Leadership Gurus Don't Want You To Know This

Seven steps to build a high-performing team, four pillars of extraordinary leadership, 12 habits of unstoppable executives.

And they're all basically the same,

and they all have one thing in common. It's that you really don't need a framework to be successful as a founder, owner, executive leader. And the next 10 minutes, I am going to save you thousands by giving you just three steps, not a framework,

completely malleable, call whatever you want, not proprietary to me, but it will save you thousands of dollars on leadership training. So stay with me. If you're new to the channel here,

my name is Ryan Handley. I am a multi-time founder. I recently exited from my own National Digital Small Commercial Insurance Agency.

I'm an angel investor, speaker,

and soon to be bestselling author of the book Easy Mode, which comes out in September of 2027. I know that's a long ways away, and I am future pacing, but I am highly confident that that book is going to crush

“because I believe in what's inside it, as should you.”

Okay, so let's get on to how we bust up all these frameworks in 12-step or 11-step or seven-step processes, right? The truth that no one, in the personal development or leadership space, wants to say out loud, is that frameworks aren't primary. They're not primarily designed to help you.

They're designed to brand the guru selling them. Let me say that again, frameworks are not primarily designed to help you. They're designed to brand the guru who is selling them. Now think about that. If I were to tell you, figure out what works and keep doing it.

That's good advice, but I can't put that on a book cover. I can't charge you $5,000 for a two-day workshop built around a simple idea. I can't trade market, and I can't build a certificate program for it. So no one gives you the real clear baseline simple answer

that essentially you can use over and over again in every situation, right? If I call this the clarity method, or I call it the peak performance operating system, now I've got a brand, now I've got IP, now I've got a business. So that's what most frameworks are. There are monetization strategies wearing a costume of wisdom.

It doesn't mean there isn't good stuff inside them. I'm not knocking what these people are actually coaching. In most cases, these frameworks work, but just understand what the real reason the framework was created is for. And here's how you can tell.

Just count the steps. If a process is more in three or four steps, ask yourself the question, why are the additional steps there, right? Are they genuinely required to get the result that I want? Or were they added to make the framework look more proprietary,

or specific unique, to make it feel different from the last leadership guru's framework that you came across?

Nine times out of ten, it's the second one, right?

There's an added flip or a word misspelled in a weird way so that it spells out some acronym, and I get it from a branding and memory standpoint of a consultant or a coach wanting you to have their ideas locked in your brain. That's why they do this. And while as I said before, many of these frameworks work perfectly well.

Complexity is the enemy of execution.

“The reason you have to keep hiring these gurus over and over and over again”

is because their frameworks are complex and you do miss steps and there are things that feel extraneous and that you have to maneuver and work around to fit into your workflow or your work style. Complexity is the enemy of execution. The more steps between you and starting the less likely you are to actually do the thing.

I've been in rooms with leaders who could recite their company's eight step innovation process for Baton and couldn't tell you the last time to team actually ships something. Think about that. We can walk through the seven step proprietary process that we were taught

by insert leadership guru or maybe like hashtags like this, I don't know. But the thing ever comes out of it, the framework becomes a religion and not an execution strategy. Right? The framework is the work and that's the trap.

That's the thing that drives me nuts.

“That's what's got me sitting here about to tell you how you never have to worry about frameworks again.”

And if you want to work with a specific leadership guru, go do it. I get it. But think of them more as accountability partners. And that who have lived experience and insights that they can help you with. The frameworks are bullshit.

So what do you actually need?

Let's save you those thousand dollars on the framework.

You need three things and this is all you need. And the reason that you need three things and I'm not putting it into a framework or an acronym is because these three things need to be valuable to how you work and what you need to get done. They should be applicable to small projects and large projects alike. They should be applicable to human situations and machine situations.

One, have an idea. Two, test the idea. Three, iterate on the results. Rinse repeat. That's the whole game.

Do you understand now why you can't no one shares the information with you like this?

Because frankly, they can't sell this.

You can't sell this, right? Like one, you need to have an idea.

“I believe that we need to add a new marketing channel and that GEO is the way to go, right?”

That we need to optimize our web properties for AI search. Okay, great. Let's test the idea. Let's build out a section of our website that is wholly optimized for GEO. Let's give it a month to see what happens and based on what happens.

We'll make a decision and test the new idea. Then that but for everything. Should we hire a new person? Okay, well let's think about what we need. Let's hire a person, put them on a three month initiation program. And if they work, keep them, if they don't, get rid of them and make a decision whether you actually need that person or you don't or you need to hire someone else.

