Before you read one more word, I need you to actually do something for me.
Right below this is a short video. Your one job is to watch it and count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. That’s it. Count the white team’s passes. I know that sounds like it has nothing to do with whether you need a business coach, but trust me, it has everything to do with it. So actually count. Don’t just let it roll while your eyes drift on down the page.
Go ahead. I’ll be right here when you’re done.
Okay. You got a number? Good. Hold onto it.
Now the only question that actually matters here. Did you see the gorilla? Did you see it or were you like me the first time I watched this and completely missed it?
If you’re sitting there thinking what gorilla, you just proved the entire point of this article, and you’re in good company. Right in the middle of that video, a person in a full gorilla suit walks into the frame, stops, beats their chest, and strolls off the other side. They’re on screen for a solid nine seconds. And about half the people who watch that video while counting passes never see the gorilla at all. (It’s a real Harvard study by two psychologists named Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, and you can read about it right here.)
And it gets worse. When researchers tell people about the gorilla ahead of time and then ask if they would have caught it, about 90 percent are dead certain they would have. Certain. And half of them are wrong.
(Be honest, were you one of the people who didn’t watch the video and just kept reading? When you realized what the video is about, you went back and watched it and then said, “Yep, I would have seen it. I’m not stupid like all these other people. I’m actually observant.” Was that you? It’s funny how we all think that we wouldn’t miss it.)
That gap, between how much you’re sure you see and how much you actually see, is the most expensive blind spot you own.
And it’s exactly where a lie moves in and starts drinking all your beer. The lie goes like this: I know my business better than anybody on earth, so I’m the one who can see what’s wrong with it most clearly. It sounds like confidence. It sounds like the kind of thing a sharp, successful owner ought to believe about himself.
It’s a cage. And the smarter and more successful you are, the more at home you feel inside it. That’s what this whole article is really about, so stay with me.
The Smartest People in the Room Miss the Most
Now, you might be telling yourself the gorilla thing only fools distracted people. Amateurs. Folks who weren’t really paying attention.
I told myself the same thing. So did a team of researchers, so they went and tested it on actual experts. They took twenty-four trained radiologists, the doctors whose whole job is to stare at scans and catch the one tiny thing that’s wrong, and had them look at lung images hunting for cancer nodules. Then they slipped a picture of a gorilla into the last scan. Not a little one. A gorilla forty-eight times the size of the nodules they were searching for.
Eighty-three percent of those expert doctors missed it. And the eye-tracking showed most of them looked directly at the spot where it was. They stared right at the gorilla and never saw it. (That study is here.)
Listen. This is too important to miss because it turns everything upside down. The experts didn’t miss the gorilla in spite of being focused. They missed it because they were focused. The better you get at locking onto what you’re looking for, the better you get at not seeing whatever you’re not looking for.
So when you tell me you don’t need anybody looking over your shoulder because nobody knows your business like you do, I believe you. You do know it better than anyone alive. And that’s exactly the problem. You’re the radiologist staring at your own scan, and the gorilla has been standing in the middle of it for years.
And it isn’t the struggling, scattered owner who’s in the most danger here. It’s the successful one. The further up the mountain you climb, the more certain you get that you can see the whole landscape, and the more of it ends up hiding right behind your own confidence. Your success isn’t protecting you from the blind spot. Your success is the cage.
You Cannot Be Your Own Business Coach
Let’s get clear on what a blind spot actually is, because people throw the word around loosely.
A blind spot isn’t something you’re bad at. It isn’t a weakness you already know about and you’re working on. A blind spot is, by its very definition, the thing you cannot see. If you could see it, it wouldn’t be a blind spot. It’d just be another problem on your to-do list.
The truth is you can’t fix what you can’t see, and you can’t see your own blind spot, no matter how sharp you are. You can read every book, take every assessment, journal until your hand cramps, and you still can’t climb outside your own head to look back at yourself. Nobody can. It’s just how eyes work. They point out, not in.
As one of my former business coaches used to say, “You can’t see the picture when you’re inside the frame.”
This is the golden cage of going it alone, and it’s a sneaky one, because the bars are built out of something you’re actually proud of.
The gold is your self-reliance. You built this thing with your own two hands, you figured out what nobody else could, and you wear that like a badge. Good. You earned it.
