How are you going to create value that someone else in the world wants or needs? Businesses are created by people for the benefit of other people. And so we need to understand human psychology. Both our psychology and the psychology of the people we interact with relate to.

Think about in your own life, in your own businesses, like what is the thing you're looking forward to and excited about? And it could even be small. Like one of my phrases I like is put it on the calendar. What's on the calendar? What are you looking forward to?

I think a lot of the the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow, right? Like how quickly can this business turn a profit? You know, how can we do that really predictably? How much cash are we going to generate? At Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around, well, how big is that opportunity? Like, is that a huge opportunity? Is that opportunity big enough? Cuz if it if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that interesting.

The thing that ultimately allowed me to get over the hump was actually playing out the worst-case scenario in exquisite detail. Like, so if I went there and I failed, I can always get the job back. Mhm. So, like, this is actually a significantly lower-risk move than I'm perceiving it to be. Me doing all this stuff only makes me more valuable.

The secondary argument was for me, I was young at the time. I thought to myself, if it's this hard now when I have no kids, I have no wife, I have no stakes, it's going to be nearly impossible for me to do later. And so I was like, I have to do it now. Jump and the net will appear.

Hard work alone is definitely not enough. You have to work hard, but you also have to work smart. Hire the best people, especially if they're better than us. Always raise the standard in everything we do in our people, our processes, and our products. Honestly, just keep trying and keep trying and don't be afraid to fail. I think that's so, so, so important.

Building wealth, it's a very simple formula. Spend less than what you make and invest the difference. Period. It's so funny. Those of us that are entrepreneurial, we we're like, I want to work for myself. And then you find out your boss is a jerk. You find out he's he's a slave driver. 16 days and cracking the whip and you're exhausted. You don't even know what you're doing and you're scared and you're lonely and you're and you're, you know, you're stepping and fetching and you're leaving the cave trying to find something to kill and drag back and oh my gosh, it's hard. It's really hard. And then add a bunch of outside societal variables to it that are all yelling at you that you're going to fail. It gets scary. It gets hard. And, um, if you're not a little scared, you're weird and you should be a little scared. That that if you're not a little bit lonely and a little bit, uh, overworked and a little bit stressed, uh, welcome to self-employment. Welcome to running a small business. That's how it works. Uh, the good, that's the bad news. The good news is is that it can get better. Uh, it's a natural place to be because I think the hardest you ever work is when you first kick it off.

The thing that ultimately allowed me to get over the hump was actually playing out the worst-case scenario in exquisite detail. Like, so if I went there and I failed, what would I do? I was like, well, I'd apply to business school and I'd have this cool story and they like entrepreneurs or people who tried to do things. So, this would actually this would be fine. And I have plenty of friends who would let me sleep on the couch if I had to. I could go back to mom and dad's house with my tail between my legs, which I felt it was was that was honestly the most horrifying thing that I could imagine going back home as a failure. But the idea, the one that that got me out of it was I can always get the job back. Mhm. So like this is actually a significantly lower-risk move than I'm perceiving it to be. Me doing all this stuff only makes me more valuable cuz I'll have a cooler story than somebody who just did four years of this job rather than two and then did, you know, two years of things on their own.

Go make something a little bit better at the job you have right now. Like step number one, if that coffee shop isn't giving you what you want out of it, you're not making enough money, you don't love what you're doing, how can you actually give more to the business, which sounds counterintuitive, but I would come up with every single day, what's a little bit more that you can be doing? Can you be going around and seeing if anybody wants some additional orders? Try to take note how much the business is making each time that you're on shift and then how much it makes after you start making these changes. Create a little list of the things you did to affect your will on the world. Show that, hey, you actually know how a business works and you want it to grow. Small little changes. Maybe you go outside, you're starting to say hi, you hand out a little coffee sample to people. Think like an owner. Have an ownership mindset because when you have an ownership mindset, that transfers to ownership eventually.

Then the second that you do that, I want you to go to the owner of the business and I want you to tell them just a little brief, hey, here's the stuff I've been doing at the business. No ask. I've been doing this little list of things. It seems to be working. Here's some of the experiments I've been trying. First of all, they're going to be shocked. Nobody's going to ever have done something like that to them. You are already now the 1%. Second step, you do it for a few more weeks. At the end of a few weeks, you go, "Hey, I've been doing these extra things. I'd love to make some additional money here. Is that possible? Can you show me like what a career progression looks like here for me to move to the next step, for me to make additional money?" Here's the thing. If they say nothing, this is Starbucks. We don't hire this way. you're stuck here, then that's a bad company and you need to start looking elsewhere. And you need to as you're looking for your next thing, not just have a resume, but have some case studies. Here's what I did in my last business that they didn't ask me to do. Here's how I realized that I could provide positive value. I can promise you one thing only. That capability is so rare and desire is even more rare. And so, if you can show those two things in the world, you will go from having an owner's mindset to an owner one day.

