Transcription
Entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. Like we can understand what we should do, we just don't do it. And I think that's why um we're so much better at giving advice than we are at following it.
With 20 hours of focused effort, most people can be pretty decent at something, whether it's guitar, it's singing, even cold calling. But most people spend years waiting to do the first hour.
If you want to change your behavior, the strongest way to do it is to simply change your environment. Because right now, you're probably not doing something because you're like, I'm too busy. I'll start when it's convenient, whatever. If you say that as the excuse for not doing something, then there's an assumption underlying that that says that if I get busy again in the future, I will stop. And so, do you want the success that you want to be long term? Yes. Then, do you believe that you'll never be busy again for the rest of your life? No. So then you might as well start when you're busy so that you have the most support because if you learn how to do it when you're busy, when you get when it gets quiet, you'll succeed even more. And when it gets busy again, you know how to do it cuz that's how you started.
The difference between a self-made billionaire who started with nothing and someone who else started with nothing is not the resources obviously cuz they both started at zero. So what else is it? It's their resourcefulness, not the resources. If we give power to circumstance, then we cast power outside of ourselves. If we give power to other people, we cast power outside of ourselves. And so it's, you know, it's controlling the control.
You can take pride in the fact that you admit that there's a deficit, right? But there is the only thing you can't take pride in is casting and being a victim. Even if you're right, it doesn't serve you. And so it's it's owning the fact that like you are the only person who can actually change anything about your life because you may blame your circumstances, but no one else will care.
It doesn't matter how smart you are. You can't live a 100 lifetimes. Like you can learn quickly. Sure, there's some people who can learn faster than others, but you're not going to be able to live a thousand lifetimes. And so, when you have three things going on, any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. And I can promise you, the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing. And you think a third of your time is going to beat theirs. No.
Entrepreneurship is far more a war of the heart than it is a war of the mind. like we can understand what we should do. We just don't do it. And I think that's why um we are so much better at giving advice than we are at following it. The biggest entrepreneurial mistakes I've made in my career have all come from splitting my attention. Every one of them. As soon as I did that, my my revenue started slowing down in growth. Like when you have three things going on, any of them can work, but none of them will work unless you pick only one. And I can promise you the competitor who is going to beat you is only doing that one thing. and you think a third of your time is going to be theirs. No.
And I think by doing that, you can actually conquer this this cycle and make it past the split where you go uh crash and burn and then restart the doom loop or make it to informed optimism and then eventually to the achievement that you want. Any massive company that you know of has existed for multiple decades. And in order for something to exist for multiple decades, the founder has to stay focused on that thing for the whole time. And I measure focus by the quantity and quality of things that you say no to. And I measure commitment or I define commitment as the elimination of alternatives. And so if you think of marriage as the ultimate commitment, then it is the ultimate commitment because you've eliminated literally every alternative besides this person. And so I think that many business problems and many entrepreneurs would 5x 10x their business if they simply gave themselves no way out. This is what I'm doing. And I'm I mean the term you know burning the boats but I'm eliminating all alternatives and structuring my life such that I I make it very difficult to pursue the alternatives.
I think one of the biggest misconceptions when you're an entrepreneur is not understanding the difference between being an owner and being the CEO. And so they might hear that you have a portfolio. They might hear that I have a portfolio and be like okay well they have a portfolio so I must model that. That guy's tall. I should play basketball. Doesn't work that way right? I should be so if I want to be rich I should fly private. doesn't work that way, right? Um it's conflating order. And so we must do these things in order uh to get the outcome. We have to concentrate on only one thing in order to get the outsized return. And that spreading of attention, especially when you're newer in the entrepreneurial career, it's like you already don't know so many things. How do you now want to have three sets of unknowns that you want to try and conquer at the same time? And the the fallacy of thinking is that I'm going to try all of them and see which one works. But none of them will work because you're waiting to see which one will work.
There are six stages. You have stage one, which is uninformed optimism. This is where you see your friend or you see something online and it looks like they're making money or it looks like there's some opportunity and you think, "Oh my god, that sounds amazing." and you have optimism because it looks great, but it's uninformed because you have no idea what it entails. So then you dive in and you say, "Okay, I'm going to pursue this this thing, whatever. Is it baking cupcakes or I'm going to I'm going to do lawn mowing or I'm going to do crypto trading, whatever." Second step is you get into it and you're like, "Oh my god, I don't know. There's so many things involved in this and this is significantly more complicated than I I expected." So then you become an informed pessimist. You now know uh that it's hard or significantly harder than you expected. The third stage is you have your crisis of meaning or the value of despair. So you're continuing to do this stuff. It's continuing to not work and you keep working and it keeps not working. And so this is the step and this is the this is the point of truth. And this is the cycle where the the paths of the entrepreneur split and the vast majority of people take this next step which is they then say, you know what, there's that thing over there that my other friend's doing. maybe I should do that instead. And so then they hop back to uninformed optimism and then they go boom to informed pessimism and they just go around and around and around and they live the same 6 months uh for 20 straight years.
Now the other path of from the valley of despair is sticking with it. And so then you become an informed optimist because now you understand you still understood all the bad stuff but you also understand the good stuff and how to avoid the bad and maximize the good. And then once you're there you do you stick on that path long enough and you end up achieving what you originally thought was really easy and fast.
I think that the vast vast majority of organizations have no idea how to train and their entire training their their way of getting talent is just uh let's hire 10 and we'll just see who works out rather than being able to take someone and level them up. And I think that the ability to train is one of the largest alphas that exists in organizations because if you can buy talent at at B skill and get them to A+ then you net the delta and profit between what you had to attract and pay the person to come and what they perform at. If you have to use a picking strategy, then you have to pay for ex for current market rate of the skill. And so you actually eat into margin because you don't know how to train.
