Graham Cochrane (00:09.262)
Have you ever hit a big milestone, maybe a revenue goal or a business career achievement and thought, why don't I feel as happy as I thought I would? This has happened to me time and time again and actually most recently happened when my recent book Rebel hit the USA Today bestseller list. I was so pumped for a day and then I was disappointed that it didn't hit the New York Times bestseller list.
Graham Cochrane (00:43.502)
Well, in this episode, we're gonna unpack why success alone doesn't lead to happiness and how you can build a business that truly aligns with your values so that it will bring you actual lasting joy.
Graham Cochrane (01:10.126)
So here's a common problem. We often think the success equals happiness, but it's not often the case. Now, let me unpack this for a moment. I believe that human beings are wired for achievement to conquer that mountain, to create something, to solve a problem, to explore an unknown territory. I think it's in our DNA the way we're wired. Entrepreneurs by 10X or more, right? Like that.
is the definition of an entrepreneur, someone who goes first, who creates something new, who risks something in order to create something that's valuable for someone else. It's easier to watch someone else go build a thing and see if it works. It's much harder to be the person going and building the thing. But I think what makes us love entrepreneurship, if you're in business, is that desire to achieve. So I don't think the desire to achieve is actually bad. I actually think it's very normal and better than normal,
It is a good thing without that desire to achieve, create success, to be successful in our endeavors, things will never get done. We will never create new medicines. We'll never create new vehicles, new fuel sources, better food sources that are healthier and tastier. We will never build safer homes and roadways. We'll never have better ideas for how to create education that
really empowers the next generation, right? So we need people that are driven to succeed. I think the problem is when we start to misunderstand what success will give us. And this is something that I teach inside of Rebel briefly in my book Rebel, and I've been teaching it when I share this message on stages and keynotes, is this idea of success. Is that we think success will bring us fulfillment.
But success is just one of three elements of fulfillment. So we all wanna be fulfilled, we all wanna have lasting joy, and we think, okay, if I have success, however you define it, I make $100,000 a year, I make a million dollars a year, I have 500,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel, I publish a USA Today bestselling book, whatever the case is, we think that that'll lead us to happiness. But then why, when we reach that thing, are we not happy?
Graham Cochrane (03:32.878)
Like whatever your goal was back in the day once you reached it, like you probably weren't like satisfied is what I'm trying to say. You are living your past's future. Like you've already achieved something that your past version of yourself would have loved to achieve. But if you're honest with yourself, are you completely satisfied or fulfilled? No. Right? Because success doesn't bring fulfillment. But success is part of fulfillment. The second part of fulfillment is satisfaction. We have to be actually find,
enjoyment and satisfaction in our pursuit of success. Because you could be incredibly successful at something and can be completely unsatisfied in that. I know entrepreneurs who have very successful businesses on the outside, but they're not satisfied on the inside. Last week I shared the story of one of those who had created $450 million in revenue a year in his business, incredibly successful, but had gotten to the point where he was not satisfied in his work anymore. He had blown past his happiness point.
So we wanna have success and satisfaction and then ultimately we wanna have service to others as well. If you have just success and you're satisfied in your success, that alone won't bring you fulfillment because they're both inward self-oriented, which is not bad, it's not selfish, it's just not enough. I think we're wired for service to others. So the perfect triangle as it were is when you have success and achievement, you have
satisfaction in the work you're doing in that achievement and success, and it's oriented around serving others. You get those three things, you will be incredibly fulfilled. And that's part of what we're talking about today. So there is a huge concept that has been so helpful to me. It was a book that was recommended to me for the last couple years. I finally read it last year. I reviewed it on this channel and
It's just a concept that I keep coming back to. And it is The Gap and the Gain, a great book by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I just can't recommend it enough. The concept is incredibly simple. The application and the value you can get from it, if applied, is infinitely more valuable than almost anything you could pursue. So the concept is simple. In the book, Dan Sullivan, it's Dan Sullivan's concept. Benjamin Hardy kind of teases it out in the full book. It is a fantastic writer.
