Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business

by Ramit Sethi

One of the biggest weaknesses of business books is that authors fill them with tactics that simply stop working as the market changes. After a few months, or maybe a few years, the book becomes totally useless.

Candidly, most people reading this will not become millionaires because it involves extremely hard work and insane perseverance.

What those people don’t realize is they’re losing money every single day, thanks to inflation. They never took even a single weekend to read a good book about personal finance, so they don’t understand that by not investing, they will absolutely, positively run out of money.

But the biggest failures aren’t things you did. They’re things you didn’t do. Playing it safe is one of the biggest failures possible.

The invisible risk of working at a job you don’t love is every day you’re not being challenged, you’re not just stagnant — you’re actually going backwards compared to other people who are learning new skills, getting more responsibility, and getting paid what they deserve.

the very best in the world are relentless at mastering the fundamentals. Kobe Bryant spent hours working on dribbling drills every day.

How can you achieve your goal if you’re terrified of what you’ll look like when you’re successful? What might you do to sabotage your success?

It took me years to be able to say, “You know what? My stuff is really good, and I’m going to charge for that and if you are not ready to pay, or you can’t afford it, that’s OK.”

Money is an emotional topic. It makes us feel guilty. It makes us feel alone. Who else can we talk to about it?

Rule #1: People Pay Me for the Value I Create

That’s a scarcity mindset. People with a scarcity mindset believe there’s a limited pie, and if you take one piece, that’s one piece less for everyone else.

When you can connect and really solve their problems, the price is a mere triviality.

if you create value for others, they’ll happily pay for it.

Rule #2: The More Money I Make, the More Value I Can Create

But, how do you think I wrote a New York Times Bestseller based off a blog, built high quality courses, and created a world-class event? By taking the money I make and reinvesting it back into making my business even better.

Rule #3: Money Is a Marker That I’m Doing the Right Thing

The best entrepreneurs know we have an OBLIGATION to ask for the sale, because that’s the best way to help our customers.

I’d rather focus on the few real numbers that matter, like sales, revenue, profit, etc., than all these other proxies for success. Why? Why is money a marker that I’m doing the right thing?

But it takes a lot of trust for someone to actually pull out their wallet and pay you money, because they believe you can help them solve their problems.

It’s more efficient to pay money in exchange for someone’s knowledge or expertise or skills. And if you’re willing to pay for someone else’s expertise, there are people out there who will pay for yours.

Whatever your idea is, it has to be something somebody wants.

This may be the most important idea in business. If you only take one thing away from this book, it should be this: Create something that people WANT to buy.

For example, any business that serves nonprofits is doomed. Nonprofits are not going to pay you. Neither will restaurants or students. Restaurant owners believe they’re “too busy” for most services, and students are poor and want to spend their limited money on alcohol.

A huge part of your success in business comes from consciously choosing who you’re attracting and who you’re repelling.

By just taking the 3 steps above, you’ve put yourself ahead of 99% of people who think of an idea and spend years of time and tons of money before finding out it will never be profitable.

Actually listening is the critical differentiator between a successful business with happy customers… and everyone else.

I cannot emphasize enough that the simple act of actually listening to people — without judgment — can skyrocket your business.

your ears should perk up whenever you hear the words “I want,” “I wish,” or “I don’t know.”

“Tell me about that.”

That attitude inspires me — to be able to run my business the way I want, and to be able to choose the customers I want to work with. To sacrifice short-term revenue to create a business I am proud of.

“Your biggest challenge [is] customer selection. You pick the right customer, you win. You pick the wrong customer, you lose. Focus on helping great people get better.”

It turns out that real entrepreneurs don’t think about starting a business like the rest of us do. And until you adopt their mindset, you will never be successful on your own.

The reason famous entrepreneurs seem so natural is that, by the time you hear about them, they’ve had a lot of practice.

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

If you don’t learn to embrace mistakes, you get stuck in analysis paralysis.

Mindset shift #3: Focus on giving, not getting

You can safely ignore most of those things. In fact, I believe in doing less — and doing it better. Our business doesn’t do half the things that many of our competitors do. Yet we’re bigger than they are.

Anyone can be “efficient” — meaning they can do a given task pretty well. But very few can be “effective,” meaning they select the right things to work on in the first place.

Author, journalist, and psychology expert Charles Duhigg says one of the best ways to stand out is by “indulging in your obsessive compulsive disorder.” “People who are successful are people who are not ashamed to say, I am super passionate and interested in X and I’m going to indulge that. Yes, I’m a weirdo. But I’m going to figure this out, and I’ll figure out what I like about it, so that I can share it with you.”

It’s the psychology that separates the winners from everyone else.

Here are more examples of communicating professionalism: Number 1: Being 100% prepared.

Number 2: Being proactive It’s really easy to go into a client meeting, listen to what they want, and do it. It’s easy to send out an email with some newsletter tool, then never follow-up with any of your readers. This is table stakes.

What does doing your homework look like? It means really going deep in the archives and reading every blog post they’ve ever written.

So many of us go into these meetings without having thought through our questions. Write them down the first few times and go through the process of answering them.

Most importantly, don’t rush it. Nothing damages this kind of relationship more than someone who is overanxious and becomes more of a pest than a person who’s interested in a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

I hate that voice. I hate it because every time I listen to it and quit, I regret it and want to go back in time and slap myself in the face.

I thought I couldn’t go on, and I was getting ready to quit, but instead of letting me quit or even coast, my coach pushed me to do even more.

It made me think about how easy it is to quit — and how rare it is to find someone who’ll push you harder than you even thought was possible.

“Don't worry about this. This is an easy day. You're capable of 20 times what you think you are.”

says, “Everything is figure-out-able.”