Relentless: How efforts compound

Transcript

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host, Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach,  trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camaraygal people here in Sydney, Australia. 

In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work. 

2025 has been the year where I have been absolutely relentless. And one of the ways that I have gotten myself into a mood, uh like Pavlovian’s dogs with the salivation when the bell was rung, is I put on this song, Bulletproof.

And I thrashed that song, absolutely thrashed that song. And especially in the beginning of the year when things were not going in a predictable kind of a way. I mean, the whole year has not been predictable, but in the, you know, the first months of the year, the first three or four months of 2025, it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t necessarily fun, but I knew that I needed to get myself into a bulletproof attitude. So I thrashed that song.

Now, one of the big wins and the thing that I’m perhaps most proud of in 2025 is the launch of my new Momentum Mastermind. But what you might not know, what you likely don’t know in fact, is that this is my third attempt. 

And I’ve had two other things that have been called Momentum. Way back when, I’m talking about 2016, 2017, 2018, I flew myself to Melbourne every quarter and in Sydney as well and I ran quarterly get-togethers. 

So I would get a small group together and we would do quarterly business planning. And the name Momentum actually came from one of my clients. Shout out to Catherine O’Dwyer from Catherine O’Dwyer Accreditations.

And we would have a drink, had a drink afterwards in one of those cute little laneways in Melbourne.  And Catherine said to me, oh, I love these sessions, she said, I always get so much momentum afterwards. I thought momentum! That is a way better name than quarterly business planning. My God, what was I thinking? So I renamed it Momentum. 

And one of the things that um I was really, really keen on was this face-to-face quarterly get together. thought, you know, once a quarter, every quarter, the same group of same group of business owners get together and reflect, analyse, review, and then set a new chart, chart a new course for the next quarter. 

Yeah. Because most of us are sprinters. We’re not marathon runners. Most of us can do a short sharp sprint, and before COVID came along, I was in a really good groove of going on quarterly holidays. I had, you know, Peter and I kind of had that locked down. And then of course, COVID came along. 

And so 2019,  just before then, I turned those quarterly get togethers into a membership, also called Momentum, Momentum membership, I ran it for about a year and a half and I evolved it and changed it,  you know, several times during that year and a half and I never really nailed it.

I was never really that happy. was like, ah, feel like it’s just not quite, I just can’t, I just, it just doesn’t quite, it felt like a lot of effort was going in for not a lot of results. It didn’t feel easy and that’s not, you know, not everything feels easy. Don’t get me wrong. But I just kind of felt like something was missing. 

And one of the things that kind of bothered me about it and one of the things that I kind of tried to correct, but never really nailed, is I hated the fact that people didn’t commit. And that was the same when I got together face-to-face. People would come along, but then they wouldn’t come back or they’d come twice, but they wouldn’t come a third time or they’d come once. They wouldn’t come the next time, they come again.

You know, like I wanted, and I knew that we needed to kind of be in this for the long haul because business coaching is not magic, even though it might feel like magic from time to time. It does require commitment and I’ve never, you know, been one of those coaches who’s like, you know, I’m going to fix everything in an hour for you. Like give me an hour, and I’ll change your life. I’m not, I’m not that coach. 

Yeah. 

So I didn’t like the fact that people weren’t committed. I wanted a kind of a minimum commitment and the third attempt, Momentum Mastermind came together pretty quickly and it’s now a yearly commitment. So I hope that people will stay for longer than a year, but it’s a minimum commitment of a full year together. 

And of course in that time, because our very first step with business planning is to plan your holidays. In that time, of course, we’re not going to be working 365 days of the year. We’re going to be taking breaks.  We’re going to be hopefully travelling, having a good time. But this third attempt came together pretty easily. Like it felt pretty easy. It felt pretty easy.

And one of the reasons why that is, is because I did something which I have done several times over the years and it’s always worked spectacularly well when I remembered to do it. And that is, this is what got me out of coulda, woulda, shoulda, thumb up the ass, no progress. And I was thumb up the ass for a good two years when I finally plucked that thumb out of said ass.

It was because I wrote a manifesto for my group program, and I did the same with Momentum Mastermind. So I wrote a manifesto and that felt like one of the very first things I did to make it reality. 

So I’m not going to go through, there are 10 points in the manifesto and I don’t want to bore you. I don’t want to kind of recount all 10. It’s not a secret. If you want to know them, just send me a quick message and I’ll happily send you the PDF with all 10 and maybe, you know, at another time I might go into it in more detail. But I want to talk about the first and the last because weirdly, when I was outlining, you know, my notes, when I was making notes for this particular episode, I got out the manifesto and I thought, oh, there’s too much detail. Like, you know, that’ll turn into an hour-long episode and I’m aiming for 20 minutes. So I don’t want to go through all 10, but weirdly the first and the last were relevant and related. 

So the first in the Momentum Manifesto, actually, why don’t I just stop for a second? Because I want to tell you why this works so well. So why this works so well is what a lot of owners do, what most owners do when they go, okay, I want a group program. I want to group up my clients. I want to create something new. I want to use some kind of offering, some new thing.

The very first thing they tend to do is they jump straight into format. It’s going to be 12 phone calls over 12 weeks. It’s going to be 24 phone calls over 12 weeks. It’s going to be an eight week thing. It’s going to be going to have a community on Slack. We’re going to have a community on Facebook. We’re going to have a community on WhatsApp. We’re going to have a community on Telegram. We’re going to have  one training call and one, I don’t know, review call, which is what I do with Ignite.  

