I recently watched a presentation from Alex Hormozi (founder of acquisition.com) on how to rapidly scale as a business owner and entrepreneur.

The whole presentation is worth the 55 minutes it takes to watch. It’s packed with insight and wisdom.

But there was one mental model that stood out to me above everything else.

Hormozi notes that every business is bottlenecked by the entrepreneur who runs it in one of three ways:

1. Skill deficiency
2. Trait deficiency
3. Belief deficiency

He uses the example of the Niche Slapping Fallacy, where entrepreneurs try to focus on several different projects and businesses at once hoping that one “sticks.”

Of course, it rarely works.

When someone falls into this fallacy/trap, they lack focus.

Focus is a trait.

Therefore, the bottleneck holding that entrepreneur (or the business) back is a trait deficiency.

What we’ll cover in this post:

In this essay, I expand on Hormozi’s three categories of deficiencies. I’ll show you how to think about them in the wider context of your goals, and how to think about fixing them (or whether you even should, in some cases).

Here’s the breakdown:

• The Analytical Improvement Framework: How to Find & Diagnose the Bottlenecks Holding You Back
• Common Skill Deficiencies and How to Overcome Them
• Common Trait Deficiencies and How to Overcome Them
• Common Belief Deficiencies and How to Overcome Them

Let’s go.

The Analytical Improvement Framework

In Principles, Ray Dalio talks about your “Two Yous and Your Machine.” 

“Think of yourself as a machine operating within a machine and know that you have the ability to alter your machines to produce better outcomes.“

As the designer of the machine, any skill, trait or belief deficiencies will affect your ability to both design a well-crafted machine and work productively inside it.

Let’s say you have a belief deficiency.

You’re passionate about teaching guitar. You dream of being able to make a full-time income from helping others learn to play guitar.

But you believe the market is too saturated, and that you’d never be able to pull it off. You think that maybe you’ll be able to pick up a few local students and supplement your income instead.

So you design a machine that helps you achieve the outcome of getting a few local students.

You make some money. You have some clients. But you haven’t achieved your true desired outcome of teaching guitar full time—because of your belief deficiency.

If you could overcome this belief deficiency—you believe there is space in the market for you to carve out your own niche and get enough clients to go full time—then you’d design the machine differently.

But like Dalio says, you’re also inside the machine yourself as a worker.

Let’s say you’ve overcome your belief deficiency. You’re confident you can teach guitar full time, and you design the machine and strategy to achieve that.

And then it turns out that you don’t actually have any semblance of a work ethic. You have a trait deficiency: you’re lazy.

You just don’t execute or get things done.

The machine might be designed perfectly. But if you’re not doing the work, then you’ll never achieve your desired outcome.

You eventually fix your poor work ethic. Finally!

And then you run into another bottleneck. This time, it’s a skill deficiency.

You don’t know how to get clients. You have no marketing knowledge.

You have a well-designed machine and work ethic, but you’re pushing too hard in the wrong direction.

In all these cases, you need to spot the deficiency and overcome it:

1. Belief that the market is saturated: is the market actually saturated? Or is that just an excuse you’re telling yourself to justify inaction? What are the key signs it’s saturated? Can I create a sub-niche within the niche?
2. Poor work ethic trait: progressively overload your ability to focus and work.
3. Lack of marketing skill: Read books on client acquisition, hire a coach, buy a course, etc.

Now you’ve got a well-designed machine that you can competently execute on (and in).

So, how do you uncover these deficiencies in your own roadmap and system?

Step 1: Know where you’re headed

You want to have specific, clearly defined outcomes that you can explain easily to someone else.

If you only have a vague idea of what you want to achieve, it’s much harder to identify the bottlenecks in your way.

For example, let’s say your goal is to make money on the internet. 

That’s it.

Super vague. 

There could be hundreds of bottlenecks with a vague goal like this.

Contrast this with a more specific goal: “I want to make $200,000 take home income per year from an online course and coaching business based around my expertise in early childhood care.”

This is more specific, and we can identify bottlenecks more quickly as we work through the rest of the framework. 

Step 2: Be ruthlessly honest about where you are now

You’ve got the clear, specific outcome. 

Now you need to look at where you are currently.

But you need to do this in a ruthlessly honest way. 

As Hormozi says:

“You’re not making as much money as you want because you’re not as good as you think you are.”

It’s harsh, but it’s true.

