Transcription
You'll make more money once you realize failure is just the entry price to eventual success.
Respect is earned, not given. I wasn't deserving of respect. And if you're not getting respect right now, it might be because you need to have a little bit more dangerous of a demeanor. Sometimes a chip on your shoulder is worth more than a pat on the back. Stay cool on the surface, baby. Paddle like hell. Never apologize for trying really, really hard.
Having a job is hard. Having a business is hard. Choose your heart. That thing in front of you at this moment that you think is going to break you might actually be the thing that is going to catapult you to the next level of the game.
Welcome back to the Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez. I want to talk to you vulnerably today about all the ways I've lost, the lessons I've learned in it, so you can get more comfortable with the truth and thus win more. If you're not failing enough and big enough, you'll never really win. So, without further ado, welcome to the official Cody Sanchez lowlight reel, where I can teach you all the lessons and you can skip my scars.
If you didn't get into the school that you wanted to get into, don't worry, I was the exact same way. In fact, I applied to all the big names, you know, the Harvards, the Stanfords, the Yales. And shocking, I got into none of them. In fact, I barely got into Arizona State University, Harvard of the West, some might say. I think the only reason that that didn't [ __ ] me at that time was I had no money to go anywhere else. And so, uh, I went to Arizona State and that actually ended up being the biggest win that I ever could have.
What do you mean by that? Well, 60,000 students meant that I had to navigate not being that important, being a number. Nobody cared about me. Nobody was checking up on me. You know, I wasn't special at all. And that meant that I worked really hard. I had three degrees by the end of it. I got a grant from the Howard Buffett Foundation because when you're not special, but you have a chip on your shoulder, you have the opportunity to prove everybody wrong. And sometimes a chip on your shoulder is worth more than a pat on the back.
So then, you know, you might think, well, maybe it gets better afterwards. And once you're done with college, you're going to figure it out. Everything's going to be fine. Well, if you're like me, I had no jobs, you guys. Senior year of college, I had no jobs. I was too busy partying, doing things I shouldn't have been doing, going to frat and sorority things. And uh the only people that wanted to hire me were like the Associated Press for $18,000, which even back then was not enough money. And I was pretty scared. I thought I was going to have to move back in with mom and dad. I was super embarrassed.
But maybe that thing that is your biggest fear leads you to do the irrational thing you would not have done otherwise. If I had an easy job come across my plate, maybe I wouldn't have pushed myself to do the irrational thing, which is I went to a finance conference. I sat next to a woman. She ended up being a recruiter for one of the biggest companies in finance in the world. It's called Vanguard. And I just got curious. Your willingness to ask questions and look stupid while everybody else tries to position themselves, especially when you're young, is what's going to make you stand out. The older you get, the more you realize you don't really know anything. And the younger you are and the more you try to look like you know everything, the more foolish you actually look.
So I sat next to her and was like, "I don't understand anything. What do you guys do? How does that work? How does this go? What happened?" She gave me a job offer. That job offer made like 3x more than my 18k, which was a lot at the time. And every single other person in this program, it's called an accelerated development program. Every single other person in it, uh, they went to the Harvards, the Stanfords, the Yale. I was the only public school little kid nerd who was also a sorority girl in it. And uh if you've ever seen how like ducks look really calm on the surface, but they're paddling like crazy underneath it, that was me.
So if that is you right now, that's that's okay. Stay cool on the surface, baby. Paddle like hell. Never apologize for trying really really hard. That's what I certainly did. And I thought maybe I had made it at Vanguard. But then what's going to happen is you're going to feel like this climb that you're on, every single time you hit to the top, you hit the first peak, there's a big cliff on the other side. There's a ravine you have to go back down.
