Transcription
A lot of people spend most of their time answering questions not worth answering. If I do what the best people did, I will get what the best people got.
When people are allocating their time, um they're not by percentage, they're they're kind of like consuming their time rather than investing their time. You have to change your environment so you can change your behavior. And you have to delete everything that's not the thing that you want most. And if you can't decide what you want most, then that's what you need to do first. But once you know what you want, then go get it.
People have two sets of resources, right, that they allocate. So they've got time and they've got money.
Yeah. And so, if you look at someone's bank statement and you look at their calendar, you know what their life is. And you can also predict what their life is going to be in x amount of years, right? And so, if someone wants to change what their life is going to look like, you have to reallocate where you're investing the resources that you have. And so, from a time perspective, people who are poor, in my opinion, spend a lot of time not doing stuff. And that sounds terrible to say, but like at the base level, they're distracted, they're doing the right stuff.
Right. Well, I was I would even say not doing anything. The base is like they don't do anything. They're purely distracting themselves from their current state, which is hard because it's hard to confront reality. If you're like not happy, it's easier to to distract yourself, right?
Mhm. Now, the level above that is you've got people who are operating, they are working every day, but they're operating in low-leverage opportunities, right? So they're they're doing things that do not give them a lot of return on their time. It doesn't matter how many hours I work at McDonald's. Like, it's very, very difficult to become wealthy there, right?
Near impossible, right?
Mhm. Um versus like you could buy a building for $10 million and then sell it to somebody else for 11, you know, for $11 million, just get the contract and make a million dollars on the exchange. Super high leverage, right? From a time perspective, which is crazy for somebody who doesn't have money to even contemplate something like that. But the only way that that happened, and that required no money, is skill, right? And so, like that's an example of like it didn't require money to make that money. That's skill that's required to do that. And so, first is the time, right? People are not doing stuff with the time they have, or they're doing low-leverage activities with the time they have. And then they're not trying to increase their output per unit time, which means investing in their skill set. So, like one of the easiest ways to gain leverage on your time, and and when I say leverage just for everybody, like leverage is the difference between inputs and outputs in a system. So, um you know, Archimedes said, "If you give me a lever long enough, I can move the world." And so, to the same degree, if you have enough skills, you can do anything. Right? And so, skills give you leverage on your time. So, you get more out of each unit of time. So, if I'm a a master cold caller, I will get more sales and calls booked for the same unit of time than somebody who sucks at it. Same time, more output.
When people are allocating their time, um they're not by percentage, they're they're kind of like consuming their time rather than investing their time. So, they're either doing nothing, or they're consuming the time rather than putting time into getting higher returns on their time, which is education, right? And so, education you can have from like the conceptual learnings, watching stuff like this, um or and or the actual doing, right? And so, the first thousand uh cold calls you make, the first thousand cold emails you do, the first thousand doors you knock on, the first thousand, you know what like you'll learn more from that than you'll learn from every single book you read up to that point on the concept. Like you you'll learn, right? Um and so, people don't allocate nearly enough time to that in the beginning.
And so, I think one of the things that the formal education system did really well, that people poopoo on it, is the idea of going into debt to gain education is something that fundamentally makes sense. The idea of borrowing from a future self that can make more money to pay for the thing that you're getting the skill for makes total sense. I think Elon was saying something about how Neuralink in the future it's going to be such a competitive advantage that they could price it at whatever they want, because once you have it, you'll be so much more able than anyone who doesn't have it that you could so easily pay off the price of the thing.
That's how it should work conceptually, right? That's how education is supposed to work.
Yes. And so, I like this is the simplest example that I have. So, a friend of mine has a 17-year-old daughter. She got a job at a bowling alley, and she makes minimum wage.
And he said, "Why don't you become a phlebotomist?" She was like, "Well, I don't want to spend the money." He's like, "It's 500 bucks, and it's a 2-day certification, and then after you have that, you make $25 an hour." So, she didn't have the money. Now, she could save it to get the $500, right? Or, she could take a loan for the 500 bucks from her dad and pay it back in a week.
Right. Right? Because she has higher earning capacity. And so, it was like she could she could either save for 8 weeks, right? From her her bowling alley to pay the 500, or she could take a loan for the 500, do the 2 days, and then pay it off in a week. At that 1 week, she now has 7 more weeks of earning capacity. This is a micro example, right? 7 weeks of earning capacity at her new level, and she'd be net positive on the next 7 weeks of earnings, right? And so, this is just a micro example of like what skill investing does.
