Speaker 1: You can build something very big in about five to
Speaker 1: seven years, And the problem is most people spend that
Speaker 1: same five to seven years reliving the same thirty days
Speaker 1: over and over again. You have to stay in that
Speaker 1: painful place. Staying in the pain is what gives you
Speaker 1: the catalyst to learn how.
Speaker 2: To get out of the pay Please welcome a serial entrepreneur,
Speaker 2: best selling author, and the mind behind a one hundred
Speaker 2: million dollar business portfolio, Alex Hormosis.
Speaker 3: What's that number one misconception you hear when people are
Speaker 3: thinking about building a business, and you go, that's the issue.
Speaker 2: I think the conflict sequence.
Speaker 1: A lot of people who are wanting to make money
Speaker 1: believe that you're making money comes from investing.
Speaker 2: In Vesting is the last thing you do, not the
Speaker 2: first thing you do.
Speaker 3: How do you get over the block of I don't
Speaker 3: want to work for free?
Speaker 2: I actually think it's entitlement. You're not working for free,
Speaker 2: you're learning and then you're earning.
Speaker 3: Should you do what you love for money and love.
Speaker 2: What you do? I think this is big myth. Number two.
Speaker 3: People fail not because there's some magical list nobody has.
Speaker 3: They fail because it's an obvious list nobody does.
Speaker 2: It's the obvious list.
Speaker 1: If you were trying to get in shape, you know
Speaker 1: you should eat less than you should move more.
Speaker 2: You already know what you're supposed to do. The question
Speaker 2: is why you aren't doing it.
Speaker 3: What do you think is the number one emotion that
Speaker 3: people don't know how to control that leads to family fear?
Speaker 3: The number one Health and Well Inness podcast, Jay Setty,
Speaker 3: Jay Setty set Alex Almosey. I've been looking forward to
Speaker 3: this interview for a long long time. My friends are fans,
Speaker 3: I'm a fan, and I know we were in touch,
Speaker 3: like maybe even a couple of years ago. Now it's
Speaker 3: been but I'm so happy to be at the holy
Speaker 3: grail of acquisition dot com. I saw the big logo
Speaker 3: when I walked in. Congratulations and everything you've been up to,
Speaker 3: and I'm so glad to introduce you to my audience,
Speaker 3: some of who I'm sure follow you already and love
Speaker 3: your work. And then I'm hoping you get a ton
Speaker 3: of new fans and a ton of new people being
Speaker 3: impacted through this as well. So thank you so much
Speaker 3: for doing this.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for having me, and I've
Speaker 1: been I'd say a mirror right back. I've been looking
Speaker 1: forward to talking because I think there's so much good
Speaker 1: stuff that I think is going to happen.
Speaker 2: So I'm very excited.
Speaker 3: I love it, Alex. I want to start with asking
Speaker 3: you something that I've been thinking about a lot when
Speaker 3: I'm talking to people today, and it's when I think
Speaker 3: about my community, my audience who's listening right now, what
Speaker 3: are you going to unblock for them? When you if
Speaker 3: someone read all your books, listen to your podcast, listen
Speaker 3: to today's podcast, what are they going to unblock that's
Speaker 3: been tripping them up, keeping them behind, or holding them back.
Speaker 1: I think they would have clarity on what actions were
Speaker 1: required to get what they wanted, and then at that
Speaker 1: point they would only have to just think like why
Speaker 1: am I not doing it? Which is a separate conversation,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot of confusion. I would say around
Speaker 1: like what are the things that are required in order
Speaker 1: to create a business, in order to create an income?
Speaker 1: I would say that I'm an objectivist, and so I
Speaker 1: just look at what are the things that are observable?
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of time people spend inside
Speaker 1: their heads trying to think of about manifesting and energy
Speaker 1: and all of this stuff. When it's like, we got
Speaker 1: to let people know about the stuff we have, we
Speaker 1: got to have something to sell, and we got to
Speaker 1: make sure that what we're charging costs less than it
Speaker 1: costs to deliver it. And we try and do that
Speaker 1: as many times as we can. And so each of
Speaker 1: those pieces obviously as frameworks behind them, but they're all
Speaker 1: tied to one thing, which is just what actions are required.
Speaker 1: And that's been the single pervasive frame in my life
Speaker 1: that has made navigating reality significantly easier for me, because
Speaker 1: I was very confused coming up, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what any of this is. And I
Speaker 1: read all these self help books and I felt more
Speaker 1: confused after the tenth book than I did in the
Speaker 1: first book. And then it's just like, Okay, what do
Speaker 1: I have to do? And then that is kind of
Speaker 1: what has started this journey for me.
Speaker 3: What's that number one misconception? You hear what people are
Speaker 3: thinking about building a business, making money, changing their financial situation.
Speaker 3: What's the number one thing you hear and you go,
Speaker 3: that's the issue.
Speaker 1: I think the conflate sequence is probably the first and
Speaker 1: biggest thing because a lot of people who are wanting
Speaker 1: to make money believe that the making money comes from investing,
Speaker 1: and investing is the last thing you do, not the
Speaker 1: first thing you do. And so one of the things
Speaker 1: is the look at people are at the end of
Speaker 1: their careers and say, Okay, well, these guys are making
Speaker 1: all these these bets. Right if I just bought this
Speaker 1: mean coin or I just bought bitcoin and twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: I'd be super rich. But it actually doesn't take into
Speaker 1: consideration what a decision making process like that would create,
Speaker 1: which is if you took a swing at every type
Speaker 1: of bitcoin, because you can't just say I would only
Speaker 1: pick this one. You'd have to say I pick every
Speaker 1: single super long shot. It's like we probably would have
Speaker 1: lost them ninety nine of the other bets, and so
Speaker 1: it's like we have to take it an aggregate. And
Speaker 1: so I would say making active income cool again rather
Speaker 1: than the passive bed and really just gambling. Is Probably
Speaker 1: the first thing that people mess up is that they're
Speaker 1: they somehow think that working or active income is not scalable,
Speaker 1: when in reality, the people who have the most money
Speaker 1: typically have tremendously high incomes, and it's because of the
Speaker 1: excess of cash flow from that income. Are they able
Speaker 1: now to make big swings with riskier bets that sometimes
Speaker 1: pay off and sometimes don't. But you can't take those
Speaker 1: swings unless you have more cash lots coming in from
Speaker 1: the things you do every day.
Speaker 3: You know what, no one's ever said it that well,
Speaker 3: like from everyone I've spoken to, And I'm so glad
Speaker 3: you pointed it out, because I completely agree. I have
Speaker 3: so many friends who, when they saw the rise of
Speaker 3: crypto or whatever it was, jumped in with a large
Speaker 3: sum of their life savings because they heard of a
Speaker 3: friend of a friend of a friend who'd made a killing,
Speaker 3: put it all in there. A week later, it dropped
Speaker 3: by like ten k, they pulled it all out. The
Speaker 3: next week it went up double and it was just
Speaker 3: a mess, and so many of them lost like ten
Speaker 3: twenty thirty forty pounds dollars. And it's all because you're
Speaker 3: thinking that's the way to get there, and it's cooler
Speaker 3: and it's smarter, and like you're a genius, and you're right. Actually,
Speaker 3: everyone I know that's made amazing money on any of
Speaker 3: that already had tons of money and it was play
Speaker 3: money for them. So it just changed into this. So
Speaker 3: what's happening there? Why is it that we've been led
Speaker 3: down this thought process, and how do we get out
Speaker 3: of it?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's fundamentally something for nothing fallacy
Speaker 1: of like how can I get rich quick? How can
Speaker 1: I do it really easily? And basically, the more it
Speaker 1: feels like luck is usually where you should have your
Speaker 1: first red flag if you I mean, I have a
Speaker 1: belief that if you control all the variables, then you
Speaker 1: can predict the outcome. Now, we don't always control all
Speaker 1: the variables in any given situation, but the greater number
Speaker 1: of variables we control, the greater influence we have over
Speaker 1: the outcome. And if you're getting into something like this
Speaker 1: and you're like, I actually don't even know what the
Speaker 1: variables are, then it's like you are one hundred percent gambling,
Speaker 1: and so this is your life savings. Would you put
Speaker 1: it on black at the casino? Probably not. This is
Speaker 1: really not that different than that, except at thexino you
Speaker 1: have no nods at least.
Speaker 2: Right here, it's like you have no idea.
Speaker 1: And typically by the time especially gen pop kind of
Speaker 1: retail investors find out about something, it is the peak
Speaker 1: and it is too late, and so you have to
Speaker 1: be at the very beginning of these if you want
Speaker 1: to be speculative, which I whoheartedly am not a big
Speaker 1: fan of speculative investments in general, because it's basically the
Speaker 1: greater fool theory, which is what they called in the
Speaker 1: investment world, which is just like we just keep selling
Speaker 1: to the greater and greater fool until sometimes somebody is
Speaker 1: the greatest fool of all and then it drops.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so I prefer to think about instead of thinking
Speaker 1: of investments and active income, I think of the just
Speaker 1: money per unit of time, and that kind of takes
Speaker 1: out this binary what I would consider a false binary
Speaker 1: if active and passive and think well, and I feel
Speaker 1: like I can prove this pretty clearly, which is we
Speaker 1: live in time and we collect money in that period
Speaker 1: of time. And so fundamentally, all we want to do,
Speaker 1: if one to increase our income is just think what
Speaker 1: are we earning per unit? And this is where again
Speaker 1: bad piece of advice is like never sell your time.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, well, if someone give you a billion
Speaker 1: dollars for an hour, would you.
Speaker 2: Not sell that?
Speaker 1: I would, right, And so it's a question of how
Speaker 1: much is your time worth? And then that creates a
Speaker 1: much more actionable decision making framework of is this worth
Speaker 1: it or not? And to ladder up to the active
Speaker 1: versus passive, it's how active is it versus how passive
Speaker 1: is it? And it's my belief that nothing is passive
Speaker 1: because there's always going to be a certain amount of
Speaker 1: if you're doing it right.
Speaker 2: Let's say, if you want, you made one passive.
Speaker 1: If you're doing it the right way, you probably should
Speaker 1: have looked at a hundred deals and all of that
Speaker 1: took time, and all of that takes diligence, and then
Speaker 1: after doing all this analysis, then you decide to make
Speaker 1: this investment. And so to say that it's passive, it's
Speaker 1: like it doesn't take into account all of the research
Speaker 1: that goes into ahead of time, which is absolutely still
Speaker 1: work now after the investment. Sure, but there's still time
Speaker 1: that you're trading by first breaking that idea of like
Speaker 1: if we're in order for me to get rich, it
Speaker 1: must be something that I don't trade my time for.
Speaker 1: I think is like big myth number one. So if
Speaker 1: we assume that, then we say, okay, I have to
Speaker 1: trade my time for money because money comes in over time.
Speaker 1: What are the things that I can trade my time
Speaker 1: for that will get me more than I'm currently getting,
Speaker 1: which is a much more solvable problem that also is
Speaker 1: significantly less risky. And so especially when you're trading time,
Speaker 1: we have some and so we don't we really just
Speaker 1: risk the time to be like I would, I never
Speaker 1: want to I don't want to sell them. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: not a slave. It's like calm down, where it's a
Speaker 1: voluntary exchange and if it's and here's the thing is,
Speaker 1: if you don't think the price is worth it, then
Speaker 1: don't make the trade. And that's one of the beauties
Speaker 1: of capitalism is it's two parties both saying they'll be
Speaker 1: better off. And so fundamentally, I would say the focus
Speaker 1: of the content and stuff that I put out is
Speaker 1: how can I equip people with the skills so that
Speaker 1: when they trade that time think it more for it,
Speaker 1: and then continue to trade up and up and up
Speaker 1: for the rest of their careers.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, that's actually such counterintuitive advice to what
Speaker 3: I feel has been spreading on the internet for the
Speaker 3: last two decades of every conversations around passive income. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I feel like every one of my friends is addicted
Speaker 3: to figuring out how they can make passive income and
Speaker 3: those are the same people that are not making any
Speaker 3: more money than they already were. But it's this addiction
Speaker 3: and obsession with if I figured this out, then I
Speaker 3: won't have I can quit my day job and whatever
Speaker 3: it may be.
Speaker 1: Ye, And I've had influence so that my neighbor is
Speaker 1: he owns Panda Express and so last time I checked,
Speaker 1: they did three point seven billion dollars in revenue and
Speaker 1: they have about a twenty seven percent that March, and
Speaker 1: so he took home nine hundred and thirty five million
Speaker 1: dollars in personal income, not investment income. And so people
Speaker 1: see his investment porfolio, which is impressive, as you can
Speaker 1: imagine be doing it forty five years, and so.
Speaker 2: That starts to add up, right.
Speaker 1: But the thing is you can only take these kind
Speaker 1: of bigger swings or bigger bets because he has this
Speaker 1: very regular cash. So they spent forty five years building,
Speaker 1: and I would say that what's interesting is that you
Speaker 1: can build something very big in about five to seven years.
Speaker 1: And the problem is that I think most people spend
Speaker 1: that same five to seven years reliving the same thirty
Speaker 1: days over and over again, jumping from thing to thing
Speaker 1: to thing, and never actually getting the root set so
Speaker 1: that they can pay down their ignorance tax of not
Speaker 1: knowing enough. Basically, there's I would say there's five stages
Speaker 1: that most newer entrepreneurs are people who want to pursue
Speaker 1: income go through. So the first is what I call
Speaker 1: uninformed optimism. So your friend tells you about this thing
Speaker 1: they made ten grand on and you're like, that sounds amazing.
Speaker 1: You're uninformed, but you're optimistic, right, and so then you
Speaker 1: get into it, and then all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: get to informed pessimism. So you get in and then
Speaker 1: you put your money in and then it drops and
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, this sucks. And then you know, people
Speaker 1: are like buy the dip, and so you're like, OK,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put more money in. And so then you
Speaker 1: get to kind of stage three, which is the value
Speaker 1: to spare, where you're like, oh my god, I've lost
Speaker 1: so much money. I have no idea what's going on
Speaker 1: right now. And at stage three there's kind of a
Speaker 1: fork and so either people then go, well, my other
Speaker 1: friend told me about this other thing, and they jump
Speaker 1: back to step one and go to uninformed optimism, and
Speaker 1: then they just they funnel through that loop over and
Speaker 1: over again. Now to break through that dip, you have
Speaker 1: to basically get to stage four, which is informed optimism.
Speaker 1: So now you understand the rules of the game, you
Speaker 1: understand the variables at play, and it's not as good
Speaker 1: as you thought it was, but you at least get it,
Speaker 1: and so from there then you can get to achievement.
Speaker 2: Right is the fifth step.
Speaker 1: But the thing is that you have to stay in
Speaker 1: that third painful place, because staying in the pain is
Speaker 1: what gives you the catalyst.