My ravine was at the end of that year process, you had to find your own job inside of Vanguard. And so they didn't just like give you another job after you went through the program. Somebody had to choose you inside of the company to come stay and work in their division. And I came up with an idea for the company. I brought it to the head of my division. The guy's like, "Cool. This seems like a cool idea. And then what happened?" Well, he pulls me back in couple hours later. He I think I'm getting this job. He's like, "We've cleared it. This is going to be awesome. You're going to go do this thing that you really want to do at our other campus." I'm like, "Great." He pulls me back in and he sits me down. I'm all excited. I've called my parents. I've told them already like, "What if I have to move to this new place, do this thing?" And he goes, "What do you think your colleagues think about you?" And I was like, "What? I thought we were talking about this job that I came up with and this cool thing that I could do." He's like, "What do you think they think about you?" I'm like, "Ron, I have no idea what you're talking about. Like, can you explain to me?" And he goes, "Well, um, your colleagues think that you would leave dead bodies behind you to get ahead." I was like, "Jesus Christ." Like, metaphorically, physically. I was like 110 pounds soaking wet back then. And And I am trying not to cry candidly because I I don't know what to say to that. Um, and I'm like, I I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're talking about. And he basically said, 'Well, you know, you never come to the group lunches. You know, you never plan group activities. Uh, apparently when people come to your desk, you're like too busy to talk to them. They think that you're too good for them. Little did he know that the reason why I was doing all those things was because I was drowning. Like there were all these smart people who had finance degrees. I was like a journalism background trying to figure out how to keep up with Harvard and Stanford and Yale. And so, yeah, I wasn't like party planning because I was dying on the inside.
So, so at the end he said, "So that job that you want to have, we're actually going to give it to this other person." And I remember going home and I was crying. I was super embarrassed. I didn't want to tell my parents because I like proactively told them I was going to do this whole thing. But what's fascinating about that is if you flash forward seven years, that same person who took that job from me, who's awesome and a friend now, she became my COO at another company. She worked for me. And so thankfully, the fact that they had been like, "No, because you're not nice enough. You don't smile enough. You don't party plan Cody. We're not going to gift you this job." I was like, "Fuck you guys. I'm out then."
Okay, fine. Not even like a couple weeks later, a recruiter calls me for the best company in the world in finance and investing at the time. It's called Goldman Sachs. And when I tell you that like normal kids like me didn't work at Goldman Sachs, like you don't you don't have like a like a dad who didn't go to college and a mom who was a special education teacher and go to Arizona State and go work at Goldman Sachs. Like that just does not happen. So when the recruiter called me about this, I was like, "Yeah, I want to take this call." And I had such a big chip on my shoulder that I went ham through the interview process. I did everything you could humanly imagine. And I ended up making 3x my salary again. And that took me to Chicago and New York for one of the best investment banking firms in the world.
What I learned from my mentor at Goldman Sachs that helped me get the next job was that no matter what you do, if you do one thing right, which is control what gets into your brain, control the inputs and what you consume, that leads to your outputs, aka how you succeed. And since I learned that, I've been obsessed with making sure I only listen to things that feed me. Things like this podcast. So, if you're not already subscribed, this is your moment to do it, to steal all of my rich mentors homework, like my mentor from Goldman Sachs. And make sure that you're not filling your brain with things that aren't going to give you the success you want in life. And so, if you aren't already subscribed, if you're not already following us, if you're part of the 60% of humans that never achieve what they want to achieve fully, I would change that and I would subscribe to the podcast.
The lesson is when you can get around people who are smarter than you, do it every chance you get. Especially when it makes you uncomfortable, you become what you surround yourself with. So if you surround yourself with a bunch of people who aren't winning, who don't make any money, who aren't happy, who aren't married, who aren't having sex, guess what? You ain't doing none of those things. So thankfully I went to Goldman Sachs and again it was these group of people who lived in worlds I've never understood. That was the first time I heard the term we summer somewhere. I was like, we summer? I was like, I think everybody's summers. There's like a summer and it's a fall. There's this this is like a thing. What are you talking about? And I heard all these fancy words and um people live, you know, lives where they they went to international schools, you know. I didn't I didn't leave the country except to go to Mexico probably when my parents didn't know it uh until I was well uh out of college.
