing the thing that only bothered me.

None of it felt like progress. All of it was.

Your business is the same. The compounding stuff never feels like the important stuff while you're doing it.

✅ Your Move This Week

Write down what your business looked like three years ago. Maybe it didn’t even exist! Revenue, team, clients, how much of it ran through you personally.

Then look at today.

You're probably standing in something past-you would have been thrilled about… and you've been too busy staring at the gap to notice.

To profiting more and working less. 💸

-Matt

To profiting more and working less. 💸 

-Matt

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