If you’re not where you want to be—you haven’t achieved your goal yet—then it’s because you’re simply not as good as you think you are. There’s a deficiency.

So, let’s say you’re the person who wants to make $200k take-home from their online education biz in the early childhood care space.

Here’s what you do have:

• A wealth of experience in the subject matter of early childhood care (you’re not just a grifter who’s trying to make a quick buck from something they know nothing about)
• Passion and care for the customer/client/student (you truly want them to succeed)

Is that enough to achieve the goal?

No. 

You need to sell the product or service. 

And being ruthlessly honest with yourself, you have no idea how to do that. You have zero experience in marketing and sales. 

That is the deficiency. 

Don’t create a reality that isn’t a reality

Most people gloss over their shortcomings, ignore them, and adjust course in a way that makes it “easier” for them but less effective towards achieving their goals.

I know that I’m not good at sales as a skill, and when I’m building a new business, it’s very tempting for me to do EVERYTHING except sell. I’ll subsconsciously change the business model, and practically everything else just so I don’t have to jump on the phone with people. 

But if my goal is to build a 7 figure business fast, then I need to face that deficiency head on. Not ignore it. Not gloss over it. And not adjust course just to make it feel better.

The easiest way to uncover your deficiencies is to stop ignoring them.

If you look at the last 12 months of your life and career, I guarantee you can spot obvious deficiencies. 

I guarantee there were times where:

• You should have taken action but didn’t (either because of a belief or trait deficiency)
• You chose to use a strategy you know wouldn’t work as well, but it felt better to you because you didn’t have to leave your comfort zone (skill/trait deficiency)
• Friends pointed out a bad habit of yours (e.g., “You’re so impulsive! When are you going to stick to something?”)
• You were in conversation with someone and found yourself complaining about “How hard it is to achieve X” or how you think the cards are stacked against you (belief deficiency)

If you sit down by yourself for an hour with just a notebook and pen—and think—you will uncover these deficiencies. 

It won’t be fun. You’ll feel like a failure. 

But it’s necessary for personal hypergrowth. 

Bonus tip: ask a friend to give you critical feedback.

Simply ask them the following question: “Hey, I’m taking some time to do a personal review of my life and work. I’d love to hear from you personally, as my friend, what you think my strengths and weaknesses are? Please be as honest as you can. I won’t be offended.”

When you give permission for a friend to do this, they are usually more than willing to let you know. You may need to encourage them to dig deeper.

For instance, they might say: “Well, I think you’re a very calm and chill person. But maybe you could be more decisive at times.”

“What do you mean by that? Do you have any examples?”

“Yes, actually just the other day you were…”

You get the idea.

Find the deficiency, and then take action

You’ll notice that the analytical improvement framework is about finding and diagnosing the deficiencies you have.

It is NOT about trying to analyze and figure out why you have this deficiency in the first place.

You might think this is a good idea, but your desire to do so is a deficiency in itself (you want to procrastinate). 

For instance—I know I’m an impulsive person. I make decisions on a whim, I’ll book holidays last minute. It’s a trait deficiency that I’m actively working on fixing. 

I could spend days, weeks, months or even years trying to figure out why I’m an impulsive person. 

Is it because of how I was raised? Is it because of some traumatic event? 

I have no idea. It could simply be that that’s just my genetic inclination. 

Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s worth pondering. 

You do not need to philosophize and analyze your deficiency to death. You need to either fix it, learn to work around it, or eliminate it altogether. The faster you do this, the faster you’ll forget about this part of you and move forward towards your goals. 

This passage from Straight-Line Leadership says it all:

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “But why do I do that? What’s wrong with me? Why do I stop? Don’t I need to find that out?” 

No, you don’t need to figure any of that out. Why does it matter? It will only delay your progress to wallow in past theories, stories, and beliefs. You want to replace all that mental spinning with pure action.“

A quick note on fixing deficiencies:

You can’t fix every trait or skill deficiency, and for some—you shouldn’t.

Often it’s better to hire people who don’t have the same deficiency, instead of trying to fix it in your own life.

For instance, I have a skill deficiency in operations and management. It’s important that I shore up my weakness in this area enough to find someone who’s extremely good at operations and management, but probably no further than that. 

Keep this in mind as we walk through common deficiencies and how to overcome them. You need to make sure that fixing the deficiency is the best course of action as opposed to hiring for the gaps. 