I start working in Goldman. I climb my up the ladder and I'm the again I'm the little duck paddling underwater like a crazy person. And what I learned there is half the time it's not what you know, it's not how you're doing, it's who you know and even more who knows you. I was working like crazy. And when I went to go to get promotion from kind of the miserable job that it is when you become an analyst, that's the low guy on the totem pole at Goldman Sachs to trying to get to the next level of the game. It was like rejected, rejected, rejected. And I remember all these people getting ahead of me and they were really good at a thing you should never feel bad for doing, which is self-promotion. if you are good for real things you did. And I remember being pretty jealous at that time about a bunch of other people. And I was like, man, maybe I'm maybe it's me, you know, maybe it's not everybody else.
But thankfully, that led me to do some pretty crazy things. I ended up not asking my boss for permission and going to another boss in another division, and another part of the company and saying, "I want to come work here. I want to come work there." When I kept getting turned down, uh, I kept going. Finally, one of them says yes to me. Like, sick. My boss sucks, but this person sees I'm great. And my boss shuts it down. He's like, I don't care that that other person wants you again. I'm going to fill it with somebody else. I was like, son of a gun. I'm really doing something wrong here.
So, what happened? I leave. But where do I go? I'm like, well, this time I am apparently relatively unemployable. And so, if you are also unemployable, just know that most entrepreneurs, the reason for your success will be a bad former boss. And so it's okay if you're semi unemployable. If you don't like the people that you've worked with before, have a little introspection to make sure if everybody's an [ __ ] what do we know? You you probably are. So I'm sure I was in many ways back then.
Um, but then I went to uh State Street. And the way I went to State Street was different. This time I was like, "Okay, I want to be a boss. Not the boss, but a boss. I want to manage people. I want to lead a team. And I want to see if I'm any good at this. and are they bad or am I like unleadable? And so, uh, I wasn't really qualified for that at the time. Uh, and the best way to get something you were unqualified for is to show don't tell. Is to do proof of work, not proof of resume. And so, what did I do? I went out to State Street. I looked at all these jobs they had outstanding. I had there was one that I thought I could do, which was in Latin America, and I put together an entire business plan. Here's how I would run this division. Here's the client list I would go after. Here's the scripts I would use. Here's the product I would sell. Here's the people I would hire for my team. Here was my budget. I just put together like I did all the work and I still didn't get the job. And then I did it three different times for three different people and three different roles at State Street until I swear to God one of the guys finally called me and he goes, "Are you this Cody Sanchez girl that is calling all of us?" And and I said, "Yeah." I go, "Can you imagine what I'm going to do for you when I do this when I don't get paid? What do you think I'm going to do for you when I do get paid?" And he was honestly like worn down like a sad dad, you know, after the kids just beaten him up. And I was like, "Okay, cool. Let's do this." He gives me a job.
That job was pretty incredible because that was the first time I got to run my own little team. I got to have people report into me. But if you think I was good at it at first, you're out of your mind. I remember the first time I had to fire somebody, which was like my first employee, too, whose name was Ryan. Sorry, Ryan. And Ryan was like straight up Bostononian. I lived in Boston at the time. And I remember nobody respected me. Like respect is earned, not given. I wasn't deserving of respect. And if you're not getting respect right now, it might be because you need to have a little bit more dangerous of a demeanor. It might be because you're not that impactful of an enemy, so you can't be a very good ally. And that was me. I wasn't really I wasn't really dangerous on either side of the coin. And so Ryan respected me about as as little as a human could. And I remember one day we're at an event and he looks at me and I'm his boss and he's like, "Uh, you got any tattoos?" and he's Bostononian, so he has an accent and I at the time did not. I'm like, I do not, Ryan. And he's like, I got one. I'm like, that's cool. I'm excited for you. And he's like, uh, you want to know what it is? I'm like, I feel like you're going to tell me. And he responds, it's a squirrel reaching right up towards my And I was like, Ryan, what the did you just are you? He goes, "My nuts. My nut sack. You get it?" I was like, "I do. I in fact do get it." Then he proceeds to ask me if I slept with anybody to get this job. And at that point, I'm like, we are we are backsliding here. This is not working out very well. He also proceeds to like not come in with these elaborate stories about why I'm getting in trouble because I got this liability on my hands. And it took me having the balls to do a thing that's like not very well lauded on the internet, which is tell somebody they're not a fit for your company. Like if you want to get hated quickly, go tell somebody that was hard for you to fire somebody on the internet. doesn't go over very well. But the truth of the matter is, if you want to make crazy amounts of money, you're going to have to do something irrationally difficult. Your bank account is a reflection of this of of the difficult decisions that you've made and the difficult conversations that you've had. The more difficult conversations you have, the higher the bank account you will eventually have.