But that same self-reliance is what locks the door, because the one move that would set you free, letting another set of eyes in, feels like admitting you couldn’t do it all by yourself. So you don’t. You’d rather sit in the cage than dent the pride that built it.
The gold is the lie.
I found this out the hard way. For years I ran a business doing seven figures, winning the awards, the whole deal, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I felt so trapped inside my own success. I was too close to it. It took my coach saying one sentence out loud to finally show me the gorilla. He said, “The reason you want out is the same reason no one would want in.” The business was built entirely around me. I’d been staring at that scan for years and never saw it. He saw it in about ten minutes. (I wrote more about that particular cage in being your own boss didn’t make me free.)
I Still Pay for a Business Coach. Every Single Month.
I’ll tell you exactly what I do about my own blind spots, and it’s probably not what you’d guess from a guy who teaches this for a living.
This Friday, I’m getting on a plane to Pensacola. I do it every month. I fly down there to sit in a room with my own business coach and invest my time, attention, focus, and money for him to look at the things I can’t see. On purpose. With my own money.
I’ve been on the Inc. 5000. I built a company, got it to run without me, and walked out of the daily grind. I teach owners how to do the same thing. And I still write the check, still book the flight, still hand somebody else the job of spotting what I’m built to miss. Not because I’m behind. Because I never want to go back to being the guy staring at his own scan alone.
And this isn’t soft, feel-good spending, either. The research is blunt about it. The International Coaching Federation found that companies who actually track it see a median return of seven times what they put into coaching, and 86% at least make their money back. (The numbers are here.) Then think about who keeps a coach. Every serious athlete on earth.
Michael Jordan, the best basketball player of all time, had a coach.
Tiger Woods, one of the best golfers of all time, had a coach.
Tom Brady, one of the greatest football players of all time, had a coach.
The people at the very top of the mountain are the ones most committed to having somebody else point out what they’re missing. The idea that coaching is for people who can’t cut it has the whole thing backwards.
Hire Eyes, Not Answers
Part of why owners dig in their heels on this, I think, is they’ve got the wrong idea about what they’re even buying.
You’re not hiring somebody smarter than you to hand you the answers. You’re probably the smartest person in your business, and any good coach knows that walking in. You’re not paying for their brain. You’re paying for their perspective. You’re hiring a second set of eyes that stands outside your head, where they can see the gorilla you are guaranteed to miss from the inside. They are outside the frame you are living in. They can see the picture clearly. You cannot.
Now, to be clear, you’re not handing them over a license to design your way out of the trap. You are still responsible for designing the way out. That’s the Law of the Architect, and it stays yours. The coach doesn’t draw your blueprint for you. They walk the building with you and point at the crack in the foundation you’ve strolled past a thousand times and never noticed. Awareness is the key to recovery, and you simply cannot manufacture awareness of the one thing you’re wired not to see.
Edward, one of the people I write about in my book, Exit Without Exiting, never let anybody look. Ten years, sixty to eighty hour weeks, dead sure he had it handled, right up until he tried to sell and learned his business was worth almost nothing without him sitting in the middle of it. James, on the other hand, brought in outside eyes early, before he was forced to, and by year four his company ran without him. Same trap sitting in front of both men. One of them let somebody help him see it.
Words of Wisdom
“The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” – Proverb 12:15
Look closely and you’ll notice it doesn’t say the fool is dumb. It says he’s right in his own eyes. Totally convinced. Completely sure. Just like the 90% who knew they’d have caught the gorilla. The wise man isn’t the one with better eyesight. He’s the one humble enough to know his eyes have a blind spot, and to let somebody else look. That’s the whole difference right there. Not brains. Willingness.
What To Do Now
So this week, stop asking whether you’re smart enough to figure your business out on your own. You probably are, and it’s the wrong question anyway. Start asking who is actually allowed to see the things you can’t.
If the honest answer is nobody, well, that’s the thing to fix. Letting outside eyes in is the entire game.
The easiest first step I can hand you is a free training I put together on exactly what to fix in your business before you ever try to step back or sell it. It’s me pointing at the cracks I see in owner after owner, the same ones they couldn’t see in themselves. Go watch it at whattofixbeforeyouexit.com.
And if you want a set of eyes on your specific situation, book a call with me, just you and me, over at therealjasonduncan.com/talk. I’ll tell you what I see. That’s the whole job.
You already counted the passes. This week, go looking for the gorilla.
– The Real Jason Duncan