I think the biggest thing that I took away from my time at at Stanford and from that class was the focus on going after really, really big opportunities. And I think one of the things that's so different growing up here in LA, I think a lot of the the business community that I was exposed to is more focused on cash flow, right? Like how quickly can this business turn a profit? You know, how can we do that really predictably? How much cash are we going to generate? At Stanford, the business culture is entirely oriented around, well, how big is that opportunity? Like, is that a huge opportunity? Is that opportunity big enough? Because if it if you're not going after something that could reach billions of people, that's not that interesting. Uh and that was a totally different way of thinking for me combined with the venture capital approach which is really to invest a lot of money early and scale quickly and then build out the business later, uh after you've achieved scale after you've achieved mass adoption.

The big, so the key is the big opportunity is build a personal brand next to an elegant business model. That is that's everything. If you build the personal brand, it doesn't have to be a massive personal brand. If you've got 5 to 50,000 followers within a high-value niche, if you're seen as a key person of influence in a high-value niche, that's enough of a personal brand to make seven figures. Uh if you've got an elegant business model, you can sell to anyone in the world. Uh you can communicate your value to anyone in the world. That's some of the stuff with an elegant business model. So essentially, those are the two pillars. If you're not financially successful or where you want to be at the moment, you want to look at building a personal brand and attaching that personal brand to the right business. Those are the two steps. So ultimately, if you said, if I was 21, I'm trying to build my personal brand. I'm trying to attach that brand to a per to a great business. That's the key to capital. It's the key to talent. It's the key to customers. So, it's that personal brand on a scalable business. You look at every single person who's who's succeeding right now, they're focused on just those two things.

If you're going to move on anything, what I would say is move as fast as possible. And it's fascinating because you've met with many billionaires now doing this podcast. I've met with many of them in buying businesses, building businesses, etc. And if there's one thing they all have in common, it's the same idea of speed. So, um, you know, when I was talking to Bill Perkins the other day, who him and I have done a bunch of deals together, he said the same thing. He's like, "I am not smarter than anybody else or richer than anybody else. I just move faster than anybody else." And by the time they've even pondered an idea, I've made a move, made three mistakes, and found a better way. And so, if I could give anybody broad money advice, it would be you're waiting too long. And maybe be a little honest with yourself about are you thinking a lot? Is there a lot of mental masturbation going on on money? Are you actually taking action and then doing like the scientific process? Trial, error, trial, error, trial, error as quickly as possible with as little cash as possible so you can figure out what works for you.

And then the only other thing I would add is, you know, coming into this next year, you have what, I don't know, 40 days left in the year, something like that. So January 1 can start on January 1 for you or it can start today. You know, it can start 30, 40 days earlier than everybody else. And because of that, you've already got a head start. You know, I can't tell you how many people, in fact, I was just talking to uh another person this morning and they were saying, "Well, should I wait until 2025, you know, because business financials at the end of the year, they're wrapping up their financials?" It's actually a really reasonable question. But the answer to waiting is almost always no. And so, if you see people who are really successful, they just move faster than you could ever imagine. And I remind myself that a lot. And so, I would start there. Whether you're going to start learning, whether you're going to start doing, whether you're going to start allocating, just start, uh, because you'll make some mistakes, but you'll learn a lot from it. And it's just it's all dependent on you and you know that and that's what you signed up for.

So, it's okay, but you don't want to stay there cuz it feels like you're on a treadmill. And so the way to level up out of that is to start to talk about, okay, how do we get some team on board that can create some revenue and that can make some of the widgets and can do provide some of the services. And I've got to learn to manage my freaking time because you you know when you're in the treadmill stage, when I was in the treadmill stage, you're you're running from crisis to crisis to crisis. You just wear a fireman's hat all the time and you're not doing any thought past the moment. All you're doing is living in the moment. And that just is chaos, chaos, chaos, chaos, chaos. The customers feel it. Your spouse feels it. You feel it. And you don't feel like you're getting traction because you're not. You're on a treadmill. And and so you've got to start managing your time and going, "Okay, I'm going to set out blocks of time to think about something other than the flavor of the moment, the crisis of the moment." And I'm going to start talking about how can I add team members. Um, just a few key ones just to get this off of my shoulders. They're tired. Yeah. And and the the that sounds very obvious, very primitive, very simple, but that is exactly how you level up out of out of that and move on.

Yeah. And and so what would it take? And it's like, hey, if we have a deal that we're working on, like what would it take? Now, you can make the decision whether the price tag is worth it, but at least you learn the price. And what I have found in my life is that when I when I try to answer those questions, like, what would it take for me to be number one in this field? What would it take for us to to to lead this market? What would it take for me to be the best salesman in this company? The answers are not as crazy as you'd think. And so a lot of people spend most of their time answering questions not worth answering. It's playing games that aren't worth playing. It's like if you play stupid, stupid games, you win stupid prizes. And so no one asks the question before they play the game. Is this game worth it? And so when you ask the question of like what what is the big goal and what would it take? Then you just get to solve for it and to me it's just great. If if I know what it is, then either I have those resources or I have to use my resourcefulness to get them.

The framework is that every idea is stupid. There is everyone, you know, listen, you probably haven't had a corporate job yet in your No, thank God. Yes. Thank God is right because there's this thing in corporate, uh, I would say corporate America but corporate world and it's the brainstorming session and they put everyone in a conference room and they go, we're going to brainstorm and try and come up with an idea for whatever it is and he goes, but first some ground rules for the brainstorming. Rule number one, there is no such thing as a bad idea. And I call there's plenty of bad ideas. In fact, there's no such thing as a good idea. Every idea is bad. We just don't know why they're bad yet. And so the framework I approach, I assume all these ideas are ridiculous. I assume none of them are going to work. But here's the difference. The reason I start from that that, uh, position is I don't want to commit the single worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur, which is fall in love with your idea.