So, that was my first little lesson. And I was like, "All right, now I got to figure out how to get somebody here who would actually who who I could be worthy of their respect, and I got to live up to that."
So then I'm looking to leave State Street. Boston's amazing place. What up, Bostononians? Tell me if I got any of you guys who listen. But it's cold as [ __ ] and I'm from Arizona, and so I was so cold. I had lived in like New York and Chicago and Boston. Also, highly recommend if you stay in the place that you were born, it is really hard to change the human who you were. move often. See who you are. You can always go back, but at some point it's hard to leave. So, see what it's like when you uproot your tree. So, I I was ready to leave Boston because I'm a wuss and it was too cold. And I'm looking for my next role. Um, and so I I I want to switch into a different part of finance. And for you guys, I don't know if you've ever like, you know, you want to get to this next level, but like you can't see the bridge between the two. It's too far. or like you're like how do I get this ladder from where I am to what I want to be. What I want to be is like not reasonable for where I'm at but I want to get there and that was me and that's when I really wanted to break into private equity. And so there's one firm at the time that was doing it really well. They're called Credit Swiss. They're not as round as much anymore. Uh, but I wanted to work at Credit SW and I wanted to run this division there like I I was at State Street. And I had to interview at in three continents with 12 different people. I had to pay and fly myself out to those locations to get the job. I remember I still remember the way the guy laughed at me when I told him that I went to Arizona State. He thought it was a joke. He was like because I made the Harvard to the West joke. He goes, "Ah, oh, you did go to Harvard?" I'm like, "No, no, bro. I did go to Arizona State." Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got three degrees. He goes, "Do all of them combined equal a real one?" I was like, "This is going well. I think he likes me. I think we're probably going to get hired." Shocking. I don't get the job at Credit Swiss. And I'm actually kind of ticked because at that point I was really qualified. Like I already had the client list. I spoke multiple languages, English and Spanish. I knew the territory. I was already covering it. And they hire this other person. And I'm like devastated.
But inside of the thing that I wanted more than anything else was that line from the Gar Brook song, which is sometimes uh you should thank God for unanswered prayers. Because what that led to was me building my very first billion dollar and assets under management business in Latin America. I could have gone and been somebody else's employee or I could have built my own company. And the reason why again a chip on a shoulder so big it fuels bigger than any backpack. So I go to a company called First Trust which is awesome and I'm loving it and I'm building like crazy. And then I get divorced. And I'm like, everything's going so good. Total destruction of my life. Uh, lose all my friends. Uh, lose my house. Uh, lose a bunch of money. Um, feel awful. I'm so embarrassed. We work together at the same firm. That was a real real blast. I'm like the only female, not to play the woman card, but it is true. I'm the only female uh that that runs a division there, and all the rest are dudes. So, who do you think they like more? Spoiler, not this one. So anyway, they all side with him. I'm still there. It's a total nightmare. And yet I have built this big huge business where like nothing had been built before. So I was like, "You're going to have to pry this out of my cold dead fingers." I was like, "What do I do now? I have to like walk away from this huge thing that I built or I have to like see him every day and kind of get these comments." And I remember like one of them in particular, one of the MDs I I will show it to you. We'll put you if you see this in the YouTube video, I'll put it up there. I keep it to this day. one of the other uh you know kind of directors like I was sent me an email real late at night one night and it just said you are dumbing down the firm. I'm glad you're happy but you're ruining the mission that we're on. Something to that effect. You can see the exact words here. You're dumbing down the firm. That's the part that I remember more than anything else. And I remember thinking [ __ ] like I'm too tired for this. Like I'm tired. I'm beat up. It hurts. My heart hurts. I like, you know, I I just feel like I'm getting kind of attacked on all sides. And I'm like, I'm just going to give it up. I'm like, I'm gonna leave. And I talked to a couple other people at the firm. You're like, they're like, you're crazy. You can't leave. You bought this all up. Like, you already lost all this other stuff. You're going to lose this, too.