Graham Cochrane (05:58.254)
The gap is the distance between where you are and what your ideal is. Okay? Where you are and what your ideal is. So, go back to me. I hit the USA Today bestseller list. The gap is where I am, USA Today bestseller and New York Times bestseller. That's the gap. The gain is behind you. It is the distance between where you are now and how far you've come.
where you were before. So in that specific example, the gain for me would be, wow, I've published two books. My first one was an Amazon, number one Amazon bestseller, and then this one is now a USA Today bestseller. Look at those gains. And the principle is simple. When we're focused on the gap between where we are and what our ideal is, we will never be satisfied, we'll never be happy.
We will achieve more because that's ultimately what draws us to success and achievement is seeing another mountain to climb, another goalpost to kick the ball through. But we'll never be happy if you're only focused on the gap. Why? Because you never reach your ideal. You never can. The moment you get to what you think the goal is, there's another goal ahead of that, which I do not think is inherently bad. I just think it will leave you feeling incomplete and empty inside.
So the problem is when entrepreneurs and high achievers like myself focus on the ideal that we want, exclusively, I'm always unhappy if I do that, as opposed to if I look back and stack the gains, count the gains, write down in my journal, at the end of the day write down three gains from the day. If I'm looking back at how far I've come, wow, there was a moment 15 plus years ago where I was unemployed.
and living off of food stamps, I had no idea what I was doing. I have since built $2 million businesses, generated over $15 million in revenue. I've helped millions of people all over the world, initially in their music careers and journeys, and then now in their businesses and their personal development. I've been able to raise a family that loves each other. I've been married for coming up on 20 years. I keep looking back,
Graham Cochrane (08:24.491)
you stack the gains, you get incredibly happy. So if you find yourself dissatisfied, despite your success, it may be because you're staring at the gap between where you are, where other people go, wow, you're so successful, and where you wanna be. And maybe you just need to shift it and look back at how far you've come. This is not giving up on achievement. This is not waving the white flag and saying, can't do it. This is just a strategic decision and choice.
to focus your attention and your energy on all your gains versus the gap. Okay, so this is a huge reason why we get trapped in this success trap is the more you achieve, you're still not happy because we're constantly focused on the gap. Gap and the gain, makes sense? And if you've read the book, put in a comment below if you're watching on YouTube, gap and the gain if you've read it because if you have, it's one to go back to and reread and reread it. If you haven't, put it on your reading list. Another root cause of
being deeply unsatisfied and being disappointed and unhappy even though you're successful is misaligned goals and values. So here's the problem.
The easiest things to measure, we want so desperately to measure, am I good enough, have I achieved enough, do I matter, we want to measure, the easiest things to measure are these external markers. So think money, think status, think accolades from other people, think views and subscribers and followers, et cetera. These are the things that we are easy to measure, easy to see, and easy for others to see.
And so we, without really thinking about it, tend to pursue those things. The problem is, is these are not values. These are external markers of success, but they are not values. So, if you don't know what your values are, you'll never know what truly fulfills you, you'll never actually be happy. Even though you'll continue to be successful on the outside, you'll never be happy. Inside of my book Rebel,
Graham Cochrane (10:33.623)
I have an entire chapter on really letting go. It's the final part of the rebel framework is letting go of the outcomes that you've actually intended to achieve, but also letting go of other people's opinions. And one of the ways you do that is I submit to you in the book that you create your own set of personal or family values. Let me give you an example of mine. One of our family values is hospitality.
and specifically the way the Cochran family likes to do hospitality, which is twofold. One, we like to have a beautiful home with a guest bedroom and suite where people can come and stay if there's someone that's displaced. We had a sweet single mom whose house got flooded in a recent hurricane in Tampa and she was displaced. And while they were trying to get FEMA to figure things out and find a new place for her to live, we let her and her daughter stay with us. Hospitality, we want a house that's big enough
where there's always a guest room and a guest suite that's ready for them to just come stay. Number two, we like to have people over for dinner and we like to have long, deep conversations. Also, hospitality. Shay, my wife, is really good at this. She'll have a ton of ladies over and they'll do like biohacking wellness nights where they'll get a bunch of ladies in our sauna outside and our cold plunge and in the hot tub or we'll set up the fire pit out back. We just like to create peaceful respite for people.