Speaker 2: To learn how to get out of pain.
Speaker 1: And so rather than trying to pull your parachute, it's like,
Speaker 1: I have to trudge through this so that it forces
Speaker 1: me to learn the individual skills, the individual variables that
Speaker 1: affect this outcome, and that means I might have to
Speaker 1: take twenty more lashings to finally get it, and then
Speaker 1: point it starts to tick up, and then that's when
Speaker 1: you start to.
Speaker 2: Become more of an expert, more of a master at something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if you don't send that pain, you're gonna
Speaker 3: keep repeating that cycle with something new. So it's crypto,
Speaker 3: then it was nft IS and it was whatever else
Speaker 3: just keeps going around and around around is that system
Speaker 3: in this new book.
Speaker 2: So this is probably for one trunk above that.
Speaker 3: Okay, got it, gotta got it? No, because I was
Speaker 3: I love the way you break down the journey that
Speaker 3: we go through in our mind, and you do that
Speaker 3: with multiple things, because I think we don't even see it,
Speaker 3: Like that pattern you just explained is a pattern you
Speaker 3: could live for three decades. You've just saved people three
Speaker 3: decades of pain by pointing it out and saying, well,
Speaker 3: this is what you're doing and here's how to shift that.
Speaker 3: And I think people make the mistake where we go,
Speaker 3: I don't have time to learn, so I'm going to
Speaker 3: learn from someone who makes me feel like I can
Speaker 3: learn it in an hour, and then I'm going to
Speaker 3: do it, which still is uninformed optimism. So how do
Speaker 3: we learn? Where do we go? How do you build
Speaker 3: that time to say? How many hours do I need
Speaker 3: to even learn about this? So I'm going to put
Speaker 3: money in it? How would you calculate that If someone
Speaker 3: is like I'm going to put in a thousand I'm
Speaker 3: going to put in a ten thousand dollars, how much
Speaker 3: time should they put to value that amount of money?
Speaker 1: So great question. I would reframe the premise, which would
Speaker 1: be we'd still be operating under this as I'm going
Speaker 1: to put money into something, And so I would reject
Speaker 1: the original premise and say, well, if you want to
Speaker 1: get really good at something, then why don't we start
Speaker 1: with the skills that generate income. And so if we
Speaker 1: follow kind of the three elements of a business at
Speaker 1: its most basic form is you have some element of promotion,
Speaker 1: so we got to let people know about our stuff.
Speaker 1: The second element is we got to have a way
Speaker 1: to convert them, so we have to be able to
Speaker 1: sell some sort of exchange mechanism, and then finally have
Speaker 1: to deliver right. So track, convert, deliver very easy, well,
Speaker 1: easy to easy to say, harder to do right. Within
Speaker 1: each of those things, it's like, okay, well how do
Speaker 1: I let people know about my stuff? Or even before that,
Speaker 1: what stuff do I sell?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And so that's where I like to think about it
Speaker 1: as people trying to think, man, there's so many people
Speaker 1: and try to boil the ocean, like it's impossible to
Speaker 1: try and think what business could I possibly start because
Speaker 1: you're trying to address the world when it's much easier
Speaker 1: to say, what are the problems that exists? In my life,
Speaker 1: and I kind of think about it as the three p's, Like,
Speaker 1: most businesses come out of a passion, so something that
Speaker 1: you're just inherently interested in.
Speaker 2: They come out of a profession.
Speaker 1: So you currently exchange Right now, you have a job
Speaker 1: whatever it is, and you get paid, maybe not as
Speaker 1: much as you want, but you do get paid for
Speaker 1: exchanging some sort of value with the business. And the
Speaker 1: third is P, which is pain. Right, so there's some
Speaker 1: deep pain that sometimes you went through. So maybe it's
Speaker 1: a mom who had to figure out how to create
Speaker 1: non allergenic food for their kids, right, It's be something
Speaker 1: as small as that. And so from that, those three
Speaker 1: kind of buckets is I think the best starting point
Speaker 1: for most people who want to start making an income.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, well, if you're inherently interested in this topic,
Speaker 1: it's like, can we make Can we let people know
Speaker 1: about stuff around that topic, Can we create solutions around
Speaker 1: that stuff? Can we create services? Which is where I
Speaker 1: prefer most people start, which, to be fair, in the
Speaker 1: United States, seventy eight percent of businesses are service based businesses,
Speaker 1: and I think it's because they're the easiest to start.
Speaker 2: You just trade time for money. Low risk.
Speaker 1: You either get rich of it or you don't. But
Speaker 1: like your base is zero.
Speaker 3: Have you seen any metrics in success rates between passion, profession,
Speaker 3: and pain.
Speaker 2: No, I haven't. That would I really want to know now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. The reason why I ask it is because I've
Speaker 3: been thinking about this for so long and I want
Speaker 3: to go through each of those because I think they're
Speaker 3: really I think it's really sound advice. I used to
Speaker 3: really believe that everyone should try to do what they
Speaker 3: love and love what they do, and I've changed my
Speaker 3: mind about that. And I used to believe it very strongly,
Speaker 3: probably like ten years ago, only to then realize that
Speaker 3: that works great for the one to ten percent, but
Speaker 3: for the majority of people, that's going to be really,
Speaker 3: really hard. And recently I was giving the Princeton commencement
Speaker 3: speech for their graduation, and I was thinking about it
Speaker 3: a lot before I gave that speech, because it's like,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, these are like the most talented, smartest
Speaker 3: people in the country who have everything at their disposal.
Speaker 3: And I know that even some of these people may
Speaker 3: not get a job they love or may never ever
Speaker 3: build something they love. But guess what, everyone needs money
Speaker 3: to survive. So the question is, and I want to
Speaker 3: hear your take on it, and I'll reflect back, is
Speaker 3: should you do what you love for money and love
Speaker 3: what you do?
Speaker 1: I think this is big myth number two, So if
Speaker 1: we have we start with, you know, passive versus active
Speaker 1: is big problem Number one. Number two is follow your passion.
Speaker 1: I think the reason that this is so espoused. I'll
Speaker 1: start where I think the idea comes from and then
Speaker 1: kind of break down from there. I think it's because
Speaker 1: most of those commitment speeches are billionaires or very successful people,
Speaker 1: and they say, follow your passion. But if we think through,
Speaker 1: what other advice could they give that would be socially acceptable.
Speaker 1: They can't say, you know, I got lucky. They can't
Speaker 1: say I worked, you know, super hard, because we were
Speaker 1: like sure.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: And so then it's like, okay, well, they're never going
Speaker 1: to get attacked for saying follow your passion. But the
Speaker 1: problem with that is it also assumes that your passion
Speaker 1: or your interests will never change. And I mean, anybody
Speaker 1: who's listening to this, just think about what you were
Speaker 1: really interested in ten years ago. It's probably different than
Speaker 1: it is now. And if you exrapolate that in another ten
Speaker 1: years it'll probably different again. And so if we can
Speaker 1: think about the hypothetical extreme of a really successful person
Speaker 1: as someone who sticks with the same thing for an
Speaker 1: extended period of time, which is something that I believe
Speaker 1: because you learn all the lessons you possibly can in
Speaker 1: a very narrow field, right, and that you basically try
Speaker 1: and make as many mistakes as you can, and if
Speaker 1: you basically pay off all the ignorance that you can,
Speaker 1: it's like you end up just succeeding by default if
Speaker 1: you just fail every other way. But if you try,
Speaker 1: and if you try to do too many things, you
Speaker 1: never actually get to push the road all the way,
Speaker 1: you know, trudge through the mud and get there, because
Speaker 1: you're only learning one or two mistakes in many fields
Speaker 1: and not many in one. And so the follow your
Speaker 1: passion issue is that, yeah, number one, the passions will change.
Speaker 1: Number two is that sometimes you're passionate about things that
Speaker 1: people don't value. And the thing is there's something wrong
Speaker 1: with that. It's just that it will be very hard
Speaker 1: to make an income that way. The third thing is
Speaker 1: that I think that it creates an emotionality around business
Speaker 1: or income, which is at the moment it doesn't feel
Speaker 1: good that you believe the mid that you should stop
Speaker 1: when I think that if you and I were to
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, the business side of anything. There
Speaker 1: are elements that I love and there are elements that
Speaker 1: I hate, and I see them as both required. You know,
Speaker 1: I would love to maximize one versus or the other,
Speaker 1: but it's just the cost of doing business literally. But
Speaker 1: I try to reframe that pain that comes from doing
Speaker 1: the things that I don't want to do to do
Speaker 1: the things that I do want to do as the
Speaker 1: price tag required to become the person that I want
Speaker 1: to become. And so if we think about the traits
Speaker 1: of any person, so it's like, if I want to
Speaker 1: be patient, then I can't expect things to happen faster.
Speaker 1: Right Like if we were to go to the end
Speaker 1: of our lives and say, hey, I want these character traits,
Speaker 1: It's like, well, if you had to play a character,
Speaker 1: you know, in a video game and make them that way,
Speaker 1: It's like, well, what would you have to put them
Speaker 1: through in order to get those traits. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: if you want patients, then you're not going to get
Speaker 1: things quickly. If you want to have endurance, it's like
Speaker 1: you have to be able to tlright suffering right. If
Speaker 1: you want to be wise, it's like you're going to
Speaker 1: have to get burned and you're gonna have to learn
Speaker 1: the value of judgment, and sometimes that means you're going
Speaker 1: to get betrayed in order to learn that pattern. And
Speaker 1: so it's like we lament the price tag for the
Speaker 1: things that we want. And I think that at least
Speaker 1: for me, my ultimate, you know, long term goal is
Speaker 1: just to become the person the best version of me right,
Speaker 1: and I think that in order for that to happen,
Speaker 1: I will have to go through pain. And so the
Speaker 1: follow your passion, you know, moniker also creates this emotionality
Speaker 1: that gets you to quit when you really are on
Speaker 1: the right path, and it's just this is just part
Speaker 1: of it. And so I think those are probably the
Speaker 1: big three that I think about when it comes to
Speaker 1: why follow your passion doesn't serve most people. And the
Speaker 1: other I would say, bonus four might be that you
Speaker 1: might be really good at something and people are very
Speaker 1: willing to exchange money for that thing, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you actually have to do the thing that
Speaker 1: you work on that you make money on all the
Speaker 1: hours of the day, right, Like you can work for
Speaker 1: twenty or thirty hours a week and then have the
Speaker 1: other one hundred and twenty to do whatever you want,
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty to do whatever you want. And
Speaker 1: that's I mean, not a bad thing in my opinion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the reason I asked. And I think even
Speaker 3: the advice follow your passion doesn't mean focus on your passion, right,
Speaker 3: Like there's this confusion with time. So even when I
Speaker 3: think about it in my life, when I left the
Speaker 3: monastery and went to work as a consultant because I
Speaker 3: needed to pay the bills again, a very real decision
Speaker 3: because I was twenty five years old living in my
Speaker 3: loft room in my parents' house again and that couldn't
Speaker 3: last very long. When I went into that work, I
Speaker 3: was teaching meditation by lunch. Like in my lunch breaks
Speaker 3: in the evenings, I would teach meditation to my colleagues.
Speaker 3: There was no demand for it. Two people would show
Speaker 3: up twenty thirteen. This was meditation and mindfulness were not
Speaker 3: this global movement, and I was just enjoying it because
Speaker 3: I was following my passion. But I was making money
Speaker 3: by being a consultant, which was trading my time for money.
Speaker 3: As I followed that passion more, I got more confidence
Speaker 3: in it. The market changed. We're in a very different
Speaker 3: landscape today twelve years on, for there being business opportunities
Speaker 3: and wellness and health that didn't exist twelve years ago.
Speaker 3: And so now, following my passion for all of that
Speaker 3: time meant there was a time when I could focus
Speaker 3: on it. But let's say I had another passion that
Speaker 3: wasn't monetizable people weren't interested in at all. I could
Speaker 3: follow it for years and bring it into my work
Speaker 3: and bring it into my life, and it would beautiful
Speaker 3: and I'd be more fulfilled, But it didn't need to
Speaker 3: be my thing, right And so I really really like
Speaker 3: that advice, and it's something that I almost want to
Speaker 3: propagate so hard right now because I feel just responsible
Speaker 3: that for so long we've been telling people to, you know,
Speaker 3: just do what you love and chase what you love.
Speaker 3: And it's like, yeah, in your private time and personal time,
Speaker 3: you should, but don't think that that has to be
Speaker 3: the thing you make money from, especially if you have
Speaker 3: a really obscure, oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, gift.
Speaker 1: I one hundred percent agree. I mean, I'm a utilitarian.
Speaker 1: I tend to be very I've probably edged too much
Speaker 1: on pragmatic. And maybe that's just the immigrant upper of
Speaker 1: just like.
Speaker 2: How are you going to pay your bills? Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: all I cared.
Speaker 3: All The funny thing is I had that too. Yeah, no,
Speaker 3: for sure, immigrants too. But I think that there's a
Speaker 3: I think I got really lucky to figure out what
Speaker 3: I loved really early, and I got really lucky that
Speaker 3: I got to get really good at it really early.
Speaker 1: I had this mentor really early on in my career
Speaker 1: who said, never do what you love, because then it
Speaker 1: becomes work. And so just to completely countertake, and this
Speaker 1: guy was a guy who just had a normal He
Speaker 1: had three or four stores that he ran, and he
Speaker 1: retired at age twenty eight, and not as a gazillionaire.
Speaker 1: I think he made something in the impater, probably like
Speaker 1: thirty forty thousand dollars a month, you know, take home.
Speaker 1: And for twenty years he did nothing besides collect his
Speaker 1: money once a month, and then he played golf five
Speaker 1: days a week and he got to hang out and
Speaker 1: watch and basically be there for the entirety of his kids.
Speaker 1: And he loved that and that was that he accomplished it.
Speaker 1: He used to tell me He's like, I slayed the
Speaker 1: dragon of life. And so what's interesting is that now
Speaker 1: that his girls are out of the house, he now
Speaker 1: is going back and he's back in door.
Speaker 2: He's like, well, what am I going to do now? Right?
Speaker 1: I wholeheartedly agree with the not following your passion piece.
Speaker 1: The practical translation might be at least my third myth
Speaker 1: that I would probably tack onto this as we're building
Speaker 1: these is overbelief in idea and under belief in execution.
Speaker 1: And so there's two almost of this. So one is
Speaker 1: that I think many people who are intimidated to start
Speaker 1: believe that they have to start the next Facebook. And
Speaker 1: you know, the Zuckerbergs and the basis of a world
Speaker 1: are so incredibly rare. The vast majority of people who
Speaker 1: gotten into business have many many failured and many many failures,
Speaker 1: many many failed businesses that led them to fail into success, right.