Um, and so, that cuz I a lot of us we talk about like you got to get educated, you got to learn stuff, and like you learn stuff by doing it. And a lot of times you pay for that education or access to people who can teach you those skills, cuz a lot of people aren't going to give it to you for free. And that makes sense. It's okay. Like it took them time to learn the thing, and they compressed that time to give it to you. So, I mean that's why I'm a like educate if there's one thing that's my like life's mission is education.
And so, the single highest return on investment thing I've ever done and not to sound trite here, but I think it's like using scenarios. Like if I had taken all the money that I'd spent on coaching, mentorships, courses, workshops, seminars, and put that in the S&P 500 when I, you know, 10 years ago, right? The amount that I would have right now is inconsequential compared to what I currently have. And that's because I invested in something different. So, rather than investing in the S&P 500, I invested in the S&E 500. So, I took all of the excess cash that I had every single month, and rather than saying like, "Oh, I'm going to dollar cost average, you know, I'm long term. I wait 4 years, whatever." I was like, I just don't make enough money. So, like, I could be the millionaire next door who saves every penny, doesn't go to Starbucks for my entire life, and have $2 million when I'm older. And literally enjoy nothing during that period of time. That doesn't sound like this is not a trade I wanted to make. And so, I had a belief that I know I I will work hard, and if I'm given the right tools, I will be able to implement them. And so, I took all my extra money, and this is kind of, you know, a lot of people might not necessarily agree with me on this, but it worked for me.
So, I put all of every dollar I had, even went into debt, to get access to communities and mentors and coaching programs and and and and
Masterminds.
Yes. And those were the biggest gifts of all, and it wasn't even just in this like, the biggest gifts I got from those wasn't even the education, but it was the perspectives on reality. It was people disproving things that I thought to be true. So, there I was like, this is the way the world is, and they're like, that's false.
Mhm. And my whole paradigm shifted because I just I I had distortions of reality. I thought reality was different than it was. And so, right now, for people who are poor, it's because they actually don't see reality for what it is. Because the way they see reality, they see making money to be impossible or incredibly difficult, or it's only for a certain select people, not for them. Right? It's just because they literally cannot see it. And so, I'm trying to think of an example of one like, you can see something that a easier example is like kids and and parents, right? Like, a kid thinks the world is a certain way, and the parent's like, you just haven't seen enough stuff yet. And so, you know, as you level up in the entrepreneur space, there's also just more levels of that where other people are like, this is the perspective you need to have, and you're like, no way that's possible. And so, that's where those rooms um gave me the highest ROI. The other skills, because there's so many people there that are trying to learn the same things, they already said, "Hey, get this program, read this book." And so, they helped sift through the mountain of information that's out there, because I only have one resource, which is time at that time, right? And so, it's like, "Okay, I'll spend it, but where do I spend it?" And they're like, "Okay, if you want to learn real estate, these are the top three guys, you can join this Facebook group, get into this guy's community. He has a coaching program that helps you do wholesaling. This guy has a coaching program that does Airbnb. This guy does You know, like and so it's like, which one do I choose? The answer for everybody who's curious is do them all.
Mhm. Because you're just like you're not like people are like, which one should I do? I'm like, you'll you're not going to be poorer by learning more.
Right. Right? And then it's not like you have a finite capacity to learn. The more you learn, the better you get at learning. Right? And then the more uh lines and synergies you find between different uh skill sets and opportunities.
The more dangerous you become.
If we were to define focus as the quality and quantity of things that we say no to. Right? Because the most the most focused person would do nothing but one thing. And so everything that's not that thing would make you less focused. If that's the definition of what focus is. But I've I've I thought about it like it's almost like wine where like as it ages, there's more nuance and there's more depth to the flavor. And I feel like as my entrepreneurial journey has has like progressed, um my understanding of what focus means has changed. Because it's actually like focus from the top It's literally from the top all the way down. Meaning the company needs to focus on one thing, not five.
