Transcription
You are plagued by self-doubt, while top entrepreneurs are moving at speed and getting more done in a week than most people are getting done in a year. Speed is a key ingredient in success. Move fast, be bold. Speed of innovation is what matters. Amazon has a million and a half people, and the company is still fast. Top entrepreneurs are not plagued by self-doubt. They have a key ingredient that unlocks speed, and we're going to talk about two ways to get that key ingredient in today's video.
Let me tell you a story about how fast Steven Bartlett moves. I was speaking at the same event as him in Romania. He arrived in the morning at 10:00 a.m. By 11:00 a.m., he had checked into the hotel. He was in the gym doing a workout. By early afternoon, he had arrived at the venue. Backstage, he was leading an innovative team meeting with a dozen of his senior people. Then, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, he spends an hour on stage. He delivers an amazing presentation. At the end of that, he walks backstage and he goes back into the green room. He's going to be presenting to another group of over 500 people, and he delivers another hour-long presentation to hundreds of people in an online environment. Then I bump into him at the business lounge in the airport, where he's working on a pitch deck, and then we jump on an airplane where he shows me some of his next big products that he's going to launch and talks me through some of his big ideas for the year ahead. He's a powerhouse of moving fast and getting things done.
In my first year in business as a 21-year-old, I went and booked ads, booked venues, filled venues, made sales, did $1.3 million worth of sales in my first 12 months. All while people I knew who are twice my age were sitting there plagued with fear and not getting on with it. By the time most people had figured out whether they should act or not, top entrepreneurs have already taken action. They've already gotten the results. They've already kicked the door off the hinges and made things happen.
So, how is it that they're able to do this? How are entrepreneurs moving at speed? What is the ingredient that top entrepreneurs have that allows them to go fast? The key ingredient is confidence. Entrepreneurs who can do things quickly have confidence. And confidence is the thing that unlocks speed. Whenever you see someone who's moving fast, you know that underneath that speed is confidence.
So where does confidence come from? The definition of confidence is the ability to know what's going to happen next. When we think about a confident athlete who's throwing a basketball into the hoop, they know what's going to happen when that ball leaves their hands. They've got a high degree of confidence as to what happens next. When we think about a professional Formula 1 driver, they're driving around the track at 300 mph, but they have a high degree of predictability as to what happens next. So, confidence is nothing more than your ability to predict what will happen next.
So, where does this ability to predict come from? It comes from data. So I want to start by explaining this idea of a confidence interval, because this is where confidence comes from. A confidence interval basically means that you collect lots of data, right? All this data is coming in, and most of the data starts to fit around what we call a bell curve. And when we collect 30 points of data, we then know that most of the data, in fact about 65% of the data, will fit within this range here. And this gives us our first confidence interval. So our first confidence interval is that about 2/3 of the data fits roughly speaking into this box here. We're starting to predict what will happen.
Now let me translate this to you for a business situation. Imagine that you do 30 sales meetings, one-to-one sales meetings, and out of 30 one-to-one sales meetings, you make three sales. So, what that means is that we can predict with about a 65% accuracy that if you were to do 300 sales meetings, you should get 30 sales. Now, are you guaranteed to get 30 sales? No, you're not guaranteed. But, you know, you're going to be about 2/3 right. You're going to be right 2/3 of the time. You're going to be pretty confident that about 30 sales, it might be 33 sales. It might be 27 sales. We know with about 65% confidence that if you do 300 sales meetings, you'll get about 30 sales based upon doing 30 sales meetings and getting three sales. So that amount of data gives us our very first confidence interval.
Now, here's the next confidence interval. If we were to do 150 sales meetings, right? So we do 150 one-to-one sales meetings and we were to get 15 sales, that gives us a new level of confidence, right? So we now have a new confidence interval. We're not 2/3 sure. We're now about 95% sure. Right? So, we've moved to a greater level of confidence. We know with about 95% accuracy that roughly speaking, we should be able to extrapolate forward that if we were to do 1,500 sales meetings, we'd get roughly speaking about 150 sales. So, now we've increased our confidence. So, we've expanded our confidence interval, right? So, our confidence interval is essentially our ability to predict what happens next.
Now, does that mean that there's not going to be outliers? Of course, there's going to be outliers. There's going to be a professional athlete who throws the ball at the hoop and it just bounces straight off. That's going to happen some of the time. There's going to be a race car driver who crashes the car. That's going to happen some of the time, but most of the time, we can predict that they're going to be fairly successful. We know what's going to happen most of the time. So, we have these confidence intervals.