And you talk about the person who sees the dog throwing up and they go, "I've got a great idea." And then what happens? Nothing. They go home and they go, "This is a great idea." And they tell their partner and their partner goes, "Oh, that's brilliant. I'd buy that." And so they go, "Okay." And they begin working on a business plan and they write this 10-page business plan and they're dreaming about how they're going they're how amazing it's going to be. Just think about we have this line of, we can do cats, too, and then giraffes. You know, they've they've built this incredibly ornate business in their head all based on this feeling that this must be a good idea. And you've got to nip that in the bud. And the way you nip it in the bud is you try rather than dreaming how amazing this idea is. The first thing you think about, the only thing you think about is how can I quickly, cheaply, and easily collide this idea with a real person and find out is it in fact a good idea or a bad idea? How can I do some kind of hack that will allow me to quickly find out whether customers actually would want this or not? And almost always you build this quick, cheap, down and dirty. I don't mean minimal viable product. I mean unviable. Something you can quickly do like turn the car around and mail a CD to yourself just to find out the the basic premise of, can I actually use the US mail to send movies back and forth? Because if that had failed, well, great, on to the next one. And that's such a critical, critical step. That's the framework that everyone has to have. It is not about having a good idea. Having ideas is easy and trivial. The important thing is how clever can you be to come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to test it.

It's such a waste of time because what happens is two things happen. One is this or idea becomes so large and ornate and complicated in your head that you go, "Okay, Mark, I need to get started. I need to raise $5 million because it's going to have to hire all these people to to build this thing." And they're probably building the absolutely the wrong thing. Uh, you you can't you you can't just go ahead and base on what you think is going to happen. You've got to start from a position of real information.

Listen, perhaps the cleanest way since we have a bit of time is to give you an example. I do a lot of work with university students and, uh, I was meeting with a young woman who, uh, at the university and she goes, "Okay, Mark, I've got this idea. Um, what I want to do is peer-to-peer clothing sharing." In other words, I've got all this clothing in my closet that I never wear or I don't wear very often. And I know my friends have a lot of clothing in their closet and other friends have clothes in their closet. Be great if we had this website and we could all post what we have and we could borrow each other's clothes and and I'm going, okay, that's interesting. What can I help you with? She goes, I'm trying to figure out, should I drop out of college to do this? Uh, how do I raise the money to hire a team to build this for me? And I went, whoa, you know, slow down here. Okay, interesting idea, but let's figure out if we can come up with a quick and cheap and easy way to collide this idea with reality. I said, "Do you have a piece of paper?" She goes, "You smart. I'm a college student. I have a piece of paper." I go, "Great. All right. Do you have a magic a marker?" She goes, "Have a marker? You have a piece of tape?" She goes, "Got a piece of tape." I go, "All right. I want you to write on the piece of paper. Would you like to borrow my clothes?" Knock. And I want you to tape that to the outside of your dormitory room. And we're going to find out in the next 24 hours whether the very, very first principle behind your idea is real. Is anyone going to knock? Because if nobody knocks, well, you've learned something very important right there. This thing you think is so attractive might not be. But let's let's be optimistic. Let's assume a bunch of people knock. Great. You've learned something. But you're also going to learn the next thing, which is are there problems with fit? Are there problems with style? Are the people who knock and look at your clothes actually going to want any of them? All right, let's be even more optimistic. Let's say they do find ones they want to borrow. Well, you're going to find out the next piece. How do you feel when your favorite blouse comes back stained or torn? You're going to find out about the cost of doing dry cleaning. You're going to find out all of these things. And you're going to find about all of this for a piece with a piece of paper, a tape, and a marker. None of this raising money, dropping out of school, and doing any coding. You're going to do something very simple. Now, is this scalable? No. Is this repeatable? No. But that's fine. You're going to do it all with 3x5 cards or on a pad. You're going to do it manually, and you're going to start losing your mind. But when you finally get to the point where you are ready to go and maybe raise money or drop out of school, you're going to know what you're dropping out of school for. You're going to know what you're raising money for. You're going to be able to tell someone, "Here's my acquisition cost. Here's my lifetime value. Here's my CAC. Here's my..." You're going to know all of these metrics. You're going to know the complexity. You're going to try all these different things. You're going to know what demographic. And you found out all of that for nothing except for your time. That's what I mean by figure out some way to validation hack. And that is the key to being an entrepreneur. You have an idea quickly, cheaply, and easy test it, find out it's ridiculous, abandon it, go on to the next one.

Building wealth, it's a very simple formula. Spend less than what you make and invest the difference. Period.

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Who I am now as a risk-taker is so different than who I was when I began. And the way that you strengthen that risk muscle is by taking risks. It's just go out and do something like take that next step. There's so many people I talk to that get stuck, right? And where do they get stuck? It's like, okay, I need a business plan. I need to do this. I need a first customer. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Right. But like, how about just call someone and ask them, do you want this service? Right? Like after that, will you pay me for this? Just do the do any little step to move forward. Otherwise, a year from now, we're going to have the same conversation. I don't know what to do next.