Common Skill Deficiences and How to Overcome Them

It’s hard for me to list out and define common skill deficiences because it’s the one category of deficiences that is highly-specific to the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.

The person who wants to build and manage a massive business of 100+ employees will need to overcome specific skill deficiencies that the person who wants to be a freelance consulstant will not have to overcome at all (specifically: management, operations, capital allocation, and so on).

My goal is to help driven individuals create and scale their own highly profitable, low-overhead, audience-first, remote business (usually centered around education). So I’ll address the common skill deficiencies that get in the way with that specific goal.

Audience Building/Content Marketing

If you’re building an audience-first business (that is, you’re building an audience first before selling a product), then the first objective is to build the audience.

This in itself is a skill. 

You need to be interesting.

You need to know what your niche is. Who you’re trying to reach.

You need to put out interesting, useful content.

You need to be consistent (trait deficiency, but worth mentioning anyway). 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Learn audience-building theory based on the platform you want to build on:
  • For Twitter, check out Sahil Bloom’s Audience Building course. I’ve taken it personally and highly recommend it.
  • For YouTube, check out Ali Abdaal’s Part-Time YouTuber Academy or Sunny Lennarduzzi’s Authority Accelerator.
• Create a plan that forces you to be consistent—e.g., post 3 Twitter threads per week, spend 30 minutes per day engaging with others.
• Analyze your wins and losses. Continously optimize and improve. 

Offer Building

Let’s say you’ve overcome the audience building/content marketing deficiency and you can safely say that you’ve acquired that skill (and you’ve got the results to show for it—an audience).

Now it’s time to monetize that audience.

Here’s where most people fall off the wagon, usually because they have unrealistic expectations of what they can achieve (financially) by launching their first product without the skill of offer building.

They think that just because they have an audience, they can sell whatever they want.

But even if you’re the best teacher in the world, or you’re the best expert on your subject matter, it doesn’t mean you’ll get the sales numbers you want. 

You need to craft, design, and present your offer (whether it’s a course, coaching service or something else), in a way that appeals to your audience and makes them need it. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Gain some foundational marketing knowledge, specifically around customer problems, pain points, etc.
• Read Alex Hormozi’s $100m Offers book (seriously, do it). 
• Test offers as quickly and regularly as possible to build your intuitive mental model of what works and what doesn’t for your audience (more on this in an article coming soon: The Low-Risk, High-Leverage Approach to Monetizing Your Audience)

Marketing

Perhaps the biggest skill deficiency budding solopreneurs and entrepreneurs have is marketing.

Marketing is a such a wide category, and can mean a lot of things, but I’m specifically talking about how to get your product/service in front of people and make sales.

Person to person or phone sales itself is a separate skill altogether, but I don’t actually think it’s a necessary skill if you’re selling an online course (I scaled EDMProd without doing any phone sales at all). 

Marketing, however, is the one skill you do need to develop.

You can be an expert in your subject, you can be passionate and driven. These things will act as a force multiplier when you nail the marketing.

But without the marketing in place, you’ll likely fail to achieve your goals. 

So, if you think you have a deficiency in this area, fix it.

Learn how to:

• Write persuasive sales copy
• Make great content
• Enhance, grow and leverage your personal brand
• Tell stories that capture attention
• Create, optimize and scale marketing campaigns 

Any work done in overcoming this skill deficiency is not work done in vain.

To overcome this deficiency:

• Like above, gain foundational marketing knowledge. Read key books like The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
• Read a bunch of copywriting books, practice copywriting. Copy sales letters by hand. 
• Constantly create and test your own hypothesis (e.g., I ran this pricing strategy expecting X to happen. Y happened instead. Here’s what I learned.)
• Practice, ship, improve, test, fail, repeat. There’s no silver bullet for developing generalized marketing skills. 

Management/Delegation

Even if you are (or plan to be) a solopreneur with no employees—chances are you’ll still be hiring contractors and outsourcing work.

This is a massive bottleneck for many people—especially those who’ve put the hard yards in developing the aforementioned skills. Here’s why:

• You think you’re better than anyone you can hire (which may or may not be true, but usually is not true)
• You’re competent, so you always rationalize the “I’ll just do it myself—I’m good at this.”
• You have a scarcity mindset around spending money for other people to get work done (subconsciously, it’s the story of “Why would I pay someone money to do this when I can just do it myself?”)
• You don’t have a clear aspirational hourly rate

This is often both a skill deficiency combined with trait and belief deficiencies. 

