Teaching Is Better Than Doing
The speaker reflects on shifting his identity from being the best individual performer to being the best teacher of skills like sales, marketing, and operations. He argues that excelling personally while your team underperforms is actually a failure of teaching, not a mark of greatness. True business success requires the ability to replicate and transfer your skills to others.
Summary
In this short clip, the speaker candidly describes a personal ego-driven mindset he once held — the desire to be the 'most valuable player' who swoops in to save the day. While he acknowledges this feels rewarding in the moment, he argues it is fundamentally at odds with building a successful business.
He draws a sharp distinction between being able to do something versus being able to teach others to do it. He applies this across multiple business functions: sales, training, and running ads. The ability to perform a skill yourself, he contends, is a lower-order achievement compared to the ability to instill that skill in others.
The speaker uses a concrete example to illustrate his point: if his team goes two for six on sales calls and he could personally close five out of six, the correct interpretation is not that he is a great salesperson — it is that he is a poor teacher. This reframing is central to his argument.
Ultimately, he describes a deliberate identity shift: moving from wanting to be the best performer to wanting to be the best teacher of sales, marketing, and operations. This shift, he implies, is what separates someone with impressive individual skills from someone capable of building a scalable business.
Key Insights
- The speaker argues that wanting to be the most valuable player and 'save the day' personally is a harmful ego-driven identity for anyone trying to build a business.
- The speaker draws a firm distinction between being able to do a skill (e.g., sell, train, run ads) and being able to teach others to do that same skill, framing the latter as far more valuable for business.
- The speaker argues that if you can outperform your team on sales calls, it does not mean you are a great salesperson — it means you are a poor teacher.
- The speaker describes deliberately shifting his personal identity away from being the best performer and toward being the best teacher of sales, marketing, and operations.
- The speaker frames teaching ability as the true measure of a business leader's competence, implying that individual performance metrics are largely irrelevant if the team cannot replicate the results.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] I had this kind of ego thing where I loved being the most valuable player, right? I love being able to come in and save the day and put the team on my back and everyone's like Rocky, Rock, you know, whatever, right? But what a terrible thing to want if you want to have a business. It's one thing to be able to sell. It's another thing to be able to teach to sell. It's one thing to be able to train, another thing to be able to teach to train. One thing to be able to run ads, another thing to be able to teach people run ads. And so before this, it was like, "Oh, they…
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