Hire the best people, especially if they're better than us. Always raise the standard in everything we do in our people, our processes, and our products. And if somebody can't keep up with that standard, you got to do something about it. Otherwise, you've automatically lowered your standard. And if you don't show up in your business loving what you turn over for your customers or your clients, your business is in decline.

The whole point is a switch you out of problem mode into solution mode. Most people can only see these are the 152 ways that this could go wrong. And we started doing that to say no matter how outrageous, there is a way to pull this off. So what would need to be true for this to work? Stop telling me all the things that aren't going to work. Tell me the thing that is going to work. First reaction after understanding identifying the problem is okay. What does it take to get there? What's the risk and how big is the reward? Like that's the next step.

[Music]

I had no business starting a business and yet I started one and I have found ways to create and make and sustain multiple seven-figure revenue streams. But I don't think I'm special. I strongly believe that every single business owner once armed with what they know how to do and once armed with the marketing and on armed with the discipline and once armed with the consistency that they too can build a six-figure revenue stream. It's my attitude and it's my effort. You're totally in control of your attitude. And that's what I look for when I work with people and we hire people at absum.com and her effort. There's literally no restriction on effort. There's no law. The only law is 24 hours. Besides that, you can work as hard as you want.

There are really five phases to business. Um, there's what we call the startup phase. Then we move into perseverance. That's like pre-profit. It's when we're still wearing lots of hats and there's not enough people. We get into viability. That's phase three. That's when we actually like look at the business and it's ready for growth. Then scale. And then lastly, succession. I have a systematic way of pushing the businesses through every phase with complete intention. And that's the problem with most small business owner for your vision. Uh, and our vision at Aribba is really simple. We said we want to build a great sustaining company into the 21st century. And then the mission is all about leadership because the object of the game, particularly in Silicon Valley, is to be the category king because when you're the category king, you get 80% of the industry resources and 80% of market cap and then your values. So right, integrity is there, courage, high ambition, accountability, respect, the basics. And then we had a set of team rules that kind of personify those values. And by the way, same team rules for all the companies. The first one is direct, open, and honest communication. In a word, the truth. Um, the second one is no ideas a bad idea. And then we add in parenthesis unless CEOs. So because it's all about making a safe environment and and and you can make us the safe environment when you mock out the CEO. The third one is always raise the standard in everything we do in our people, our processes and our products. And if somebody can't keep up with that standard, you got to do something about it. Otherwise, you've automatically lowered your standard. And the fourth one is we're a team first and functional specialist second. So you developers put your feet in the customer's shoes. You sales guys don't make commitments we can't keep. And then the fifth one is the most powerful one of all. And that is hire the best people, especially if they're better than us.

And I'll give you a specific mentality that really works well. But I would say the success of a founder and success in as a if you want to be an employee CEO within a company is how are you being resourceful? How are you solving the goal and the problems and the priorities with the resources that are available? Most people sit and they complain like, "Oh, I don't have this." Like, there's a lot of people, I'm not getting paid enough. Well, what are you doing about it? Did you put together a proposal? Did you go look at comparison analysis? Did you go create more revenue so it's obvious that people should get paid you more?

We play a game called know what would it actually take. So, once we sit there and go, what is our goal to build a studio as big as Disney? All right. Before you even get started, we sit there and go, "What?" Like, no BS. Don't try and say like the things that we want it to be true, but actually what is true that what would need to be true in order for us to build a studio as big as Disney. And so we sat there and we said, "Okay, it's going to take us to put our own capital in. It's going to take us to work hard. What does work hard look like? Is it a certain amount of hours? It is it a certain amount of achievements where you put things into place and you make sure you're always incrementally working towards that? Is it maybe you have to, um, so this is exactly what we did with Quest. It was, oh, we have to put the house on the line. And that was like the no BS, that's what it's going to take for us to go all in and build Quest Nutrition. And so once we sat there and said, okay, it's going to take us to put our house on the line. It's going to take me at the time to be that the supportive wife to come in and help you out. It's going to take no vacations. It's going to mean you're going to need to take a third of your payer. Like we literally sat down and wrote a laundry list of what it's going to take to start New Quest Nutrition. And once we had that list, we just looked at each other and we're like, "All right, are we willing to do it?" And if the answer when the answer is yes, now you just know what you're heading towards. You know the type of path that you're about to approach. And so there's no surprises. There's no all of a sudden him coming home and going, "Yeah, babe. So the business isn't doing well and so, oh my god, I'm so sorry, but we lose our house." Right? There's no surprise. We've established what we're going to do in order to go for that goal. And in that comes the sacrifices. What are you willing to sacrifice? What are the things that you're okay with, um, putting aside for now? And a lot of that was my self-esteem, my ego of like I didn't know what I was doing. So every day I'm struggling. I'm trying to figure something out and I'm keep failing. But I knew that I had to learn in order to get to the goal that we wanted to get to. So I knew every day I had to get back up. And then the same with him with the skill sets. What skill sets do I have to learn in order to get to the goal that we we have to we want to get to?

