Brent Beshore: Business Brilliance and Happiness at Home

1. Choose Love Over Fear

Recognize that life can fundamentally be lived either out of fear (scarce, competitive) or out of genuine love and care for others and oneself. Consciously choose to operate from a place of love.

2. Adopt a Stewardship Mindset

Shift from an ‘ownership’ mindset, where you feel entitled to do whatever you want, to a ‘stewardship’ mindset, where you view your role as a responsibility to care for and preserve what has been entrusted to you.

3. Reject Scarcity Mindset

Challenge the belief that acting out of scarcity is necessary for success, as this mindset isolates and shuts down individuals and relationships. Embrace an abundance mindset instead.

4. Operate from Abundance

Strive to operate from a position of abundance, love, and care, regardless of your current resources. This mindset leads to a better life, as money only amplifies your existing character.

5. Love Without Reciprocity

In relationships, particularly marriage, strive to focus purely on the good of the other person, serving and loving them without any expectation of reciprocity. This shifts from ‘fish love’ (consuming) to genuine care.

6. Foster Bi-Directional Relationships

Cultivate relationships where help and support flow in both directions, as a one-sided dynamic where one person always helps and never needs help prevents genuine connection and equality.

7. Actively Ask for Help

Actively ask for help from others, rather than always being the one eager to provide it. This fosters bi-directional relationships and prevents the destruction of genuine connection.

8. Cede Control in Friendships

In true friendships, practice ceding control to the other person, allowing for mutual vulnerability and trust. Constantly paying the bill or always having your way can be a subtle form of control that hinders genuine connection.

9. Avoid Hero-Victim Dynamic

Be mindful that acting as a ‘hero’ by helping others without them asking, or in an outsized way, can remove their agency and inadvertently create a victim dynamic, diminishing and insulting them.

10. Help When Asked, Respect Needs

Offer help when explicitly asked and ensure you are in a deep relationship where you understand and respect the other person’s actual needs. Avoid providing unsolicited help that removes agency and dignity.

11. Emulate “Elders,” Not “Elderly”

Strive to be an ’elder’ who is outwardly focused, genuinely caring, loving, and lives with joy, lightness, and freedom regardless of circumstances, rather than being ’elderly’ who are self-focused, irritable, fearful, and incurved on themselves.

12. Assess Your Life Quality

Regularly question if you are settling for an interior life filled with anxiety, disconnected relationships, or an unhealthy physical body. This self-inquiry can reveal areas needing profound change and growth.

13. Surrender to Self-Examination

Choose to surrender self-promotion and self-protection, taking the risk to honestly examine yourself, even if it means confronting uncomfortable truths. This vulnerability is essential for deeper relationships and personal growth.

14. Pair Awareness with Healing

Understand that gaining awareness of your faults without also pursuing healing can lead to a worse state than not being aware at all. Actively seek healing after achieving self-awareness.

15. Self-Assess for Fear/Love

To determine if you are operating from fear or love, check for internal peace or anxiety. Anxiety and fear are signals of operating from a scarcity mindset.

16. Manage Catastrophizing Tendencies

Recognize that the capacity to envision many scenarios, while useful in professional contexts like investing, can be detrimental in personal life if it leads to catastrophizing the future. Work to manage this tendency in your personal sphere.

17. Avoid Competitive Relationships

Understand that competitiveness is the antithesis of true relationship, as it creates an ‘I win, you lose’ dynamic. Strive to remove competitiveness from your personal interactions.

18. Detach Self-Worth from Wins

Avoid tying your self-worth to winning, whether in games or life, as losing can lead to prolonged negative feelings and hinder personal well-being.

19. Avoid Work as Relationship Escape

Be aware of using work, like answering emails late at night, as an escape or a way to seek praise when facing relationship conflict. This behavior avoids addressing underlying issues and can damage personal connections.

20. Prioritize Close Relationships

Reflect on whether you are optimizing your life for the approval of those who know you least (e.g., social media) or for the genuine connection with those who know you best. Prioritize the latter for deeper fulfillment.

21. Reduce Social Media for Validation

Decrease your reliance on social media for validation and praise. Engage with it only when genuinely wanting to help or contribute, rather than constantly checking for likes and external approval.

22. Focus on One Habit at a Time

Recognize that habits define our lives and are difficult to change. When building new habits, focus on adding one at a time, as attempting multiple simultaneously is often ineffective.

23. Utilize Personality Testing

Become familiar with and utilize personality testing tools like Myers-Briggs and Enneagram to better understand human behavior, foster empathy, and improve predictability in relationships and hiring.