So, instead, I start dabbling in my side hustles, my little side hobbies. And like, I start growing and I start like that's just is when I start buying companies. If you know anything about what I do on the on online now, I started buying up these little companies. And I realized one, whoa, thank God I didn't buy these while I was married cuz that [ __ ] would own part of them. So I was like, that's sick. Okay, now I got these side things. They're actually making me a ton of money. That helped because, you know, I'm expensive. And so I was like, I can't leave this firm and not have any money and I don't want to live on my couch and I like nice things. And I think they lie to you guys when they say that you have to live on your couch in order to have success. I do not think you have to do that. I think you have to do very hard things, but I don't think you have to go to the point of bankruptcy and breaking and and all of that in order to win. And so, um, these things are like making some money. I'm like, this is cool. What a win. If I hadn't gotten divorce, if him and I hadn't gone through that, if all those people at the firm weren't really mean to me, I wouldn't have tried to like get a little safety raft going.
Then, of course, what happens? I start getting a little notoriety like they're covering Cody Sanchez is doing this in Latin America. I'm on a magazine cover. That's cool. Well, the CEO comes to me and says, "I want to take a walk." Which spoiler you guys, not a great sign ever. So, I'm like, "Oh god, I'm fired." And he takes me on a walk and he basically says, "At this company, we get rich quietly, Cody." And I thought, "Why can't we like get rich together? Why can't why can't we all talk about what we're doing?" I totally disagreed with him. He's like, "Well, listen. I got a boat and on this boat we're rowing left and if you want to row right, you got to get your own boat, but you can't stay on mine. And now as a CEO, I understand it. Back then I was like, who do you think you are? But I get it. He's right. I those weren't my chips. That wasn't my boat. He has every right to go the direction that he wants. So I had to leave the company. I basically got pushed out.
But you know what that led to? I went to another company. I raised $100 million for that company. And we had a huge fund in an industry that historically didn't. I got three new partners. I was no longer a director, which is like a level here. I was a partner, baby. I was like in the game. I was a player. And that was awesome. And we had one fund and it had incredible returns. And then we have another fund and it's doing great. And I think I'm kind of like on high, right? And at each stage of these you guys, my network stacking up, stacking up, stacking up. goes down a little bit, goes back up higher, goes down a little bit, but even higher. And then at this stage, I do a thing that I really hope you do consistently, which is I tell them, I think we need to take money off the table. We're winning. We're like winning big. And if you learn one thing about money, it should be save some for when it stops shining. You need to have a little cash for a rainy day. And so I was like, "Ah, man, guys, we're doing so well. We're crushing it. I don't think this is sustainable. I think we better put some cash on the side and move it over. And I remember I was the youngest of the three. I was uh there were two ladies at the time. Uh, but I was the youngest by far and they were like, "You're out of out of your mind." Like this is going to the moon. We're going to crush it. Don't Don't keep talking. We have more experience. We've seen this before. And I pushed and I pushed and I push and they wouldn't listen to me. And so I was pretty upset and I let that be known and I thought I was right. And then one of my employees calls me and he's What's up LJ if you hear this? LJ's the man. And LJ calls me and he's like, "Hey, uh, I think they're going to fire you." I was like, "They can't fire me. I own part of this place. What do you mean fire me?" He's like, "They're like digging up trying to find something on you so that they can push you out because you think that we should do X and you're really pushing for that investment committee. They don't think your vision's aligned with theirs." I'm like, well, first of all, a truth that I've come to agree with, which is when you have something hard to say, say it to somebody's face. No matter what, you will have more respect for not going around somebody else's back and instead having the coahones, as we would say in Spanish, to say it straight up. So, I thanked LJ LJ and uh and then I got invited to the dinner, a dinner with one of the partners.
