How to Achieve Success in the Face of Adversity

What's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of First Class Founders, the show where we dive into concepts, frameworks, and mental models to help build your problem-solving toolkit. Each episode is short and sweet, jam-packed with value. My name is Yong Soo, and I'm the founder of Urban EDC and GrowthJet.

If you missed our first episode, we talked about warping time and money to reframe your mind, think bigger, and turn your passion into a business. Today we're going to take a deep dive into the concept of the 20-mile March and how it's been an absolute game changer for my company, Urban EDC, in so many ways.

With that, let's jump right into today's lesson.

So let's say you start a side hustle and it's just starting to get off the ground. How do you maintain momentum and make sure that you're making progress? Should you work on your project after work when you have a couple of extra hours, or maybe you should wait until you get that burst of creativity and inspiration?

What's the right approach to making progress on your project? Today we're talking about a concept called the 20-mile March. This one comes from Jim Collins. I am a huge fan of Jim Collins in all the books and frameworks that he has researched and developed. I will link to his book Great by Choice in the show notes for anyone who is interested in learning more.

The 20-mile march is a concept that came out of studying companies that perform not just slightly better than their peers in the same industry, but 10 times better. Can you guess what the single most important indicator of success was across all these companies? Keep in mind that the question the study set out to answer was, why do some companies thrive in uncertainty even.

While others do not. Surprisingly, it wasn't creativity, innovation, or the ability to adapt quickly to changing environment. The most important character trade that every 10 X company exemplified was discipline. Being able to hit certain key metrics on a consistent basis. This is the key point of the 20-mile March concept.

The 20-mile March has two important types of self-imposed disciplines. The first one is the commitment to hit your goals even during the most difficult conditions. And the second discipline is the ability to hold back during times of exuberance, even though it might be tempting to extend further. It's this balancing act of being ambitious enough to achieve no matter what while having the self-control to hold back that characterizes the 20-mile march.

Other features of a good 20-mile march are that it must be something that lies within your control to achieve it. This means that you don't need to rely on any other variables to help you achieve your 20-mile march. Remember that a good 20-mile march must be achieved with great consistency. Just trying to achieve it doesn't count.

Okay, so what's with the name? 20 Mile March. Well, here's a short story behind the name.

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On December 12th, 1911, two Explorers began their quests to become the first men ever to set foot at the south pole. One expedition was led by Roald Amundsen. Throughout the journey, Amundsen stuck to a consistent schedule to achieve consistent progress. He led his team to travel between 15 and 20 miles per day no matter what the weather conditions were or how his team felt when a member of his team suggested that they go faster up to 25 miles per day.

Amundsen simply said no. The other expedition was led by Robert Falcon Scott. In contrast to Amundsen, Scott drove his team to exhaustion on good weather days and then decided to rest his team during the bad weather days. Now, which team do you think made it right now? You can probably figure out that the team led by Amundsen reached their goal averaging around 16 miles per day while the team led by Scott never even made it.

The lesson here is that consistent action that you can control is the single most important factor in running a company through uncertain, chaotic times, the entrepreneurial journey is filled with ups and downs of variables completely out of your control. Even just in the last couple of years, we've had a worldwide pandemic, political unrest, supply chain shortages, historically high inflation, and the list goes on.

It's critically important to focus on what you can control and set your 20-mile mark to keep moving forward despite the confusion, uncertainty, and chaos.

All right, so let's do a real-world example. Earlier in the episode, I mentioned how the 20-mile March concept has become a game changer for my own brand, Urban EDC. We're able to keep our entire team accountable and even train our customers to come back to shop with us week after week. So what's our secret sauce?

But before we get into that, I want to tell you about our First Class Founders membership.

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So in the early days of Urban EDC, I decided to implement a weekly cadence on Wednesdays called the Gear Drop. This is when we release all of our new products and announce them across all of our social channels. Our gear drops occur consistently each week at noon Pacific time, and we're able to drive a lot of hype each week, resulting in many items selling out within hours, minutes, and sometimes even a few seconds.

Oftentimes, this creates a frenzy and a lot of our customers feel the adrenaline rush of acquiring a desired item that they've been eyeing all week in true 20-mile March fashion. This takes a lot of discipline to plan and co. For example, even if we have a lot of inventory to release, we hold them back and instead schedule them into a future Wednesday gear drop.

Sometimes this can create a cash flow crunch for us, but we do this to maintain our 20-mile march for our customers. We've ingrained Wednesdays in their minds as the day to come back and shop with us. We actually have customers setting weekly alarms for our gear drops and have even commented that they look forward to their Wednesdays now because they know that we're releasing new gear that they can scoop.

Consequently, our weekly gear drop 20-mile March has also had another significant positive side effect. It single-handedly increased the level of accountability for the entire Urban EDC team without adding much management overhead. Because we have these gear drops every Wednesday, every member of our team knows exactly what they need to work on with a strict deadline each week.

It's the ultimate accountability tool. Adding to this, our 20-mile march has had an unexpected additional benefit. The entire Urban EDC team is distributed and our 20-mile March keeps everybody accountable to each other and to the success of the company. Everybody is on the same page on what their responsibilities are for each week so that we don't skip a beat.

I see our 20-mile march as the heartbeat of our company. To summarize today's lesson, ask yourself if you currently have a 20-mile march in your business. If you're more of a creative type that likes to work, whenever you feel a burst of inspiration, try to block off some time in your calendar each day to dedicate yourself to creative work.

It may not seem like you're making too much progress, but you may be surprised to find out how much you've accomplished after a month, a year, or even several years. All right. That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. On the next episode of First Class Founders, we'll continue this idea of doing something consistently over a long period of time and how that can add up to something much.

We'll discuss the secrets of compounding and how critical it is to have time working for you, not against you. How do you make sure that you're on time's good side? Tune in and find out. If you enjoy this episode, please help us grow the show. The best thing you can do is to go to a FirstClassFounders.com/review and leave us a five-star review.

It takes a couple of minutes and really helps the show grow so that we can reach a larger audience. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode of First Class Founders.