"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." — Peter Drucker
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It was 2019. I was sitting across from a PE fund manager in a conference room in Boston. Nice office. Good handshake. Forty-five minutes scheduled.
He asked me one question in the first five minutes.
"How do you source deals?"
I gave him the answer I'd been giving everyone. Networks. Referrals. Relationships. The usual.
If people are open to reviewing some of the recent deals we've found, or search thesis' we've put together, lets schedule a call today.
He nodded. Let me finish.
Then he said, "That's what everyone says. What do you actually do differently?"
I didn't have a great answer. I had a polished one. Not a real one.
I drove back thinking about that question the whole way home.
The truth was, I wasn't doing anything differently. I was doing what everyone else was doing and expecting different results. I was confusing being busy with building something. Running the same plays, faster, harder, with more energy. None of it mattered because the plays were wrong.
That conversation changed how I built DealGen. Not what we said. What we actually did.
The market doesn't reward effort. It rewards results. And results come from doing the right thing consistently, not doing the wrong thing perfectly.
Where in your work right now are you confusing motion with progress?