There are advantages to speed and sometimes it still makes sense to bring in the talent because maybe the training requires so much time that it's not worth it. And so from a hiring perspective as we were just talking this is the theme we always want to hire for the smallest skilled efficiency. And so in low-skilled labor for example if we have a cupcake uh bakery and I need somebody to work the counter that is pretty lowkilled labor. And so if there's a number of skills that are required, being able to be on time, smile, be nice, those things are bundled terms that have many skills underneath of them, right? Whereas teaching someone how to use the register might take like 30 minutes. And so it makes sense to hire for attitude and then train aptitude when you have lowkilled labor. When you have really high skilled labor, I can't teach someone 10 years of being a CFO for M&A. This is an extreme example, right? And so in that instance, we still hire for the smallest skill deficiency, but I can probably teach someone to be nice under these circumstances faster than I can teach them to be a CFO if they have everything that I want here. Obviously, you would want both, but the world isn't perfect. And so we just try to hire for the smallest skill gap. And attitude is a series of skills. And so in instead of thinking of things as an attitude and aptitude, just think of everything as skills. And then we hire always for the smallest efficiency demonstrations of the difference between a beginner and expert.
A beginner has binary thinking. So they think this worked or it didn't work. And if it didn't work, then I need a new idea. Rather than having the nuance thinking of a master or an expert or advanced person who says what about this if I click into it, I break it into its component parts. What about this didn't work? Okay, it's not that meta ads don't work or advertising doesn't work. it's that we didn't nail the hook in our ad or that we didn't make our our offer clear enough on the landing page or it was not congruent with the advertisement or um you know it was the offer itself wasn't very compelling or it didn't have it didn't like it was just this we everyone's coming in and saying yeah yeah I kind of want that but this is actually my issue we're not solving the core problem. So it's it's always in the in the details. It's always in the sifting through the many small things that you find the kernel that ends up fixing uh the business.
I mean I know that uh Facebook was trying to fix their virality issue and they were locked in a room for days trying to figure out how they could get more users to retain on the platform. Right? People would sign up but then they wouldn't do anything and then they they drop out. And so finally, um, Zuck just said, "Okay, we have some belief that if people have more friends that they will engage." And so they didn't. And here's the thing, like with the uncertainty, they couldn't prove it. He just was like, "I feel like that's better than them not having friends." And so he said, "All right, the new goal is 10 friends in 14 days. That's the goal. So we have to create the experience so that we can get it to introduce them to 10 people or connect them with 10 people that they already know on the platform within 14 days. And as soon as that happened then obviously Facebook took off or continue to grow. And so he wasn't like oh Facebook doesn't work anymore or social networks aren't going to be a thing. It's it's usually way smaller and way the adjustment you need to make is much more nuanced than what you originally expect.
If the foundational principle of like cutting hair, mowing lawns, whatever, it's like this problem exists and I can charge a certain amount and make a profit on it, then there's nothing wrong with the business. It's just what is the constraint that's holding us back and then usually zooming into the constraint and realizing there's 20 things that are contributing to the outcome, not one. And that's where expertise and that and you develop that expertise by trying and failing. Yeah. And that's and that's just the name of the game. And so I think you have to have an incredibly high tolerance for failure without internalizing it and feeling like you yourself are a failure as a result of failure.
The potential of an organization is directly correlated with the aggregate intellectual horsepower of everyone contained within it. And so if you are the smartest person in the business then and you can do everyone's job better than everyone in your company then it means that the limit of the business is purely based on one person's horsepower and one person's life experiences and that will be the cap. And basically it doesn't matter how smart you are. You can't live a 100 lifetimes. Like you can learn quickly. Sure there's some people who can learn faster than others but you're not going to be able to live a thousand lifetimes. And so as a business grows, more expertise is required. And I think the easiest litmouth test for this is if you look at the richest people in the world, almost none of them own 100% of their business. So number one, most of them don't even own 50. Like most of them are small percentages. Jensen Wings at 4% for Nvidia. Basos is at 7 or 9% for for Amazon. Uh I think Elon's at 20 for Tesla. Like small percentages. And it's because it takes a lot of horses to take a chariot to the moon, right? And so basically, as you put in more intellectual horsepower, the potential peak of the business goes so much so much higher, so much faster.
Keith Rabois from um he was one of the original PayPal mafia guys has a really good analogy for this and he talks about it in terms of barrels and ammunition. And he says, "So as soon as you get some product market fit, the business starts to grow and you say, okay, we need to start shipping things faster." And this works the same with a services business, a physical products business, software business, the concepts the same. And so what happens is you then hire a lot of people and you assume that your throughput is going to increase proportionally. So we have 10 people, we hire 50, we should 5x our output. And then you quickly realize that that is not the case. And so what happens is uh there are people who are rate limiters for organ or an organization and those are the barrels. So think about like a civil war barrel, you know, old cannon and you've got these cannonballs next to it. He said most people are ammunition and so you bring more ammunition but you're still going to be limited by the one barrel capacity of how how many shots can get taken by the barrel. And so you need to find more barrels. So you have to go from one barrel to two barrels, two barrels to three barrels. And that becomes an increase in capacity or throughput for the organization. And there are very few of those in a different um I can't remember the law but it's some organizational uh law but the square root of the number of people in a company generate 50% of the work. So you have 100 people in an organization 10 people are responsible for 50% of the value that's created. facts, right? And so the thing is is I think the real game of entrepreneurship is that your standards rise over time and it's unfortunate because we we hear things that other entrepreneurs tell us it's all about the people stupid and then you're like sure but look at my and it's like no you're not hearing it and I don't know there are some I think Williamson talks about this how there's like some lessons that for some reason it's like we have to learn for ourselves. I still believe that that it's like we can operationalize this at a lower level so that we don't have to learn it for ourselves. Like I'm convinced. I haven't figured it out yet. But um so every entrepreneur can can can can resonate with this which is every business that I've started I've gotten to the success of the business prior way faster. And I kind of liken it to a video game where it's like you beat level one and then you know you you get to level two and it's like you spend months trying to beat this boss. finally figure out how to beat the boss and it's like great and you spend another three months getting beating boss three and let's say you start the game over with a new character. It's like you just zoom through level 1, two, and three and then you get to level four and you're like shoot now I got to spend time. It's like virgin land like I don't know how to beat this yet. And so I think that that happens for archetype finding for skill and talent within an organization. And so say that again so if you have functions across an organization there are people who are going to drive results within that function. And the first time you hire a salesperson, for example, you don't know what you're looking for. And so you just hire a human who says they can sell. And maybe they can, maybe they can't. And then you cycle, you try to train them, that doesn't work, does work, whatever. And then finally you, let's say you cycle through three sales guys, and finally you find a killer. And then you have this pattern recognition. You're like, "Okay, that's what I'm looking for." And then all of a sudden you try and approximate that person or that archetype as as much as you can. And so when you start your second company, you're like, "Oh, I can quickly staff up sales cuz I know what I'm looking for." But then you're like, "Shoot, I've never really nailed sales manager yet." And so then you cycle through. You start you start whacking away at the boss and then you have to end up firing the boss at the level because you're like, "Oh god, this didn't work." And then 6 months are gone because you had to find them, recruit them, hire them, train them, and then find out they sucked and then start over again. And maybe it takes 18 months to really find the right sales manager. And then you're like, "Okay, I know what that looks like, but I still don't have a director of marketing. What does that look like?" And so it's basically developing this pattern recognition across all functions of the business so that you know what exceptional looks like. And then over time what happens is as a business grows your ability to attract talent increases. And so then your standards also grow. And then you find out that there's even more nuance to this which is that there's a director of sales at a1 to$10 million level which is a different looking person from $10 to $und00 million level. And it continues to go all the way up. And so it's basically building this repertoire of identifying patterns. And what if you talk to I would say more experienced entrepreneurs now, they don't talk about building businesses. It's like assembling. You just assemble the pieces and you just know that this is how it's all going to flow together. And that fundamentally is basically what I try and decode within the content that I have so that it's like here's a pattern for how you can recognize this. Here's a pattern for a recognize this. so that you can just move faster through the levels um to get to where you want to go.