You don’t have the skill of management or delegation, usually because you don’t truly believe that it will move the needle forward. Or you don’t believe you can find the right people. 

If you’re in the position where you need to hire and outsource, it’s important you accurately diagnose exactly what the deficiencies are. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Start small. If you’ve never outsourced work before, then pick something. Anything. Go to Fiverr or Upwork, create a job/project, pay someone to do it. It might fail miserably, but you’ll get the ball rolling.
• Set an aspirational hourly rate. This isn’t how much you currently earn, it’s how much you want to earn. Now, any work you’re doing that you could outsource for less than that amount, you should outsource.
• Make some personal sacrifice. Most solopreneurs are hesitant to outsource because it affects their profit margins. Take a paycut now in order to scale your income in the future.

Common Trait Deficiencies and How to Overcome Them

Trait deficiencies are easier to list than skill deficiences. They’re usually non-specific and universal.

Which means regardless of what you’re trying to do, or what business you’re trying to build—or even if you’re just trying to get ahead in your corporate career—overcoming common trait deficiencies will supercharge your progress. 

Let’s take a look at the 5 most common trait deficiencies. 

Focus

This trait is closely linked to courage, decisiveness and work ethic. 

The person who lacks focus will first be unable to pick one path or project to execute on. They’ll jump from project to project, idea to idea, and ultimately spin the hamster wheel without making any progress or shipping anything.

If you can’t decide between multiple projects to work on, then you lack decisiveness and probably courage too (you have multiple projects because you’re “hedging” and don’t truly believe that a single one will work). 

And you likely lack work ethic because you keep jumping to new ideas and projects when the going gets tough.

But once you overcome this trait deficiency, amazing things happen.

• You finally ship finished work. You have something to share, something to sell.
• You build massive momentum. You feel like you’re making progress, improving as a person and an entrepreneur.
• Your income increases. 
• You feel less anxious and stressed. You’ve picked a path and you’re executing on it. 

To overcome this deficiency: 

• Simplify, simplify, and then simplify some more. Cut out projects that have a low chance of success or that you’re not excited about. Get rid of them. Remove excess noise. 
• Think with a longer term time horizon. You’re not going to build a business in 2 weeks. Commit to longer time frames. 
• Expanding on the above, set reverse-deadlines. Reverse-deadlines are where you commit to working on something for a minimum period of time, no matter what.

Work Ethic/Self-Discipline

Look, I’m all about personal leverage. I don’t think you need to work a 60 hour week in 2022 to “make it” and build an amazing business.

But you do need to work. 

Being lazy will get you nowhere.

And sometimes… guess what? Work isn’t fun.

It just isn’t.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re doing something you absolutely love. There will be moments of pain, frustration, and all you’ll think about is doing anything but work.

In my own experience, my work ethic dropped substantially when I achieved some small success. When I had a business that was generating residual income (without me having to trade my time for it), something switched inside my brain and I stopped working as hard.

Maybe it’s similar for you—you don’t have a fire under your ass to really drive you.

Or maybe you just lack work ethic in general.

In any case, it’s a deficiency that must be overcome if you want to achieve your goals and win in the new economy. Work ethic combined with wisdom and leverage = superpower.  

To overcome this deficiency: 

• Build your work ethic like a muscle. Progressively overload. If you can’t focus for more than 30 minutes, then start there. Increase your ability to focus on the work at hand.
• Remove distractions and excuses that pull you away from doing the work.
• Most importantly, take note of how it feels when you do work hard compared to when you don’t. Chances are, you’re less anxious, more fulfilled, and happier. Focus on this feeling and recreate it.
• Hire a performance/accountability coach. 

Decisiveness

Aside from work ethic, if there’s one trait deficiency you must overcome, it’s a lack of decisiveness.

People will spend years making decisions about things that should take weeks or even days.

They’ll spend months making a decision that should be made in an hour. 

And they’ll spend hours making decisions that should be made instantly.

Speed up your rate of decision-making and commitment, and you’ll build real momentum. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Get comfortable with the fact that you will make poor decisions from time to time. But unless the outcome is irreversible, you’re better off making a decision than no decision.
• Reduce your options. Extreme optionality leads to analysis paralysis leads to indecision. You have too many options, it’s too hard to pick, and so you run around in circles trying to decide.
• Realize that usually you need to take action in order to get the right information. If you can’t decide which city to move to, it’s probably because you’re constantly theorizing and imagining what it would be like, instead of actually moving there. 

