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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
📍 Everybody's gifted in something. There are things that you can't do well that somebody else is amazing at. And there are things that you do well that other people can't wrap their head around. But none of it matters if you don't show up every single day. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode before we get started. Just a quick reminder. If you're finding value from this show and this content, please subscribe on whatever channel that you're on. It helps me to one connect with you and reach more people, which is ultimately my mission.
And if you haven't Go on over to brianforce. com and subscribe for our newsletter. I spent a lot of time bringing a lot of practical, actionable insights on how to grow your business and become a better leader. And we've got some really cool stuff that we're cooking up just for our subscribers. So head on over to brianforce.
com and get signed up. That's it for the announcements. Appreciate you joining me again. Let's dive 📍 in. I've been thinking for a while now about the difference between natural talent and the value of consistency of really ingrained habits and the power that they can have in your ability to achieve your goals.
Natural talent is the gifts that you have. We all have gifts. We all have things that come naturally to us, things that we organically do very, very well. And I've been thinking about how important those natural gifts are in comparison to the habits that we create over time, the things that become ingrained in us through our behaviors, the things that we focus on, that we have total control of making important in our lives and then creating a routine around them, creating consistency around them, Which is more valuable and which creates better results over time.
Our natural gifts, our natural talents, our natural abilities, or our consistency, our habits, the things that we do routinely every single day. It's a really interesting question to ask because we all have natural talents. And I think if we align our natural talents with the right goals, they're gonna help us a lot.
guys. We also need to be consistent without consistency, without really powerful habits. , our natural talents will be a benefit, but they won't take us all the way to the finish line. They won't get us to where we want to go because there are going to be ups and downs along the way.
They're going to be things that are challenging. There are going to be times that are hard and our natural talents can't prepare us for that. That's where we have to be disciplined. That's where our habits really come in. So how important really is it that To have powerful habits rather than just natural talents.
Well, I did some digging because this has been on my mind for a while. And we all know that talent isn't enough, that natural gifts aren't enough, but to what degree. Are habits more important than talent? So I did a little digging and this is just one really good example that came to mind.
There was a survey of 343 Mensa members done. If you're not familiar with Mensa, it's the high IQ society. People from all over the world that are in the top 2 percent in IQ. Essentially it is a group for the smartest people on earth. And if you've ever tried to take one of their little IQ tests, they're very challenging, full of really difficult puzzles and questions that are really hard for the average person with average IQ, like myself probably to answer.
It's a very, very exclusive club and it's hard to get into. They're considered some of the most intellectually gifted people on earth. And so I did some digging and found a survey of 343 Mensa members and how much they make on average per year.
Now disclaimer, earned income is not the only way to measure success. I understand that, but I think it stands to reason that if you are intellectually gifted and make a decision that you'd like to make more money,
Then your natural gifts Your intellect should help you earn more money if you put your mind to it and back it up with the right habits So I think it's a good barometer for how much natural gifts really mean And what the survey showed was that 130 respondents, which is 38 percent make more than 80, 000 a year.
means out of 343 MENSA members, 62 percent make less than 80, 000 a year. It's about the median household income in America. 62%, way more than half. of the respondents for a survey of the smartest people in the world make less than the median national income in America.
So why is it that the brightest minds aren't the most financially successful people? And of course this disregards the ideas of doing something that you're passionate about and being successful in other ways. But again, we have to find one way to align habits and intellect.
And I think that income is something that most people would like to have a little bit more of. If we were capable just based on our intellect alone to make more money, we would probably do so. So I think it's a very fair comparison.
So why does 62 percent of the smartest people in the world make less than the national median income? It's a fascinating question. Now let's look at another very exclusive group. I wanted to take a comparison of Mensa members who seem like they are the most gifted intellectual people on earth and compare them to another exclusive club of people that are known for being very consistent in their habits.
So I took a look at Ironman finishers as a group and Ironman is the world's longest triathlon. It is a race where you do three events back to back. You go for a 2. 4 mile open water swim followed by a 112 mile bike race. Followed by a marathon that you are running for a total of 140. 6 miles. That is one iron man triathlon.
It is known as one of the world's hardest races and, And people that complete Ironman triathlons are a different breed of human. They'll even get Ironman tattoos on their bodies to just showcase how proud they are of the commitment that they've made. It's an incredibly difficult race.
But it requires very little talent in order to be able to finish an Ironman. You need to be able to swim, ride a bike and put one foot in front of the other. The only difference between finishing and not finishing is the habits that you have around your training and the consistency with which you prepare.
