EverydaySpy Podcast - My First Month as an Entrepreneur Made Me Question EVERYTHING | Day 5

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/4kXTh7s The unknown can be a scary thing, especially for people struggling with stress, anxiety, depression or other common mental health challenges. My time at CIA taught me an incredible framework for dealing with the unknown, and I'm excited to share that with you today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No entrepreneur forgets what the first month of business feels like. For some people, it's really exciting because they're wildly successful. For others, it's not so exciting. It can be quite stressful. It can be quite scary. Now, for me, my first month as a true entrepreneur, no second job, no moonlight job, no side income, just straight up running my new company Everyday Spy. That first month was terrifying.

hindsight it's really kind of funny because all I needed was $4,000 in the whole month so that I could keep everything alive. So I could feed my kids. I could pay the rent. I could feed my wife, feed myself, and just kind of survive another 30 days. But it was so hard to make that $4,000. I mean, you would think that over the course of 30 days, you only have to sell less. than $100 worth of stuff per day for 30 days to make $4,000. But it was still really, really hard. I wasn't good at selling. I wasn't good with anything digital and I had a digital business.

I still didn't understand how to make the best kind of products. I didn't have any idea how to market. Like I said, selling was something that I knew how to do and I was selling treason for CIA. But that's completely different than selling a product, especially a product. that you believe in. So every month, I was terrified by the idea that this might be the month, I go bankrupt, or this might be the month. I run out of money and I have to ask for a loan, or this might be the month that my wife tells me it's time to grow up and go get a job again. It was a terrifying and stressful period. And every independent contractor, every entrepreneur,

every business owner out there knows the stress and the fear of those months. Those months where it gets so close. Those months where you don't know if you're going to make payroll. Those months where you watch your business banking account get close to zero or maybe even go to zero. Those months where your business credit card bounces, those months where you have no idea how you're going to make this thing work. Maybe one of those months is what killed your business.

be one of those months is what was the final stake in the coffin for you trying to be an entrepreneur. Maybe just the thought that one of those months might be coming is enough to keep you from trying. I am incredibly grateful to my time at CIA because what CIA taught me was that you never know what's coming. You might think you know what's coming. You might have an idea of what's coming. You might have planned and prepared and you are ready for what's coming or you think you are. But in reality, the future is always unknown. CIA has this concept that it teaches to its field officers called the cone of uncertainty. And when you visualize the cone of uncertainty, it's really as easy as visualizing a string with a funnel, like a car funnel or an oil funnel, on that string.

Wherever you see string, you know that that is the past. It's clear. It's defined. You know exactly what happened, what day it happened, and what time it happened. It's the past. But then as the string connects to the funnel, or it enters the funnel, the funnel is very narrow. But as the funnel continues, it gets quite wide. And you can't see the string when it's covered up by the funnel.

So you follow the string of time into the cone, the funnel of uncertainty. And what happens is that clear line of what has happened gets hidden. It gets obfuscated. It gets lost inside the actual cone. or the funnel. That means you don't know if the string is still straight when it's inside the funnel. You don't know if the string has been bent or if it's tied in a knot or if it goes in circles or swirls or loops. You have no idea because it's inside the cone of uncertainty. That can be frightening to many people. But what CIA taught me is that the cone of uncertainty is the shape

of a cone for a reason. And that cone is very important because where the cone is narrow, it means that there's very low probability that what is going to happen next is that different from what has happened in the past. But the more that the cone continues, the wider that uncertainty, that wider that unpredictability gets until the cone moves forward

and you have a new bit of string of the past that's exposed. When you think about the cone of uncertainty, you learn to accept that you don't know the future, but you have a high point. probability of predicting the near-term future where the cone is narrow, and you have a low probability of predicting the long-term future where the cone is wide. Now, that doesn't help you know for sure what's happening, but what it does help you find is comfort in knowing that the next thing that's

going to happen. The thing that's just around the corner probably isn't that different from the rest of the string of time that you just watched. So if your business is going well, there's no reason to think that it's not going to continue to go well in the near future. Similarly, if things are going poorly, there's no reason to think that things are going to improve in the near future. But the long-term future, the distant future, the wide part of that cone of uncertainty is uncertain. So you might be stressed and scared today

and that fear is very likely to continue in the near term of the future, but you have no idea. what's going to happen in the long term. You have no idea what's going to happen inside that cone as the probability curve widens and you are less predictive of what's going to happen next, everything could get better. Everything could get excellent.