Now, if you want to achieve more wealth, you need to invest more money. How can you invest more money? You can spend less money or you can earn more money. It's as simple as that. Now, there's a limit to how much less you can spend. There's a limit to how many costs you can cut, but there's no limit to how much money you can earn. So, if you've already cut back as much as possible, there's no other way that you can cut back and you still want to invest more and you want to see the returns sooner, then you got to earn more money. Now, again, how can you earn more money? Well, if you don't want to do it through starting a business or a side hustle, then you got to do it through your career. Are you at a job that will allow you to earn more money? Are you in a position that will allow you to earn more money? Maybe you have to get a certificate. Maybe you have to go back to school. Maybe you look for a different company. Maybe you look for a completely different career. Maybe you add on a second job. Now, I I can't answer that question for you, but this is where you just have to be honest with yourself and see what type of life do you want to live and are you being honest with yourself? And then you just plug in the numbers.

Like you got a guy that he's running a small tech company or a dry cleaner or whatever it is, they will get into what we call perseverance mode where they're making a little bit of money. Like and perseverance is like you might be profitable one month, you might not be profitable next month. You might be profitable for six months and then you might not be right. And you don't have the right people in the right seats. You don't have the right systems. You don't, there's no way to scale it. But what they do is is they go, they start taking all their revenue and they start putting it into areas that really shouldn't be invested in until they're truly viable. And they they misstep because they don't know the sequencing. What I've realized is there's a sequencing to growing businesses. And it really doesn't matter what the business is. There's a sequencing to it. And if I can actually grow the business properly, hire the right people, create the right governance layers, understand the right KPIs, right, at the right time, then I can systematically get it through that process faster than just about anyone else. I've mastered that and that's how we grow and run and scale and potentially exit all the businesses.

Really, if you look at all the the best CEOs today, the ones that I admire, almost all of them are immigrants. You know, my father's an immigrant, didn't speak English, came to this country. Uh, Satcha, Microsoft, name these companies. I mean, just most of them, the guy running Google, Sundar, uh, a lot of the ones, I mean, even Elon Musk, who is debatably a great CEO, you know, South Africa. And so what is it with them that we can all learn from? And at appsumo.com, we have Aean from Iran, my father's from Israel, Alona is from Uzbekistan, Sean is from London, and Vanessa's from Colombia. Like, you know, what is it about immigrants that we can all copy? Because that that is what's what built America was, well, y'all came here from somewhere else. And so the two things that have really struck with me and I saw this woman who exemplified it, her name was Sharon, and she kicked so much and she was working basically at the Best Western serving breakfast. And I, you know, if you've never been to Best Western, it should be called the Okay Western. It sucks. It sucks. But she was working like she was at, you know, the the Four Seasons. I could not believe it. She's like bringing me a pancake. She's doing all these things and she was acting like a founder. And and an immigrant, I would say she is an immigrant. And I asked her, I said, you know, tell me more. What's really going on? She's like, there's two things. It's my attitude and it's my effort. And I I think immigrants, uh, have been very successful from thinking, I got to figure this out. I can work as hard as I want. I'm going to do at least my best attitude around that. And I think one of the things what that's common especially for employees is thinking that they can't escape being an employee. Right? I I thought I couldn't escape being middle class. And through, you know, it does take time, patience, and belief and vision. And vision sounds so ominous, but a dream, a fantasy. And through that, that you can create the reality that you can move outside of being the employee if that if that's your dream, which I think everyone should be an entrepreneur, whether it's a millionaire entrepreneur, billionaire entrepreneur, at least some type of entrepreneur.

I thought it was impossible or difficult to ever position myself as an authority to be a consultant. That was impossible. I thought it was impossible to ever create a course, much less create revenue streams of multiple seven figures in the back of courses. Then I thought it was impossible to create a membership. Then I thought it was impossible to start a tech company. So the early, the earliest part of my career was, I want to become a photographer and then I want to become a successful photographer. And then all of a sudden the game got really slow. I could predict my income. I could predict the publicity. I could predict the resources. I could predict the connections. I could predict the publications. And when I predicted it, I loved it and I appreciated it. And then I just didn't want it anymore.

Key is when the world has you a sack of sour lemons, the objective of the game is to turn into sweet lemonade. So what ends up happening for the majority of people is you end up just being a pawn in the system. You just continue fueling the system because guess what? Corporations are going to get you to spend. They hire the best marketers in the world to get you to spend more money. You're going to continue borrowing money because guess what? Banks are in the business of getting you to borrow money. And they hire some of the smartest people in the world to get you to borrow more money to create programs to entice you to borrow more money. Salespeople are the same way. They go through trainings after trainings to learn how to sell something. Again, this doesn't make them necessarily evil. This is just the way the system works. The system is fueled by spending. What we don't have, the problem is we don't have the education to then tell us when we should spend and when we shouldn't spend. We're always chasing the the easy thing, right? The quick fix, right? The scrolling on the phone, the quick hit of dopamine, all of those pieces where what we really want is to feel good, be happy, and have joy. Those are hard and take time and are difficult, right? It it it really matters to slow down sometimes. I'm I I go fast as anyone else, but sometimes we have to slow down if we want those pieces of life. That's slowing down and attach getting back to how do I feel? What's going on right now? And that takes a long time to get comfortable with. Like at first, it's really uncomfortable. Over time, it feels better and better.