And so to loop back to the original question, which is how important are people in an organization? People are the organization. And so if you ever want to build enterprise value, it's building the collective consciousness of the organization, the skills, and how they collaborate together towards a specific outcome. And so knowing how to staff that up is the job.
So the simplest way of attracting somebody to your business when you don't know how to do the job or know who to look for is to unfortunately do the job yourself. And then once you can break down the job, we follow the 3Ds which is um document, demonstrate, duplicate. That's how we train anybody. So first you have to document everything that you do to successfully do the job and that's step by step into a checklist. Then you demonstrate. So, you do this checklist in front of the person that you're trying to bring on. Then they duplicate. They do the checklist in front of you. What's interesting about that three-step process is that you'll often find when you try to demonstrate following the checklist, you don't follow your checklist. And so, then you have to adjust the checklist until you actually follow the checklist. And then when you can consistently follow that checklist and get the output, then you can have them do that checklist. And so I think this is why bootstrap founders uh I think often times will find they they tend to know more about more things because they had to learn them in order to teach them.
Now what's really interesting about what you said about accidentally finding that that star at 3 or four years in is that I think that happens to almost everyone. Well hopefully it h the people who end up making it. It happens to almost everyone. Um because then you realize oh my god like if I had four of these people like we could change the world. It was one of the first people that you're like, "Oh my god, I hired that person. It changed everything." So my CFO in Jim Launch um had taken four companies from zero to 100 million. Um she had done over 40 M&A transactions. Her largest one was 5 billion. Super experience. Um she was the very end of her career. And she was like, I'll take you guys I'll I'll take this one last ride with you guys. And so, you know, mind you, Laya and I'm 26 or 27 at the time. Laya's 23 24. And we're sitting across the table from a very experienced business person being like, "Please help us." And so one of the things that she taught me that I I will never forget is she said the grass is always greener on the other side. You just don't know that it's fertilized. And she and she she's southern so she had this deep southern accent. She's like there's everywhere. And so she's like, I've been in enough businesses to know that all businesses have and so you just have you don't know about and do know about and you're in this business and so this is you know and that has been so profoundly impactful in my life because it was so hard for me to break the cycle really hard for me. Um I mean I gave you my my life story of the many businesses that I've been involved in. And so like the entrepreneurial ADD has been so real for me and I've made some of the biggest career mistakes by just pursuing and splitting my attention between multiple endeavors. And the thing is is you actually we have a linear life. And so we that is it's an unfair but true comparison of the opportunity cost. And every exceptionally um successful entrepreneur that I know has just stuck with one thing for such an inordinate amount of time. And I think there's a quote by um I want to say Shane Parish, but he said um success is doing the obvious thing for an extraordinary period of time without believing that you're smarter than you are. Yeah. And it's just like we know what we need to do. So we don't need to make our lives more complex. Complexity will come with scale. I promise. And so just simply trying to do more of what you're already doing well is already hard enough, don't add anything else. And so like if you need to write some sort of commitment of like I'm just going to stick with this, then do that.
