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The early bird gets the worm. When I think about that, I think about getting up. Like I need to be the first one up before everybody else. But to be honest, I believe that this goes deeper. Being first doesn't automatically mean that you win. Sometimes you can be the first one and still mess up an opportunity. You can move too fast. You can expose something too early before it's ready. You can get so caught up in it trying to beat everybody else that you don't even realize that you are running in the wrong direction. Because there's a difference between moving early and moving strategically. In business and in life, taking early action allows you to capture opportunities that might look scarce before your competition comes. Whether you're securing market share, snagging prime real estate, or tackling tasks before distractions arise, there is still something that not everybody is talking about. For a long time, I connected speed with success. And if I see it first, I need to move. If there's an opportunity, I need to jump on it real quick. If somebody else is in the building or they're building something similar, I gotta hurry up. And I'm not telling you to sit around while everybody else is outside getting it. Absolutely not. Execution matters. Opportunities, they have windows, but everything in life has an expiration date. There are absolutely times when moving early gives you an advantage. For sure. Being busy trying to be the first can become its own distraction. Because what happens when you're going too fast and you really don't know where you're going? What happens when you start immediately something so quickly, you get excited about it, you tell everybody about it, and then you stop? What happens when somebody else enters in the market and now you're looking at what they're doing instead of finishing what you started? That's not even momentum anymore. That is confusion. And I saw something recently that made me look at this whole situation differently. Y'all know the story of the tortoise and the hare, right? So I was scrolling on Facebook and I seen a reel where somebody had put a tortoise and a rabbit or a hare in a race. They had it all set up. They had two lanes that they blocked off. They started them off with and then the finish line had like an opening. You probably seen it on Facebook, but it reminded me of the story we learned when we were children. But seeing it outside of a book and in real life, I mean, this made me think so different. At first, when they put the rabbit down, the rabbit took off. And for a minute, I thought it was about to be over for the tortoise. Like I'm like, oh, it's over with, bro. You might you might as well just give up right now. And as I I was watching them move, I started to think maybe the story's not true. But something took place as the tortoise was slowly catching up. The rabbit stopped midway and was and he started looking around. And I'm in the way he was looking, it was kind of like probably he was thinking, Oh, I gotta go back. I gotta go back to where I started. That's the way he was looking. But as the turtle started catching up, the rabbit, he took a few more steps forward. Not enough to get back ahead of the turtle, but he was moving. He kept stopping, he kept looking around. The turtle, he wasn't looking around, he wasn't stopping. He looked like he was moving slow, but guess what? He finished the race. I was stoked. I mean, when I say stoked, I'm like, yay, go team turtle. Because I got to watch this in real life, and it hit me differently. I realized that the turtle had a steady pace. There was no confusion on which way to go. He was sure of himself, he knew what he was capable of, and he kept going. So I gotta ask you, which one are you? I mean, really, in this moment, not in a distant future, are you the tortoise or are you the hare? Because I gotta be real with you now. Seriously, if I wouldn't tell you my own story, I would be just an imposter because I was a hare for a while. I would jump up thinking that I got to get ahead, gotta be ahead, have a head start. I would rush to get things done. I would be so excited and then burn out mid-journey sometimes. And oftentimes, I would go back to the finish line, sometimes staying where I'm at, not moving forward, not doing anything until I was sure. Now, after many trials, many errors, and a lot of wasted time, I became the turtle. Laser focused on getting to the finish line, no matter what, but not in a rush and not trying to prove a point to anyone. And when I watched that rabbit keep stopping and looking around, I was like, wow, how many times have we done that? You start moving, you're excited, you know where you're trying to go, you got it all visualized in your mind, and then you look around. What is everybody else doing? Are they moving faster than me? Should I change this? Should I go back? Should I start this because somebody else said to? Maybe I need another program. No, no, no, no. I need another strategy. No, that's not working. I need another tool. And while you're looking around, you stop moving. The turtle. You have to understand this. The turtle didn't suddenly become faster. You know what happened? The rabbit stopped executing. That's the difference. Does an early bird actually get the worm? I want to dive into this, but I don't want you to think that I am here telling you don't get a head start or be lazy while everybody else is out there doing their thing. I'm saying that being early isn't always advantageous depending on the role that you play in the system. Sometimes getting to a thing quicker or exposing something too