You hear all these like I'd say fake entrepreneurs or fake coaches. They don't they don't actually have any real businesses. Uh, they're like, "You got to 10x today and you got to 5x. If you're not 5xing, you're failing." And I was like, I've done that. But it's also interesting. What if you our goals now for for appsuma.com is to grow 10% next year. And it's been that for quite a quite a lot of time. And the reality is is when you set less ambitious goals for yourself, you can stick with them for longer because you're not burnt out, you're not tired, you can sustain. And then by having less ambitious goals, you also have creative freedom because you're not stressed about hitting a target. And that gives you the ability to create 10x opportunities because you're like, "Okay, cool. I'm not worried about making money in that, but I can go do things that could potentially, you know, be moonshots and really drive the company for the future."

Every Friday up until we probably got be about 100 people. We'd go around the room of what we call the round table. Anybody could say anything they want, uh, on their mind. We had seven founders, right? And so this one guy stands up, our VP of marketing, one of the founders, Bobby Lynn, and he goes, "You know, this opportunity is way bigger than I ever imagined. Uh, Arie is going to be way more successful. I think even I can dream of." And he goes, "I think I think we ought to go out and hire a real world-class VP of marketing who's done it before and I'll focus on partnership." And you could just see jaws dropping. And a guy who came after him, I'll never forget his guy, his name was Guy Haskins. He was about 24 years old. He just goes, "Bobby, I just came from a software company that's going to go bankrupt any day now. But if one guy would have had the courage to say what you just said right now, we could have taken it to the moon." So from that point on, it became noble to hire the best people, especially better than us.

You know, I've had the good fortune of, uh, living the American dream. Um, and I feel really, really, really, uh, blessed. And so I think that was one of the things my parents, you know, obviously I I my drive comes from my upbringing and, uh, and it's about paying it forward and giving it back. And so if you look at the things whether it's, uh, what I did in higher education or in business world or in, uh, public service, it's all about that next generation. Um, you know, it's it, uh, one of the things that I started before I went off into government was called the Global Mentor Network, and it's all about, uh, mentoring, uh, tomorrow's transformational leaders at scale. So, you know, we created all these videos of these really famous transformational leaders. And so, if if you ask me, okay, so what would be your big, uh, legacy you want to leave behind? I think back of what my dad would always say about fatherhood. He goes, you never know if you're a good father until you see your children's children. So, I would say, you know, it's all about my mentees' mentees. You never know if you're a good leader until you see your mentees' mentees because you're teaching them how to cascade back down. And I've had some great mentors in my life. You know, there's a genealogy out here in Silicon Valley because this stuff's not written in a book. Mhm. Right. So, you learn from the previous guy. My mom would always say the best way to learn is OP, other people's experience. She would always say best way to learn is from your mistakes. She goes, learn from other people's mistakes. You have time enough to make your your own, right?

Why don't people start? And I say that, you know, in hindsight now, you're going to understand looking back at your own work, the quality of it, what you went through. Why don't they start? I think it's that pressure of failure, the the the feeling of doubt, like and as well wasting time. If they've got a family or they've got a job where it's full-time, then to start something else on the side when they've got to see to the family or the girlfriend or the wife or whatever it is, like you don't have much time to go and do something else that you then hope will eventually in the future take off or become successful. A lot of people say it takes 10 years to become an overnight success and I think that's true. Honestly, just keep trying and keep trying and don't be afraid to fail. I think that's so, so, so important. And everyone I've met, by the way, from the people that run businesses that are 10 times bigger than Gymshark, every successful person in sport, in business, whatever, whether they've started a business or not, every single one of them has failed time and time and time again. And I think then people look at the the final product and just assume that they've just they were either this incredible human who had was born this way or and it is just never, never, ever the case. More often than not, the all the most successful people I've ever met are all winging it. They're all literally just working incredibly hard and they're just giving it their best shot.

I think once you've actually learned how to try, really try one thing for an extended period of time every single day and take all of your discretionary effort and your money and your time and your resources and put it towards just doing that thing. Number one, you realize how few things you can really do well because of the amount of time that it takes. The second thing is you realize how easy it is to beat everyone else because of how few of them actually do that. And learning how to try becomes a generalizable skill across domains. So when you do learn how to play the saxophone and if you want to pick up tennis, you think about how many sessions you did to fix your fix your fingers and you know play play a more advanced and a more advanced thing over and over again. And then when you when you realize that the domains are similar in terms of skill achievement, you're like, "Oh, this is the same thing." And then when you go like, "Oh, I need to make content now." I was like, "Oh, it's the same as hitting 500 forehands and 500 backhands and I make 500 tweets and 400 posts and if I do it for an extended period of time and I take the feedback and I don't stop, I'll probably beat most people."

Hard work alone is definitely not enough. You have to work hard, but you also have to work smart. There's this quote that I read from Kobe where he said he thought that it was going to be super competitive in the NBA, but when he got into the NBA, he realized that people, well, they figured out that they had made it and uh weren't willing to sacrifice as much as he was to

continue to win. And I would say that that that realization has been somewhat true for me, which is that like winning it hasn't gotten harder from the actual doing stuff side. There has been the trades that have been different than I expected. Um, but especially when you're looking at, you know, the population of everyone to a 100 days of doing something in a row.