Speaker 1: And so one is that the idea has to be
Speaker 1: this big, amazing thing. And the second is that you
Speaker 1: shouldn't that the idea itself is the success, right, because
Speaker 1: they'll share with as many people as they can, and
Speaker 1: they almost scratch the itch of starting when you haven't
Speaker 1: done anything. I say, there's basically four steps of starting
Speaker 1: a business. It's like, you have to get an LLC,
Speaker 1: you take the LLC to a bank, and then you
Speaker 1: get a bank account, and then you connect that bank
Speaker 1: account to a payment processor, and then you go ask
Speaker 1: a stranger if you can do something in exchange for money.
Speaker 2: And if you do all four of those things, you
Speaker 2: have a business.
Speaker 1: That's it, right, And so a lot of people like
Speaker 1: spend years being like I'm going to start a business.
Speaker 1: Fun day, it's like, you can do it tomorrow. You
Speaker 1: literally do all of this tomorrow, and then it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: then how do I get the person to exchange money?
Speaker 1: It's like, well, you reach out to the people you know, right,
Speaker 1: you open your phone, you look at the four hundred
Speaker 1: contacts you have there. You open up your Facebook profile,
Speaker 1: you have three hundred friends. You look at those friends,
Speaker 1: and then you just say hey, you send a personal video,
Speaker 1: send a personal text, and say hey, I am starting
Speaker 1: this thing. This is what we're doing, this is what
Speaker 1: I'm solving. Do you know anybody that's it? And so
Speaker 1: it's not even like you're asking your friends to buy
Speaker 1: something from you. What's interesting, though, is that ninety percent
Speaker 1: of the time, the person who respondses is, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: you could do that for me if you want, But
Speaker 1: that just gives you the easiest way that costs zero dollars.
Speaker 1: And because we're all connected with the Internet and phones,
Speaker 1: it's like the bearer to entry has never been lower
Speaker 1: than it is now. It's just the problem is that
Speaker 1: the barrier to distraction is even lower.
Speaker 3: What stood out to me there is the personal text,
Speaker 3: the video and the email, and then the fact that
Speaker 3: you're asking your friends to introduce you to people who
Speaker 3: may want to, not asking them directly. That first part.
Speaker 3: The amount of emails I get and I'm sure you
Speaker 3: get as well of people pitching their services to you,
Speaker 3: but none of them are personalized. Yeah, walk me through
Speaker 3: the difference of that personal video that personally because it's
Speaker 3: life changing, like when it's done right, So.
Speaker 1: I mean, these are your friends or at least your
Speaker 1: context that you've met at some point in your life,
Speaker 1: and so trying to recall when you met that person
Speaker 1: literally just stating their name and asking that it's hey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to be doing this. And I would say
Speaker 1: consistency is the currency of credibility. So what people don't
Speaker 1: want to do is refer a friend as somebody who's
Speaker 1: fly by night. But if you can actually just demonstrate that, hey,
Speaker 1: he's still doing that, the likely that they're going to
Speaker 1: refer someone goes way up because the relational capital is
Speaker 1: not nearly at risk, because if I'm going to introduce
Speaker 1: somebody to somebody else, I'm risking my social capital on
Speaker 1: the hope that the third party or whoever is sending
Speaker 1: this original text is actually going to do a good job.
Speaker 1: So you can also include a little bit of risk
Speaker 1: reversal in that, which is like, hey, I'm doing the
Speaker 1: first ten for free, and the reason I'm doing it
Speaker 1: is because I just want to get some testimonials, get
Speaker 1: some reviews, and also just so that I can learn too.
Speaker 1: And I think just being really upfront and really being
Speaker 1: really honest about it makes the stakes feel a lot easier.
Speaker 1: And so then those first ten people, you do exactly that,
Speaker 1: And the thing is is that you're going to be
Speaker 1: better off than they will. For those who are like
Speaker 1: I don't want to work for free, it's like you're
Speaker 1: not working for free, you're earning, and then you're sorry,
Speaker 1: you're learning, and then you're earning. And so we got
Speaker 1: to go through the learn phase first, and the best
Speaker 1: way to do it is people who aren't direct connections
Speaker 1: of yours maybe one step step removed, and then at
Speaker 1: that point they're going to give you very real feedback.
Speaker 2: And if you do a good job.
Speaker 1: Then after a certain point, my goal is to get
Speaker 1: people to basically shift supply demand in their favor. Like
Speaker 1: I say, the two laws of business that I am
Speaker 1: the most moved by are supply and demand, which is
Speaker 1: this X ray, and then leverage. So it's a full
Speaker 1: come for leverage, and so I see those are the
Speaker 1: two biggest forces in business, and so I want to
Speaker 1: create artificial demand for somebody who's starting out by just
Speaker 1: say we'll do a lot of stuff for free. What
Speaker 1: happens is when you have no more time to give,
Speaker 1: and if people still want you to do stuff, and
Speaker 1: you say, hey, I can't take any more people. If
Speaker 1: you want, you can pay, and people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fine, and then boom, and then you make your
Speaker 1: first sale and so and you'll have confidence because you're like, well,
Speaker 1: I just did it twenty other times and look at
Speaker 1: the results from those people. And the first one you'll
Speaker 1: be embarrassed about. The nineteenth one, You're like, Wow, you're
Speaker 1: going to already pay down sixty seventy percent of all
Speaker 1: the mess ups that you were going to do, and
Speaker 1: then at that point you're going to start feeling good.
Speaker 1: And then from there my way of doing it is
Speaker 1: just you just keep bumping the price by twenty percent
Speaker 1: every five people until eventually people start stop saying yes,
Speaker 1: and then apper're like, Okay, this is the price I
Speaker 1: can do for now. And that's basically a very seamless
Speaker 1: transition into how do I go from nothing to making
Speaker 1: my first dollar?
Speaker 3: How do you get over the block of I don't
Speaker 3: want to work for free?
Speaker 1: I actually think it's entitlement. I think it's believing that
Speaker 1: you deserve something for nothing. Like to flip the flip
Speaker 1: the roles in reverse. Imagine somebody comes to you they've
Speaker 1: never done anything ever in this particular space, and they say, hey,
Speaker 1: will you pay me.
Speaker 2: To do this thing? Would you immediately?
Speaker 1: Now, maybe some people be like sure, then it's a
Speaker 1: charity thing, which is different, But would you be like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I really believe that this guy is
Speaker 1: the best person that I can get this problem solve
Speaker 1: from probably not, And so to carry some of that
Speaker 1: risk for yourself. You say, I'm gonna front this, but
Speaker 1: if you want to not do it for free. Thing
Speaker 1: number one is that you're getting educated, so like you're
Speaker 1: getting free education, which I see is absolutely valuable. The
Speaker 1: second thing is that you can make terms that don't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean that it's free. Like there's the price, and
Speaker 1: then there's the terms. The terms of the agreement can be.
Speaker 1: If you do this with me, you have to give
Speaker 1: me feedback throughout the entire process, and at the end,
Speaker 1: if I do a good job, you leave a review
Speaker 1: right and on three different formats, and leave me a
Speaker 1: video and leave me, you know, a text version of
Speaker 1: it that's now absolutely like I'll say it differently a
Speaker 1: business owner, they do illegally, and so therefore they are
Speaker 1: very willing to pay people to leave them testimonials. And
Speaker 1: so if you'd be willing to pay five hundred dollars
Speaker 1: to get an amazing testimonial, then they're basically you're the
Speaker 1: We've paid you that five hundred dollars, but I promise
Speaker 1: you those first five to ten reviews will make you
Speaker 1: so much more than they could ever have paid you
Speaker 1: and not given you a testimonial. So if we flip
Speaker 1: it and say, hey, would you rather get one thousand
Speaker 1: dollars from this person and have them not leave a
Speaker 1: review versus free and a glowing review, I promise you
Speaker 1: you will make so much more from one glowing review
Speaker 1: than you.
Speaker 2: Will from the thousand dollars long term.
Speaker 1: So you're just building up the stockpile of the foundation
Speaker 1: to then build whatever you want to build on top
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really strong advice. It's I hope everyone who's
Speaker 3: listening watching right now is like going, this is what
Speaker 3: I'm going to do right now, like ten hours for free,
Speaker 3: because that's where we're blocking ourselves. We don't have the experience,
Speaker 3: and therefore we don't feel comfortable selling more because we
Speaker 3: don't even know how this service will look.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So you're trying to sell a service, and maybe you
Speaker 3: sold one, but you haven't been through the full life
Speaker 3: cycle of what it feels like to deliver that service. Now,
Speaker 3: you don't know how many website revisions or edits there's
Speaker 3: going to be, you don't know how many app updates
Speaker 3: they're going to be. You have no idea, and now
Speaker 3: you're actually less likely to go sell another one because
Speaker 3: you're scared that you don't even know if you can
Speaker 3: do it, and I feel under that entilement is an
Speaker 3: insecurity totally. I don't actually even know how to do this.
Speaker 3: I've got a lot of friends who are like really talented,
Speaker 3: really skilled. They actually would do a great job, but
Speaker 3: because they've never just done ten clients for free, they
Speaker 3: don't know how it's going to be if they went
Speaker 3: and got one hundred clients tomorrow. So they're scared of
Speaker 3: getting one hundred clients, not because they're not capable, but
Speaker 3: because they haven't taken ten clients through the process.
Speaker 1: So I want to give get some super tactile for
Speaker 1: the audience. Please just ten by ten. So give ten
Speaker 1: people ten hours and so you can say, hey, I'm
Speaker 1: going to do ten hours of work for free. That
Speaker 1: is a really compelling offer, and you're going to do
Speaker 1: it one on one and ideally with them. And so
Speaker 1: if you want to build the website, build it in
Speaker 1: front of them for the ten hours so they can
Speaker 1: give you real time feedback. If you want to write
Speaker 1: email copy, you still meet with them once a week
Speaker 1: or not ideally multiple times a week during that so
Speaker 1: you can pay down that. But ten hours faster, and
Speaker 1: if you're worried, you can do you can do five
Speaker 1: people for five hours.
Speaker 2: That matters less.
Speaker 1: But it's more that one on one, So the least
Speaker 1: scalable thing possible, and it's free labor that they can track.
Speaker 1: The reason that such a compelling offer is that everyone,
Speaker 1: even in every country, even minimum wage has value. Anybody
Speaker 1: can understand that five hours of work is a material
Speaker 1: amount of work that you're choosing to give away for free.
Speaker 1: And so even if you have no expertise, labor at
Speaker 1: base price is still worth something, and so if you
Speaker 1: add on expertise, it becomes a very compelling offer. But
Speaker 1: the beauty of that setup of having five or ten
Speaker 1: hours that you choose to spend is that there's basically,
Speaker 1: if you're doing a one on one, there's almost no
Speaker 1: technical you know component to it. You don't have to
Speaker 1: like build all these calendaring and schedule. It's just like
Speaker 1: you're just going to text those five people, hey, you
Speaker 1: want to do the same time tomorrow, very simple, and
Speaker 1: then for each of those you know calls that you'll
Speaker 1: take with them by the In the very first call,
Speaker 1: you just say, hey, I want to just be clear,
Speaker 1: what's the problem. What do you want to you know,
Speaker 1: what do you want to solve? And do you mind
Speaker 1: at the end of the five hours we spend together
Speaker 1: if this was good, if I can tell you about
Speaker 1: what I do, If you just set that that pre
Speaker 1: frame up front, and then you do the hours. On
Speaker 1: the fifth call or the fifth hour or the tenth hour,
Speaker 1: you say, hey, remember I said at the beginning, I
Speaker 1: was like, has this been good so far? It's like, awesome.
Speaker 1: Let me just recap what we've done, what we've covered
Speaker 1: and the progress we've made. You feel happy about that?
Speaker 2: Great?
Speaker 1: So this is what I think it would look like
Speaker 1: because also you spent those five or ten hours getting
Speaker 1: as much information or ammunition from them all the other
Speaker 1: problems that you could potentially solve, and then at that
Speaker 1: point says, hey, I think that I can solve problem.
Speaker 2: One, two, and three.
Speaker 1: It'll take me maybe six months, but this is what
Speaker 1: kind of engagement would look like.
Speaker 2: How does that sound to you? That's all you have
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 1: And the thing is that after you give someone five
Speaker 1: or ten hours, there's so much reciprocity that's built up.
Speaker 1: They're like, well, shoot, I mean sure, now if somebody
Speaker 1: on the first call says no, I don't want to.
Speaker 1: Then it's like you don't even need to continue. And
Speaker 1: so one of the big things that I'm a big
Speaker 1: proponent of is absolutely give stuff away.
Speaker 2: For free two people who are qualified. Yes, And so
Speaker 2: we're like.
Speaker 1: I don't want a lot of tire kickers. It's like,
Speaker 1: for sure, neither do I. But if I had a
Speaker 1: room of one hundred of the most qualified people, which
Speaker 1: if you're like, what are a qualified person?
Speaker 2: It's bent.
Speaker 1: So IBM made this figure this alex seventy years ago
Speaker 1: and it's really never changed. So bant's budget authority need timing.
Speaker 1: Do they have the money to spend the ability to
Speaker 1: make the decision? They need the thing right now? And
Speaker 1: now is it now a priority? And so if we
Speaker 1: had a room of one hundred people who met all
Speaker 1: four of those criteria, wouldn't you want to do something
Speaker 1: and spend five or ten hours for free? I mean,
Speaker 1: my god, like if you could sign Like the reason
Speaker 1: they sell time shares over six hour blocks of time
Speaker 1: is because it just takes time to build trust for
Speaker 1: a higher ticket sale. So if anything, it's like you're
Speaker 1: choosing to say that I'm going to give you five hours,
Speaker 1: but they're giving you five hours to influence them to
Speaker 1: ultimately prove that you're good at whatever you do. And
Speaker 1: so I think that is the easiest way to get started.
Speaker 1: You can make that your front and offer, you can
Speaker 1: put that in the video, and I think the beauty
Speaker 1: of that specific offer is that you don't need to
Speaker 1: even figure out what you're going to sell because you'll
Speaker 1: figure it out during the time you spend with them,
Speaker 1: and so you can figure out the offer in real
Speaker 1: time with them. And also because you're doing it one
Speaker 1: on one, you can basically you can you can permutate it,
Speaker 1: you can tweak it every single time you pitch it
Speaker 1: to somebody on the fifth or eighth call or whatever.
Speaker 1: That ultimately gets you so many faster iterations that are
Speaker 1: low risk.
Speaker 3: Before we dive into the next moment, let's hear from
Speaker 3: our sponsors. Thanks for taking a moment for that. Now
Speaker 3: back to the discussion. You know, talking to you today
Speaker 3: and Alex, I watch your stuff all the time. The
Speaker 3: thing that's standing out to me is you're super tactical.