early, it can lead to failure or incompletion. And I understand that now more than ever because it is so important to focus and keep quiet while working on special projects. Everything doesn't need an announcement. Everything doesn't need to be shown while you're building it. Sometimes you need to put your head down and just keep working. Because the minute that you start looking around, comparison can make you question everything. And this brings me to what I call the strategic perspective. The strategic perspective, if I can get the words out of my mouth, it is like quality over speed. See, execution matters more than your arrival time. Let's just think of you as a late arrival, but you got a better strategy. You have a better product, a refined product, a clearer focus that routinely outperforms an early actor who rushes without preparation. And right now, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one that can relate to this because we're watching this happen with AI. There's a point where just knowing how to use AI gave you an advantage. At first, you knew how to prompt, you knew how to automate something, you could build a chat by. Okay, rah-rah. You know how to connect a few systems, and everybody was like, oh my God, how do you do that? But now everybody has access to it. I know some people who like 80 years old with access to chat GPT. Okay. And I've been paying attention to conversations happening within small business owners about this very thing. I even came across a Reddit discussion. And one of the things that stood out to me is the conversation around simple automation becoming saturated. Everybody's selling the same basic thing, and domain expertise is becoming the separator. That is important because AI didn't kill the opportunity. The opportunity evolved. So I want to give you an example, okay? Everyone knows that I'm a real estate, I'm in real estate. So let's think about it like this: you have an automated lead qualification, right? You create a system where somebody comes in and the AI immediately responds to them. Now, this system can ask whether they are buying or selling, what their time frame is, their budget. It can ask whether they're pre-approved. It can do all of the preliminary pre checks, right? Collecting all their information, following up, booking an appointment. That's powerful. But the question is what happens when every real estate agent has that same system? Because eventually, having automation is not going to be a special thing. It's going to be an expected thing. So then what do you do? Expertise matters. Let's say somebody comes through the system and they say, I'm not a pre-approved. My credit needs work. My lease doesn't end for another eight months. And basic qualification systems, right now, they look and they say, I'm not ready. See, an experienced agent is going to look at that same person and say, No, that's a future buyer. That's they gonna, they're gonna need nurturing. They're gonna need more education. They're gonna need a lender. They might even need an eight-month plan, right? But the professional understood what to do with it. That is the difference. And this is where I think people are getting caught up because they're chasing this growing industry and they're forgetting about what they already know. Mm-hmm. I know. I stepped on your toe, didn't I? I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry. You're chasing a growing industry and forgetting about what you already know. The sweet spot is where your abilities, your interests, and a growing industry will all intersect. That's where the sweet spot is. And that's where you need to look. Not in, oh my God, everybody's doing AI. So I need an AI business. Let me go ahead and pay $1,000 to try to prompt something. What are you already good at? What do you understand? What problems have you actually solved? Like why do people come to you? What is the industry that you understand beyond something that you watched on YouTube last night? And where does this intersect with what is already growing? That is the opportunity. And this is something that I teach because there's a difference between chasing something and being aligned with it. When you are aligned, you don't have to become somebody completely different. You take what you know and you learn how to move with what's changing. And this is exactly why I want you to start thinking beyond tools because tools are gonna change. Platforms, they're gonna change. Look at what Manis is doing right now. They're changing. They're changing their process. What's hot right now, that's gonna change too. But your ability to identify a problem, understand people's experience with it, execute on a solution, that's something that you can keep building on. That's not gonna change. So when you're looking at AI, you're looking at automation and business opportunities or whatever that you're building next, I want you to start documenting that intersection. Your abilities, your interests, what industry is growing, and most importantly, what problem can you actually solve? That is where you start building something. That is not another copy and paste of what everybody else is selling. So I gotta leave you with three things. Speed gives you momentum. Time that gives you longevity. Speed gives you momentum. Timing gives you longevity because being early, that opens doors. But rushing in without any type of strategy just to get exposed is not gonna work. You gotta focus on readiness instead of being in a rush. There is nothing wrong with getting a head start. You heard me throughout this whole podcast. Get a head start, but make sure that you're actually