What happens is we were talking about the levels earlier about like beating the bosses. So what happens is you know how to beat boss one through three of the game and so then you just say okay well I'm just going to start the game over and beat boss I mean this this time it's going to be different but then you just get to level three again and then you're stuck again and so people just keep getting up to level three and new and and new endeavors over and over again because they never learn how to get past that boss and so you just have to confront the uncertainty of knowing that you don't know how to do it but that you will figure it out if you keep doing enough repetitions. And that's where you talk to as many people as you can. You see what they said, you consolidate it all. You say, I think this is the highest likely path. It might not work. But I do believe fundamentally that if we cut people's hair well and we do it for a long period of time, we will have a thriving business. And if we have a really good model from that thing, we might be able to open up another location. And if we keep our cost down, we might be able to have an actual model that we could either invest our own capital or bring somebody else and take it national, right? Like all of these, like I have yet to find a business that can't get to $100 million a year, that has a permutation of it that exists. You're a dry cleaner. Fine. Well, cool. We'll build the model and either we can license the model, we can franchise the model out, we can get outside investors, we can scale it nally, we can do it. But the crazy goals are only crazy because people have crazy timelines. They're actually very sane goals if you extend the timeline. If you have a a true 10ear goal or a true 20-year goal, almost anything's accomplishable. I mean almost every multi-billion dollar company is about, you know, they get it's usually between like years 6 and 10 when companies get to kind of like those big numbers and most people who are listening to this are 5 years into entrepreneurship, but you're 6 months into the thing that you've been working on right now and you keep restarting the clock for getting to year 10 every time you start over. And I think that's the part that it took me a very long time to figure out and I think it takes a lot of entrepreneurs like everyone messes around with a lot of stuff in the beginning because you just don't know what you're doing. And so in my experience it takes about 5 years for most entrepreneurs that I know to just like find something that works. Like I'm like it takes about 5 years to figure out which way is north. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And then it takes like another 5 years. And a lot of people that's it like they they restart they they go off crash and burn. Um, and it takes another 5 years to build something that can can create generational wealth. So, it's about a 10ear slug. And here's the really hard truth about it. If you have a job right now, for almost all of that 5 years, you quit your job because you don't want to work as hard as you are and you want to make more money. And as soon as you quit, you will realize that you are now going to work way harder than you were and you're going to make less money for an extended period of time. The one benefit is that you get to claim all responsibility for how little you make and how much you work because you're like, "My boss is an idiot and it's me." But it's the truth. And I think that in some ways having that optimistic ignorance is actually one of the really redeeming traits of entrepreneurs. And one of the really hard parts is that the biggest jump you have to make gets so immediately reinforced from the freedom you have from being able to, you know, chart your own path. But that big success of quitting one thing and starting another, you need to immediately forget. And I think that fundamentally that is why so many entrepreneurs keep doing it is because the first time you do it, it's the biggest rush ever. You quit your job, you do the business, and and you get some some first traction and that that first dollar that you make when the new business is like the best dollar ever, right? But it's such a strong reinforcer that what does it reinforce? It reinforces stopping what you're doing and starting something else. And so I think one of the fundamental errors of entrepreneurship is that sometimes the jumping ship to start this thing is the lesson that you need to immediately unlearn because after that you have to just stick with it for a very long period of time.
Is this the business I'm going to start? With 20 hours of focused effort, most people can be pretty decent at something. Whether it's guitar, it's singing, even cold calling. If you actually cold called for 20 hours focused effort, you'd be decent. But most people spend years waiting to do the first hour. And so I like thinking about things in terms of directionally correct rather than will I hit it or not? It's because it's easy psychologically for us to say yes, no, honest, dishonest, etc. But it makes making decisions really hard cuz you're like, is this the path for me? where I was like, well, if I started something, I would be more likely to be successful than if I did not start anything. And from there, I will gain experience and perspective to then make the next iteration on the main thing. And most people had a graveyard of failures before they had their actual first success.
What amount of action would it be unreasonable for me not to be successful? And so for me, it's like I I believe that if you do 10,000 cold calls, you'll you'll get better. Like it would be unreasonable for you not to be good. Like after that level of effort, if you take half your paycheck every month or a 30-year paycheck every month and you say, "I'm going to advertising university, which is I'm going to spend money actually advertising trying to get people to click on this thing and give me their name and phone number." If you go and you spend that amount of money on actually advertising after a year after 2 years you'll probably you'll probably be pretty good especially if you join a community other people who are doing the same thing right you see got mentors who are doing who who have done and and give you frameworks that you can just work off so you can shortcut your path to success it becomes unreasonable that you wouldn't be more successful in the future than you are today just embrace the suck and so it's like how can I normalize nos so it's like if I'm teaching somebody to sell it's like dude I need you to get 100 nos and the thing is all of a sudden If the no becomes the goal, then they realize that it's about the process and not the outcome and then they would become better sales people because they stop being afraid of it. The same thing like for training sales person. I want them to hear the gasp, right? Which is like you say a price over. Everyone's afraid of saying the price. It's like, dude, if you didn't get a gasp, you didn't go high enough, right? They're like, what? I'm like, oh, you failed. Terrible sale. They didn't gasp. They're like, really? And so then it becomes, it flips it and it becomes a point of pride. It's like, oh, I got you hear the gasp on this one. And so all of a sudden they stop being afraid. We normalize we do like exposure therapy and the things that people are most afraid of. And I hope that with all the stuff that we do that we can do that in a microwave for at least a handful of people. So they just start doing and realize that they're going to gain perspective and the light of their knowledge will give them the next foot.
But the thing is they're stuck on the first one trying to take the first path when they have no idea. They should focus on one thing in general rather than lots of different things that you're not sure about cuz if you're starting out everything looks like an opportunity. So the correct answer is all of them are opportunities but all of them won't work unless you pick one, right? So you have to say no to all the other mistresses. So boom, you pick one and then from there I always say six figures is sell something to someone. That's it. And if you want more detail, sell something to someone. So it's one avatar, one product, one channel. So you don't have to figure out how do I create 20 pieces of content across it's like just pick one channel, one media source, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, you know, whatever, Twitter, consistently start going on that whether that's cold outbound, whether that's content, whether it's running paid ads, whether it's uh affiliates, word of mouth, whatever it is. um and start reaching out to people there to start selling your stuff. You have to learn how to advertise, which I define as the process of making known. So, how do you let other people know about the stuff you sell? And then once people engage with whatever advertisement you have, you have to sell them. So, advertising is the first skill. Selling them is the second skill. And then product would be the third skill, which is the thing that you're ultimately advertising and selling. So, usually once people do it in the beginning, they're sporadic. They're not consistent with it. Just the act of doing the same thing every day usually gets people to 100,000 a month, which sounds crazy to probably people listening, but most people who think that's crazy also haven't done it consistently for an extended period of time. And so I use something that I call the rule of 100, which is 100 primary actions, whether that's 100 minutes of of content creation per day, 100 reachouts per day, uh $100 of ad spend per day. Uh like you have to pick one of them, but 100 per day. You do that for 100 days and I promise you you'll have you'll be making six figures.