24. Prioritize Predicting Human Behavior

Recognize that predicting human behavior is a critical skill for success in business and life, as it reduces volatility and increases the likelihood of positive outcomes.

25. Understand “Why” Behind Behavior

Strive to understand the underlying motivations (‘why’) behind people’s actions, consider incentives beyond just financial ones, and cultivate empathy for diverse reactions to avoid taking things personally.

26. Use Multiple Personality Tests

When using personality tests, avoid the misconception that any single test will perfectly predict behavior. Instead, use multiple tests to gain a more comprehensive, 3D understanding of individuals.

27. Acknowledge Individual Differences

Recognize that people operate and desire things differently than you do. Avoid assuming others think like you, as everyone is a unique mixture of attributes, fostering empathy and understanding.

28. Use Myers-Briggs for Empathy

By understanding people through the four Myers-Briggs parameters (energy gathering, information processing, decision-making, lifestyle preference), you can cultivate greater empathy in your interactions.

29. Use Enneagram for Core Drives

Utilize the Enneagram to understand your underlying insecurities and primary drives, which can provide deep insights into your motivations and behaviors.

30. Ideal Investment Scenario

When investing, assume a knowable risk, ensure you are paid more to assume that risk, and have some ability to mitigate it. This approach defines an ideal investment scenario.

31. Prioritize Optionality for Longevity

Prepare for things not playing out as expected by keeping optionality open, even if it decreases annual returns. This strategy provides the ability to survive and thrive over decades.

32. Understand Debt’s Role

Recognize that debt is an amplifier, not a source, of return; it can magnify good outcomes but will destroy mediocre or bad situations.

33. Avoid Hubris in Debt

Given that the future is largely unknown and unknowable, using excessive debt can be a form of pride or hubris, as it assumes a level of future predictability that often doesn’t exist.

34. Seek Businesses with Little Debt

When evaluating businesses, consider a lack of debt (or very little debt) as a strong positive signal, as debt can mask fragility and significant risks that operators often underestimate.

35. Align Time Horizon with Decisions

Recognize that good long-term decisions cannot be made with short-term capital and short-term time horizons. Ensure your investment and business strategies are aligned with a long-term perspective.

36. Align Incentives for All

Design systems where everyone’s incentives are perfectly aligned to achieve the same goals, ensuring all stakeholders ’eat at the same table’ rather than having misaligned interests.

37. Ensure All Stakeholders Win

Design systems, especially in business, where all stakeholders win, because any system with ’losers’ is inherently unsustainable in the long term.

38. Consider All Stakeholders

When making business decisions, consider the well-being and needs of all stakeholders, including leadership, employees, customers, vendors, communities, and regulators, not just buyers and sellers.

39. Treat People Well for Long-Term Returns

Explore the possibility that treating people well and using little to no debt can actually lead to higher long-term returns in business, challenging conventional finance wisdom.

40. Be Kind, Not Just Nice, in Firing

Recognize that while firing someone impacts many, it is also unkind and unhealthy to keep someone in a role where they are not performing well. Prioritize kindness by making difficult but necessary decisions for their sake and the company’s.

41. Address Underperformance Promptly

Avoid being overly tolerant of a lack of performance, as it is unhealthy for the company’s returns and for the individuals engaging in the underperforming behavior.

42. Help People Find Right Role

Practice true kindness by helping individuals recognize when they are in the wrong role, especially if they are stressed and fear-based. Your job is to serve and help others succeed, even if it means guiding them to a different position.

43. Guard Against Peter Principle

Be aware of the ‘Peter Principle,’ where individuals rise beyond their competence and cannot step back due to pride or ego. Guard against this by detaching identity from title and being open to different roles.

44. Meet Criticism with Curiosity

When faced with criticism about your role or performance, meet it with curiosity and self-reflection, even if you initially disagree. Seek to discern if there’s truth in the feedback.

45. Use Personality Tests in Hiring

Incorporate personality tests like Myers-Briggs and Enneagram into the later stages of the recruiting process to gain deeper insights into candidates, avoid projecting assumptions, and assess suitability for specific roles.

46. Self-Select Out Based on Fit

Be open to self-selecting out of a job opportunity if personality testing or self-reflection reveals a poor fit, as this indicates self-awareness and integrity.

47. Identify Core Business Action

When analyzing a business, focus on identifying its ‘core action’ – what it fundamentally does to create value – to understand its true nature beyond surface-level descriptions.