prepared for what happens when the door opens. Because when you get an opportunity you're not prepared for, you can't execute, that's gonna expose every hole in your business. Nobody's gonna trust you. You don't have a system, you don't have a process, no follow-up, no capacity, no clear offer. You get there first and can't deliver. So, what I want you to do is look at the thing that you're rushing towards right now and ask yourself if this opportunity opened up tomorrow, am I actually ready to handle it? And if your answer is a quick no, identify one thing that needs to be strengthened and do this before you start worrying about being in competition with everybody else. Number two, observe the traps. Observe the traps before you chase the reward. Because the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse, he's gonna get the cheese. So don't be afraid to let other people test uncharted waters so that you can refine your approach and execute smarter. And I really love this one. The second mouse gets the cheese because everybody talks about the bird, but nobody's talking about the mouse. You like how I did that? I know you do. Sometimes there's an advantage to not being first, right? Let somebody else discover the problem. Let somebody else find out what customers hate. Let them figure out what doesn't work. You've you're not copying them. You're observing the market. That's the difference. We're watching what happens with AI right now. We got more information today about what businesses actually need from AI because the people went first. We can see the generic stuff becoming saturated. Everybody's teaching prompts. We can see where businesses still need human expertise. We can see where AI works beautifully and then somebody still needs to step in and make a decision. Stop panicking because somebody got somewhere before you. So the action for you is going to be find a person or a company that's already operating in the space that you're interested in. Okay? You're not going to copy what they're doing, you're just studying what's missing. Read the complaints, look at the gaps, and ask yourself, what would I do differently now that I can see the trend? Number three, align your schedules with your natural strengths. Success isn't about forcing yourself into a 5 a.m. hole. It is about maximizing execution. So during your peak windows, you got more energy, you got more focus. And I know somebody needs to hear that because I needed to hear that. Because the early bird conversation, it has somehow turned into successful people will wake up at 5 a.m. Listen, I am not a morning person. If 5 a.m. works for you, get up. Do your thing, boo. But if you get up at 5 and spend the next three and a half hours scrolling, watching videos, trying to convince somebody that you're being productive because the sun isn't up yet. What exactly did we accomplish? Nothing. The goal isn't to prove that you can wake up before everybody else. I used to do that. The goal is to execute. Where are you sharp at? Where can you think you're best at? When do your ideas flow the most? When can you sit down and actually finish something? Like that is your window. And that's the window that you want to protect. Your action this week is going to be simple. You're going to identify the strongest 60 to 90, 90 minute execution windows. You're going to put in one important task and turn the distractions off until you finish it. So are you ready for this? Are you ready? Stop changing direction every time somebody announces something. Stop exposing every special project before you have time to develop it. Stop letting somebody else's speed make you question your pace. Put your head down, do the work, test it, refine it, finish it. Do your thing, boo. Execution doesn't always look exciting. Sometimes execution, it actually is boring. It is the same thing every single day. And the next day, and the day after that, that's how the turtle won. And when I think about that video, it changed the childhood story because I actually got to watch it happen in real life. The rabbit, he was capable of winning. That's the part that got me. He started off with speed. He had a head start. Everything that we would normally call the advantage he had. But he kept stopping, he kept starting, he kept just looking around. While the turtle was slow, steady, and moving, and he eventually crossed the finish line. It doesn't get no clearer than that. Are you focused on the finish line? Because there is something different that happens when you know who you are, you know what you're capable of, and you are clear about where you're going. You don't have to run everybody else's race, you don't have to announce every move, and you don't have to panic because somebody got there before you. You move, you adjust, you learn, and you keep going. That's what connecting the dots between who you are and how you move looks like. So in closing, I want you to do something different with this episode. Tell me in the comments, which one are you right now? Not who you want to be, not who you plan on becoming Monday morning. Right now, are you the tortoise or are you the hare? I want you to drop that in the comments. And if you know somebody who keeps starting, they keep stopping, they keep looking around and they're starting over and over, send them this episode and don't send it being messy. Okay? We ain't doing that. We listen and we don't judge. And then I want you to get back to your race. Because whether you're the early bird, the second mouse, or the tortoise, wherever you are, at some point you gotta execute. You gotta get focused, you gotta keep moving, and finish what you start.