So, the two tests that I like to use when I am doing anything in business is called the 30 test and the 150 test. So, we want to do a 30 test to get our first level of confidence and a 150 test to get our second level of confidence. What might this look like in typical business situations? If I was to post 30 pieces of content and see how many leads that that content generates, that's going to give me a little bit of confidence. If I was to post 150 pieces of content and see how many leads that generates, that's going to give me much more confidence in my ability to do this.
Now, the reason that we're doing this is because confidence equals speed. People who have a lot of confidence can move really, really fast and get a lot done really quickly. And that is a key thing that entrepreneurs do when they're performing at their best.
So, let's think about the person who doesn't have confidence. Consider this. If you don't have confidence to speak publicly, to get up on a stage and speak publicly, it's probably because you don't have a lot of data about what happens when you do that. I could almost guarantee you that if you were to get up on stage and do 30 public speeches, you would have much more confidence when it comes to public speaking. If you'd done 150 talks on stage, you would have 95% confidence because you would know what happens when you set foot on stage.
Let's say that you don't feel confident in front of a camera. There's a good chance that if you don't feel confident in front of a camera, it's because you've not done it 30 times. If you had done it 30 times, you'd have 65% confidence. If you'd done it 150 times, you'd have 95% confidence getting in front of a camera because you can predict what's going to happen next. Remember, confidence is nothing more than your ability to predict what happens next, and your ability to predict what happens next comes down to how many data points you've got. The first confidence interval comes from 30 bits of data. The second confidence interval comes from 150 bits of data.
How else could you use this? If you've never hired someone before, you might want to look at 30 resumes. You might want to have 30 one-to-one meetings with somebody who could potentially join your team. You've got a pretty good level of confidence that you know the types of people who are willing to join your team. If you've never run ads before, you might want to spend enough money to get 30 clicks over to your landing page to give you a little bit of confidence as to what happens next. If you want to get more confidence, you might want to run enough ads to get 150 clicks over to a landing page to see what happens next, because that's going to give you more confidence.
When we normally describe confidence, we normally describe it as a feeling rather than as data. Here's what I would like you to do. Rather than focusing on the feeling of not having confidence, I want you to refocus on the data that you've been able to collect. Because the feeling should only indicate that you don't have enough data. When we feel confident, it's typically because we've done something 30 to 150 times and we intuitively just feel confident that we know how things are going to work out. When we feel a lack of confidence, it's because we typically haven't done something 30 to 150 times. So, we intuitively don't know how things are going to work out.
Have you ever heard of beginner's luck? Beginner's luck is where you have no data, so you're just optimistic about how things might work out. You don't really have a way of judging. You're just going to turn up and see what happens. And that's what we call beginner's luck, or that's what we call newbie confidence. Newbie confidence is just simply a really positive thing because you don't have the data, so you're just curious to see what happens next. And some people have newbie confidence, but long-term sustainable confidence comes from data.
So, here's my challenge to you. My challenge to you is to pick something that you're not confident on and to go out and collect 30 pieces of data and to then re-evaluate and see if you can predict what happens next. Then go and do 150 points of data and see if you can increase the level of confidence about your ability to predict what happens next. You may want to apply this to advertising where you drive people to a landing page and check the conversions. You may want to apply this to public speaking where you get up on a stage more often. You may want to apply this to sales meetings where you do more sales meetings. You keep notes, you keep data, and then you evaluate at the end of the process. You may want to do this with hiring, right? What we're looking for is to raise your level of confidence. The one thing I really want you to do is to suspend your feelings until after you've collected the data. Rather than focusing on how you feel, just simply acknowledge, I don't yet have the data. I'm going to choose how I feel about this once I've collected 150 samples.
So, why is it that someone like Steven Bartlett can move fast? It's simply because he's now got enough data to know that he can move fast. He's done a thousand episodes of the podcast. He's worked with more than 30 world leaders. He's worked with more than 30 celebrities. He's worked with more than 150 high-profile people. And he knows how that's going to work out. Confidence is not some magical mythical thing that some people have and other people don't have. Confidence arises out of data. It arises out of samples. The two tests that every entrepreneur should be conducting more often is a 30 test to get 65% confidence and a 150 test to get a 95% confidence so that you can feel better about how things are going to work out for you.
The mindset of an entrepreneur is a passionate visionary scientist. You're going to be passionate because you care about this. You're going to be visionary because you have an opinion of the future. And you're going to be a scientist because you collect lots of data and then you figure out how confident you're going to be. Now, if you're not quite sure what to collect data on, I've got a video that is 29 minutes long that breaks down the entrepreneurial journey into five clear steps from zero to a million of revenue or more. It's going to tell you step by step what to collect data and how to feel confident to move to the next step. So, the next video to check out is this one here. Okay. I hope your business is doing really well. I hope you're succeeding, and I look forward to seeing you next.