Now, I'm not very scary. You can see me, but my husband is scary. He is a former Navy Seal. And not only does he have the scariest of Navy Seal arresting [ __ ] faces, he is also jacked and a pretty big dude and also knows a lot about weapons, like an odd amount about weapons. And everybody knew that at my firm, but I knew the guy that was going to try to pull this one over on me where he was going to try to sort of strongarm me out of the company at this dinner and try to tell me like he kind of thought he could intimidate me, I think. Which to be fair you guys, throughout your entire life, there will be people that try to use their intimidation, their aggression, their whatever to make you feel less than. And when that happens, you have to figure out, is this a moment that I hold a wall or am I made of paper? And those moments where you stand up and you realize that you are not made of paper, they're the moments where life really changes. I remember shaking on the way to this dinner. It was actually here in Austin at a hotel and Chris came with me. And so I was like, "Here's my plan. He thinks I'm going to come to dinner, just you and just me and him. And he's going to try to like he usually does either yell at me or intimidate me or blackmail me. I don't know what's going to happen." And uh you're going to come, Chris, and you're just you're not going to say anything except you're just going to sit there and look scary. and that if he doesn't let me talk, like he sometimes doesn't let me talk, you're just going to put your hand on his shoulder and you're going to say, "I'm going to need you to let my wife speak." And he's going to he's going to be scared. And when I tell you the joy of my life that happened to you guys, when we get to this hotel, we go to stand in there. This gent who I won't say his name sees me. I see his eyes flare because he sees Chris, too. And then he comes up. Oh, hi. Hugs. Hugs. Hugs. And then goes, "You know what? I got to I got to go to the bathroom really quickly." And I peek around the corner and I watch as he gets on the phone. I'm sure to call the other partners and go, "Oh no, you know, Cody's husband's here. I don't know if this is going to go exactly the way we want to. I don't know if I'm going to be able to strong arm her. I don't know what they actually said."
Anyway, we come back out and I lay it on the table. And I'm like, he starts talking about something. And I'm like, "My mom has a great line." She says, "9.9% of the time when I ask you a question, I already know the answer. You have the ability to tell me a truth or a lie here. Your choice." And his face was like, "What?" And so then I told him, "I I know that you're trying to push me out of the company. Don't ask me how I know it. I know. I know you're trying to dig up something to make me look like the bad guy." And it's not going to happen. So you have two options. One, you get out of the way and you resign, or two, you give me a buyout option. But there's no three. So it's one or two. And he's like, "Well, you can't force that." And I said, "I think my attorney can." And so we can choose that non-paper wall led me to the very first time you guys maybe past any point that that normal entrepreneurs do it doing something completely on my own for 15 years. I had worked for other people. I had worked with other people. I had done stuff with other people in finance and I didn't really love the people in finance. And this was the first time that that big scary moment where I almost got pushed out where he tried to blindside me turned into me putting up a not paper wall.