Speaker 3: There's all these methods, there's all these systems, but then
Speaker 3: when you were talking about your life, you're like it's
Speaker 3: all about who I want to become. Is there a
Speaker 3: number that you stop at, or is actually who you
Speaker 3: want to become? That's your north star.
Speaker 1: I see entrepreneurship as the single greatest path for personal
Speaker 1: development because if we define you know, learning as fast
Speaker 1: feedback loops, there are very few other professions that give
Speaker 1: you that much feedback that brutally, brutally on his feedback,
Speaker 1: as the market will do. And so at every point
Speaker 1: where I get stuck in a business, I think to myself, like,
Speaker 1: what skill do I lack?
Speaker 2: And I define everything by skill.
Speaker 1: So even traits, which is just you know, a colloquial term,
Speaker 1: which is really just a bucket of many skills, I
Speaker 1: just think, okay, well, in order for me to appear
Speaker 1: confident or be confident, it's really like thirty eight things
Speaker 1: that I have to learn, and all of these things,
Speaker 1: if I break them down easier, I can do them.
Speaker 1: So it's like, Okay, when I shake hands, I make
Speaker 1: sure that I web the middle of my hand and
Speaker 1: I squeeze firmly and I look at the person in
Speaker 1: the eye. It's like that's thing one. Thing two is
Speaker 1: that when we're talking, like you not because you've been
Speaker 1: doing this for so long. But some people who don't
Speaker 1: know how to have conversations just stand like this, But
Speaker 1: somebody who's an active listener will not. They'll say, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a great point whatever. And so it's like, that's
Speaker 1: the second thing. When I walk into a room, I'm
Speaker 1: going to call people by name. It's a third thing.
Speaker 1: And so when I try and think about these traits
Speaker 1: of who I want to become, it's like, can I
Speaker 1: break these down into actions that I can actually do?
Speaker 1: And so I think that there has been a large
Speaker 1: part of the growth that I've hopefully, you know, been
Speaker 1: able to achieve. But in terms of the ultimate goal
Speaker 1: for me, it's always just been to be useful. And
Speaker 1: if I think I just do that, then I like
Speaker 1: that as such a simplified goal because being useful has
Speaker 1: it actually includes multiple parties, because you cannot be useful
Speaker 1: unless there's someone else you're being useful too. And so
Speaker 1: it gives you something controllable, which is that I have
Speaker 1: to learn skills so that I can serve someone else,
Speaker 1: and that is how I can ultimately be useful. And
Speaker 1: so even when we're you know, we're making content or
Speaker 1: whatever it is that we're putting out.
Speaker 2: I always try to think like is this useful? Like
Speaker 2: can someone.
Speaker 1: Actually well this change one's behavior. I'd be like, I
Speaker 1: want to educate. It's like what is education? It just
Speaker 1: means same condition, new behavior. So if someone has that there,
Speaker 1: same day over and over again, then they're not learning.
Speaker 1: So if your day looks the same every single day,
Speaker 1: you have learned nothing. And so that means that if
Speaker 1: you listen to this podcast and then nothing changes my
Speaker 1: behavior as a result, this was just entertainment, not education,
Speaker 1: And so that has been just It's a very sobering
Speaker 1: point because you realize, oh, I have to change my
Speaker 1: behavior in order to.
Speaker 2: Demonstrate that I have learned.
Speaker 1: Now, the second component of this is like, okay, well
Speaker 1: what's intelligence then? So intelligence, as I define it is
Speaker 1: rate of learning. So how quickly do I change my
Speaker 1: behavior in the same condition based on some stimulus? And
Speaker 1: so if you in a very real way, you can
Speaker 1: influence your intelligence by being willing to change faster. And
Speaker 1: so if you've heard ten podcasts and then you eventually
Speaker 1: change firsus somebody who listens to one and then changes,
Speaker 1: that person is more intelligent than you are. And so
Speaker 1: I see that as actually really encouraging because it means like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I have an active control on how
Speaker 1: quickly I can learn simply by changing my behavior. And
Speaker 1: so so that has been kind of my my modus
Speaker 1: operator for how I how I live life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I want to dive into that, but as an aside,
Speaker 3: my no, no, no, the reason why you'll you'll get
Speaker 3: in a second. As an aside, I've been really embarrassed
Speaker 3: in my handshake lately. It's because I've got a really
Speaker 3: bad case of tennis elbow. I've been playing a lot
Speaker 3: of pickleball, and so my elbow is destroyed. And so
Speaker 3: every time I've been I was on tour for the
Speaker 3: last month, and every time I've shook someone's hand in
Speaker 3: a meet and greet, my hand was just like just
Speaker 3: like literally and I felt so embarrassed. But every time
Speaker 3: I did a proper handshake, my elbow would her anyway.
Speaker 3: But so you just you just brought back all that trauma.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate that mindset because it's what you said
Speaker 3: earlier that it actually sets you up for long term
Speaker 3: success even when things are not going your way, when
Speaker 3: the results may not go your way, when you're having
Speaker 3: to do the things you hate. Like it's only when
Speaker 3: that's your north star that you can do all of that,
Speaker 3: Whereas if your north star is just a number or
Speaker 3: just an exit or whatever it may be, it's really
Speaker 3: really hard when you feel like that exit is just
Speaker 3: further and further away, and that numbers further and further away.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that you've met, I mean, so many
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs that they have their exit, and everyone almost has
Speaker 1: invariably the same story. I went into a beach, I
Speaker 1: drank my ties for a month, and then realized that
Speaker 1: this wasn't for me. And so one of the refrains
Speaker 1: that I have in my head all the time is
Speaker 1: you are the problem, like me talking to me, but
Speaker 1: like we are the problem. And so we have this
Speaker 1: issue where we fundamentally just always want what we can't have.
Speaker 1: Single people want to get married, married people want to
Speaker 1: be single, and so it's more that we just want
Speaker 1: something different almost all the time. And so it's that desired.
Speaker 1: You're the monk here, so you know more about this
Speaker 1: than I do. That's the issue. Like that's the core problem.
Speaker 1: And so even everyone right now who doesn't have a business,
Speaker 1: it's like, man, I would like to start a business someday,
Speaker 1: and then all the people who started businesses are like,
Speaker 1: my god, I can't wait to get out of this thing, right,
Speaker 1: And so it's just there are pros and cons on
Speaker 1: both sides. There are trade offs, and I would say
Speaker 1: that if there was a fourth myth that we would tackle,
Speaker 1: it's that people want the benefits of multiple paths without
Speaker 1: the trade offs speech and so I think one of
Speaker 1: the reasons. So there's lots of you know, content of
Speaker 1: like you know, talk to eighty year olds and they'll
Speaker 1: tell you, you know, their biggest life regrets. But what
Speaker 1: I find really interesting is that typically what they will
Speaker 1: do is they will assume all the benefits of their
Speaker 1: current life and say, I also wish I had the
Speaker 1: benefits of this other path, yes, without the costs of
Speaker 1: that other path that are unknown. And also they don't
Speaker 1: they forget to subtract all the benefits of their existing path.
Speaker 1: And so I like to play it out. It's like, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: if I were to do this other path and make
Speaker 1: that trade, would I be better off? And most times
Speaker 1: it ends up just being like I probably be not
Speaker 1: as happy as I am now, Like it's like, oh man,
Speaker 1: that the.
Speaker 2: One that got away.
Speaker 1: It's like you probably be about just as happy as
Speaker 1: you are now. As soon as you play it out
Speaker 1: a couple of years, it's like you probably be about
Speaker 1: the same. And so that's actually dramatically reduced my kind
Speaker 1: of regret analysis from from a living perspective. But I
Speaker 1: think the trade off part is so important because especially
Speaker 1: when you're starting out or even when you're more advanced
Speaker 1: in business, there's a what I call the fallacy of
Speaker 1: the perfect pick, which is that we overalize things because
Speaker 1: we think that we have to get it just right,
Speaker 1: because we think that if we pick just perfectly, we'll
Speaker 1: find a way to get only benefits and no costs.
Speaker 2: And it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: And so instead people just stay stuck thinking that there
Speaker 1: is some pick that they're not seeing, but it's just
Speaker 1: not true. And so I think the faster you're willing
Speaker 1: to make the trade offs and actually spell them out, like,
Speaker 1: these are the things I'm willing to trade, because I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people when they want to like
Speaker 1: pursue any endeavor, they immediately think, and I think it's
Speaker 1: a little bit more Western, is that they think about addition,
Speaker 1: they think about how many more things can I do?
Speaker 1: How many more things can I add to my calendar?
Speaker 1: But most like, right now you currently have a quote
Speaker 1: fool calendar. You live twenty four hours a day and
Speaker 1: you do stuff, And so I think it's more valuable
Speaker 1: to think what am I willing to give up?
Speaker 2: What am I going to sacrifice?
Speaker 1: And because we have to create space, we have to
Speaker 1: create this vacuum so that we can put this other
Speaker 1: thing in.
Speaker 2: And so those are the trades.
Speaker 1: And I think in the beginning, the trades are sometimes
Speaker 1: you know, more emotional, because in the beginning it's more
Speaker 1: you know, my friends will think this is weird. They
Speaker 1: don't want to get this text. What if someone says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're starting your business. I forgot or oh you're not
Speaker 1: coming out with us? Are you really doing thing again? Dude,
Speaker 1: it's not going to I mean, hey man, I love
Speaker 1: you man, like I'm supporting it, right, or your mom's.
Speaker 2: Like, are you really going to pursue? Podcasting is a thing? Right? Right?
Speaker 1: I think like the you know, the first rule of
Speaker 1: entrepreneurship is use what you got, right, It's not waiting
Speaker 1: for some perfect condition, because starting is the perfect condition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's where the profession part comes in going back
Speaker 3: to where you are, like going back to passion profession
Speaker 3: pain with profession, that's use what you've got, Like you
Speaker 3: actually understand this industry. Maybe you even worked really hard
Speaker 3: to get a degree in it if you went to college,
Speaker 3: or you've had work experience since you were sixteen, But
Speaker 3: you kind of want to disregard that because you think
Speaker 3: there's the perfect pick yeah over here and potentially the
Speaker 3: passionate pick over here. How do you turn that profession
Speaker 3: into a service aside us or a real businesses? What
Speaker 3: does that look like?
Speaker 2: So what's really nice?
Speaker 1: If from the profession of the three is by far
Speaker 1: the fastest angle for sure, because you already have the
Speaker 1: thing that's valuable because you already do exchange it for money,
Speaker 1: and so the only thing you actually have to add
Speaker 1: at that point you're promotioningsion. So you have to say,
Speaker 1: how do I let people know about this thing that
Speaker 1: I'm doing? And secondarily, how do I get these people
Speaker 1: once they find out to give me money?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And so from a letting people know about it, I
Speaker 1: gave one of eight ways of letting people know. So
Speaker 1: there's warm outrates. So that's letting people know one on
Speaker 1: one about your stuff. There's cold outreach, which is one
Speaker 1: on one to strangers. You've got paid ads right which
Speaker 1: you can run on any platform, or you've got posting content.
Speaker 1: Those are the only four things that one person can do.
Speaker 1: Now that's a great breakdown.
Speaker 3: There's only four things because you start thinking there's a
Speaker 3: million things I have to do.
Speaker 1: You've got strangers and people. You know, you've got one
Speaker 1: on one and one to many. That's the four box.
Speaker 1: Now from those core four, you then unlock four others,
Speaker 1: which is that I can do one on one outbound,
Speaker 1: or I can do or can post constant, or I
Speaker 1: can run ads to get customers who then get me
Speaker 1: more customers, to get affiliates or partners who get me
Speaker 1: more customers, to get employees who will then do these
Speaker 1: things on my behalf to get me more customers, or
Speaker 1: to get agencies who will then do it as a
Speaker 1: vendor on my behalf. And so the first is the
Speaker 1: everyone must start with the for. Even if you get
Speaker 1: you know, a bunch of you know partners who then
Speaker 1: promote on your behalf, you still started with a message
Speaker 1: that you sent to somebody, right, And so the core
Speaker 1: for is the first activity that you must do in
Speaker 1: order to promote. These other things are higher leverage. That
Speaker 1: makes sense, but this is the core four that you
Speaker 1: start with. Once you have someone who's responding to you
Speaker 1: and say hey, I'm interested in your stuff, which takes
Speaker 1: someone from a contact to an engaged lead. Right, they've
Speaker 1: shown interest, then we basically have to take them from
Speaker 1: engaged to ideally somebody who's gonna buy. Right, And so
Speaker 1: that process, at the most basic level is going to
Speaker 1: be a conversation that leads to a conversion.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so I have a very simple framework that I
Speaker 1: that I encourage people who are starting out to follow,
Speaker 1: which I call closer And so it's an acronym so
Speaker 1: it's easy. So CEE stands for clarify, which you begin
Speaker 1: the conversation like, hey, why do you respond to my thing?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And the nice thing is that whenever you promote, you
Speaker 1: only are really going to have a conversation with someone
Speaker 1: who engages back, right, So you always have the reason
Speaker 1: why right.
Speaker 2: At the front.
Speaker 1: So what made you what made you comment on my post?
Speaker 1: What made you DM me after that? What made you
Speaker 1: respond to my ad? What made you even respond to
Speaker 1: my original message?
Speaker 2: Or call? Right? So that you have that reason, so
Speaker 2: what made you do that? Clarify?
Speaker 1: Then you have L, which is you label them with
Speaker 1: a problem. So okay, so what I'm hearing is this
Speaker 1: is a problem. This is we're trying to solve. Is
Speaker 1: that's not about right?
Speaker 2: Okay? Cool.
Speaker 1: Then we go to O, which is overview their past experiences.
Speaker 1: And so here we're simply asking them more or less
Speaker 1: the same four questions, which is, Okay.
Speaker 2: What have you done so far? How did that work
Speaker 2: for you? What was good? What was bad?
Speaker 1: And then we try and tie that to our solution,
Speaker 1: the pieces that we can solve and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I think you might like this because we have this
Speaker 1: other element. I'll get to that later, but okay, this
Speaker 1: is great. What else have you done? What else have
Speaker 1: you done? And so that's kind of a pain cycle.
Speaker 1: And the reason the pain cycle is important is because
Speaker 1: in order to increase motivation in the short term, we
Speaker 1: have to basically expand the deprivation around the thing that
Speaker 1: they want, and so we have to we have to
Speaker 1: increase its priority in the short term to get them
Speaker 1: to take action. And that's why that that cycle is
Speaker 1: so important. The fourth is S which is we sell
Speaker 1: the vacation, and so we want to talk about the
Speaker 1: outcomes of what the experience is going to be like
Speaker 1: once the problem solved, rather than just having some long
Speaker 1: winded pitch. And what's very interesting about the sell portion
Speaker 1: is that most people talk way too much. We try
Speaker 1: and get it to under three hundred and twenty words.
