Two hours ago, Kyle arrived at the bar Hey, what's everyone drinking? Thirty minutes ago, Kyle got his friends another round of drinks Cheers. Cheers. Five minutes ago, Kyle decided to drive home drunk. A minute ago, a law enforcement officer pulled up behind Kyle Sir, have you been drinking tonight?
A chain of events that began two hours ago is about to change Kyle's whole world. Drive sober or get pulled over. Paid for by NHTSA. If one bad day can derail your plan, you don't have a plan, you've got a mood. Back when I was running brand and growth for Agency Nation, I made this mistake on loop.
One slow day of traffic, run out new headlines. A week of soft sales, new ICP. Open rates dip, new platform, new list, new guru playbook. It felt like leadership, it was chasing, chasing every rabbit. Every time I overreacted to one outcome, I yanked the team's attention off whatever we had been doing and sent them down a fresh rabbit hole.
New tech, new tactic, new market, rinse, repeat. We never let the system compound. No consistency, no scale. It finally clicked during Elevate 2018. We set the strategy, locked the system, and stopped reacting to every blip.
Registrations wobbled, sponsors hesitate, we stayed on plan. The result... Today's episode of Finding Peak is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring's not hard because there aren't enough people. It's hard because you're drowning in resumes and starving for candidates who can actually do the job.
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That's ziprecruiter.com/W-O-R-K. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/work. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. The result, eight hundred and twenty-seven attendees for an insurance conference with zero CE credit. Years later, people still tell me that that event changed their career.
That's what consistency buys you that chasing never will. Detaching from the outcome doesn't mean ignoring results. It means refusing to let one result hijack your strategy. Single outcomes are variance. Systems are compounding.
Variance is noise. Compounding is signal. If you optimize for noise, you will always destroy the signal. Here's what happens when you don't detach. You launch a campaign.
Day one, it's slow. Instead of letting the system breathe, you yank the wheel. New copy, new channel, new audience. You've just hit reset on the clock that was about to start compounding for you. Do that enough times, and you will never build momentum.
You just build motion sickness. I know. I have lived this life. Chasing is seductive because it feels like productivity. You're busy.
You're innovating. The team's cranking on new decks, new tech, new markets. It looks like leadership, but it's the business equivalent of a dog sprinting after every squirrel it sees. You're moving fast and going nowhere. And here's the ugly truth: chasing erodes trust.
Your team stops believing in the plan because there is no plan, just the next rabbit hole you feel like chasing. Your market stops recognizing you because you keep reinventing the wheel before it even starts to roll. The only thing that scales is repeatable inputs executed consistently over time. That's what compounds. That's what creates predictable growth.
That's what gives you leverage. Look at Amazon. For decades, their North Star wasn't sell more stuff. It was an unshakable focus on customer experience, lower prices, wider selection, faster delivery. Every innovation from Prime shipping to Kindle to AWS was an output of that strategy.
Sure, they tested and iterated, but they didn't abandon their core play every time a quarterly metric dipped. They stayed locked on the system, and the compounding did the rest. Today, they're not chasing squirrels. They own the whole damn forest. The move is simple.
Lock your strategy. Define the inputs that drive it. Judge yourself and your team on doing the work, not on today's wiggle in the chart. The translation here is stop worshiping the scoreboard. Build the team that always moves the chains, because games aren't won on one play.
They're won on a relentless grind of running the right plays over and over and over again until the clock runs out in your favor. Now, here's a simple exercise to help you lock in on this particular core tenant, the anti-chase protocol. Number one, name the hill. Write one clear ninety-day outcome. Step number two, define the machine.
Pick three to five non-negotiable inputs that create that outcome. Now, this could be a hundred targeted outreaches a day. It could be three long form pieces of content or maybe five demo follow-up calls a day. Step number three, your thirty-day no chase contract. For the next thirty days, you evaluate only input completion.
No switching tools, markets, tactics just because you see one bad data point Step number four, your rabbit list. It's the parking lot. Every shiny new idea goes here. Review it weekly, not hourly. If it still matters after a week, test it deliberately, not reactively.
And step number five, process the score daily, zero to 100. Grade on inputs executed. At day 30, look at trend level outcomes. Adjust the system, not your mood. And a fun way to hold yourself accountable is to create what we call a chase penalty, and I've done this in a few of my businesses and a few of my coaching clients.
Uh, $100 to charity, or you gotta do 100 burpees if you break this contract with yourself. What you'll find is that when there's a penalty, you stop chasing real quick. So detach from the outcome is not apathy, it's discipline. You're choosing compounding over chaos, machines over moods, scale over sprints. As Derek Sivers taught us, it's hell yes or it's no.
Guys, post your anti-chase protocol in the comments. The first five get my personal notes. And make sure you subscribe so you don't miss tenet number three, systemize for freedom, how to build machines that run without you so you can actually lead. And if you haven't already, head over to findingpeak.com and join our community of leaders. It's free.
There are unreasonable humans doing unreasonable things, and I would love for you to be part of it. As always, I love you for being here, listening to this show, watching this show, whether you're on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. I appreciate the hell out of you. This, my friends, is the way. Happy holidays.
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