So we want a big house, we want a clean house, we want a peaceful house, because that's how we view hospitality. That is a huge value for our family. Another value is flexibility and time. So I want to make sure that I'm always optimizing my life and business to make sure I have time and flexibility, meaning I can take my kids to school, pick them up from school. I don't work on Fridays, I don't work on the weekends, we can travel extensively, however we want, whenever we want. I'm not shackled by my business. So you can start to see
what your values are. One of my values is generosity. It's not just mine, it's our whole family. So generosity looks like a lot of different things. One category is financial generosity. We try to give more and more money away each year. And we try to give about half, what we shoot for is half of our income away, 50 % of our income away. So our businesses create income, we have expenses and employees and things like that. And then whatever our profit is, meaning whatever the money is that we actually could take home if we really wanted to take all of it home.
Graham Cochrane (13:00.993)
we give 50 % of that away. And we do that in a variety of different ways. That's a huge part of our heartbeat. And I actually talk about this in my TEDx talk, why givers are happier and have less money stress. And I'm gonna link to that also in the show notes as well if you wanna go, if you didn't know, I gave a TEDx talk, it's about 12 minutes, and it will blow your mind with the science of being done around generosity and happiness. So it's fantastic to watch and it'll encourage you, but.
I share a little bit of our story with that as well. So generosity is a huge value for me. What are your values? What are your values? What truly fulfills you in life, in your family, in the world? What are the things that make your heart sad? What are the things that make your heart sing? What are the things your family is uniquely doing that you think is normal but is actually not normal but it's actually a gift to the world?
These are all things to think about. And the question for you is, are you building a business that serves your life?
Or have you forced your life to serve the business that you're building?
There's a difference, right? I always tell my clients, and I said this last week, answer this question, what are you optimizing your business for? You can only optimize for one thing. Now you might think you can optimize for more, and that's fine if you feel like you can do that, but the most powerful question you can ask yourself is, what's the one thing I'm optimizing for? Yes, we want lots of money, I get it. We all want our business to make money, but.
Graham Cochrane (14:40.993)
I would highly encourage you to consider something to optimize your business around other than money. Because if you optimize your business around money, which is what we do by default, you will end up serving the business you've created. And you will be successful. You will make money. That's the irony. Whatever you optimize for, you will get. You will get. If you optimize for money, you will get more money. One way or another, you will. But will you get happiness?
I don't know if just default gets thrown in. I don't think it does. So lot of the work I do with my clients is to help them optimize their business for their values. And one of the things I love to teach is how to build an effortless business. By effortless I mean a business that feels effortless. You're working 20 hours a week or less. You love waking up every day and doing what you do. It is not a burden. You don't feel handcuffed to your business anymore.
You get to do what you want, when you want, and it energizes you so much so that it doesn't even feel like work, and you only need to put in 20 hours a week max to reach your goals. And I'm helping multi six and seven figure business owners cut their work hours in half, grow their income, and love what they're doing. I wanna teach you some of that for free if you wanna join my effortless master class, how to turn your exhausting business into an effortless business. I'm gonna link to it in the show notes below, or you could just go to effortlessmasterclass.com.