So I did some digging on this exclusive club of Iron Man finishers and found that their average annual income is $247,000 as of 2015. That's the most current data I could find. 247, 000 on average is what an Ironman finisher makes in America.
So what a gap that is when you go from 62 percent of the smartest people on earth not making 80, 000 a year to an average Ironman finisher making 247, 000 a year. It's a very interesting thought experiment. And by the way, it doesn't mean that Ironmen are happier than Mensa members or that they're actually more successful.
At all, because there are many areas of life in which you can be successful. You can make a lot of money and be miserable. You can make very little money and be incredibly passionate about what you do have phenomenal relationships and bring real joy into the world every single day. This is just a comparison of one.
Aspect of life, but it's an important aspect. We would all, if we had the ability, like to make more money, if not for just the ability to do better things in the world with it and to provide for more people and to provide more opportunity
and so I think that income is a fair comparison and there's a massive gap. Between these two exclusive clubs, one takes zero habit inconsistency whatsoever. It's simply a measure of your natural IQ, what you were born with, your natural gifts. The other exclusive club really takes no talent to be in whatsoever.
The average annual income doesn't talk about what place you finish in the Ironman. It's just a survey of Ironman finishers. You can get dead last in the Ironman and still be in this group. So it doesn't measure talent.
It doesn't measure natural ability. It's just a measure of the people that finished the race and how well they do in the income part of their lives. It's a huge, huge, huge gap. But what is also true of these groups of people? This could really give us some insight into the difference between natural gifts and habits and consistency.
If you're a Mensa member, the only thing I really know about you from that is that you have a natural gift of intellect.
I know several Mensa members. My father is one. But they're all different. They're different human beings. It says nothing about you as a person. I know Mensa members that have struggled professionally. I know Mensa members that are very well off, uh, and have completely different habits. Some are extroverts, some are introverts.
They approach the world entirely different. One aspect being your intellectual gift really says nothing about the rest of you. It says nothing about how you interact with the world. It just says that you have one talent, that you are naturally intellectually gifted. And that's all we really know from knowing that you're in that Mensa club.
But if you look at the other exclusive club, what do we know by default about iron man finishers? Well, I will tell you from firsthand experience what it takes to complete a massive triathlon it's incredibly difficult.
It requires an enormous amount of commitment, sacrifice, discipline, and the will to continue doing things that you know are going to be good for you in the longterm, even when you feel like you really don't want to do them right now in order to prepare for the future.
For an Ironman triathlon, you're going to be swimming every day, biking every day, running every day, spending hours and hours and hours physically punishing your body, taking time away from your family, your friends, other things that you would enjoy doing. Your diet is going to change. You're going to have to say no to a lot of things that you would rather say yes to in the moment, because that's how you prepare for a massive.
Physical undertaking like an Ironman triathlon. It takes everything you've got just to be a finisher. Just to finish the race is a massive commitment to living a certain way with consistency over time.
And so whether or not I know. anything else about you as a human being. If you're an iron man finisher, I know one thing about you for sure is that you have the ability to showcase massive discipline. You have the ability to be consistent in things because you want a particular long term outcome and you're willing to make short term sacrifices to get there.
And that's most likely the reason for the wide average income gap between these two groups, iron men, when you have that sort of commitment that you have to make. Simply to a physical challenge that you're not getting paid to do.
You get no real other accolades in life other than being able to say that you're an iron man finisher. When you can make that type of commitment to something that doesn't really give you anything but pride. Then what type of commitment are you most likely to make to every other aspect of your life, your job, your relationships, your spirituality, the things that really can show up in the form of a higher level of income.
You're much more likely to make those types of commitments to things that really, truly matter every day. If you're willing to make that type of commitment just to finish what some people might call a silly race. How you show up every day to train for an Ironman is probably how you show up every day to do anything.
Whereas this group of people over here, these intellectual geniuses, we don't know much else about them. We know that they're smart, but we don't know how they show up every day. There are a lot of really smart, lazy people out there.
There are a lot of really smart people out there that don't have great habits that don't show up consistently, and that doesn't mean that they take their gifts for granted or anything. It's just most people don't show up consistently. Most people in life struggle to really ingrain solid positive habits in their world, and so being intellectually gifted doesn't necessarily make you all that much different than anybody else in any other aspect.
We know that iron men are different. We don't necessarily know how much different Mensa members are other than that they have a higher IQ and that's the difference in this income gap, what we can learn from this though.
Is that talent is entirely overrated. And I just, I want you to understand that if you don't take anything else out of this episode, just please understand that your natural gifts don't mean shit. And I apologize for the language there.