Also, I have like I feel like two parts of the audience that like follow my stuff. I've got the business owners who are trying to scale their business, etc. And then I've got all the people who want to start a business and usually they're a little bit younger and whatnot. And I think there's a a misnomer around like education. And so a lot of them, I don't know how explicit I can be, but like they mentally masturbate to watching lots and lots of videos. They, you know, want the pumpup features. They buy the tickets to the things. And I think that they think that exposure to information is learning. And I don't think that's true or at least it hasn't been for me. Definitely not true. And so when I do the original rule of 100 and whatnot, it's because I think it's the most effective way to learn, which is you force yourself on the one controllable that you have, which is the activities that you can take. And then it goes with the underlying assumption that you go off feedback and you're like, well, that opening message did not work. Yeah. Right. And then I think most people have a dramatic underestimation of how much volume it takes to be successful. You get the the skill from the volume, the feedback from the volume. And there's all these like little things. I'm sure it's like from the exercise world cuz you come from that. Um like when you squat, the first time you squat, you're you're orienting yourself to your environment. You're barely actually squatting. You're just looking like you have a bar on your back. But you learn so much between that first rep and your 10,000th rep of squats. And so I think for most people it's like if I can just decrease the action threshold for people to begin and be okay with the fact that they're going to suck and it is okay to suck. It is you should expect to suck and it would be unreasonable for you to be good if you haven't done it before.
There's three traits that people when they looked at because they were trying to find habits of highly successful people and when they actually pulled apart it's not and I hope I'm not contradicting anything but there's people who are really rich who wake up really late and work really late and there's people really rich who wake up really really early and there's people who are really rich who eat really healthy and there's people really rich who drink Coca-Cola and eat French fries every day and so there's all these things that we want to make as truths but there there's easy examples that counter those things. So it's like what are the few things that are true or at least that seem to be present in all of the situations and it seems as though there were surprisingly few. And so the three common traits that they had or that they had found were one that people have superiority complex. They believe they're better than others and they believe that they deserve more than everyone else does and that they can accomplish big goals. Right? So they have a bigger vision because they believe they deserve it or whatever it is that they were able to identify that. The second thing that they identify is that they had crippling insecurity and which which is a paradox of paradoxes. They feel they'll never be enough. um and they'll always be measured against the things that they've achieved. And so you've got this crazy dynamic between they they think they're better than everyone. They think they deserve more. They want to go after this big hill. And at the same time, they fear they'll never be good enough. They'll never actually achieve it. And they actually suck. And then the third piece which kind of adds the beautiful like mix of this is impulse control. And so they're able to control their actions and focus on a single thing for an extended period of time. And so if you put those three things together, it's like you've got a big goal that's pulling you this way. You've got this big fear that you are running away from and then you've got impulse control to keep you focused on the one thing that matters. And if you do that, if you if you are the type of person who has those traits, then you are very likely to be successful.
If you can wait a year, you can make a ton of money. Like if you can do something for 12 months, you can not need for financial goodness pretty much for the rest of your life. I'm not saying you're going to be hella rich, but you're not going to need for anything if you can wait 12 months. If you can wait a decade, you're going to be above the 1%. If you can wait 10 years for an outcome, be able to do the doing without seeing the result, you will be able to be above any most achievement of most people. And if you can wait a lifetime and you don't even need to see the result of you're doing this even while you are alive, but know that it may get done after you pass, then I I believe that you can change the world. And I mean that. And so I think that if people can just extend the time horizon that they're measuring themselves on, they can just do so much more. I mean, you've probably heard the Bill Gates quote where he says people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. I think it's the same thing just continue to draw it out. And I think as I as we've been able to, you know, achieve more leverage and make more money, etc., my horizon has extended. And when I listen to the people who are the people who I want to emulate, I can almost tell by the measurement of money that they talk about and the measurement of time that they discuss how successful they are or how successful I think they're going to be. Like if I talk to a 25-year-old and he's talking about what he wants to do in two decades and his whole plan of what he's going to do, as long as he's not just blowing smoke cuz he's heard an interview from me, um then I'm like, "This kid's got it. He gets it. He gets it." And most people just don't think they they can't wait 90 days. They most people can't even wait a month, right? They start a diet and 14 days later they don't have a six-pack and they can't wait. Like if you do a year, you can look whatever way you want for the most part, you know, by and large. And if you wait a year for the ability to learn how to sell, you wait a year for the ability to learn how to market, wait a year just providing value to a a group of people for free and then delaying your ask, you can do whatever you want.
The difference between a self-made billionaire who started with nothing and someone who else started with nothing is not the resources, obviously, cuz they both started at zero. So what else is it? It's their resourcefulness, not the resources. And so um if we give power to circumstance then we cast power outside of ourselves. If we give power to other people we cast power outside of ourselves. And so it's you know it's controlling the controllable. You can take pride in the fact that you admit that there's a deficit right but there is the only thing you can't take pride in is casting and being a victim. Even if you're right it doesn't serve you. And so it's it's owning the fact that like you are the only person who can actually change anything about your life because you may blame your circumstances but no one else will care.
If you want to change your behavior, the strongest way to do it is to simply change your environment because you can you can have huge leaps and bounds in how much your behavior changes without even having to get better. You usually have to take a step back in order to take 2 3 10 steps forward.
Why don't people do the stuff that they want to do? I think it's because they can't even hear their own voice cuz the only voice they can hear is everyone else's. They can like theirs is barely a whisper. Because right now you're probably not doing something because you're like I'm too busy. I'll start when it's convenient. Whatever. If you say that as the excuse for not doing something, then there's an assumption underlying that that says that if I get busy again in the future, I will stop. And so, do you want the success that you want to be longterm? Yes. Then, do you believe that you'll never be busy again for the rest of your life? No. So then you might as well start when you're busy so that you have the most support because if you learn how to do it when you're busy and you get when it gets quiet you'll succeed even more and when it gets busy again you know how to do it cuz that's how you start it.
I think about death all the time. It's like I'm going to die and I think you have to agitate the pain for yourself like you have to stoke the pain when you are starting out. I think you got to find the thing that's the pain and like pain motivates significantly faster and stronger than pleasure does. Like people were like, "No, passion is the right way." It's like point a gun at a family member. All of a sudden 10 out of 10 motivation, pain. And so like I think people should use their pain more.
I think we'd have to boil it down to what are the obstacles to taking action. So either you take the wrong actions, which is a knowledge deficit, which is why everyone who's listening to this, it's like you want to learn, right? Which is great. I define learning as same circumstance or same condition, different behavior. Meaning, if I show you a flash card that's red and then I slap you, if I show you the flash card again and you duck, then you have learned same condition, new behavior. Intelligence is the rate of learning. So, how quickly do you change your behavior with the same condition? So if I show someone a red flash card and
Then I slap them and I show them again. They don't move and I slap them. I show it again and I slap them. I was like, "What are you?" Right? Their rate of learning is not as fast.