It's 100 % free. It's about a 45 minute on-demand training. Watch it. You're gonna learn three powerful frameworks that can completely revolutionize the way you think about your business and make sure that you're building an effortless one, one that's optimized for the life you wanna live, not just for the money you wanna make. All right. So let's break it down real quick. I'm gonna give you just a couple of steps to practically solve this thing because we wanna redefine success, which is the solution.
to being unhappy in a successful business, which is crazy. Number one is define your core values, okay? So we talked about this earlier. You need to think about what truly matters to you. Is it family? Is it time? Is it flexibility? Is it creativity? One of my clients has an incredible business, but had no time to be creative. He's a musician, he's a creative at heart. And so we helped him redesign his week. We built what we call a dream week. And he's built in days each week where all he's doing is creating music.
Graham Cochrane (17:09.665)
so that he can be creative. He's making sure that his value of creativity is baked into his work week. So what really matters to you? Impact, changing the world. Think about the things that are your values, write them down. And then what you wanna do is you want to align your business with your values. So you have a list of your values, write them down and then maybe expound on them with a sentence or two. And then look at your actual business.
and say, where in my business and the way I've got it set up currently, is it diminishing or prohibiting this value from showing up? And maybe where in my business is it allowing that value to be elevated and lived out? Because it's probably not all or nothing. It's probably a mixed bag. You're probably doing some things that really allow certain values to exist, but there's gonna be other things that are snuffing out or quenching the ability for you to live out this value. So for example,
very often I'll have clients, whether it's inside my effortless business accelerator or group coaching program or one-on-one clients who say that they have a value of flexibility and time with their family. They say that and I believe that they have that value, but their business says otherwise. Their business is set up in such a way that it prohibits the family time the way they want, it prohibits the time to have off to travel, and so,
there's this conflict. And so what we have to do is just reverse engineer their business, give them the confidence that guess what, your business is not gonna fall apart if you actually limit your work hours or put boundaries around your communications on email or Slack or text or social media with clients or potential clients. There is a way, there is a process and we can do this and the good news is I've been on the other side of this now for 15 years where you can have it all.
and your business revenue can stay the same. In fact, it will actually grow. This is the irony of it. It'll actually grow the moment you reverse engineer your business and re-optimize it for your values. Because you're gonna show up differently. You're gonna show up with more energy, more creativity, more of the thing that makes you you, which is attractive and it actually brings in clients. Whereas when you're tired, when you're determined and you're stubbornly white-knuckling things to achieve the next thing, it...
Graham Cochrane (19:32.782)
subtly and subconsciously repels clients and opportunities from you. I don't really know how to quantify it. I've just seen it time and time again. So, you're gonna realign your business with your values. This way that you can still have the business, but have your values and watch what happens next. Step two is to focus on the gain. So go read the gap in the game. And even if you haven't read it, it's very simple. One of the takeaways you can do every night before you go to bed is write down your three biggest gains from the day. Just do that. You can call them three wins from the day.
three gains, and they can be business and they can be personal. That's it. What you'll be doing is A, remembering, yeah, that did happen today. I did have that great email. I just got a really nice email from somebody who remembered that it's my birthday coming up. this guy actually put a notification in his calendar to reach out to me every year on my birthday to thank me. And he actually reached out earlier, because he saw the calendar.
and he sent me a really nice encouraging message about something that God was telling him about me. It was just beautiful, right? Like that's a gain. when I go to bed tonight, I'm gonna write down one of my gains was that email that I received from this guy Jason, because it really encouraged me. And what a gift to have fans, followers, students who remember your birthday and email you to say, I'm thinking of you, I'm praying for you and believing this over your life. Like, wow, what a gain, right? So for you, what were the three gains
Do that every day the next 30 days and watch it transform the way You think about life and business because what it's doing is changing what you focus on what you focus on expands When you stop focusing on shrinks So why not focus on your gains and stop focusing on the gap because then your gains will expand you'll notice more gains and more gains which means you'll have more confidence and more joy be like dude my life and business is awesome and then the gap starts to shrink
so that comparison, not just to other people, but to your ideal self will shrink and you will feel better about yourself. So focus on the gains, always reflect on how far you've come, always, instead of obsessing over what's next. And then finally, number three, build the business that supports your life. And this is a lot of the work I do. Again, if you're interested in joining my group coaching program, check it out at
Graham Cochrane (21:54.71)
grahamcochran.com slash EBA. I'ma link to it below. It's my Effortless Business Accelerator. You can see if it's a good fit for you, where you are in the business, see if you qualify for it, you can apply there. You can also just jump into the free masterclass at effortlessmasterclass.com. I have been developing frameworks over the years and in the last six months, really fine tuning this material to help my private clients and now people in my group coaching program and hopefully you as well if you come to the masterclass. Really structure this out.