I just really want that to sink in. Everybody's gifted in something. There are things that you can't do well that somebody else is amazing at. And there are things that you do well that other people can't wrap their head around. But none of it matters if you don't show up every single day.
I would take someone in my business who showed up consistently every day over the most talented person for that role. that doesn't show up consistently. I take that first person seven or eight days out of the week because consistency is what creates results over time.
There is nothing that you can't get better and more effective at. If you create a habit around it and you're consistent. A triathlon is a great example. In my triathlon days, there are three events, and I was not great at every single one of them.
There's running, which I was actually pretty good at, because I come from a boxing background. I've been boxing my entire life. Running far distances is just one of the things you get used to, and I didn't really mind that very much. Biking was something that I consistently got better at. I was very intimidated By the biking aspect of the triathlon world, because it's very scary.
I'm scared of crashing. I'm scared of going fast. It was a lot like sales for me in the beginning. Actually, it was one of the things that intimidated me. I didn't really like cold calling. I didn't like door knocking and I got really discouraged every time I'd crash and burn just the same way you get discouraged.
Every time you crash on a bike that seems to weigh three ounces and you get blown over by the wind all the time, it's scary and intimidating. But what happens is you're consistent about it and you get better and better and better. And before you realize it, you're flying around at like an average of 22 miles an hour.
And it doesn't even feel like you're really moving that fast. You've just done it so many times now so you can learn it. And then there's swimming, which is the hardest for me. It's the shortest distance. It was the hardest, most physically challenging for me. I think for me, swimming was the most difficult because it was the most placid.
It was always just in your own head. It feels very quiet when you're moving through the water. And it's one of the most mentally challenging exercises I think you can do because every muscle in your body is being engaged. And it's very hard for me, at least to kind of disconnect and go into a Zen place when there was just so much of my own thoughts swirling around me, but you can get better at every single one of those aspects with simple consistency,
and that's what triathletes do. That's what iron men do. That's why they have so much pride. There are also, by the way, Mensa members that carry around a lot of pride. They don't have as much to show for it. Showing that you're a Mensa member just means that you happen to have a high IQ, but it doesn't really say all that much else about you.
And so what we can learn from this, is that your habits mean a heck of a lot more than your natural gifts. That's never going to change. So what can we do with this information? Well, the first thing that we can do with this information is to get rid of all of the negative associations we have with other people being more talented than us.
We have this tendency to limit our beliefs by thinking that if I was only this, or I only knew this, that person's got better connections. We tend to have all of these limiting beliefs around how we're not good enough, smart enough, strong enough, experienced enough.
Every single one of those things is malleable. We can change our level of experience. We can change our level of knowledge. We can change our ability to perform with simple consistency. So every little thing that holds us back because we feel like we don't have this or that, it's irrelevant, especially the intellectual part.
We don't know enough to get started. We're too afraid of failing because we're not experienced yet, right? That's the exact opposite of the Iron Man mentality. The iron man mentality is I have a place I want to go and here's how I'm going to get there and then I'm going to be consistent about it every single day.
If you take that same mentality into your business and every other aspect of your life, you're going to succeed. It's only a matter of time and that matter of time can be compressed by the intensity of your commitment, by the intensity of the habits that you form. How concrete your habits are, how unwavering you are and your commitment to whatever it is you're trying to achieve all of that is way more powerful than your natural gifts.
Your natural talent, the things that come easy to you can sometimes be a detriment. Because when we know that we're really good at something, we tend to practice it less. we know that we're good at something, we tend to not have as great a habit around it. If I want to scale my business, if I want to become a better leader, I don't need to become more gifted.
What I need is to take consistent action every single day. That's how we've scaled our organizations. That's how I've built all of my companies, not because I'm naturally gifted, but because I've been consistent every single day. And that's how I've eventually found success.
And what's interesting about being really committed about having great habits, about consistently taking action every day is eventually you'll look around and the world will look at you as if you have a natural talent for whatever it is you're doing. As if you are a natural Ironman, a natural triathlete or whatever the equivalent is in your business, you will start to appear more gifted than others.
You will start to appear as someone who has a natural talent for building businesses. You'll start to appear as somebody that naturally gravitates towards success. And isn't it funny how the people that you look at right now who are further along than you are or maybe where you want to be right now,
you might consider them more gifted than you. You might consider them more talented. You might think that they have more natural ability than you, but have you ever considered. That you think that because they've been consistent for much longer than you have, and that's the only difference they probably appear a lot more naturally gifted because they have great habits and they've taken consistent action for a long period of time.