Speaker 1: So it does it like people if you can, if
Speaker 1: you can very accurately describe someone's existing condition to them
Speaker 1: and say, so it sounds like you're struggling with this,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like you're struggling with this, and it
Speaker 1: sounds like you're struggling with this. And if we solve
Speaker 1: this one, this is what's unlocks. We solve this one.
Speaker 1: This is one locks, and we solved this at this
Speaker 1: one locks. Is that about right? They're like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like we can totally help you a lot of times
Speaker 1: you actually don't need to sit if you nail the
Speaker 1: pain part.
Speaker 2: The pitch is very easy.
Speaker 1: And so I am a big believer in having three
Speaker 1: points and whatever pitch you have, so you can always
Speaker 1: chunk it up, you know, like I have our attract
Speaker 1: convert deliver, you have, Okay, how do we get people
Speaker 1: find out how do we convert them and.
Speaker 2: How do we give them the stuff? Right?
Speaker 1: Having three elements of whatever it is. I mean I
Speaker 1: used to do sales scripts for you know, different companies
Speaker 1: back in the day. So it's like I had a
Speaker 1: mortgage lead company and they're like, okay, well the leads
Speaker 1: are you.
Speaker 2: Know, timely. You want them to be qualified and you
Speaker 2: want to be exclusive. Okay, great.
Speaker 1: If you're in fitness, it's like you need you need,
Speaker 1: you need to work out, you need to eat right,
Speaker 1: you need to have accountability. If you have all three,
Speaker 1: then you can't fit right. And so there's always three.
Speaker 1: And then with each of those three, I have kind
Speaker 1: of in the back pocket a little anecdote that to
Speaker 1: give an example of that. So that way it makes
Speaker 1: it more real for the person. Rather than explaining all
Speaker 1: the sets and reps and all that stuff, no one cares.
Speaker 1: That's why it's selling the vacation, not the plane flight.
Speaker 1: We're not gonna sell how we're gonna ge there. We're
Speaker 1: gona tell where're gona go. And so once we do
Speaker 1: S then we go to E. So at that point
Speaker 1: we ask for the sale. If they say no, then
Speaker 1: E and are coming to play. E is explaining to
Speaker 1: with their concerns. There's only five. Right, They're going to
Speaker 1: have a timing issue. I've got a lot going on
Speaker 1: right now. They have a money issue. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's worth it. They have a decision maker problem, which
Speaker 1: is I don't have the authority to make the decision.
Speaker 1: I need someone else's permission. They're going to have a
Speaker 1: stall issue, which is let me think about it. And
Speaker 1: then there's fifth is preferences. So I don't like this
Speaker 1: particular thing about your product or solution, which is just
Speaker 1: saying that they want your results a different way. And
Speaker 1: so basically, once you understand how to overcome each of
Speaker 1: those five issues, which they are all actually just fallacies
Speaker 1: in decision making. So if it's timing issue, it's not
Speaker 1: really a time thing. It's a priorities thing. If it's
Speaker 1: a money thing, it's not really a money thing.
Speaker 2: It's a value thing.
Speaker 1: If it's a decision maker thing, it's really that they
Speaker 1: need support, not permission. And then we rely on past
Speaker 1: agreements in order to say, hey, well, your husband knows
Speaker 1: that you're overweight, right, do you think he wants you
Speaker 1: to stay overweight?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Then why would it be against you doing something to
Speaker 1: change that, right, So just walking through those and.
Speaker 2: I go through all of them, but that's enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is it.
Speaker 1: And then from installing perspective, it's actually helping someone make
Speaker 1: a decision because a lot of people don't know how
Speaker 1: to decide. Because you will have this conversation far more
Speaker 1: than every person you talk to. People maybe only have
Speaker 1: five ten sales conversations a year. If you are selling
Speaker 1: it for a business, you'll have four or five a day.
Speaker 1: And so you should absolutely always be more equipped than
Speaker 1: they are to solve the problem. The one that I
Speaker 1: skipped with preferences, which is you know, I like, hey,
Speaker 1: I really want you know, my friend Charlotte, she lost
Speaker 1: thirty pounds doing your thing, But.
Speaker 2: Can I just keep eating the food that I'm currently eating?
Speaker 1: And so they want their results your way, And so
Speaker 1: the easiest way to explain around that is if you
Speaker 1: change the variables to change the outcome, do you like
Speaker 1: the outcome? Yeah, well, then don't change the variables. And
Speaker 1: this is the only thing that I can give you
Speaker 1: confidence in. And the question is is you eating the
Speaker 1: food you want more important than you look in the
Speaker 1: way you want to look? And that's a real question
Speaker 1: and if the person says yes it is, and it's
Speaker 1: like okay, well then nothing's going to change if you
Speaker 1: don't change, and so then you get to have a
Speaker 1: real conversation. But each of those those are the fundamental
Speaker 1: kind of ways of getting over them. And so once
Speaker 1: you explain away the concerns, after each explanation, you always
Speaker 1: ask again, so does like does that?
Speaker 2: Does that help that? Does that? Does that? Does that?
Speaker 2: All that for you? Great?
Speaker 1: So ready to move forward, You're ready to do whatever
Speaker 1: the next thing is. And then finally it is our
Speaker 1: And the R actually happens after the sale and is
Speaker 1: something that I added years later in my career.
Speaker 2: It used to just be close. But the R is
Speaker 2: reinforce the decision.
Speaker 1: So in the twenty four hours post purchase is when
Speaker 1: the vast majority be either have you know, cold feet
Speaker 1: or they regret or you can reinforce it and becomes
Speaker 1: a super positive right and so people believe it or not.
Speaker 1: There's tons of research that supports this is that they
Speaker 1: will make a decision about your business based on the
Speaker 1: first twenty four.
Speaker 2: Hours post purchase.
Speaker 1: So it's this huge moment where you can make a
Speaker 1: first impression that preframes the remainder of the of the
Speaker 1: relationship that you have with them and so being incredibly
Speaker 1: died of Like, hey, so you bought. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you what the next steps are going to be. We're
Speaker 1: going to take these steps and we're going to tie
Speaker 1: that to goal. Right, so you said you wanted these
Speaker 1: three things. The way that we're going to solve these
Speaker 1: three things is these three steps. These are the actions
Speaker 1: you take. We're gonna meet tomorrow at this time, I'll
Speaker 1: see you there, or if you have a you know,
Speaker 1: onboarding rep, then you'd go from there. But that fundamentally
Speaker 1: is how you'd have the conversion conversation. And so to
Speaker 1: loop back to if I'm a professional, how do I
Speaker 1: do this, It's like, well, you're gonna.
Speaker 2: Use the core four. You're gonna reach out to people.
Speaker 1: Once they respond, you'll initiate the conversation where you go
Speaker 1: through the closer framework and then you make them an
Speaker 1: offer to do your stuff, which will be either moonlighting
Speaker 1: or you know, in the morning. And what's really interesting
Speaker 1: is that people think that they're nine to five is
Speaker 1: getting in the way of their dreams, when it's really
Speaker 1: they're five to nine, and so five am to nine
Speaker 1: am it's like your's four prime hours, and then five
Speaker 1: pm to nine pm it's another four prime hours. So
Speaker 1: it's like you've got eight You've got a full work
Speaker 1: day that you can work, which I strongly recommend. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of people are big on the burn
Speaker 1: the boat's thing, and I think there's a time and
Speaker 1: a place for that. But if you have a family
Speaker 1: and you've got a mortgage, I would recommend you keep
Speaker 1: your job and then supplement your income. And then at
Speaker 1: the point where your supplemental income in your off time
Speaker 1: surpasses your full time income, that is when I say
Speaker 1: make the jump. And for me, because I actually believe it,
Speaker 1: I tend to be relatively risk averse person. I would say,
Speaker 1: if you do that for six months, because there's going
Speaker 1: to be volatility in the business, and I'll also just
Speaker 1: play out the next.
Speaker 2: Problem they're going to have. If that's all right, I.
Speaker 3: Go for it. So so much value, so much value.
Speaker 1: So volatility is a symptom of insufficient volume. And so
Speaker 1: if you feel like you're like, man, you know, I
Speaker 1: got a couple of customers and then you know the
Speaker 1: lead stop coming in, it's like, well, you're doing insufficient volume.
Speaker 1: You're not doing enough of the core four. We have
Speaker 1: to post more content, we have to post more ads,
Speaker 1: we have to do more reach outs, right, That's what
Speaker 1: we have to do. And so if you think, okay,
Speaker 1: well I've been doing these reach outs and you know
Speaker 1: no one's responding or things like that.
Speaker 2: One we need to make.
Speaker 1: Sure that the offer that we have is good, which
Speaker 1: I think we started with the five hour thing. I
Speaker 1: think it's a great first offer. But you know, under
Speaker 1: that assumption, if we do this, I have a rule
Speaker 1: of one hundred, which is that you do one hundred
Speaker 1: per day. So that means you're doing either one hundred.
Speaker 1: It's that you're putting into posting content and you post,
Speaker 1: and you post it to be very clear, and you post.
Speaker 1: You spend one hundred dollars a day on ads, or
Speaker 1: you do one hundred reachouts and if you want to
Speaker 1: be crazy, you can do all three. And so those
Speaker 1: in those in those scenarios, the key is that you
Speaker 1: have to keep going. And so if you get let's
Speaker 1: say you do the rule of one hundred and you
Speaker 1: get one sale a week, okay, then if you want
Speaker 1: to that would give you four sales a month. Roughly,
Speaker 1: if you're like, man, I want to go from four
Speaker 1: sales a month to sixteen sales a month. The nice
Speaker 1: thing is that you actually have a clear input output equation,
Speaker 1: which is that, Okay, it cost me seven hundred primary
Speaker 1: efforts to get one sale, and so that volatility feels
Speaker 1: like it's only one, but it's because you're not doing enough.
Speaker 1: If I take that seven hundred and do seven hundred
Speaker 1: per day, then all of a sudden, I'll be making
Speaker 1: one sale a day. And fundamentally, that little compression process
Speaker 1: is the only thing that separates very small businesses from
Speaker 1: very large businesses. Most small business owners have no idea
Speaker 1: how much more volume the guys who are ahead of
Speaker 1: them put out. I'm ride a conversation at the very
Speaker 1: beginning of me deciding to make content after I sold
Speaker 1: the company where I said, hey, you know, I really
Speaker 1: want to learn this Instagram game and content game. And
Speaker 1: so I talked to somebody who's a big, big influencer,
Speaker 1: and I said, you know, can you can you analyze
Speaker 1: my stuff and tell me what I'm doing wrong? And
Speaker 1: he said, dude, you're not doing anything wrong. You're just
Speaker 1: doing too little. And so he said, he said, pull
Speaker 1: up your Instagram and I pulled it up and I
Speaker 1: think I was doing like a post every other day
Speaker 1: or something like that, and.
Speaker 2: He's like, dude, I got four posts a day. And
Speaker 2: I was like, whoa.
Speaker 1: And then he said, pull up your LinkedIn and I
Speaker 1: don't think I've posted on LinkedIn. And he's like, I
Speaker 1: got ten posts a day. And he's like, pull pull
Speaker 1: up your Twitter. At the time, now X is like
Speaker 1: I had nothing right. So he went side by side.
Speaker 1: He's like, I'm putting out seventy eighty a day and
Speaker 1: you're putting out one every other and you're complaining. And
Speaker 1: I was like, got it. And so the most people
Speaker 1: dramatically underestimate the amount of volume that is required. And
Speaker 1: that volume has a great feedback loop for skill because
Speaker 1: you do these iterations and you will suck. And that
Speaker 1: is okay, and as long as you like. The process
Speaker 1: that I have for improving any part of any system
Speaker 1: is just do a tremendous amount of volume. Let's say
Speaker 1: we do one hundred whatevers. We look at the top
Speaker 1: ten percent of the ones that got the highest response rated,
Speaker 1: the ones that got the most views, or the ad
Speaker 1: they got the most clicks. We say Okay, what was
Speaker 1: different about these top ten percent compared to the other
Speaker 1: ninety And so the next hundred we do, we say,
Speaker 1: let's just try and just do the thing we did
Speaker 1: in the top ten percent, we do it again. And
Speaker 1: that continual refinement process has been the key to all
Speaker 1: the stuff that we've done.
Speaker 2: It's just look at what worked, do more of that.
Speaker 1: And so if you were in the professional bucket, that
Speaker 1: is more or less kind of the approach that I
Speaker 1: would take to get that first dollar.
Speaker 3: Everyone needs to listen to that fifteen minutes every day.
Speaker 3: I'm not kidding. That was the most amount of value
Speaker 3: I think has ever been back and at fifteen minutes
Speaker 3: that I've ever heard in my entire life. And I'm
Speaker 3: not kidding. That is such brilliant, brilliant advice, totally broken
Speaker 3: down step by step. I mean you could, I mean
Speaker 3: you can make like seventy posts off of just the
Speaker 3: last fifteen minutes. It was so no And I mean
Speaker 3: that I'm not just saying that because right now as
Speaker 3: you're speaking, I've got so many friends that I've got
Speaker 3: in my head that are exactly at that point, and
Speaker 3: it's the volume that's messing them up. It's either not
Speaker 3: having the plan to how do you pitch and convert
Speaker 3: two questions? The first is how do you stop being
Speaker 3: scared of sucking? Because a lot of my friends are
Speaker 3: scared of sucking? And the second one is why are
Speaker 3: we so uncomfortable selling and promoting and showing our work?
Speaker 1: So the first one, what's really interesting about the question
Speaker 1: is that I think that most people are actually very
Speaker 1: okay with sucking. I think they're very not okay with
Speaker 1: being judged for sucking. And so I think that at
Speaker 1: the at the onset, we have to redefine success as
Speaker 1: trying and not as succeeding or at least getting whatever
Speaker 1: desired outcome there is, because failure and success are salt
Speaker 1: and pepper.
Speaker 2: They're married.
Speaker 1: One leads to the next, and so the idea is
Speaker 1: we want to get as many failures out of the
Speaker 1: way as fast as possible, and so it's like we
Speaker 1: want to pay down that failure that again as soon
Speaker 1: as we can. And so the very tactical thing that
Speaker 1: I would advise is think about there's we think, don't
Speaker 1: I don't want people to think that I'm a failure.