Uh, there was a there was a friend of mine who had a he offered a guarantee on a product that he sold. And the guarantee was this. He said, "All you have to do, you can get all your money back if you just open up a Google doc and say what you're going to do every day. And at the end of the day, you're going to say what you did. That's it. and you just do that for 6 weeks. That's all you have to do. And if you do that and you don't get the the results, I'll, you know, I'll give your money back."

And what's crazy about that is when he was talking about, he said, "Do you know what the completion rate of twice a day doing something is?" He's like, "It's like less than 1%." And so I think we underplay how simple success is and extrapolate an expectation of how easy it must be from that and then we're disappointed or dissatisfied when it doesn't meet those expectations. Like it is harder than we expect but also the rewards may be also greater than we expect.

Why didn't you quit? Because as I said a second ago, there must have been so much force telling you to go and get a real job. Yeah. But why didn't you quit? I think it just leads back to again proving people wrong and proving myself right. And like the only other option I had was to go and work for my dad and I didn't want to do that cuz I'd done that all my teens and I hated it. I hated cleaning mini buses and ripping stickers off the sides of windows and going to auctions and bidding on cars and stuff. Like that wasn't me and that was the only other option I had. So it was like this is it. It's all all or nothing really.

Setting yourself up for success and setting yourself I say you have to be intentional about something right and so for me the intentionality was what do I have to learn so I don't go back to prison? What do I have to learn so that I don't become dead before a certain age? And then I I got past that and then I'm like, what do I have to learn to become a great father?

At the very start of your business there's not going to be a ton of evidence evidence that it's going well. There's probably not going to be a ton of revenue, probably not going to be a ton of users, but there will be evidence of progress, evidence that you're getting better, evidence that you're making marginal gains. And for me, and even with this podcast, I don't necessarily look for results today or or more viewers or more downloads or more revenue. What I'm looking for is is this thing getting 1% better week over week? Because it only then takes a 100 weeks for us to be 100% better and that means we're moving in the right direction.

Businesses are created by people for the benefit of other people. And so we need to understand human psychology. Both our psychology and the psychology of the people we inter interact with relate to whether that's customers or employees, contractors, the other people in our world. And then there are certain parts about how the world works, system and process, how things tend to interact with each other that's very valuable and important to know. And I think there's there's a lot of for for the person who wants to start a new business, a lot of it comes down to answering those fundamental questions. How are you going to create value that someone else in the world wants or needs?

So, you're going to have to create a company. Create something that generates a lot of value. Typically, that's going to be a company. So, you're going to create a company that meets a very well-known need that has not yet been serviced by a product that is relatively easy to get across the finish line and into the marketplace. It needs to be something that is going to resonate with social media. And it needs to be something that doesn't cost a lot of money to get started.

So either you're going to layer on way better marketing. So if somebody has a solution to a well-known problem, but they don't know how to market it, you can go and partner and say, "Hey, look, I understand marketing. I'm going to be able to get this out there." Or if you have an information product that can be associated with a known problem that you uniquely can solve. I happen to know a little bit about your background. So, if there is an element to uh working in the music industry, to becoming a professional singer, improving your voice or something like that that you really have a beat on that, you know, a lot of people are interested in that you could turn into a course, for instance, that people would really resonate with, um, that could be a great one.

The reason that I keep coming back to information products is you're looking for something that doesn't cost money upfront. If you're gonna like take Quest Nutrition for instance, when we were building that, there was still a substantive amount of investment that we had to make. Even just buying uh a bunch of protein powder was expensive. Buying the liquid fiber, you have to buy them in 55-gallon drums. So, it's like there were still thousands of dollars that we had to put in in the beginning. And so you to find something that really takes little to no money down, you're either going to be doing an information product or you're going to be doing something that you can make yourself that doesn't have expensive uh constituent parts or you're going to be finding something that's already made that the person doesn't understand marketing. So, it's really about what is the bit of value that you're going to be able to bring to that that's unique that somebody else can't easily replicate that the world is going to know instantly that they need and you just have to make them aware of it.

Cuz 3 years is fast. And so, Quest for instance, depending on what you mean by rich, so for instance, 3 years into Quest, we had a billion dollar brand, but I was I didn't have a billion dollars that I could put in my pocket. So, I was still driving. I think by then I had finally upgraded my car. But for a first couple years of that, I was still in a beater car even though I was worth a lot of money. And so, if you need the money to be in your pocket, that's probably going to take a fair amount of time longer. And if I can take a minute to get everybody watching to understand the difference between net worth and income, that would be really valuable.

So, if you don't mind generating a million dollars plus in net worth, now we're back to you just have to build something that other people say that they want. To have the actual money in your bank account, you have to build worth in something that people say that they want and then you have to sell that thing.

For me, given my skill set, we didn't invest in the foundations of the business early enough. I I was going back to being arrogant at the start. I I didn't really respect what maybe the ops or finance people of this world did. I the the foundation elements of the business to me were nowhere near as exciting or fun as the front-end elements of the business, the product, the brand and the marketing. So I think if we'd have better prepared ourselves for that from a like I said data, ops, finance, all these things, I think Gym Shot would have grown far quicker.