And so to the same degree, and this is for I know this is going to I'm going to I'm going to poke my finger in the hole real quick. For everyone who's listening to this, if you continue to listen and listen and listen and listen and your conditions externally have not changed and your behaviors have not changed, then it means you have learned nothing.
If you can control enough of the environment, you can get anyone to do anything. Which is to the same degree we we even kind of accept this culturally as like if someone kills somebody. We say, was there temporary insanity? What were the extraneous conditions that created this behavior? Now, if there's like he, you know, he came home from the military and his wife was in bed with somebody and he just went into a fit of rage. Well, that was a condition. Now, we then say the guy who, you know, premeditated and that that's a bad guy. Then you you you zoom out a little bit more and you're like, well, what conditions created that behavior? So these conditions are excusable and these conditions aren't, which gets into a whole different argument.
But the point is is that if you want to change your behavior, the strongest way to do it is to simply change your environment because you can you can have huge leaps and bounds in how much your behavior changes without even having to get better. Which is why um one of the one of the the best ways to get good at anything is to join a team of people who are excellent at that thing. And you know this from the sports world. Like if you can join a championship team, you automatically adopt the cultural norms, the rules of behavior of that group and you either get assimilated or you get rejected if the culture is strong enough. Championship team. And so I think that that is the absolute shortcut, the the cheat code to getting what you want is changing everything around you.
So like if everybody around you is poor, don't listen to them about how to get rich and don't seek their approval for your behavior because everything that they're going to approve of is keeping you where you're at. And so I think if you if you have enough money to leave home, then do so. If you can't leave the town you're in, then move across town. Just go 30 minutes away. Just go on the other side of town. Make it more convenient to do the things that you want to do. Make it less convenient to hang out with the people and do the stuff that you don't want to be doing. And if you do enough of those, make it easier, make it harder trade-offs. Eventually, you start doing more of the stuff that you want to do and less of the stuff you don't. And that compounds. And I think a lot of times that is a lot easier than trying to willpower your way through anything because willpower is finite. If there is no ice cream in the freezer and you have to get in your car to then go somewhere to get the like it's a lot harder. It's a bigger thing, right? So it's like how can I make it as inconvenient as possible to do the things that I don't want to do.
Hate only comes from below. Like no one above you is hating on you because they're not thinking about you because winners focus on the goal. Losers focus on winners. You can define sales as the ability to get people to comply with your request. You can define leadership the same way. Um management, marketing to a degree is getting people to comply with a larger request, you know, publicly. Um but I think that fundamentally is a skill that people have to have if they're going to be successful at entrepreneurship. Um they have to have tremendous drive, whether that's a combination of towards or away. So they have a big mission that they really want to achieve or they have some very big fear that they're running away from. Either way, I think the fuel works uh just from a pure entrepreneurship perspective. Um, third piece is impulse control is that they have to be able to say no to things on a regular basis for an extended period of time. Um, and I think they have to be able to boil down the success of their business into inputs and outputs.
For most entrepreneurs, like if they have those things, if they have the ability to lead other people slash sell just influence, they have some big motivator. they can control themselves long enough to keep on going during that period of time and they are doing the right things because they know the inputs and outputs uh to be successful or to create their the thing that they want becomes a very difficult person to be. There's three traits that people then when they looked at because they were trying to find habits of highly successful people and when they actually pulled it apart it's not you know and I I hope I'm not contradicting anything um but there's people who are really rich who wake up really late and work really late and there's people really rich who wake up really really early and there's people who are really rich who eat really healthy and there's people really rich who drink Coca-Cola and eat French fries every day and so there's all these things that we want to make as truths but there there's easy examples that counter those things. So it's like what are the few things that are true or at least that seem to be present in all of the situations and it seems as though there were surprisingly few.
And so the three common traits that they had or that they had found were one that people have superiority complex. They believe they're better than others and they believe that they deserve more than everyone else does and that they can accomplish big goals. Right? So they have a bigger vision because they believe they deserve it or whatever it is that they were able to identify that. The second thing that they identify is that they had crippling insecurity and which which is a paradox of paradoxes. They feel they'll never be enough. um and they'll always be measured against the things that they've achieved. And so you've got this crazy dynamic between they they think they're better than everyone. They think they deserve more. They want to go after this big hill. And at the same time, they fear they'll never be good enough, they'll never actually achieve it, and they actually suck. And then the third piece, which kind of adds the beautiful like mix of this is impulse control. And so they're able to control their actions and focus on a single thing for an extended period of time. And so if you put those three things together, it's like you've got a big goal that's pulling you this way. you've got this big fear that you are running away from. And then you've got impulse control to keep you focused on the one thing that matters. And if you do that, if you if you are the type of person who has those traits, then you are very likely to be successful.
No one wants to say they're afraid because if you say you're afraid, then it means you're a coward. I'd rather be a failure than a coward. The first big felt like a death decision was I was a consultant, 22ish years old. I had a paid for, you know, condo that I bought uh overlooking the city. And I remember thinking like, I really hope I don't wake up tomorrow. And what was difficult about that was that at that time was when my father was most proud of me. Uh because I was doing everything that was according to plan. you know, he could talk about like his son who graduated in 3 years from Vanderbilt had the had the good job like everything was we're following the plan. It was upon realizing that my ultimate expression of living out his dream was me feeling like I didn't want to be alive. And I realized that one of our dreams had to die, either his or mine.
To put this in perspective of like how afraid of my father's judgment I was, I left the state and drove across the country halfway through before calling him to tell him that I was gone. And so I I bring this up because I don't try I'm not trying to be dramatic here, but I'm saying that if you feel a lot of pressure, I get it. Like I tried to leave the job that I was at to pursue just literally anything that wasn't that just I wanted to start a business at some point. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I just knew that what I was doing was not the path I wanted to be on. You know, our relationship struggled for, you know, years after that. And I I also bring that up because sometimes there's this illusion that like, you know, you get on the on the Oscar stage or whatever it is and you're like, "Hey, I just want to thank, you know, my mom, my dad, my friends for always supporting me." And um I can't say that and I wish I could and you might not be able to say that either. And I also don't think that's a reason not to do it.