48. Seek Mispriced Opportunities

Look for mispriced investment opportunities where there’s a divergence between the perceived risk and your unique ability to mitigate that risk compared to others.

49. Use Price as Due Diligence Filter

Adopt the heuristic that price itself serves as a major due diligence filter: a higher price means more things must go right, while a lower price offers more absorption for unexpected issues.

50. Identify “Lids” on Business Growth

When analyzing long-tenured, successful but not larger businesses, identify the ’lids’ or constraints preventing them from growing bigger, as these represent opportunities for improvement.

51. View Problems as Opportunities

After acquiring a business, adopt the mindset that all encountered problems are merely opportunities for improvement and value creation.

52. Underwrite Businesses Without Growth

When evaluating a business for acquisition, ensure it can stand on its own and generate returns even with no change in its current trajectory. Avoid the hubris of assuming you can quickly transform a long-standing business.

53. Acknowledge Business Difficulty

Understand that buying and operating a business is inherently difficult and rarely easy, especially over multiple ventures. Maintain a realistic perspective and avoid underestimating the challenges.

54. Honor Entrepreneurial Legacy

When acquiring businesses, honor the legacy of the entrepreneurs who built them, acknowledging the difficulty and fragility of their work, and strive to create long-term wins for all stakeholders.

55. Cultivate Patience

Recognize that a lack of patience can fundamentally alter outcomes, especially in long-term endeavors like business and investing.

56. Share Playbook Openly

Consider openly sharing your business playbook and due diligence processes, including the ‘why’ behind each step, embracing an abundance mindset over a scarcity of information.

57. Conduct Regular Look-Backs

Implement regular ’look-backs’ or reviews of past decisions and outcomes to continuously learn, improve, and assess your progress in any endeavor.

58. Focus Finance on Actionable Information

Structure financial teams to prioritize providing actionable, real-time information to all stakeholders for good decision-making, rather than just merely keeping score.

59. Agree on Key Metrics

Post-acquisition, work collaboratively with leadership teams to agree on a handful of high-signal metrics that truly matter, ensuring everyone is on the same page about what the data is communicating.

60. Be Accessible to Leaders

As a leader or investor, make yourself highly accessible to operating leaders, providing a crucial outlet for their loneliness and frustrations in running a business.

61. Support External Processors

Understand if your CEOs are external processors and proactively offer yourself as a safe outlet for them to talk through issues, preventing inappropriate relationships with subordinates and mitigating isolation.

62. Ensure Legal Compliance Post-Acquisition

Immediately after acquisition, aggressively ensure the business is in full legal compliance, as many small businesses unknowingly or knowingly break various regulations.

63. Account for Human Factors in Business

Recognize that human factors like divorce, health issues, death, and loss of interest are inevitable in business. Account for these realities, as self-replication of leadership is rare, especially in smaller entities.

64. Actively Fight Business Entropy

Understand that the default state for most small businesses is entropy and slow decay. Actively fight against this by providing dynamic leadership, vision, risk-taking, capital, and risk mitigation.

65. Avoid Scaling Too Fast

When scaling a business, avoid the temptation to go ’too fast, too soon’ or assume you know too much, as this often leads to significant pitfalls and failures.

66. Build Foundation Before Scaling

Dedicate significant time (e.g., several years) to toil, correct, and learn from your first business acquisition to build a strong foundation before attempting to scale and acquire additional businesses.

67. Prepare for Reinvestment Cycles

When scaling, be prepared for cycles where you must reinvest all free cashflow back into building the next layer of overhead and management, effectively ‘going back to zero’ in terms of available cash.

68. Focus on Strengths

Avoid wasting your life doing things you are not good at. Instead, focus your efforts on areas where you excel and find fulfillment.

69. Live to Love and Serve

Strive to live a life dedicated to loving and serving others, motivated by a sense of gratitude and a desire to give back the love you have received.

70. Offer Choice When Paying

When offering to pay for a meal, express your pleasure in doing so, but explicitly state that you will respect their choice if they prefer to pay. This gives the other person agency and prevents unconscious resentment.

71. Apologize for Past Control

After realizing you’ve exerted subtle control in relationships, consider an ‘apology tour’ to acknowledge your past behavior. This can lead to deeper understanding and improved relationships.

72. Ask “How Do You Feel Loved?”

Ask loved ones, ‘What do I do when you feel most loved?’ and then focus on doing those specific actions. This ‘magic question’ unlocks tremendous intimacy in all relationships.

