Tom Dekan

“Don't rule out your offer until you've made it at least 100 times” – Alex Hormozi

When you’re creating a new business, you must avoid giving up when you're in the no man's land of effort.

This is when you’ve put in lots of effort and time, but not enough to see any results.

In a new business, where there's a lot of uncertainty and you haven’t yet had success, you have to conclude whether:

a) you haven't put in enough effort, or

b) your product hypothesis is wrong.

Many would-be entrepreneurs have their idea killed by the mind virus of self-doubt at this stage. They don't see immediate traction, so they conclude that their offer is fundamentally flawed.

In reality, they haven't put in enough effort to find out if their offer is good.

To see success, you must cross the no man's land of uncertainty – where you are putting in effort but getting no results. This is an emotionally uncomfortable phase. You’re spending time and money and you don’t know if you are progressing towards something,

At this stage, most would-be entrepreneurs take an emotional shortcut. As they don’t see success, they take the shortest way out of the no man’s land of uncertainty. They take the certainty of flipping to another idea, or giving up entirely.

To pass through the uncertainty, and to establish whether your offer is actually good, you need to push to the extreme. You need to have put in such a large amount of effort that it would be unreasonable for you not to see any success if your offer has merit.

If you put in this unreasonable extreme of effort, and don’t see at least some success, then you can conclude that your product hypothesis is wrong.

The test you should be asking is: “Have I done so much X that it would be unreasonable not for me to get results?”.

If you don't put in an unreasonable extreme of effort, you'll never know if your idea was good.