How do we go from, yeah, nice idea, Graham, to really building this out? This is the work I do with my clients. And so if this sounds like something you need, and you're already doing six figures in your business, you're probably a good fit, apply. See if it's a good fit. Or you can apply to work with me directly. I only work with five clients at a time. But this is the work that I feel called to do, is help successful entrepreneurs who feel stuck, who feel trapped, who feel handcuffed to a great business, set them free.
make them love what they're doing again, blow past that plateau of income and impact and reach and actually work less. It is absolutely possible. I'm a great example of it. I have organized and optimized and oriented my business around my desire to make one to $2 million a year minimum, work five hours a week or less, and I'm not lying about that. My business only takes five hours a week so that I can spend time with my family
I can take care of my body and my mind. I can connect with really cool people. I just got back from Arizona for a couple of days, masterminding to some incredible Christian entrepreneurs. And I can write books and I can travel and speak and do the things that matter to me that the business doesn't need. I don't need to write books. I don't need to sell books. I don't need to speak and make money. But I want to do those things. There are other modalities that give me joy and are having impact outside of YouTube land and podcast land.
Right? And so that's a huge part of what I'm optimizing my business for is there's a certain amount of income I'd like. There's a certain amount of time I want to be working in the business and not be working. And then I want complete flexibility to do the things that I want to do. So that's what I've built my business around. Make sense? All right. So in summary, success doesn't guarantee happiness. I hope you know that by now. And if you don't, you'll find out, but it doesn't. Number two, you got to align your goals with your values.
Graham Cochrane (24:21.889)
You gotta figure out what your values are first and then align and optimize your business around those values. Number three, you need to focus on progress, not perfection. So focus on the gain, not the gap. You have come so far, my friend. The more you can reflect on that daily, the happier you will be. And then finally, you want to build a business or reorient or restructure your business to support your ideal life.
You always start with the life you want, which is based around your values, and then you build the business to support that. Otherwise, you'll build the business, but not get the life you want. You build the life you want and build the business to support that, you get both. Does this make sense? So, again, here's a practical challenge. it again. This week, I want you to take 30 minutes a day to write down your top three values.
Graham Cochrane (25:27.607)
Okay, two homework assignments for you this week. Very simple, number one. This week take 30 minutes to write down your top three values and then evaluate whether your business aligns with them. And think about if they don't, what's one small change you can make to bring those two in alignment, to bring your values and your business in alignment. So take 30 minutes to do that this week and then I really do recommend you every night for the next 30 days write down your three biggest gains from the day, personal and professional. Just write them down.
in a journal or piece of paper or on your phone before you go to bed, three gains every single day for the next 30 days. And if you want to go deeper, you want to unpack this effortless business idea, come to my effortless masterclass where I'll help you turn your exhausting business into an effortless one. It's all for free. It's about 45 minutes on-demand training. I think it'll blow your mind. Just go to effortlessmasterclass.com. I'm gonna link to it in the notes below. And friend, just remember,
that success isn't about how much you achieve, it's about how aligned you feel, your life feels with what truly matters to you. And you've got this, I believe in you. I can do this, and my clients can do this, you can do this. All right, friend, thanks for watching and listening. I'll see you on another episode real soon.