Speaker 1: It's actually not people. There's like two people that you
Speaker 1: hear their voice in your head. And so when you
Speaker 1: actually get really clear on whose voice is that, because
Speaker 1: I'll say, I'll tell you a real world example. So
Speaker 1: for me, when I say this just sounds ridiculous, but
Speaker 1: just but just to show you, hopefully how ridiculous whatever
Speaker 1: you think sounds, I'll share one of mine. So when
Speaker 1: I was thinking about selling my company, the offer was
Speaker 1: for forty six point two million, and I was afraid
Speaker 1: that it wasn't enough to impress the people that I
Speaker 1: wanted to impress, and so and I had to figure
Speaker 1: that out. I was like, I don't know, I mean
Speaker 1: it's worth it. Maybe I should hold on to a
Speaker 1: longer and grow more and I want, you know, back
Speaker 1: and forth. And when I thought more about it, I
Speaker 1: was like, actually, there's only one person whose opinion I'm
Speaker 1: concerned about.
Speaker 2: And then when I named it, when I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's Tom.
Speaker 1: Tom's the and like I'm not even that close with Tom,
Speaker 1: but tom my envisionment of Tom judging my my my
Speaker 1: egg it is not good enough for their approval. I
Speaker 1: was like, wait, I'm letting Tom have this much influence
Speaker 1: over my life.
Speaker 2: That's absurd.
Speaker 1: And so one of the big reframes that I have
Speaker 1: in my head is that if you don't know why
Speaker 1: you believe what you believe, it's not your belief.
Speaker 2: Ats someone else's.
Speaker 1: And so if you can't explain, like why am I
Speaker 1: not doing this, If you can't actually explain it, it's
Speaker 1: because there's someone else's voice that is influencing you that
Speaker 1: you're not aware of. And so I try and name it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the naming is the key part, because as soon as
Speaker 1: you see that, you're like Tom, You're like screw Toom.
Speaker 1: We're like I want to do say it's like, is
Speaker 1: Tom's approval worth more than the dream that you want
Speaker 1: to pursue?
Speaker 2: And as soon as you get that, you're like, well,
Speaker 2: hell no. And then you move forward.
Speaker 1: And I can tell you just from the other side
Speaker 1: of this, and I want to unders want to be
Speaker 1: really clear.
Speaker 2: I understand how scary it is.
Speaker 1: It took me six months to quit my job, and
Speaker 1: I talk to my friend every single day saying this
Speaker 1: is the day, this is the day, this day. And
Speaker 1: when I did finally quit my job, I drove across
Speaker 1: the country and I only called people from home when
Speaker 1: I was already halfway across. I didn't tell anyone I
Speaker 1: was leaving because I was so afraid of what they
Speaker 1: would say.
Speaker 2: So I say, this is somebody.
Speaker 1: Who absolutely gets it, but I just want to see
Speaker 1: you from the other side of it. It's you know,
Speaker 1: this is a Layla quote, not me, but you know,
Speaker 1: fear is a mile wide and an inch deep, and
Speaker 1: so it looks like this vast ocean of like I'm
Speaker 1: going to drown. But as soon as you take the
Speaker 1: first step, you're like, oh, this is a puddle. And
Speaker 1: there's a quote from Jocko Willick that I love. That's
Speaker 1: recent that's been top of mind for me, which is,
Speaker 1: besides death, all failure is psychological. And it's just when
Speaker 1: you the longer you think about it, the where you're like, wait,
Speaker 1: all failure is just me drawing an arbitrary line in
Speaker 1: the sand that I say anything that does not meet
Speaker 1: the standard or force me to be upset. And so
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, well, if I don't die, then I
Speaker 1: can keep going. And if I don't die, then it
Speaker 1: means I can stand it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think a big part of it when
Speaker 3: I'm listening to you is because it's psychological. Let me
Speaker 3: know that it will happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I remember when I put out my first video,
Speaker 3: which I didn't tell anyone I was going to do.
Speaker 3: I spent two years watching videos before I made one
Speaker 3: and put one out. And when I put out my
Speaker 3: first video, I remember my friends saying to me, you
Speaker 3: talk too fast, the music is too loud, it's edited
Speaker 3: badly cool like, it wasn't received with praise. Now, I
Speaker 3: didn't think about that too much. And now if I
Speaker 3: go back to advise someone, I'd say, anticipate that, because
Speaker 3: if you anticipate it, then it's okay. Then it's in steep, right,
Speaker 3: You're like, oh, okay, Well, yeah, they're probably going to
Speaker 3: tell me that the editing wasn't great or whatever. But
Speaker 3: if I followed Alex's advice, maybe I have sent it
Speaker 3: to a couple of people, you know, not friends, but
Speaker 3: people who actually know what they're doing. I've got some insight.
Speaker 3: I've studied it well enough, and maybe I'll avoid some
Speaker 3: of them. But guess what, I won't avoid all of them.
Speaker 3: There will still be someone who criticizes the tone, what
Speaker 3: I'm wearing, how I look, whatever it is. And as
Speaker 3: soon as you know that, you go, oh, that's all
Speaker 3: it is someone's going to look at it and be like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure, and it's like, oh wait, their reaction
Speaker 3: doesn't change my reality, Like their reaction will always be.
Speaker 3: Then I think what we're trying to do going to
Speaker 3: you earlier as well, is we're trying to avoid the reaction.
Speaker 3: We want to create something that has no negative reaction.
Speaker 3: And there is not a single class on planet Earth
Speaker 3: that has created a song, a movie, podcast, or whatever
Speaker 3: it may be that has had no negative reaction.
Speaker 1: So I have so many quick thoughts on this, yea.
Speaker 1: So number one is that if you do nothing, people
Speaker 1: will criticize you. If you do something, people will criticize you.
Speaker 1: So criticism is a fixed cost period. Number two, it
Speaker 1: takes about twenty hours to become proficient in just about anything.
Speaker 1: You want to play guitar, like proficient in just about anything.
Speaker 1: It just takes people ten years to get the first
Speaker 1: twenty hours, and that's a huge issue. The third is
Speaker 1: that when you're thinking about feedback is one not all
Speaker 1: feedback is created equal. You don't want to listen to
Speaker 1: the people who are closest to you. You want to
Speaker 1: listen to people who are closest to your goals, and
Speaker 1: so listen to people who already at your goals, who
Speaker 1: already achieve those goals, and listen to their feedback. Because
Speaker 1: I'll say, for example, for me, like if I if I,
Speaker 1: I mean I rarely do, but if I post anything
Speaker 1: of me at the gym, the only people who comment are.
Speaker 2: People who are smaller than me.
Speaker 1: No guy who is bigger than me ever has talked
Speaker 1: a bit about you know about my you know my
Speaker 1: fitness stuff. And so to the same degree, anybody who's
Speaker 1: an entre who's a real entrepreneur is going to be like, hell, yeah, man,
Speaker 1: you got out there.
Speaker 2: Oh of course you failed. Obviously you failed.
Speaker 1: But that's okay, right, everyone falls the first time, right
Speaker 1: from the matrix, and so expect failure. And I think
Speaker 1: that if you can play it out, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a really wonderful stock frame around this, which is the
Speaker 1: frame of the veteran, which is, if you were to
Speaker 1: imagine whatever bad experience occurs happening a thousand times more
Speaker 1: in a row, how would you feel in the thousandth time.
Speaker 1: And if that's how you're gonna feel in a thousandth
Speaker 1: time with the exact same condition, you might as well
Speaker 1: feel that way today, and it's just been a really
Speaker 1: like a like if you're like, man, I hate traffic,
Speaker 1: It's okay. Let's assume traffic is a constant and it
Speaker 1: happens for the next thousand days. You'll probably be like, well,
Speaker 1: it's just how it is, right, and.
Speaker 2: So this is just how it is.
Speaker 1: That's the feedback that you're gonna get from videos, and
Speaker 1: it's going to keep happening, and it's okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, your point just now of the problem is it
Speaker 3: takes us ten years to get the first twenty hours.
Speaker 3: Is so true. I know something that I've biggest people
Speaker 3: are off something like that to me, Like, Jay, how
Speaker 3: do you solve a problem? I'm like, if I think
Speaker 3: something's a big problem to solve or a skill to learn,
Speaker 3: I will cancel every evening planned this week and I
Speaker 3: will cancel my entire weekend. And all I'm doing this
Speaker 3: weekend is figuring out that skill. I'll get a coach,
Speaker 3: I'll commit to the time, and I'll be around that
Speaker 3: community of people. Those are my three practices or things
Speaker 3: to develop a skill. And then this weekend is dedicated
Speaker 3: to getting good at X. And it's like, if I
Speaker 3: don't get enough hours in this weekend, the next four
Speaker 3: weekends are dedicated to that thing, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 3: in a month, I've solved a problem that could have
Speaker 3: taken me six years. And so I love that piece
Speaker 3: of advice because I think it's the same advice when
Speaker 3: you give people like, hey, just try three things out,
Speaker 3: and then they're like, okay, I'll try three things out
Speaker 3: one a year. And also when you give it twelve
Speaker 3: months to try one thing out, you actually never know
Speaker 3: whereas if you did something for a whole day. Like
Speaker 3: I remember when me and my wife were in Hawaii.
Speaker 3: We both grew up in London. We never went surfing,
Speaker 3: more skiing and things like this. Right we're in Hawaii,
Speaker 3: we try surfing, we do it the whole day. I
Speaker 3: knew I was never going to be a surfer and
Speaker 3: it's the last thing I want to do. And I
Speaker 3: don't care at all about surfing. It looks good, but
Speaker 3: it is not fun to do, Like I didn't enjoy
Speaker 3: the process, And I'm like, but if I went like
Speaker 3: for thirty minutes one day, then I'd be like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: maybe I just didn't do it right. And then you're like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'll go thirty minutes next year, I'll do an hour
Speaker 3: next year, And so we just keep elongating the kind
Speaker 3: of failure rate or knowing how quickly something's important or not.
Speaker 1: I think it's getting completely immersed and just soaked in
Speaker 1: whatever the thing that you're trying to pursue. So I'll
Speaker 1: tell you a comparable story. So when I was when
Speaker 1: I had my first business, I was I've never been
Speaker 1: a tech oriented person. Now I try not to speak
Speaker 1: that over myself, but like, I'm working on it, and
Speaker 1: so I was like, I have to learn how to
Speaker 1: build by pages. I hate relying on these it guys.
Speaker 1: They're slow, they don't build it the right way. And
Speaker 1: so this is right as some of the early kind
Speaker 1: of software say come out. And I had put it
Speaker 1: off and then I finally said, both days this weekend,
Speaker 1: I'm locking the doors, I'm closing the frames, I'm turning
Speaker 1: off my phone. And I just had a simple page.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm just gonna copy this page. I just
Speaker 1: want to see if I can figure it out. And
Speaker 1: I set two full days aside and I finished it
Speaker 1: by noon. Yeah, but I had put it off for weeks,
Speaker 1: and so most times it's almost like fears them all
Speaker 1: wide and an inch deep. So is ignorance. It's like
Speaker 1: it's more than you expect, less than you think. Right,
Speaker 1: you get in and then you're like, oh, there's only
Speaker 1: four parts to this, Okay, I think, okay, now you
Speaker 1: want to wrap your arms around it. And I think
Speaker 1: that's why having these kind of longer inten sessions you
Speaker 1: kind of drink all of it up, because if you
Speaker 1: did multiple thirty minute sessions, for example, it's like it'll
Speaker 1: take you the first fifteen minutes to get back into
Speaker 1: what did I just learn last time? And then it
Speaker 1: just it's very hard to get make progress. And so
Speaker 1: I'm a massive advocate of full shutdown days. I mean,
Speaker 1: drink your coffee, get your good night's sleep, and then
Speaker 1: put your your plugs in and then like lock in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, before we dive into the next moment, let's
Speaker 3: hear from our sponsors and back to our episode. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: And then the second question was why are we so
Speaker 3: uncomfortable with selling, promoting ourselves, putting ourselves out there?
Speaker 2: So I would put this two separate buckets.
Speaker 1: So one is the promotion, which is kind of public
Speaker 1: of embarrassment, public harass, you know, that's not right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second one is why am I scared to ask
Speaker 1: this person for money?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And so I think on some level it comes down
Speaker 1: to some people feel like impostors. They're like, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't deserve this, and things like that. But I
Speaker 1: think that there's a there's a very tactical way to
Speaker 1: overcome that, which is you outwork yourself doubt. And so
Speaker 1: if you if you've done those twenty and I think
Speaker 1: it's people who haven't done the twenty who feel like impostors.
Speaker 1: But if you've done it twenty times, and you're like,
Speaker 1: I know what's going to happen next, and I know
Speaker 1: what your problem is, and I also know I can
Speaker 1: solve it, and so your conviction goes up because you're
Speaker 1: not you're not exaggerating anything, you're not puffing your chest.
Speaker 1: You're just one of my big rules of persuasion to
Speaker 1: state the facts and tell the truth. And so you're like, listen,
Speaker 1: I've done twenty of these. You have the same issues
Speaker 1: as these people. This is what I did for them.
Speaker 1: I think I can do the same thing for you.
Speaker 1: We're not exaggerating, we're not claiming anything. We're just saying,
Speaker 1: like this is, this is what's happened, and so I
Speaker 1: think that that will dramatically decrease the anxiety around the conversation.
Speaker 1: The second piece is the fear of like rejection in
Speaker 1: the micro and so.
Speaker 2: It's it's always.
Speaker 1: Overstated because the worst thing they can say is no,
Speaker 1: and then you say, okay, fine, no worries, like, not
Speaker 1: a big deal, I'll just ask somebody else, right, like
Speaker 1: if anything, the sales is like dating, it's a numbers game,
Speaker 1: like you have to be willing to say I would.
Speaker 1: And this is why I like rule of one hundred
Speaker 1: a lot is have a hundred conversations, and I promise
Speaker 1: you your anxiety will go down because you'll just habituate. And
Speaker 1: so everyone like, and this is the psychological way of
Speaker 1: actually curing phobia. Is if you're afraid of spiders, the
Speaker 1: fastest way to cure spiders is locking in a room
Speaker 1: with spiders.
Speaker 2: You'll have a couple of panic attacks.
Speaker 1: You'll you'll you'll pass out, you'll wake back up, the
Speaker 1: spider's still there. You wait, pass out, wake back up,
Speaker 1: and eventually you're just like, all right, I'm used to it.
Speaker 1: And so that's also one of the telltale signs of
Speaker 1: an experienced salesman is that in the clone, when the
Speaker 1: stakes are high, their pulse.
Speaker 2: Is the same.
Speaker 1: It's because they've done this before, and so we just
Speaker 1: have to get you to that we've done this before
Speaker 1: part as fast.
Speaker 2: As we can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what about people who feel like the approach is
Speaker 3: are manipulative? Okay, well, these tactics are like you're preying
Speaker 3: on someone's vulnerabilities and insecurities, and of course that person
Speaker 3: wants to lose weight for their partner, and you're playing
Speaker 3: to that. Like what about someone who feels that way
Speaker 3: and that's what gets in their head like, Oh, I
Speaker 3: know I have a valuable service. I know I want
Speaker 3: to help people, but actually, like they should want to
Speaker 3: do it themselves. I'm not going to convince.