They get fixated on the bits that don’t actually matter, and what they neglect to oftentimes do is to differentiate, what makes this offering different from everybody else’s offering? What makes this mastermind different from the next? What makes this group program different from the next? And the difference is normally the values or the beliefs or we stand for, we stand against the sermon on the Mount. 

You know, what is, what is it that you actually believe or don’t believe? What is your approach, but not like, you know, seven steps to whatever. I’m not talking about a framework or a methodology. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about a proprietary process. I’m talking about something more intangible, more emotional. I’m talking about your sermon on the mount. I’m talking about your, “are you with us”? You know, this is what we stand for. If you believe what we believe, then you might be part of this. 

It gives people a sense of belonging. And business is values-based. You know my whole business is values-based. It’s the reason why people hire me. It’s the reason why my business is called Hustle and Heart. It’s the reason why I do what I do. 

So the very first part of the manifesto is that no effort is wasted. The effect might not be immediately obvious, but we’ve got to trust the value of your efforts. Now that is really clear and obvious with Momentum Aastermind, the third iteration number three. Because in business, right, we put in a lot of effort, we put in time, we might invest money. You know, we certainly invest expectation and perhaps emotion, probably emotion.

You know, we put a lot of effort in and oftentimes we don’t get the result that we want and therefore, we just write it off and we decide this didn’t work. It’s a mistake. I made a mistake. This was a waste. And we fail to actually notice that everything compounds. Everything is an iteration of an iteration of an iteration. Nothing is new. Nothing is purely original. Everything is built on what came before it. And when we can appreciate that, then we stop, you know, beating ourselves up. 

We put down the stick that we’re constantly thrashing ourselves with. We stop overthinking things. We stop over engineering things, over structuring things. We stop with the procrasta-planning. We stop with the, you know, procrasta-prep. And we start just getting on with it because we recognise that we’re not wasting what we’re doing. And that, you know, everything compounds. Yeah. 

So that’s number 10, the 10th principle in the, in the Momentum Mastermind Manifesto, so many Ms, it’s hard to keep up. Number 10 is that every effort compounds. Every effort compounds and what you focus on. So if we think about focus, what you focus on expands.

So, you can focus on everything that can go wrong and you can fixate on the nitty gritty detail and you can fixate on, oh my god, the launch needs to be exactly like this and this is exactly how I’m gonna run the launch and it’s gonna,  you know, all these little tiny pieces, these moving puzzle pieces. They all have to be exactly how I want them to be and exactly perfect and in the right spot because otherwise it won’t work.

We can focus on, you know, everybody’s laughing at me. Everybody’s judging me. My ex-boss, my ex bitchy colleagues, you know, the worst people in my life are all kind of getting together and talking about me behind my back. We can make up stories that keep us stuck and miserable. Or we can focus on the inevitability of our success, the inevitability of us getting what we want, the inevitability of everything turning out in our favour. Invariably, it’s gonna turn out even better than we could have imagined, invariably. 

And if it hasn’t worked out yet, it’s not over. It’s not over till we’re six foot under. So every effort compounds and your attitude influences everything. Everything. I can plot my profit and loss statement through my mental health. I can plot my profit and loss statement through my attitude over 17 years that I’ve been in business. So everything is leading somewhere, even if it’s not obvious to you. No effort is wasted and every effort compounds. 

Everything is building on what’s gone before it, even when it’s not clear and obvious because oftentimes life and business only really makes sense in retrospect, right? It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we can reflect that this thing led to that thing led to this thing led to where we are in all that miraculous glory. 

And the other joyful thing about these two principles in the Momentum Manifesto, no effort is wasted and every effort compounds, is that we cannot control the outcome. I hope that’s clear and obvious by now. We cannot control the outcome of our efforts. We can only control our efforts. We can only control our focus. We can only control what you know, what’s actually what we do or don’t do. What we think or don’t think, where we focus or don’t focus. So, you know, one of the things inside of Momentum, for example, is that we have unlockable prizes. I give people challenges, and then they have to, you know, do the thing and then they unlock a prize because I am not beyond bribing my clients.  I use anything, anything that I can do to motivate people to get, you know, the outcome that they want. But the point is that nobody gets rewarded. There are no prizes given for the outcomes. There are no prizes given for, you know, I made 25,000 sales and I made $25,000 this month because that is wonderful.

And you bet I’m going to be the first to celebrate you. I’m going to be the first to clap. I’m going to be the first to share that far and wide and to revel, to revel in that joy because emotions are contagious and joy absolutely is one of my favourite. It’s the closest thing I know to happiness. The most accessible kind of happiness there is, is joy. It’s an everyday thing.

But that is beyond your control. So that is not rewarded. That is not rewarded beyond joy. Instead, it’s the efforts. It’s the actual input, not the output. We can’t control the output. We can control the input. 

So if this has changed anything for you, if this has brought anything up or perhaps, you know, change your approach or your perspective and led to something tangible, better yet – please let me know.  I love hearing from you. Send me a message. You can email me at brook@brookmccarthy.com or you can send me a DM on Instagram. You can find me on LinkedIn. Send me a DM that way. 

You can, I don’t know, send me something in the mail. I would love that. P.O. Box 4122, Castlecraig 2068. Snail mail is one of my love languages. I’d love to hear from you. 

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review?  Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you  to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.