Self-Awareness

As Gary Vee would say, self-awareness is everything.

People—especially entrepreneurs—get themselves in trouble when they lack self-awareness. They make stupid decisions, pursue projects that they aren’t suited for, or self-sabotage themselves.

If you want to remove the bottlenecks in the way of you and your goals, then being self-aware is essential.

First of all, in order to even find and uncover your deficiencies—you need to be self-aware. You need to be able to look at yourself objectively and point out where you’re weak. 

Second, self-awareness = radical honesty with yourself.

Most people who lack focus, work ethic or deciveness won’t admit it. They’ll brush over it, or make an excuse, or blame something or someone else.

What’s hard is saying, “Actually, yeah. I’m extremely lazy. That’s what it is. I’ll admit that, and I need to change it.”

Self-awareness is the ability to accurately identify your shortcomings for what they are, and acknowledging them. 

If you can then fix those shortcomings, you should. And if you can’t, then it is what it is (for instance, I’m self-aware enough to know that I’ll never become an NBA player. I’ve played two games of basketball in my life, I’m under 6 foot, and I’m in my mid 20s—I have too much catching up to do).

To overcome this deficiency:

• Stop lying to yourself. It doesn’t help you or anyone else. Next time you find yourself starting to make an excuse for your behaviour—let’s say you procrastinated for 3 hours on YouTube instead of working on a project—just admit that you procrastinated and it was bad. Admit that this is something you do, and you need to fix. 
• Regularly journal and practice introspection. Analyze how you respond to situations. Try to understand your natural impulses and inclinations. 
• Ask other people what your strengths and weaknesses are. Chances are, you already know what they are, but hearing them from someone else provides confirmation. 

Courage

You can have all the above traits: focus, work ethic, deciveness and self-awareness.

But if you lack courage, you won’t achieve what you really want to achieve.

Sure, you’ll get somewhere. You’ll make some progress. But you won’t reach the heights you want to reach. 

A lack of courage usually manifests itself as:

• Playing it safe
• Fear of failure
• Indecision
• Extended, long-term procrastination on important projects
• Excuses and rationalizations for not making the big move you know you need to make (move cities, quit job, etc)

To overcome this deficiency:

• Burn your bridges. Make commitments that you can’t back out of. Get comfortable with discomfort in this regard, and slowly notice yourself being more courageous. 
• Build the courage muscle: find ways every day to act with courage. Make it a habit. 

Wisdom

Wisdom is your ability to make sound decisions.

Courage, decisiveness and work ethic alone will enable you to move forward with power, but not necessarily right direction. Wisdom helps you choose a better course and avoid pitfalls along the way. 

Wisdom is knowing to avoid entering a certain market because it’s declining at a rate of 20% per year, even though you’re incredibly passionate about that market.

Wisdom is knowing that pushing to the next level in business (even when you don’t need extra money) at the cost of family life suffering is likely not worth it.

Wisdom is choosing to work on high-leverage projects and activities, and avoiding everything else that doesn’t contribute to your long term goals.

It’s both a skill and trait. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Learn and implement key mental models. I recommend deep-diving through Farnam Street, reading books like The Navalmanack and The Almanack of Charlie Munger. You’ll start to see how these mental models can be applied in everyday life. 
• Journal more. Introspect. Analyze your decisions and actions—both good and bad. Ask “why?” more often. 
• If you’re an extremely action-oriented/fast-paced person, slow down. Extend your decision-making time. Do not do this if you’re an indecisive person. If that’s you, you need to speed up your decision-making time. 

Common Belief Deficiencies and How to Overcome Them

Finally, we have belief deficiencies. 

Belief deficiencies are perhaps the most important deficiencies to overcome, because they bottleneck every other deficiency.

You cannot overcome a skill deficiency unless you believe you can. You can’t fix or improve a character trait unless you believe you can change.

I’ve seen this time and time again in myself and other people: you have potential, but you just can’t see it. And that’s what holds you back. 

Let’s take a look at the most common belief deficiencies. 

“I’m not the type of person who can do that”

It’s important to note that most belief deficiences people have center around the belief that they can’t do a particular thing. 

The problem is, there’s always some truth to this. 

Right now, I can’t run a 100-miler ultra-marathon. I don’t have a strong enough aerobic base, I haven’t been training. I’d get halfway through and quit.