Rinse and repeat. That's the whole game. But leadership gurus can't sell that, right? No, I'll rob a con who, in my mind, is one of the sharpest thinkers in the world right now.

“You know, he just understands wealth, he sees around corners, gets success in a way and is able to package it in a way that I think is just incredible.”

He said this better than I can ever, than I ever could. It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations. Frameworks puts you into a 10,000 hour scenario. Do this thing over and over again for hours. You need iterations.

You need idea test iterate, idea test iterate, idea test iterate until you get to the result that you need. It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations. Not 10,000 hours of studying someone else's framework. Not 10,000 hours of workshop attendance or certificate programs. 10,000 iterations.

This means 10,000 times you tried something, learned from it, and adjusted. That's the skill. It's not mastering a system, it's not memorizing some acronym framework. It's mastering the feedback loop. And this works for everything in your life, right?

“How do I get my kids to pick up their clothes instead of just throwing them on the floor when they walk in the house, right?”

I could try yelling, how does that go? I could try, uh, bribing them, how does that go? I could try sitting them down and having a honest talk. How does that go? Right? Just idea test iterate, idea test iterate until you figure out what works. Feedback loop is where most people get it completely backwards. They spend months, years, learning and studying and preparing frameworks and systems, building the perfect plan,

waiting until they've got the full framework nailed until they can, every member of the team can, can regurgitate the framework at, at, at will. And they do all this before they take any action. Then they're shocked when they actually do take action and reality doesn't cooperate with the plan. When the framework doesn't produce the results that they want.

Reality never cooperates. Reality never cooperates.

We all have a plan until we get punched in a face, right? Reality never cooperates with the plan you built in the conference room. The leaders who win are not the ones with the best framework. So the ones who are the most willing to operate an uncertainty to put ideas out into the world, collect real feedback and data from real world interactions and adjust on the fly, iterative adjustments. That's not a five-step process.

It's a posture. It's a philosophy. It's a belief system. It's a culture of getting shit done, right? And the posture is this.

Assume that you don't know what works and your job is to find out. Even if you know the answer, even if in the past you have done this exact same thing and X worked. Assume you don't know what works and go find out. Every single time. Do not sit there with the ego of I've been here before.

I've been in this job for X number of years. Yeah, but you don't know what works today until you go find out. There's a freeze for this that I genuinely love and it's not one that you'll find in most leadership books.

It's a universal operating system, truth of the universe.

“Have idea, put into market, iterate on results.”

Alright, let me make this concrete where the story from my own life because I know you guys love that stuff. When I launched my insurance agency, Rogue Risk, I eventually sold it. We were the fastest growing small commercial insurance agency in the country, United States, in 2021. I had no idea which lead sources were going to produce the best results. Zero idea.

I had hypothesis. I had some past experience. But what I said to myself was, I'm not going to be so egotistical as to, is to double into places when I haven't tested everything. Despite my opinions, despite my experience, because I didn't have data.

You never have data until you actually operate in the market.

Once we launched, we started with 17, that's right, 17 different lead sources. From everything, from outbound, cold calling to obscure, you know, contact form, kind of a hook story, Facebook, things. 17 different lead sources, right? paid search, organic content, referral partnerships, social media campaigns, email. If you can name it, we tried it. I promise, right? We tested everything. We tested them all simultaneously, because one I didn't really have another way, and two, I wanted everything to compete against each other.

Because even though I had used many of these methods in the past, I had never used them with the specific inbound model that I was using at Rogue Risk. So, I didn't know what had the lowest cost of acquisition in that scenario.

I didn't know what had the highest conversion ratio.

I had loose ideas in nothing more, and some of those 17 sources looked very promising, some looked terrible early, and ended up being some of our best performers later. Some looked great and then fell off completely. The initial results were noise. The pattern only emerged through time and repetition.

We kept operating two years later, we were down to five. And it was those five lead sources that we doubled into. Out of 17, we whittled it down to five, and then we poured gasoline on the fire. Every time we removed a lead source, we took the capital and resources that were being applied to it and spread them out across the others to the point where what we had initially spread across 17, we were now spreading across five.

“Here's the key part, those five weren't chosen based on gut instinct or guru advice or a framework or a book that I read or even really my own beliefs.”

They were chosen based on iterative improvements and actual results. We ran the test, we watched the results, we made iterative improvements to every single one over time, and some of them held up and some of them did not. We didn't do it based on our beliefs or our hopes. We did it based on what worked.

And by doubling into five, the five that we knew worked that the lowest cost of acquisition, the highest conversion ratio and the largest ROI, that is what made us the fastest growing small commercial agency in the country in 2021. It was this, it was not having ego to believe that I knew the answer and just allowing real data and iterative improvements to produce the results. That's when things got real. The mistake most leaders make at this point is they skip all the messy middle.