You don't really know. Similarly, just because things are going well today and you can anticipate that they'll continue to go well in the near future, you can't take your eye off the prize. You can't stop focusing on the mission because that cone gets very wide very quickly. And the uncertainty principle starts to take over and you don't know what you can expect. Now, in a field operation, the cone of uncertainty is super useful because it allows you to communicate

with joint teams with transparency. So when CIA needs to work with paramilitary officers from the Navy SEAL team or the Delta Army team or whenever you need to coordinate with local law enforcement or even local indigenous forces, the cone of uncertainty gives everybody a shared vocabulary. So you can say, hey, here's what we anticipate with high probability for the first 24 hours. But then after our 36, 48, 72, it becomes less certain. So we start creating contingency plans for various outcomes that might yield something unexpected inside the cone of uncertainty. Because we can expect the unexpected inside the cone of uncertainty.

You can't count on anything as the cone gets wider, as you get further from today, as the future gets further and further away. But you can have high confidence in what's going to happen in the near future. And you can communicate that confidence to peers, partners, family members, co-workers, because you have no reason empirically to expect that everything's going to fall apart. The cone of uncertainty is an especially valuable piece for all of our brothers and sisters at CIA who deal with anxiety. And if you've been following me for any period of time, you've probably heard me talk about how at CIA,

we see anxiety as a superpower. Anxious people are more aware. They're more alert. They're more focused on objective facts from the past, and they're very analytical about trying to predict what will happen in the future. Now, if left unchecked, that anxiety can be very damaging, very disruptive, very difficult for them to live with,

and very difficult for the rest of the team to cope with when they have an anxious person on the team. But with just a little bit of training and just a little bit of tuning, that anxiety becomes something very focused, very powerful and very useful. The cone of uncertainty is one of those elements that helps to hone and focus that anxiety into the superpower it was meant to be. An anxious person can look at the cone of uncertainty and then objectively reason that they don't have to worry about things falling apart in the near future.

They don't have to worry about a sudden gunshot wound. They don't have to worry about a sudden death. They don't have to worry about a sudden airplane accident. Those things are low probability. The highest probability is that you will accomplish what you came to accomplish for the first 12 to 24 hours. And then after that, things will become more complicated, more unpredictable. However, the cone will have also moved forward on the string. So if the next 12 hours goes well, then there's a good chance the next 12 hours will go well also.

If the next 36 hours go well, then there's a good chance the following 36 hours will go well. That's the power of the cone of uncertainty. When I applied this principle, this idea of the cone of uncertainty to my early life as an entrepreneur, it is what helped me sleep through nights that would have otherwise been sleepless. It is what helped me communicate to my spouse in situations that otherwise could have been panicked. It's what helped me have confidence that I could continue to move forward one day at a time, one hour at a time, one meal at a time without having to worry about the world coming crashing down upon me. nobody goes from $2,000 a month to bankruptcy overnight.

It takes days. It might even take weeks. And the same thing was true with my business. It grew from $4,000 a month to $4,200 a month to $4,900 a month to $4,900 a month to the place where it is now, sometimes making more than a quarter million dollars in a single 30-day period. And I can't count on that success forever, but I can count on that success. for the near future.

Because the cone of uncertainty has showed me through the thread of the past and the shape of the cone that I have every reason to anticipate very little change in the near term, but I can't count on anything in the long term. So I'm always planning and always preparing for what comes next.

The cone of uncertainty got me through the early days of my business. It got me through the darkest days of my business. And dark days in business happen way more often than anyone talks about. The markets change, the economy changes, politics change, people change, lots of change happens that impacts your bottom line and your ability to sell, your ability to hire, your ability to grow, your ability to mature, your ability to partner. If you lean into the cone of uncertainty, if you understand and visualize this incredibly clear picture of a funnel on a string,

and the string is the part that you know is true because the string is always the past. And when you look at the cone, Where the cone is narrow, you don't have to worry about much change. And likewise, you can't let yourself count on where the cone is wide because you can't see that far into the future. That simple concept, that simple string, that simple cone has done everything to transform my life, and I hope it transforms yours as well. If you learned anything new today,

I hope that you'll leave a comment, like, subscribe, and share this with a friend. And check me out at Everydayspy.com. follow me on my other YouTube channels and I'll keep teaching you everything I can from my time at CIA. Take care.