Speaker 1: Them, So I'm going to I'll define two things. So one,
Speaker 1: I see the process of selling as arranging the variables
Speaker 1: to increase the likely at a sale occurs. That is
Speaker 1: a selling process, and so we want to use all
Speaker 1: the variables we can because if we can control the variables,
Speaker 1: we control the outcome. And so I see then underneath
Speaker 1: of that, the difference between help manipulation is intention, and
Speaker 1: so you use the exact same variables to influence someone's
Speaker 1: purchasing decision. But if your intention is to scam the
Speaker 1: amount of money and not help them, then for sure
Speaker 1: you should. I hope you feel all the feelings that
Speaker 1: you have right now. But on the flip side, if
Speaker 1: you know that you're going to do your absolute best
Speaker 1: and you have not misrepresented something, and I think this
Speaker 1: is the key part where people feel the imposter syndrome
Speaker 1: is because they misrepresent.
Speaker 2: If you state the facts and tell the truth, most
Speaker 2: of your anxiety goes away.
Speaker 1: And I have this conversation sometimes with entrepreneurs, even at
Speaker 1: a million dollars year, five million dollars year, and they're like,
Speaker 1: I just feel this imposter syndrome with my business. And
Speaker 1: I was say, are you stating anything that's not true?
Speaker 1: And then they'll kind of look at me and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I teach agencies how to grow their customer base.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, and why do you feel like
Speaker 1: an imposter? They're like, well, you know I had an
Speaker 1: agency and it just really wasn't that successful. And I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: are your client successful? They're like, no, the clients are successful.
Speaker 1: I'm like okay, so what do you teach them that
Speaker 1: you were not able to do for yourself? And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I was actually really good at the sales side. I
Speaker 1: was really bad at the delivery side. I said, if
Speaker 1: you just say, hey, I had an agency, I was
Speaker 1: really good at selling customers, really bad at delivering on them.
Speaker 1: But if you're good at delivering on them and you
Speaker 1: need a sales process, I can help you. I was like,
Speaker 1: would you feel like you're being an imposter? And he's
Speaker 1: like no, I was like, and believe it or not,
Speaker 1: that's actually more compelling because you have a damaging commission,
Speaker 1: which actually makes you It's one of the components of persuasion, right,
Speaker 1: Like you just just tell people all the things that
Speaker 1: are not good, because when you tell them the good things,
Speaker 1: they'll actually.
Speaker 2: Believe them more.
Speaker 1: And so I would tell you know, I was in
Speaker 1: the gym space for a while, and so you know,
Speaker 1: a gym owner would have, you know, a bad location
Speaker 1: and bad parking and they're like, you know, I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't. It's it's embarrassing, And I say, included in
Speaker 1: the ad. Just say hey, by the way, we have
Speaker 1: the we don't have the newst equipment. Our parking is terrible.
Speaker 1: We have a tiny location, but we have the best
Speaker 1: workouts on this side of the Mississippi.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And if you say that, then it's like people are like,
Speaker 1: I love that guy, right because he told the truth,
Speaker 1: and so you'll be significantly more persuasive and have less anxiety.
Speaker 1: I just stayed in the facts and tell the truth,
Speaker 1: and if the facts aren't compelling enough, do the free work.
Speaker 2: So the facts are compelling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Oh, I love that so much because I'm thinking
Speaker 3: of Rents right now, who has a service offers and
Speaker 3: he's always scared that he's a one man band and
Speaker 3: he's scared that company is going to ask for a service,
Speaker 3: and he's almost embarrassed of saying, well, I'm just one guy,
Speaker 3: and he wants to present himself as a company yes,
Speaker 3: And I'm always well, no, tell them. Because you're one guy,
Speaker 3: you can actually be there. You're present, you're doing all
Speaker 3: the work yourself. You're committed, You're not just rolling out
Speaker 3: something that everyone else is doing.
Speaker 2: So I have an awesome frame for this.
Speaker 1: So when we had our software company, Allen, which we
Speaker 1: sold in twenty one, it was a software that helped
Speaker 1: agencies kind of made his schedules. It did automated texting
Speaker 1: stuff back before all the new stuff, right, And so
Speaker 1: I actually had agencies that's sold to gym owners. And
Speaker 1: I also owned gym Launch at the time too, which
Speaker 1: is which is the category you know, king in that space, right,
Speaker 1: It's the biggest company there. And so they're like, how
Speaker 1: do we how do we compete against you? And I said,
Speaker 1: every position has an advantage. And so you are going
Speaker 1: to say, man, Alex, Alex isn't gonna be the one
Speaker 1: take you know, he's not the one taking your calls.
Speaker 1: He's just gonna you're gonna be client number seventy seven.
Speaker 1: He's not gonna know your name. You're gonna be assigned
Speaker 1: to some account rep that he pays you know, nothing
Speaker 1: to And of course we paid well, but like I've like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, he just pays way less
Speaker 1: that he onboarded in two days, and like that's the
Speaker 1: level of service you're gonna get, whereas with me, you
Speaker 1: get the highest person, you get the CEO, and you
Speaker 1: call me, I'll respond immediately. I'm the one working on
Speaker 1: your account. So don't compare the size of gym wants
Speaker 1: the size of my company. Compare the person you're actually
Speaker 1: gonna work with, and am I gonna be better than
Speaker 1: his Rep?
Speaker 2: Number seven? Yes, that's a compelling pitch.
Speaker 1: Now, if I'm flipping the table, I'm gonna say, listen,
Speaker 1: this guy is in his mom's basement. He hasn't proven
Speaker 1: any track record. We've been here for ten years. And
Speaker 1: the reason we've been here for ten years and we've
Speaker 1: gotten so big as because we're actually good at what
Speaker 1: we do, and if we work at it what we do,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't be this big and we wouldn't been doing
Speaker 1: it for this long. This guy has no process. He
Speaker 1: might be gone tomorrow. We both have advantages that we
Speaker 1: can cater so there's no position on the board that
Speaker 1: doesn't advantage.
Speaker 2: She got to play what you got again? All number one? Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, And the idea of pointing it out, yeah, is
Speaker 3: just so masterful because that's what's blocking us. It takes
Speaker 3: away We're all trying to be everything to everyone, right,
Speaker 3: and we want to portray that we've thought about every
Speaker 3: part of the puzzle and we're the one stop shop.
Speaker 3: And I feel like whenever anyone says they're the one
Speaker 3: stop shop, there's nothing there right, because it's like, well,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, there's no way you could have figured
Speaker 3: out this and this and this and this and this
Speaker 3: just you, with just you, and you've been in the
Speaker 3: business for two years, right, Like it's it's just not possible.
Speaker 3: And so and that's so freeing, Like I'm hoping people
Speaker 3: hear that and just feel so much lighter and go
Speaker 3: tell the truth, state the facts and that's it, you know,
Speaker 3: And if.
Speaker 1: They say no, that's okay because honestly, if they say no,
Speaker 1: then they weren't going to be a fit. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so I can promise you some of the best deals
Speaker 1: are the ones you never do because right now, any
Speaker 1: business are I can tell you this, like there are
Speaker 1: customers that you're like, I wish we did not ever
Speaker 1: talk to this person, right, and so like you're just
Speaker 1: avoiding some of these things that are going to be
Speaker 1: calamities later, so you might as well just get it
Speaker 1: up front. And the thing is that when you set
Speaker 1: those expectations, it just it creates such a clean relationship
Speaker 1: from there on. It's like, these are the expectations you
Speaker 1: can set. This is what I will do. Anything outside
Speaker 1: of that, I'm not going to pretend like I have
Speaker 1: done it. Now if we want to figure this out,
Speaker 1: I'll be figuring it out with you. And if you
Speaker 1: if you like the stuff, if hear I can apply
Speaker 1: some of those principles. But I haven't done it. I
Speaker 1: want to be upfront about that. And so where's the
Speaker 1: imposter syndrome? Where's the fear? It's like there shouldn't be
Speaker 1: any and it's all about this option piece, and I
Speaker 1: think that's where that's where people get in trouble.
Speaker 3: The other thing I've learned about that is that I
Speaker 3: feel like people who win watch winners, and people who
Speaker 3: fail watch losers. And so when I look online or
Speaker 3: even if I talk to people that I get a
Speaker 3: lot of this where people will be like, I can't
Speaker 3: believe this guy is like one hundred thousand followers. Have
Speaker 3: you seen his stuff? Like it just sucks, Like, oh,
Speaker 3: I can't believe that this guy like has a business
Speaker 3: making a million dollars, Like I mean, he hasn't even
Speaker 3: got you know. And so there's a lot of this
Speaker 3: where you find people who are not winning are constantly
Speaker 3: whereas like I'm sure if me and you were talking
Speaker 3: about something, so people be like, dude, did you see
Speaker 3: what this guy is amazing, like do you see what
Speaker 3: you know? Whatever? And and so I feel like there's
Speaker 3: that ideology that we get stuck in where we're like,
Speaker 3: I know I'm better than that guy or whoever, that girl,
Speaker 3: whatever it is. I know I'm better, but I'm not
Speaker 3: doing anything about it, and that hurts me even more.
Speaker 2: Can tell you a story about this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I know I think you've had Kylie Jenner
Speaker 1: on this. I kend that's different. Well, then I'll I'll
Speaker 1: tell you the story.
Speaker 3: So oh I know the Kylie story from you?
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, very right?
Speaker 3: When she give a billionaire Yeah, yeah, I've bought the
Speaker 3: video at.
Speaker 2: So Kylie became a billionaire.
Speaker 1: I'm twenty seven ish at the time, and I'm making
Speaker 1: i would say, very good money.
Speaker 2: And I thought I was.
Speaker 1: I was, you know, the man, right, and then the
Speaker 1: care comes this girl who's seven eight years younger than me.
Speaker 2: And she's crushing you know, she crushed it and she
Speaker 2: was better.
Speaker 1: She was better than I was and I and you know,
Speaker 1: my first response was ego being like, hey, Christians, her mom.
Speaker 1: She's had her life set up since day one. She's
Speaker 1: been on reality TV for you know, I had all that,
Speaker 1: all that narrative, and then underneath it that I was.
Speaker 2: Like, chill, what can I learn from her? Right?
Speaker 1: And so I have the fundamental belief that if someone
Speaker 1: makes more money than you, they know something that you
Speaker 1: don't know, and in that you can learn of them.
Speaker 1: And I think that that allows every single person in
Speaker 1: the world's success to serve you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Literally, you just flip the world into like, these are
Speaker 1: all the different lessons I can learn from all these people.
Speaker 1: And I think one am I it's the sort of gryffindor,
Speaker 1: But I love this quote that was on it.
Speaker 2: Okay, but it was.
Speaker 1: Made of you know, the goblin steel or dwarve of steel,
Speaker 1: and it was it only took you in that which
Speaker 1: made it stronger. And so you you know, hating on
Speaker 1: somebody in no way makes you stronger. And you're trying
Speaker 1: to point out all the deficiencies. It's like you're you
Speaker 1: are the thing that you are afraid of for yourself,
Speaker 1: Like you're you're gonna pointut all this person's efficiencies, and
Speaker 1: your big fear is about the fact that other people
Speaker 1: want to do that to you. So first start by
Speaker 1: stop doing it to other people and start trying to
Speaker 1: find what are the things that they're because the thing
Speaker 1: is it is a fact they are better than you
Speaker 1: at something. And I think like you have to accept
Speaker 1: that as much as you're like that guy's got one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand follers, well and he only had one viral video.
Speaker 1: It's like, well he's got one more than you do.
Speaker 1: What was it about that video? Now, let's start tackling that.
Speaker 1: And so like from Kylie, the thing that I learned
Speaker 1: was brand. I was like, she's got a big brand.
Speaker 1: And then that was like, okay, I need to start
Speaker 1: looking at that. And that's what That's what kicked off
Speaker 1: this entire journey for me, even making all this content stuff.
Speaker 1: Was that Forbes cover. That was like that was the
Speaker 1: thing for me. And so you know, Kylie, if you
Speaker 1: ever watched this, like you're a huge in flo my life.
Speaker 3: I love that. We'll get it, We'll get it, We'll
Speaker 3: get it.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: And what I like about that is that criticism doesn't
Speaker 3: cure envy. And also success doesn't kill envy. It's only
Speaker 3: study that kills envy. Like that appreciation, that admiration, that's
Speaker 3: the only thing. And envy is that thing that when
Speaker 3: I coach people, and I've been fortunate enough to coach
Speaker 3: musicians and access and whatever. And the two questions I
Speaker 3: always ask people is the first thing is who do
Speaker 3: you envy? And there is no person on the planet,
Speaker 3: even in the zero point zero zero one percent, who
Speaker 3: doesn't envy someone that I've met at least. And then
Speaker 3: the second one is who's your God or what is
Speaker 3: your god? Whether it's money, time, energy, whatever it is.
Speaker 3: And those two questions sum it up for people. And
Speaker 3: what I've found is that success just doesn't take away envy.
Speaker 3: So even if you had become a billionaire in the
Speaker 3: next twelve months, that still wouldn't have taken it away,
Speaker 3: because she did it twenty one and exactly. And so
Speaker 3: it's like that, that's what's so fascinating about it, is
Speaker 3: that we you become successful by what you get, but
Speaker 3: you become fulfilled by what you lose, and losing envy
Speaker 3: and losing comparison and losing criticism leads to happiness. So
Speaker 3: when people say money doesn't buy happiness, it's not that
Speaker 3: money's not portant. Money makes you successful and it's great
Speaker 3: you should get it. Happiness was never in the equation
Speaker 3: with money. That wasn't the point of it. Like, I
Speaker 3: love having awards and accolades, but they were never in
Speaker 3: the equation of happiness. They were in an equation of success,
Speaker 3: and the equation of happiness was envy, ego, illusion, lust, anger,
Speaker 3: all of this stuff. And so it's funny how the
Speaker 3: equations get like, you know, crossed over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I just I loved everything that you No.
Speaker 3: I just it really resonates hearing about it from your
Speaker 3: story and also just like breaking it down for people
Speaker 3: and making it really simple and going like, let's stop
Speaker 3: demonizing people are selling well or making money and doing
Speaker 3: this thing, because it leads to a certain part of
Speaker 3: the puzzle. But then let's also remember that you wouldn't
Speaker 3: be who you are today if you hadn't got over
Speaker 3: that envy right at the beginning.
Speaker 1: So let me toss this in that I think be helpful.
Speaker 1: So one of the quotes that I don't like is
Speaker 1: comparison is the thief of joy. And I'll explain why,
Speaker 1: because so I think comparison is an incredibly valuable feedback tool. Now,
Speaker 1: what we want to be clear is the differentiation being
Speaker 1: criticism and insults, and so insults are attacking someone's character saying,
Speaker 1: and I'll give you an example, and a criticism is
Speaker 1: a difference between expected and reality or desired and actual.