That's a thought that I want you to sit with a little bit today, and I want you to think about how consistency over time can appear as natural ability.
There are many phenomenal examples of this. Learning a second language is one of them. If you are consistent about practicing a second language, it's fundamentally only a matter of time before you become fluent in it. And how long it takes you to become fluent is simply a function of how consistent you are and intense you are in your practice.
It could take years and years and years of you tinkering around, not being consistent, but trying every once in a while. And you'll still sound like you're learning a language, like you have no natural ability to speak it. Or you could spend one year. Of intense concentration and very, very rigid consistency.
And people will think that you have naturally been speaking that language your entire life. That's a really great example of how consistency and habits can look like natural gifts. I can literally spend a certain amount of time practicing a language and getting good enough at it that people would think that it is my first language.
So what action steps can we put behind all this information? We realize now that habits mean a lot more than natural gifts. So what can we do with that information to push ourselves and particularly our business forward?
Well, first things first, we need to commit to being consistent every single day. And so we need to figure out what are the most important things that we need to be consistent about that will move our business forward in an Ironman race. We know that if we consistently run, bike and swim every day, eventually we'll be able to complete an Ironman.
So what are the three things, two things or one most important thing in your business that if you're consistent about everything else in your business becomes easier or irrelevant. If you're in sales, I'll give you a shortcut generating new business.
If you are in a sales based role inside of your organization, or you run a sales based business, new business generation is the one thing that when you do it well. All other things in your business will become easier or irrelevant. So if you're thinking about the thing that you need to be most consistent in, if you're in a sales industry, it's not operations.
It is generating new business every single day. And if you do that long enough, even if it feels hard in the beginning, Eventually you'll look like the most naturally talented salesman on earth.
So that is step one is to figure out the thing that you need to be consistent about. That is the most important thing that will take you from where you are to where you want to go. And then number two, let's figure out where do you want to go?
What is your goal that you're trying to achieve with number one, that consistency.
So if I'm trying to complete an iron man, my goal is very simple. I want to be able to swim 2. 4 miles, bike 112 miles, and run 26. 2 miles back to back all within one day. That's my goal. That's what I'm trying to accomplish with the consistent habits I have every single day.
So where are you trying to go in your business? When you're consistent about the things that move your business forward. Where are they going? What are you trying to achieve? And knowing what your outcome is, whether it's a sales goal, a growth goal, net profit, whatever it is,
that's going to dictate how intense your commitment needs to be to step number one, or how long it's going to take to get to where you want to go. Just like learning a language. You can be relatively consistent for a very long period of time and become fluent or you can be extremely consistent and intense with your focus and become fluent in a much shorter period of time.
So knowing what your outcome is, is incredibly. And then number three is to get rid of all the noise that keeps you from being committed. We've talked about this in previous episodes. You can't just build new habits on top of old habits. You only have a finite amount of room in your brain, in your body, in your soul for habits.
You already have a full habit stack. Your habits are just the way that you already interact with the world. And so if you're going Build new habits. You have to replace old ones. You have to find the habits that are keeping you from implementing the new ones. And you have to break those habits. So the new ones have a space on the shelf.
And so if you know what you need to be consistent about and where you're trying to go with that consistency, you then need to know what's holding you back already. Why are you not already in that habit? Why are you not already making that consistent effort?
Something is holding you back, right? Are you not lead generating enough in your business because you're spending too much time focused on something else that doesn't move the needle forward? Well, you can't just start being more committed to lead generation. You have to stop. Wasting time doing the things that suck your time away.
So number three is very important to make room for the other two. You've got to find what's holding you back. And once you understand those three concepts, what it is that moves you forward, where it is that you're trying to go, and what's holding you back right now from getting there, there's nothing else to know.
Then it's just about making the commitment and doing it. and re ingraining the habits every single day. You do that for long enough and you're going to look like you are just as naturally gifted as those Mensa members.
When habits are really ingrained and your activity is consistent, that becomes disguised as talent. Most of the people in your industry or in the world in general that you think are really, really talented are just products of habit and consistency.
That's all that it is. So find where it is that you're trying to go, What is currently holding you back? Let's go and be consistent about it every single day . And turn yourself into someone who looks like they are naturally talented.
I would love 📍 to hear your thoughts on this dynamic, what your one thing is to move you forward and how you're getting rid of your negative habits to make space for new ones. Drop me a line, subscribe to the newsletter, do all the things. I really appreciate you hanging out for another episode and I look forward to seeing you next time.