The Dip
🎯 Quit or commit—no in-between - Don’t half-ass things. Quit what’s not worth it. Double down on what is. The hardest part is knowing which is which—and having the guts to act.
📉 The Dip = the pain before greatness - The Dip is that long, hard slog after the excitement wears off and before results show up. It weeds out the weak. Master it, and you win.
🏆 Scarcity creates value - Few survive the Dip. That’s what makes being “the best in the world” so valuable.
🛑 Don’t even start if you won’t finish - If you’re not ready to push through the Dip, save your time and energy. Quitting early is smarter than failing late.
💥 Most people quit at the worst time - When it hurts most, they bail. But that’s when you should hold tight. Quitting in the heat of the moment leads to regret.
🧠Plan for the Dip - Expect it. Visualize success beyond it. That long-term payoff needs to be vivid and real to pull you through the pain.
⛔ Beware of the Cul-de-Sac - Some paths go nowhere, no matter how hard you push. Learn to recognize them—and bail fast.
🔥 The Dip is your filter - Success belongs to those who outlast. Use the Dip to eliminate distractions and focus on becoming #1 in your niche.
Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.
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With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.
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Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.
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The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.
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Cigarettes, it turns out, were redesigned by scientists to be particularly addictive. If you were going to draw a chart of the pleasure of smoking over time, it would look like this:
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It’s a situation where you can’t quit until you fall off, and the whole thing falls apart.
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The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.
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The Dip is the secret to your success. The people who set out to make it through the Dip—the people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the Dip—those are the ones who become the best in the world.
The Dip is the reason you’re here.
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It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.
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If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.
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Most of the time, if you fail to become the best in the world, it’s either because you planned wrong or because you gave up before you reached your goal.
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When people quit, they are often focused on the short-term benefits. In other words, “If it hurts; stop!”
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Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting.
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You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.
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When the pressure is greatest to compromise, to drop out, or to settle, your desire to quit should be at its lowest. The decision to quit is often made in the moment. But that’s exactly the wrong time to make such a critical decision.