And if we have five objectives for the year, it's because we me, personally, I haven't done my job because one of those things is the most important. And if I can't tell my team, this is the most important, then how am I going to expect them to make that judgment without the context that I have? And so it's like being willing to make the hard call. And I think a lot of people are afraid of making it. And the more I've doubled down on saying, if I have to choose one thing, you think differently. And so in thinking about that, like this is 4 years ago the big thing that I had was like, I if I just built a big business brand, then I don't need to be the best picker of of of investments. I don't need to be the best negotiator. I'll cuz I'll have more proprietary deals. So people want to They'll just want want invest with me or have me invest in them. And I'll be able to pick the best company cuz I'll get more at bats than anyone. And I don't need to be a pro negotiator cuz people want to do a deal rather than just like auctioning off between me and 10 other parties. And so it's like if I can just what's that one thing for this year? And I think where kind of strategy comes into things is by forcing that focus and saying no to the other things, you get really, really selective. And that's at the top level. I think there's this big fallacy that I've I've changed in terms of how operate, which is that we actually do things in sequence. We do things in an order. Meaning although you might have five people on your team, we need to deploy all resources towards solving this one problem. And then once that problem is solved, what happens is the fact that the other four fires exist because let's be real, there's always going to be problems. But the fact that the other four fires exist gives you urgency to solving the first one. And so you actually get five things done faster when you do them in order than trying to do all five at once. And yet for some reason we don't we don't regularly remind ourselves of that. And so this has been like I'd say like that has been the the single largest shift in my entrepreneurial like career. And the reason that like at Gym Launch, which was the company that I sold for those who are listening, um the biggest mistake I made in that business was that when it was crushing, I then started another basically another company rather than doubling down on what worked.
And basically the year that I started the second company, revenue didn't go down, but my growth rate went down a lot. So we you know, we added maybe like 30% in revenue when we probably could have doubled. Um because I put all my attention in this other thing.
Um things are going really well at acquisition.com and I had this inkling to do the same thing, just repeat the same mistake. And um I was like, I cannot learn this again. The second one has been my understanding of talent has has also kind of developed like a fine wine in terms of like how there's so much leverage with good talent. So, for example, Steve Jobs gives this great great analogy. He says, you know, in New York, there's a ton of taxi drivers, and the worst taxi driver, if you had to get it get you across town, uh would maybe cost you know, take you twice as long as the best taxi driver. Maybe maybe he'd take you one you know, he could take you a third of the time of the bad guy, right? But that's the difference between the absolute best and the absolute worst. But in like a knowledge-based business like mine, like yours, um the absolute best could get a hundred times more return than somebody who's even just good. And compared to bad, obviously, I mean, they basically wouldn't they wouldn't even ever happen. They couldn't even succeed, right? And so, in thinking about that, I still I I have doubled down on the arbitrage of intelligent, hard-working people. Which is like it's worth paying someone millions of dollars a year if they can make you tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
And I think that it's one of the great opportunities that will always exist because there will always be cheap entrepreneurs and who will not recognize the outsize value of talent. And I think that as I've as the longer I've been in the game, to be fair, the more the more exposed to higher-level talent I've become and the more I know what's out there. And one of my one of my great mentors, he told me uh the best talent is always in the future. And so, whatever your standards are, he's like, you always have to keep pushing that standard because as things grow, too, some people grow out of their you know, their sphere of competency. They're not as good at this level as they were before. There's nothing wrong with them or with you. It's just seasons.
Um and so, my understanding of that has shifted in terms of my role as well. Like, I see myself as lead recruiter for the top people because the absolute best people only want to talk to the CEO because you're not giving them an opportunity to have a career. They already have a career. They're giving you basically everything they know to help grow your vision. And so it's a lot more of you selling them than it is them selling you. They already have a track.
They have head hunters that call them every day.
Yeah. That's the You're not giving them anything that they don't already have. And so it's really It's like Sheryl Sandberg with Zuckerberg. He met with her her for dinner like once a week for a year before they before she transitioned and took over Facebook.
And so it's it's a much longer courting process. And And all the people that you know that I'm looking at are like they're all killers. And so rather than thinking like, "Man, we really need someone to fill this role." It's like, "I need John to fill this role." And John doesn't currently work for me. He works for somebody else.
Take 6 months.
Exactly. And I have to figure out a way to get John to leave what he's doing and come work with me.
Yeah. Um And so that is probably been Those have been the two biggest Those have been the two biggest changes or shifts um that I think have propelled acquisition.com um to just last few years have just continued to get better and better. Is focus on the one thing that matters most and be disciplined enough to say, "Yes, we aren't going to do these things. And yes, they are problems. And we will get to it as soon as we finish this one thing that matters most." And then in order to execute on that, you need the absolute best and brightest because the arbitrage on if somebody if that Imagine the difference if we had this as engineers, right? This This taxi driver thing. If if a good engineer costs $250,000 a year and an amazing engineer costs a million dollars a year, but you get a hundred extra dollars per on that guy. It's still a better deal even though it costs more. And I think that's where people get mixed up is that it costs more, but it's a better deal. And so talent is a better deal.