I think uh whether you have a menial job or an important job, it's what you're learning. I mean, I there wasn't a job where I didn't learn a lot. For me, I would take any job, not based on pay, but gee, what could I learn? What could I learn? Because that made you more valuable. I never really thought it made you more valuable to be paid more, but hey, I haven't done this before. Let's see what this is about. And you learn skills.

I think I learned more through my waitressing jobs cuz I always had a few at once. You know, you could always get a waitress job behind a counter. I think I learned more about people waitressing than building my business. Honest to God, you have to size someone up. Your territory is your counter. You have to make them happy. You want to upsell them a little bit. Maybe you say, you know, you give the second cup of coffee for free, but how about a slice of cheesecake is really good today. You learn how to hustle. You learn how to be organized, how to get the containers in order, how to make sure they're filled when the customer steps out, how to get that person something to drink while you're working on this person. I mean, I learned so much in every one of those jobs. And you know what's great about having a lot of jobs? You start to get a profile of what you're good at and what you're not. And I in short order after maybe seven or eight jobs, not that I knew what I was going to do for a living, but I knew what I was good at. I knew I was good at getting along with people and making them smile. I could talk to somebody and make them happy. Absolutely. And I also knew that I was efficient. I could create a system in anything. I would see the diner counter all wrong, not running right, I would talk to the boss say, you know, if you did this with the maple syrup and change sugar and I could like an executive, I could rearrange the whole counters, you know, in an efficient manner. And I started learning that those were my two gifts. People and efficiency. And if you think about any business, those are really big ticket items. If you could choose people, motivate people, get along with people, make them get along with each other, plus create systems to grow a big business. I mean, the minute you have more than a half dozen people, you need systems. And my companies were always so well organized that it they ran like they just ran like a Swiss clock. Is that a good analogy? Everything was in its place. Nothing had to be duplicated. It was fast forward. And so I was able to build very quickly which I had to do because we had big people in my market. And if I had built and replicated systems at a normal pace, I would never catch up to them. So I had to do double triple time. And what's your answer on that one? Systems. Systems get you moving forward. Get you a get get a business like a machine, you know. And that was a gift I got from my mean ill jobs. Thank God I worked. Imagine if I hadn't worked and went out into the real world thinking I was dumb, that I couldn't do anything just cuz I couldn't read or write. Thank God I learned I could be a lifeguard. I learned I could be a tent salesman. I could be Barbara Buttons calling for solicitations eight hours a day. I could be all those menial jobs. A hot dog salesman sell more hot dogs than the next guy. I mean, I had confidence from every one of those jobs. Like, look how cool I am. Maybe I wouldn't win respect by everybody. Well, who cares about the hot dogs? But in my book, I knew I sold more hot dogs than he sold on his, you know. So, so no, thank God for the jobs. You learn so much by trying different jobs on, you know, it's so important.

This was something that that I learned how to do very early in in my career. I worked for a consumer goods manufacturer, big company called Proctor and Gamble, who make everything, by the way, if people don't know what everything. They literally there's probably 10 things in this room that Proctor and Gamble made. Yeah. Toothpaste, laundry detergent, you know, all of that. I I worked on the home side. And one of the things that I took away was uh every once in a while you'll you'll read in like the the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, whatever about the the crazy lengths that consumer goods researchers will will go to to figure out how people use like paper towels or something like that. I got to be one of those people for a couple years and it was fascinating. I've watched so many people clean their kitchens and there's there's a certain amount of like the value creation process that that is psychology and anthropology of just going out into the world with your eyes wide open, noticing what people do, asking questions, noticing subtle things that they might not even pick pick up on. And then if you do more formal research, you can ask start asking people to make explicit trade-offs between options. And so if you could have a candle that lasted a long time versus had the most amazing scent throw ever, which one would you pick? And you can start to to kind of navigate the space of possible solutions in that particular category by talking to people who buy candles because you don't want to ask a random person on the street. You want to talk to people who will actually purchase the things that that uh that you're creating. But by paying attention and by asking questions and starting to to get a feel for how the people who are making these buying decisions actually navigate the process of narrowing down options to make a decision. That's where you find some sometimes the very tiny things that make an enormous difference.

There's sometimes you can walk into a room and be the smartest person in the room. You don't want anybody to know that and you want people to just talk. Let you know just talk. Give them an opening. Give them throw them a bone so that they're going to come back and talk and and learn the personality of this person. Learn. You can learn so much from people just when they talk and you keep quiet. There's other times when you're not the smartest person in the room. And by keeping quiet, nobody knows that. What is this guy thinking? What, you know, what is this thinking? It's a tremendous technique. I think I definitely got the DNA gene and and understood business, but at the same time, I've been a sponge and I'll look and watch everything and pay attention and every day I get up, I look for mistakes and uh what I can learn that day. You don't ever think that you know it all because you don't. And so every day is still a learning process and and you just you can't ever get caught up with who you are because you're worth a few billion dollars and and you have an extremely large company and cuz like I said the day I I don't look in the back of my head that paddle is going to [Music]

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