And I think that when you ask the original question, what are the people from 0 to 1 really looking for? I read tons of business books at that time, but I couldn't use any of them because I was so afraid. And what's crazy is that like I think about it now in retrospect and it's like it's crazy how large the perceived monsters can appear. And Leila has this quote that I love, but it's um fear is a mile wide and an inch deep. And so you look at it, it looks like this ocean. And then you take the first step and you realize you don't drown cuz it's like, oh, there's ground underneath of this, right?
Other people who are more on my path. And the friends you lose, you gain new friends, right? And so, um, that fear was the hardest decision that I've had to overcome in my entrepreneurial career. And I think of all the of all the the split paths in my life, that was the one that if I had many timelines or many universes that existed, that was probably the one that is the most likely that I would not have parted from. So I think in like 90% of universes that Alex Rosie exists, I'm just a consultant somewhere. And so um I would encourage you if you do feel that you're not going to die. Like you won't die and you might just live.
No one wants to say they're afraid because if you say you're afraid, then it means you're a coward. And I think that it only means you're a coward if you don't if you allow that fear to change your behavior in an aversive way as in it not towards what you want. And so you know the inverse of that many people have heard it courage is not acting um without fear but despite fear. Um, and I think that um, when you act, when you allow fear to change your behavior the wrong way, that is when you can give yourself that title of coward. And I think that that is a title that I have feared my whole life. And that label is almost I'm more afraid of that label than the label of failure. I'd rather be a failure than a coward.
There's a tweet that I love by Andrew Wilkinson, which is um every entrepreneur ever colon here's the winning number for my lottery ticket. And so it's like every entrepreneur will say here's the winning lottery ticket, but it's like that game already that drawing already happened. Okay. Yeah. Right. And so like you can't cash that ticket in. It's already done. And so people say the word first principles, no one really knows what it means. uh I mean some people do but basically there are foundational truths of business that that exist and the conditions of the environment will change and so you have to apply those truths to whatever the current condition is and so that's what I try and tease out with the books and the stuff that I that I put out in content but at the end of the day you have an input of time like zooming all the way out if the goal assuming that your goal is to make money okay like and this is just a purely economic business goal then you have time which it's the primary currency that you trade it and you make dollars over a period of time. And so I tend to reject the idea of like never, you know, never trade time for dollars or anything like that because everyone trades time for dollars. It's just some of us are more efficient at it than others. But even exchanges that occur that just are not denominated in time still occur over time. And so uh you have this foundational unit of time which you're going to give in. What we're seeking is the highest return on that time.
And so there, you know, within a business context, there's kind of three levels of uh things that have to create a business. You have to, you know, attract attention, you have to convert attention, and then you have to deliver something uh for that attention. And so, which is you need supply and demand to have a business and then leverage to get as much out of it as you possibly can. And so, um when you're looking at the assets that you have, assets can also be skills, resources, what you have available to you. Now, if you have nothing, then all you have is your brain, your hands, and the time that you have that you can put towards learning something. Which is why I'm a big fan of skill acquisition as one of the the primary things that you can do is educating yourself and not formally educating, but informally or alternatively educating yourself on super tactical things.
Uh once you get over the fear, then you start asking, okay, how do I let people know about my stuff? And what do I let them know? Right? And so, you have to have something to sell, which is the offer. And ideally, you want the offer to have as much leverage as possible. Like, so if you sold software or you sold media, those are things that you can uh cut once, sell a thousand times. Um, if you have a conversion mechanism, it's like you can't have it be automated like a checkout page or some sort of video sales letter or something like that where people just buy without a phone salesperson. If you add a phone salesperson, there's less leverage. Not to say this wrong, but you want to you want to have the highest leverage opportunity. And then from a um from the deliverability expect uh uh perspective um I kind of talked about deliverability first but uh from the advertising perspective uh if you reach out to people one-on-one that's lower leverage than being able to make one piece of content that a million people see right? And so over time you go from low leverage to high leverage uh where you have the same inputs but you just get significantly more for your output and that fundamentally is like if we're reasoning out from first principles how do I get the said differently the question someone I think is really asking is how do get the most for what I put in. And you have to reason within your current context of your skills and your resources and your assets in order to derive that solution for you.
Business ideas typically come from one of three Ps. So it comes from a pain that you're currently experiencing, a past profession, so the thing that you just quit or some of the jobs that you just quit or a passion. So something that you're inherently interested in that you would spend your time doing anyways. uh some skill that you learned while you were in the workforce, which by the way is one of the most proven ways of making money because the economy has already showed you that people are willing to exchange money for that for that specific job. And so, uh in the world of gig economies and solopreneurs, every business can be dismantled into just jobs being done. And all of those jobs can be fractionalized. So, anybody like we look at any business, you've got sales, you've got you've got marketing, you've got customer success, you've got you've got customer support. If you want to differentiate that, you've got product, you've got design, you've got web pages, there's, you know, there's so many different components to a business, you just need to learn one of them and then it's like boom, you have a skill that you can trade for money that you don't have anybody else to report to.
Um, and then pain is usually I think um in some ways um sometimes one of the biggest drivers. It's like you had an eating allergy and you couldn't find pancakes that dealt with your specific eating allergy and you bet that there's a decent amount of other people with that allergy that also like pancakes. And so then you make pancakes that that are delicious and amazing that also cater to people with that food allergy and then all of a sudden like you have a business based on pain. And why why does that matter? I think that deep knowledge of the prospect is paramount or very important for creating exceptional products and you can either do that by doing a ton and ton of research or by being the prospect.