They don't want to start with 17 sources because it feels chaotic and it is to a certain extent. And it looks like from the outside that you don't have a plan. And again, our ego takes over and we don't want people, we don't want people to, we don't want to feel like people think we don't know what we're doing. So we try to be that I have all the answers, guy or gal, and maybe we get it right. But most of the time we don't, right?

The plan needs to be gathering real intelligence from reality as fast as possible and letting the data tell you where to focus. You can't shortcut this, right? Frameworks, whatever, no framework is going to get you there. No framework knows the market, no framework knows your customer, no framework knows your teams, specific strengths, they're easy mode, right? Only you can figure that out.

“And the only way to figure it out is to operate, observe, and iterate.”

I'm not putting that into some sort of framework.

Just have an idea, test the idea, iterate off the results.

We didn't need a system to go from 17 to five. We needed the discipline to keep testing.

“And honestly, to kill even some sources that I have a persuasion towards, that weren't working.”

It was having the conviction then to double down into what we found worked. Whether I enjoyed that lead source, right, enjoyed, I guess, or not. I mean, that's it. That's the system. You don't need to pay thousands of dollars.

You've got the answer right now. Have an idea, put it into the market, iterate. It is literally that simple for everything. So that's simple. So what do we do with this right now?

Today, whatever problem that you're trying to solve in your business, in your leadership, in your life.

I want you to ask a different question. Not a framework or course should I be using. But what's the fastest cheapest most real-world test that I can run to find out if my current idea actually works? Let me say that again. What is the fastest cheapest most real-world test I can run to find out if my current idea actually works?

That's it. If you're trying to build a high-performing team, right, run a test, change one thing about how you're running meetings. Or setting expectations, or giving feedback. Run it for 30 days. Look at the result.

Then adjust. Maybe your team only needs 15 minute meetings, and they don't need to be an hour long. How would you know if you don't try it? If you're trying to crack a new revenue channel, start with more possibilities. Right, start with more possibilities than you think you need.

Run them all at low-investment or whatever you can manage. Kill what is a moving. Problems into your winners. Again, very simple. Maybe you're trying to develop your own leadership skills, like as a person. Stop consuming frameworks.

Start picking one behavior to change. Right, that could be emotional reactions to comments that you don't appreciate.

“Say, you know, take like the three breath method, right?”

Someone says something to you, and you feel that, you know, I got that Irish anger. You know, it starts coming up. You know, you're going to have to do it quite so obviously, but give yourself three beats. And then respond and see if your response doesn't elicit better results. Something like that. Right, test and iterate.

Test and iterate. Test and iterate. It's not glamorous. No one's going to sell you a certification for it. There's no 48-page workbook for test, observe, iterate. Right, there's no branded acronym.

There's just results. Real results built in the real world through the unglamorous work of trying things and iterating. That's how it works. It's not a framework.

It's never a new framework.

If you enjoy frameworks, that's fine. If your leadership guru and you have a framework, it's also fine. Just saying you don't need it.

“Maybe some people do, but I think most of us are overpaying for things that”

we just don't need. And, you know, I do want to be fair here because everybody's different. Right, there are genuine structures that help people move faster. And I'm not saying all of them are worthless. I'm just saying, don't outsource your thinking to someone else's system.

Use frameworks as a starting point, as a guide, a rough map, then go into the field and counter the actual terrain and let reality update the map for you. The leaders I respect most, the ones who actually build things that last are not the ones who followed the most sophisticated, complex, multi-step system. They're the ones who were willing to operate in ambiguity.

Put ideas out into the market, collect real data, and adjust without ego. They were willing to not know. And then go find out. That's the whole game, 10,000 iterations. Not 10,000 hours in a workshop, 10,000 iterations.

Have an idea, test it, iterate. This is the way. My friends, if you enjoy these shows, if you enjoy these solo episodes that I do, I love you doing them. Like this video, subscribe, leave a comment below. If you have questions about this, if you think I'm right, if you think I'm wrong,

if there are frameworks that you absolutely love, and you think I am doing a disservice to, I promise you, I'm not trying to knock frameworks. I do have some frameworks that I use with my coaching clients, but I don't tend to not push them.

all those frameworks really are, are more like thought experiments for getting to

idea, observe, iterate.

“That's ultimately the framework is like they're supposed to be mental exercises,”

not necessarily tried and true maps to success.

Because the only map to success that actually exists is having idea, put it into the market,

and iterate on the results.

“I love you for being here. I appreciate you for being here.”

I appreciate you for being here.