And if you think it all gets better the second that you have your own business, I'm going to let you in to a surprise. Having a job is hard. Having a business is hard. Choose your heart. Having a partner is hard. Not having a partner is hard. Choose your heart. Everything is hard. So, even though I started then my own company and built that company profitably and grew it a ton and had more success than I'd ever had in my entire life and more freedom than I'd ever had in my entire life, I also had more pain than I'd ever had in my entire life. At one point, I had a partner who wanted to stop working but wanted to keep part of my main company. The only way that I could get him to stop is I had to pay him a million dollars. I had to go through lawsuits and back and forth and gnarly letters until finally I said, "I will pay you $1 million to just leave. Just like stop working cuz I you're you're you're just in the way of everything. Just get out of here and here's a million dollars." So that was my first probably milliondoll payout. And so it doesn't get easier as you get bigger, but you you do start to build up this armor of nos and can'tss and shoulds until eventually it almost stops bothering you. Eventually you won't get bothered by the things that bother you today. Like there's some magic that happens the more you get in entrepreneurship. It's like lifting in the gym. In the beginning maybe five pounds kind of a lot. Then it's 10 then it's 15 then it's 20. that at some point you cannot even reconcile that five pounds used to be enough because you keep having gains and gains and gains. And it is the same thing in the game of success, money, life, and business. The more difficulty you have, the more burden you can carry. I don't ever think it gets easier, you just get better. And so you shouldn't ask for an easier path. You should ask for the ability to shoulder more. Those are what my prayers sound like. It doesn't sound like give me all this money, make it easier for me. I it's usually sounds like give me the strength and confidence to believe that this is possible for me. Give me the ability to do this task or to learn more intelligently until I can. Please don't give me problems and tasks that I cannot handle right now, but give me the ability to learn how to handle the ones that I do have.
And then like at some point in your life, you will have a moment in which you think you will lose everything you have built. You know, when you're young, you actually don't have much to lose. You have something called ego risk that you could lose, reputational risk that you could lose. Um, but you don't actually have a mortgage and kids and finances and uh overhead at your company. You don't have all this big huge risk that's hard to understand when you're young, but eventually you will. I've never met an entrepreneur that hasn't had a moment that almost broke them. And usually the joke at when I tell that story is somebody in the crowd will go, "Only one?" because you're going to have many moments like that and um this was one such moment where I had built the company I was doing all the things but I had another member of my company running some of the finances that person was either inept incompetent or fraudulent and I didn't realize it but we were a few weeks away from being completely out of money. I am talking about employees that I couldn't pay. I am talking about having to shut it down. I'm talking about complete and utter loss and so much fear about what that would look like, especially when you wrap up your identity into what you were a business owner, a CEO or whatever. And I was so scared for that to happen. And I remember, you know, I've told this story before, but I remember talking to my dad at that point and saying, uh, what do you do when you don't know where to go? You don't know what to do. You don't know who to talk to next. And he calls that your hand your head in the hands moment when you're sitting alone in the couch in the dark with no idea what to do next. And he said, "You're not in the game if you haven't had that moment. You're not in the game of success if you haven't felt completely lost. If you haven't felt like you were going to lose it all, if you haven't been completely mortified at the idea that you might not make it. If you have, then you're in the game, baby. But if you haven't, then you aren't taking big enough risks."
That one little risk, I think without it, all of the companies I have today, all of the opportunity would have never been there because you cannot have financial success with multiple multiple zeros if you have no system or of oversight to make it. Almost losing everything built the foundation to make sure I never do that again. Almost losing everything meant that I understood how to run a real company, not how to have hope, luck, and a prayer. So that thing in front of you at this moment that you think is going to break you might actually be the thing that is going to catapult you to the next level of the game.
There's a quote that I love by Austin Butler and I want to play it for you here. I was at a party once and I was I was dancing and and they they said uh embarrassment is an underexplored emotion. Go out there and make a fool of yourself. Go for it. Like feel that feeling. The fear of cringe and literally go out there and do The truth of the matter is, you shouldn't be scared about failing. You should be scared about looking back at yourself 10 years from now and thinking, I haven't changed at all. Take the big leap. Do the thing. Because the only real failure is never actually trying. And it's not just me that says this about failure. Listen to Kobe Bryant, the man himself. If you fail on Monday, the only way it's a failure on Monday is if you decide to not progress from that. Right? So that so to me that's why failure is not existent because you know if I fail today, okay, I'm gonna learn something from that failure and I'm going to try again on Tuesday. And what I love about that quote is he's right. He does it for the love of the game, not the win or loss of the game.