I met the guy who uh invested in Regal Cinemas which is the probably the biggest chain in the US. Um and it was when it was there was I had just one theater and it became that obvious co has disrupted that business but you know for 20 you know years whatever they they crushed and he said it was so weird to say that oh cinemas are going to make a comeback cuz they've kind of been on a downturn or something like that during the time that he was making the investment and he said the reason I decided to invest in it was because this guy knew everything about the business down to how much the cost of kernel of popcorn was and he just knew it so like the back of his hand that he was like this guy can't fail like he just knows too much about this business to not have it work and so investing in you know making a gazillion dollars and so but I think that that deep understanding and if you look at all of these the passion things you'll have deep understanding because you're spending all of your discretionary time pursuing this passion the pain you have a deep understanding of the of the problem and the prospects going through it because you've experienced it probably for years now the professional one I would say is a bit of a shortcut um because if you're quitting the job because you don't like it and then you say I'm now going to do for myself. Well, you're okay. Like um I mean well the the one the one proven point about that is that that one is proven to work from an economic perspective. You will be able to make money doing that because you already have made money doing it.
I was talking to um on one of the future episodes of uh Mosy Tank uh that's coming out. We have a guy who's um he loves Dungeons and Dragons. So, he's an IT he's an IT guy and just loves Dungeons and Dragons and he was like, I just want this to make enough money that I don't have to do it anymore and but it was so pure, you know what I mean? And so I was like, we're going to help you do this. And so we kind of walked through the business plan for it, but like is he going to be a billionaire? No. But I also don't think that's his goal. And so I think being really clear on what you want um is important. So if you're like, I want to be the richest person in the world. I think it's a terrible goal, but if you want that, great. Well, you have to have a multi-trillion dollar idea because now because by the time that occurs, there's already multi-trillion dollar companies now. So, you got to be looking at like deca trillion dollar opportunity. And so, believe it or not, basically the bigger the goal, the narrower the scope of the paths to get there. If you're like, I want to make $10 million, I'm like, you can literally do that in almost any business. You want to make $100 million, probably still almost any business, you can do it on a long enough time horizon, you can do it. a trillion or decad trillion, it's going to be some sort of tech. It's probably gonna have some sort of AI. And so you get basically the bigger the goal is, the narrower the scope of of how to get there. But the vast majority of people who are like, I want to be the richest man in the world, it's just cuz they don't know how to like really think through it and be like, all right, well after like a 100, there's really nothing you can't do except buy more big things. But like in terms of your actual consumption, maybe even 20 is like you can only eat at restaurants that go so expensive. You can only stay at the best hotels. You can only drive the nicest cars. You can do that with 25 million.
What's crazy is the latest counting happens both ways. Like um so like you set your alarm for 5:00 a.m. at night and you're like I'm going to wake up at 5, but that's because you're delaying the pain of waking up. And when it's immediate and I have to quit the job, like I'll quit my job tomorrow for 20 years. And so it's just like we always we we delay the fact that we're going to be miserable into the present uh to like we we massively discount what a whole lifetime of misery would be. it's it can't reason the logic chain of causation and causality of what's going to happen next in a chain of events. And so when you get into the specific of it, all of a sudden you're like, "Okay, I'm not going to be homeless and then shamed and die." Um I might live in inferior living conditions for a short period, which by the way, when you're later on in your life, you'll look back and think of as the good old days cuz I can't believe I was couch surfing. I was pursuing my dreams, right? It's it's only like in the moment that it feels bad. when you look back like even I I find this hilarious like like how long after you do something embarrassing is it funny right? like at at some point for almost all of us with enough time the shameful experience becomes funny and so if it is going to become funny eventually it might as well become funny now also logic downside risk here I'll have a story and I can always get my job back okay and if I can't get that job back I'll have other ones that will be available fine and if I have a downgrading And some people think that I'm not as successful with them. Okay, I'll not stop though. Like, and you just kind of play it out and you're like, "Okay, I think I have like most of these conditions prepared for and then all of a sudden you can like have those things."
If you want to be compelling, a demonstration or a model is always more compelling than anything else. And so me even going through that entire narrative, right, is taking everyone else who's been listening to this on some journey. It's like if you want to make a compelling pitch for a business, it's like you pretty much just kind of went through one. Um, and so that's that's really what it comes down to is you're like, well, what do I do with my business? It's like create your narrative of why you're even doing this. And if you can explain to somebody why why they should care about this problem or more specifically why you care about this problem. I'll tell you this more investors like I might be like I don't care about kitchen utensils but this girl certainly does and I'm sure there's other women who do too. And what everyone wants to see is obsession. And unfortunately in like some of the world I know more in the UK than the US now like that kind of perspective of like just being all in obsessed with stuff has almost been like um bastard or like you know been um chastised and I but the people who are obsessed are the ones who change the world at least change their world and so a lot of times we don't we don't look at what I call the don't which is like the the alternate path and so if I had played out my existing path I had a guarantee of outcome I didn't want. It was just out of delay. Whereas here, there's a chance that I can make it. And so, one of the final kind of frameworks for making the decision was guarantee bad, chance at good. And I was like, well, I might as well take a chance. And I I strongly um encourage thinking about uh playing it out. And so what I mean by that is like I think fear exists in the vague, not in the specific. And so when you say, "I'm going to quit my job and then what if this doesn't work? I'm a failure." Tons of fear. If I say, "I'm going to quit my job and then I'm going to try and start a business and if the business doesn't work, I'll probably have a compelling story that I could tell for business school if I wanted to to show that I had some entrepreneurial slant. In the meantime, I could use that experience plus my job experience to probably get another or maybe even better job in the meantime and match or or supersede my existing income. And the actual loss would be maybe the savings that I had saved up. But if I'm younger or I haven't made as much money as I want, then that's never been the amount of money that would be material anyways on the grand scheme of what I would like to make. Um, and in terms of living situation, I will worst case go back to my parents house with my tail between my legs or sleep at a friend's couch because I have enough people that would be willing to put me up in a garage if I had to. And so it's like, okay, so my actual worst case scenario is just like I have a cool story and maybe some shame that I is self-inflicted cuz it's not like no one else cares really, but it's self-inflicted shame and maybe a detour or a different story that I have to tell later on in my career. Not as much fear there, right? But like the first one, like I'll fail, everyone will hate me, and I'll die. Basically, anybody who's listening, the harder it is for you to break free of whatever kind of mental prison you've made for yourself, whether that's real or just in in your head, the more compelling your story will be when you break through it.