73. Love Others How They Need

Avoid loving others the way you want to be loved or the way you think they should be loved. Instead, discover and provide love in the specific ways that make them feel most cherished and seen.

74. Ask “When Do You Feel Seen?”

In professional or personal contexts, ask people, ‘When do you really feel seen and appreciated?’ to understand their specific needs for recognition and connection.

75. Analyze First Requests/Offers

Pay close attention to a person’s first request or offer, as it often provides a strong signal about their underlying intentions and whether the potential relationship will be genuinely win-win or extractive.

76. Give Grace for Transactional Slips

Extend grace to yourself and others for occasional transactional slips in relationships, acknowledging that everyone can fall short of their ideal ‘heart space’ intentions.

77. Address Transactional Behavior with Curiosity

When encountering transactional behavior, address it with curiosity by asking if you’ve misunderstood their intent, rather than judging or condemning. Observe their defensiveness as a signal of their ingrained mindset.

78. Understand Conflict Patterns

Learn to identify the three basic conflict moves—move against (confrontational), move towards (avoidant, glossing over issues), and move away (isolating)—in yourself and others to better navigate and understand conflict dynamics.

79. Debt Use Based on Predictability

The amount of debt you can use is directly proportional to your confidence in the predictability of the future, but this doesn’t mean you should maximize it.

80. Acknowledge Business Messiness

Understand that all businesses are ’loosely functioning disasters’ due to human messiness and compounding volatility. This perspective helps manage expectations and approach operational challenges realistically.

81. Understand Energy Gathering

In Myers-Briggs, understand that introversion/extroversion refers to where you gather energy (inner life vs. external world), not how you outwardly appear, to better understand yourself and others.

82. Understand Information Processing

In Myers-Briggs, identify if you are ‘sensing’ (present-oriented, practical) or ‘intuitive’ (future-oriented, visionary) to understand your primary way of processing information and thinking about life.

83. Understand Decision Making

In Myers-Briggs, discern whether you are a ’thinker’ (decision-making based on truth, logic, ideas) or a ‘feeler’ (decision-making based on relationships, values, and impact on people) to better understand your primary decision-making lens.

84. Understand Lifestyle Preference

In Myers-Briggs, identify if you are a ‘judger’ (prefers structure, order, decisive) or a ‘perceiver’ (open-ended, flexible, needs deadlines) to understand your preferred lifestyle and approach to tasks.

85. Optimize Hydration and Sleep

Hydrate immediately upon waking, before coffee, and around workouts; rest one hour before bed. These practices improve hydration and sleep, helping you become your best self.

86. Reduce Alcohol for Easier Life

Consider reducing or eliminating daily alcohol consumption, as it can make ‘hard things seem hard’ and inhibit testosterone, impacting overall well-being and energy levels.

87. Find Alternatives to Alcohol/Caffeine

If you choose to reduce or eliminate alcohol and caffeine for health reasons, find alternative rituals and ways to mark your days to maintain a sense of specialness and routine.

88. Reserve Alcohol for Celebrations

Adopt a rule to only consume alcohol during celebrations, transforming it from a daily habit into a special occasion.

89. Start Day with Reading/Prayer

Begin your day by reading and praying, as a consistent morning routine can positively impact your overall well-being and focus.

90. Express Unconditional Love

Consistently communicate to loved ones, especially children and spouse, that you see them, know them, and love them unconditionally, assuring them that nothing can diminish your love.

91. Avoid Chronic Overwork

While intense work periods are sometimes necessary, avoid making 80-100 hour work weeks your norm, as it’s unsustainable for maintaining a healthy lifestyle, relationships, and physical well-being.

92. Test Relationships Early

Be willing to open yourself up to being taken advantage of early in a relationship to test if the other person operates with mutual trust and care. If they act from scarcity, it signals they may not be suitable for deeply collaborative systems.

93. Reflect Post-Interview

After an interview or significant conversation, take time to record your reflections, highlight key moments, and explore connections or lingering thoughts to deepen your learning.

94. Join Knowledge Project Membership

Become a supporting member of The Knowledge Project to gain early access to episodes, personal reflections, no ads, exclusive content, and hand-edited transcripts.

95. Grow Business with Shopify

Sign up for a $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/Shane to leverage Shopify’s global commerce platform for growing your business, whether you’re just starting or already operating a multi-million dollar company.

96. Read “Clear Thinking” Book

Read ‘Clear Thinking’ to gain tools for mastering your fate, sharpening decision-making, and achieving unparalleled success by transforming ordinary moments into extraordinary results.