Garbage In, Garbage Out: Your Entrepreneur Mindset Inputs Are Killing Your Business

I learned the term GIGO in eighth grade. One of the first computer classes ever offered in a school, and we were learning to program DOS. The teacher wrote it on the board: garbage in, garbage out. Simple idea. What you feed the system determines what comes out. Bad inputs, bad outputs. I was thirteen. It stuck.

Thirty-plus years later, it's still the most accurate description I know of how the human brain works. What you feed your brain every day is deciding how you think, how you lead, and how you run your business. Most entrepreneurs are filling hours every week with garbage and then scratching their heads wondering why they can't stay focused or build any real momentum. This isn't a motivation problem. It's an input problem.

The News, the Scroll, and the Comparison Trap

About 25 years ago I was sitting there watching the news and something clicked. Every single story was a plane crash, a murder, some political disaster, or engineered outrage. None of it was happening in my life. None of it connected to anything I was building. All it did was weigh me down. So I turned it off. Haven't watched it regularly since. That's an hour a day I stopped filling with garbage.

Social media is the same trap, different mechanism. Those algorithms aren't built to improve your life. They're built to hold your attention, and they do it by feeding you whatever keeps your eyes on the screen — comparison, anxiety, outrage, whatever works. You scroll through someone's highlight reel and you start feeling like you're not moving fast enough, not big enough, not far enough along. But you're comparing your full life — all the hard days and the failures — to someone else's best moments. That's a rigged game. You lose every time you play it.

Stop paying attention to the garbage. It's a joke. Figure out what's actually going to give you something to work with.

The average person who built their own business and made real money is in their early to mid-forties. That's not an accident. It takes years of accumulated experience, years of the right inputs compounding, and years of adjusting how you think. If you're 32 and comparing yourself to someone who's been at it since before you graduated high school, you're not being honest about where you are.

What Winning Inputs Actually Look Like

In the last two years I've read approximately 80 books on self-improvement, leadership, and business development. About 95% of them on Audible. I get through most of it on my commute. Every morning I get in the car and a book starts playing automatically. Every evening on the way home, same thing. I didn't get there by being some kind of discipline superhero. I got there by making it the default. If the good stuff is already filling the space, the garbage doesn't have anywhere to go.

I also subscribe to Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. Not because I'm an engineer — I'm not. Because I want to see what's developing in the world and start connecting ideas across industries. I follow channels on AI and business growth. You're forcing your feed to give you something useful, and over time your brain starts pulling pieces together from unexpected places. That's where real ideas come from.

The people around you are inputs too. You've heard the line about being the average of the five people you're around most. It holds up. You don't need to be in a room full of billionaires. But you do need to be around people who are on a growth path, who are grateful for their shot, and who are pushing in the right direction. If the people closest to you aren't growing, they're pulling. Find a mentor who's further down the road and will actually tell you the truth. That relationship will change how you think faster than almost anything else. I've heard Doug talk about this on the Monster Mindset podcast more than once — who you're around changes what you think is possible.

Starting the Day Right Before You Get Out of Bed

For a long time, every single morning before I even rolled over to get up, I'd stop and run a quick self-check. How's my energy? What's my win for today? Then I'd spend a few minutes on gratitude. I'd look up at the ceiling and run through 20 things I'm thankful for. My kids. The business. The leaders we've built. Our customers. The fact that I live in a country where I have the freedom to build what I'm building. Twenty things, out loud in my head, before my feet hit the floor.

That sounds simple. It is. But here's what it does: you walk into the day already in a winning frame. You've filled the first few minutes of your brain's activity with something real and positive instead of rolling over and grabbing your phone to see what the algorithm queued up overnight. When you start with thankfulness and intention, you're not reactive. You're ready.

From there, you set one goal for the day. One. Not 25 items on a list. If you can't identify the one thing that moves the needle today, that's a sign you haven't cleared enough of the noise. The focus comes when the garbage is gone.

Build the Habit and Protect It

Dr. Caroline Leaf wrote a book called Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Smart book. She studied habit formation and landed on 63 days to build a real habit. Not 21 like everyone used to say. Sixty-three. So if you start one new input habit today, you won't fully own it for two months. That's not a reason to quit. That's a reason to be patient and stay consistent.

Don't overhaul everything at once. Pick one thing. Kill one bad input. Add one good one. Unfollow one account that makes you feel worse about yourself. Replace it with one that teaches you something. Make your commute a classroom instead of a music session. Five minutes of gratitude before you start the morning. Just one thing, every day, for 63 days. Then it's yours.

The compounding is real. I went from living in my best friend's basement, broke and depressed, to building a company doing $50 million a year with 200 employees at Bartlett Roofing. That didn't happen because of one big break. It happened one day at a time, one decision at a time, over 11 years of intentional inputs, intentional goals, and intentional action. Nobody sees the daily work. They only see where you end up. Don't let anybody tell you it was luck.

No more garbage in. Winning in, winning out. That's the monster mindset.