Right now, I’m the type of person who can’t run an ultra-marathon. It’s true.

But that does not mean that I can’t do it. I just have to become the type of person who can. I simply need to train for it and develop my physical/mental capacity. Because there’s nothing physical holding me back from actually doing it in the future (I still have my legs, a functioning heart, etc). 

The person who holds this belief deficiency either doesn’t see themselves in a good enough light (they lack confidence in the things they could achieve even without practice and skill development)…

Or they can’t distinguish between the above: just because they can’t achieve it now, it doesn’t mean they can’t achieve it in the future. 

Important Caveat

Obviously certain personality types and skill/trait makeups are better suited to certain businesses, career paths and goals. 

There’s an element of wisdom that has to come into play here. There are legimately delusional people who think they can do anything. 

For instance, I’m very hesitant to say that I could be a Fortune 500 CEO. I would never want to rule it out, but I honestly don’t think I’m suited for the role. Management isn’t my strong suit. I don’t like meetings. I have very little desire to even go down that path or anything similar. 

So when I say, “I don’t think I’m the type of person to be a F500 CEO”—I’m not admitting a lack of confidence, it’s more of a “That’s not my lane, and I’m humble and confident enough to admit that.”

Most of the time, though, people who say “I’m not the type of person who can do that” are lacking confidence and self-belief, and that’s a deficiency that needs to be overcome. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Separate “can’t do that now” from “can’t do that at all.” They are two different things. You can develop skills, gain knowledge, and change yourself faster than you think. 
• Find case studies, stories, books from people in worse situations than you who’ve achieved what you want to achieve. Ask yourself: what’s the exact reason why you can’t achieve what you want to achieve? Chances are, there isn’t one. 
• Clearly define the type of person who can do the thing. Then ask yourself whether it’s possible to develop yourself into that type of person through a series of consistent actions and habits. The answer will almost always be yes. 

“That’s just luck” 

Often said when someone else achieves success. 

The person who says this is saying it not necessarily because they are envious (though, they often are), but rather because it gives them an out.

If in their mind, the other person achieved their goal because of “luck.” Then what’s the point in even trying? 

It’s an excuse for inaction. It’s a toxic belief that will get you nowhere. So you need to get rid of it. 

You shouldn’t even engage in debates about whether luck exists. Of course it exists. But you can do a hell of a lot to increase your odds, and really, there’s no other option. 

To overcome this deficiency:

• Stop thinking in terms of luck/odds/randomness and start thinking about what you can do to improve your day-to-day life. Build productive habits, make decisions, act. 
• When you notice yourself envious of someone else’s success, or you’re tempted to boil it down to “luck”—look into the journey they took to get there. Overnight successes look completely different under the hood. 

“People who achieve X are _______”

This one’s extremely common.

You’ll hear people say things like:

• “People who can build 8 figure businesses are cutthroat and exploitative.” 
• “That person acheived that because they are genetically positioned to do so.”
• “Everyone who achieves X is like this.”

This belief deficiency is just a variation on “I’m not the type of person who can do X”

People who have this deficiency create a caricature of the person who’s achieved what they secretly want to achieve. A caricature that is different to them, so that they can excuse themselves from not trying. 

As usual, there’s an element of truth to the things they tell themselves. Yes, some 8-figure business owners are exploitative. Not all. Yes, some people are genetically positioned to do better in certain fields like sports—not all. 

To overcome this deficiency:

Realize that people are complex, and there’s no specific personality type that can only achieve X or Y. Some entrepreneurs are timid, shy, and reserved. Others are loud, proud and confident. Both can be successful. 

—

Obviously there are more than the three belief deficiencies I’ve listed above, but most of them will center around these or use them as the foundation.

If you have any of these belief deficiences in a significant way, then I truly think the highest leverage thing you can do is work to overcome them.

Sometimes that will mean introspection and thinking/journalling. 

Most times it will mean shutting your inner-voice off and taking action. 

Have a bias towards the latter. 

Wrapping it up

Hopefully this article has been as helpful to you as the reader as it has been to me while I writing it.

We all suffer from skill, trait and belief deficiencies. There will always be new goals to set, higher mountains to climb, and harder challenges to overcome.

And in doing so, we will need to remove new bottlenecks by fixing our deficiencies.

So, next time you find yourself stuck, take a pause. Ask yourself what the deficiency is, and then work to solve it.