Speaker 1: So I expect you to be on time and you
Speaker 1: are five minutes late. Okay, cool. So I say, hey,
Speaker 1: you were five minutes late. This is the expectation, this
Speaker 1: is what happened. That is criticism, right, insult and you're lazy.
Speaker 1: And so if we can pull those things apart, we
Speaker 1: can take the good of because I think our brains
Speaker 1: are comparison brains, Like it's how we orient ourselves in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: Where am I and very tough.
Speaker 1: Maybe years and years of monks study can maybe get
Speaker 1: you out of it, but I think for the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people, comparison is going to be fixed in
Speaker 1: their brain.
Speaker 2: And so it's like we want to use that.
Speaker 1: We want to use that skill of learning to point
Speaker 1: out the discrepancy between where they are and where I am,
Speaker 1: so that I can create steps so that I can
Speaker 1: get better. I want to completely eliminate in a race
Speaker 1: insults and also on the flip side, if someone insults me.
Speaker 1: This is a side note, but like if the big
Speaker 1: fear that many people have on promoting or selling is
Speaker 1: that someone's gonna say something bad about them and so
Speaker 1: that they're gonna get insulted. And the biggest reframe that's
Speaker 1: been helpful for me is simply translating all hate or
Speaker 1: insults into he lives his life in.
Speaker 2: A way that I would not prefer.
Speaker 1: And it just comes down to that I can't believe
Speaker 1: he's married to this person he makes his kind of
Speaker 1: why does he think? He like he lives his life
Speaker 1: in a way that I would not prefer, And that
Speaker 1: is just it has really boiled a lot of the
Speaker 1: hatred down to like, oh, well, I mean you live
Speaker 1: your life in the way that I would not prefer.
Speaker 2: And that's fine. That's why you've your life and I
Speaker 2: have my life, and hey, more power to you, man.
Speaker 1: And that is just like really quelled a lot of
Speaker 1: the concern because I'm sure, like you, I get an
Speaker 1: unending you know, the deluge of hate commish just because
Speaker 1: if you put yourself out there, like if again, if
Speaker 1: you do nothing, you will get criticized for doing nothing,
Speaker 1: and if you do something, you'll get criticized. So criticisms
Speaker 1: fact is a fixed cost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then yeah, and that's why I like, I
Speaker 3: agree with you on the comparison point. And that's why
Speaker 3: I look at comparison has two kind of brothers, study
Speaker 3: and envy. And so that's that's the choice you have,
Speaker 3: like we have to compare. Comparison is a fixed like
Speaker 3: you're going to compare because the brain is wired that
Speaker 3: way and it's either I compare myself with envy or study,
Speaker 3: and those are my two choices I'm going to compare.
Speaker 3: And so this idea of never comparing yourself to anyone
Speaker 3: is actually a lie, a myth in and of itself,
Speaker 3: because if you never compared yourself to anyone, you would
Speaker 3: have goals, you would aspire for anything. You wouldn't become better.
Speaker 1: There's no feedback because you can't say, well, this is
Speaker 1: where I was and this is what happened, Like that
Speaker 1: is a comparison. And so I would I say that
Speaker 1: because one of the things we have is feedback is fuel, right,
Speaker 1: and so it's like I want as much fuel as
Speaker 1: I can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, And that's that's such a you know,
Speaker 3: you've said the word feedback has come up so many
Speaker 3: times today where you've mentioned it so many times, and
Speaker 3: to see feedback as fuel is the only way to
Speaker 3: have an iterative, constantly evolving process, and I find that.
Speaker 3: You know, there's the famous quote from Albert Einstein where
Speaker 3: he said insanity is doing the same thing over and
Speaker 3: over again expecting a different result. And feedback is the
Speaker 3: way you don't do the same thing over and over again.
Speaker 3: You can change it every time. But so many of
Speaker 3: us keep doing something even when it doesn't work, hoping
Speaker 3: for that different outcome. Why we don't change the email copy,
Speaker 3: we don't post it a different cadence, we don't up
Speaker 3: the volume. It's just like we're just you know, I've
Speaker 3: got so many friends who upload a video, delete a
Speaker 3: video uploaded. You know, it's like, we don't change that,
Speaker 3: and then we're still going, wait a minute, what's going
Speaker 3: on here?
Speaker 1: So my worldview on why anyone does anything is that
Speaker 1: they've been rewarded for doing that in the past. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the really difficult things with language
Speaker 1: in general is that there's descriptive and explanatory language. And
Speaker 1: so for example, I'll give the simplist example. You know
Speaker 1: Timmy stall a bike because he is dishonest. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: if we define dishonest, we would say, well, dishonest people
Speaker 1: steal things, But that's a circular definition doesn't actually help
Speaker 1: the explanation of why did he actually steal?
Speaker 2: It is because he's been rewarded for.
Speaker 1: Stealing in the past, and so he repeated that that
Speaker 1: action because it got him something good. And same thing
Speaker 1: goes for lying, same thing goes for cheating. All of
Speaker 1: these things like why does someone do it? It's like
Speaker 1: because they've been rewarded for doing so in the past.
Speaker 1: They've been reinforced, and so why do people Yeah, why
Speaker 1: do people do anything? That is and and you know,
Speaker 1: my world views somewhat different than I think of many
Speaker 1: people's because I come from everything from a behavior's perspective,
Speaker 1: but it has made me significently better at business because
Speaker 1: I get better at predicting behavior. And so I'll give
Speaker 1: you a simple example. So, you know, there was an executive,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the companies, and I was talking
Speaker 1: to one of the other owners and they were like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, this guy said that he would leave if
Speaker 1: we changed his title or whatever. And I said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: how many times have you changed his title historically?
Speaker 2: And he said plenty of times? And I said, okay,
Speaker 2: has he ever left?
Speaker 1: And the answer was no, and I said so based
Speaker 1: on his history of behavior, I would say that he
Speaker 1: says these things to decrease likely that you do it
Speaker 1: because that's his preference, but so likely that he quits
Speaker 1: as a result is low. And so it's like those
Speaker 1: kind of deconstructions. Some people just take things at face value.
Speaker 1: It's like, well if we look, if we actually try
Speaker 1: and find the explanation rather than the description of the event,
Speaker 1: we can get way better predicting behavior, including our own.
Speaker 1: And I think that's where like people like I want
Speaker 1: to get back to the trauma of whatever. It's like, maybe, like,
Speaker 1: can I go to this because I think this this
Speaker 1: might be helpful.
Speaker 3: So I love the direction you go.
Speaker 1: Okay, So many people will use trauma or some event
Speaker 1: and they will create a narrative around why why haven't
Speaker 1: I started? It's because my dad didn't hug me en
Speaker 1: off as a kid, and I don't have this confidence.
Speaker 1: So they just create this big story and then they're like,
Speaker 1: I need to go see a therapist so that I can,
Speaker 1: you know, untangle all of this. But if I were
Speaker 1: to say, hey, I'm going to teach you how to
Speaker 1: how to serve in pickleball, right, we wouldn't have the
Speaker 1: first session be hey, do a serve, and then you
Speaker 1: would serve not ideally if I'm a pickleball coach, right,
Speaker 1: and then I'd say okay, So for the next few weeks,
Speaker 1: what we're gonna do is we're gonna try and go
Speaker 1: back in the past. We're gonna try and figure out
Speaker 1: why your serve is so bad. And no, we're just
Speaker 1: gonna say change your risk like this, this is how
Speaker 1: you do it. And so it's so much more productive
Speaker 1: to just focus on what do we need to do
Speaker 1: instead rather than trying to figure out why you did it,
Speaker 1: because the reality.
Speaker 2: Is you're never gonna know.
Speaker 1: It's a convenient narrative and it might make sense, but
Speaker 1: at the same time, it could just be that you're
Speaker 1: rewarded for doing something like this in the past period.
Speaker 1: Now there might have been conditions that created that reward,
Speaker 1: and you can lament the person, but at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, the only thing you can do about
Speaker 1: is change behavior. And so trauma, which is tossed around
Speaker 1: a lot, I define as a permanent change in behavior
Speaker 1: from an aversive stimulants some I'm a bad thing, so
Speaker 1: you permanently change how you act because of something bad
Speaker 1: that happened. Now the question is is trauma bad? Well,
Speaker 1: did the change in behavior result in increase or decrease
Speaker 1: and likely to achieving whatever goal we have. And so
Speaker 1: if a kid touches hot stove and they say ouch,
Speaker 1: and then they never touch hot stoves again, then that
Speaker 1: was a traumatic event by that definition, and it's probably
Speaker 1: good trauma because they never touch hot stoves again, increase.
Speaker 2: The likely they die in a fire. Great.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes it's like, well, then maybe we can
Speaker 1: be grateful for some of the quote traumas that we've
Speaker 1: had because it permanently changed my behavior in a good way. Now,
Speaker 1: if we have quote trauma that that primally changed my
Speaker 1: behavior in a negative way. So I had, you know,
Speaker 1: bombs and saw someone die in front of me, and
Speaker 1: the next time I hear loud noise, I you know,
Speaker 1: I freak out and I can't perform my job, then
Speaker 1: that would be something that decreases likely it. But then
Speaker 1: at that point, rather than trying to figure out the
Speaker 1: triggering event in the past, we just think, Okay, how
Speaker 1: can recondition this person under similar conditions so that they
Speaker 1: can act this way instead? And so trauma, what ends
Speaker 1: up happening is it becomes an accelerated learning event. And
Speaker 1: so something bad happens, your brain's like pay attention because
Speaker 1: it's like I'm going to learn and I'm going to
Speaker 1: permanently change our behavior to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Speaker 2: And so it's not this.
Speaker 1: And I hear this because a lot of people will
Speaker 1: answer promorphize, you know, make human, or you know, try
Speaker 1: and biologize. That's a word, go for it. Something that occurs,
Speaker 1: it's like it's stored in your body. And I was like,
Speaker 1: we're not computers, right, It's just that you have a
Speaker 1: behavior set. All we have to do is change these
Speaker 1: behaviors and then it eliminates. And so the reason so
Speaker 1: this all started with feedback, and so the reason feedback
Speaker 1: is fuel. And what makes feedback good versus bad, or
Speaker 1: rather useful versus non useful is the latency of the feedback.
Speaker 1: How quickly do you get it and how specific is it.
Speaker 1: And so if you say, hey, that sucked in the moment,
Speaker 1: not helpful, I will be less What it will do
Speaker 1: is make me less likely to do the thing in
Speaker 1: front of you. Right, if you said that, on the
Speaker 1: flip side, if you were to say immediately, hey, real quick,
Speaker 1: when you do your intro, raise your tone a little
Speaker 1: bit at the end, because I think it'll actually create
Speaker 1: more curiosity.
Speaker 2: People want to stay longer. Okay, do the intro again. There.
Speaker 1: I have a very specific piece of feedback, and I
Speaker 1: did it immediately, so that the likely that you change
Speaker 1: behavior is really high and maybe that it sticks. And
Speaker 1: so the reason feedback is full and ideally, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to change someone else's behavior or even your own,
Speaker 1: it's like, I want to seek out very fast feedback
Speaker 1: that's as specific.
Speaker 2: As possible to the behaviors.
Speaker 1: And so I tell the story a lot because it's
Speaker 1: a story that we tell inside of our companies.
Speaker 2: It's almost become lower.
Speaker 1: But we had a director, super proficient, very competent in
Speaker 1: his role, really high performer. The problem was that everyone
Speaker 1: said he's such a dick. And the thing is is
Speaker 1: that I really like I liked his performance, and I
Speaker 1: want to decrease the likely that I get complained to
Speaker 1: about him. And so he had four different people in
Speaker 1: the company have like one on ones with him, being like, hey,
Speaker 1: I need to stop being a dick. And the thing is,
Speaker 1: this behavior didn't change. And so I was supposed to
Speaker 1: be like final boss in this situation and be like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's let's let's have the sit down. And
Speaker 1: so I said, hey, I don't care if you are
Speaker 1: a dick on the inside. I would like to decrease
Speaker 1: the likely that other people describe you as one. And
Speaker 1: so I want to be clear, I have no judgment.
Speaker 1: I just want to change this likely of this outcome.
Speaker 1: And so that kind of took the personal tax out
Speaker 1: of the conversation. And then it was like, okay, so
Speaker 1: what are the behaviors you do skill wise as minutely
Speaker 1: as possible that get people to say this about you?
Speaker 1: So it turned out it was you interrupt people on calls,
Speaker 1: you tell people how to do their jobs, and it
Speaker 1: was two other things, whatever it was. And so I said, so,
Speaker 1: next time you have the you know, desire to tell
Speaker 1: someone what to do about their job, you have two options.
Speaker 1: Either say nothing or say, hey, I heard this thing
Speaker 1: that might help. Do you mind if I share it?
Speaker 1: If you just say that first, and if they say no,
Speaker 1: then just be like okay, no worries. Or they say yes,
Speaker 1: then now you've permissioned to share it. And when you
Speaker 1: share it, shared in terms of behaviors, criticism, not insult.
Speaker 2: And so I just had to change a couple.
Speaker 1: Of those things, and then within a week people are like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, he's aid night and day, he's a
Speaker 1: different person.
Speaker 2: They create all these narratives.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was because his mom did hug him, she
Speaker 1: called him, or because we told him what to do instead.
Speaker 1: And so I bring this up because I think many
Speaker 1: people do not take action around pursuing their dreams because
Speaker 1: of narratives that they create about their past. But the
Speaker 1: reality is that none of that matters, because all we
Speaker 1: have to do is just say what do we need
Speaker 1: to do instead under these conditions? And if we take
Speaker 1: that premise, then you need to learn, and learning means
Speaker 1: same condition, new behavior. And so if every day is
Speaker 1: the same for you to your point of insanity, then
Speaker 1: you have the same conditions. And if your behavior has
Speaker 1: not changed, then maybe you are insane or at least
Speaker 1: for at least for expecting a different outcome. And so
Speaker 1: that I think makes it significantly more palatable of like,
Speaker 1: just change this one thing and then run it again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how does someone who's taking that feedback trying to
Speaker 3: get better and the results just not changing, they're not
Speaker 3: getting closer to the outcome. Yeah, two questions. The first
Speaker 3: is how do you know when it's time to give up?
Speaker 3: And how do you keep going when things are not working?
Speaker 1: So this is so there's a like there's a handful
Speaker 1: of what I call like eternal questions that can I
Speaker 1: don't think they are more decoatives that be managed than
Speaker 1: problems to solve. And so how much should I consume
Speaker 1: today versus invest into tomorrow? How much risk am I
Speaker 1: willing to take? Which is the classic should I push
Speaker 1: or should I pivot?
Speaker 2: For an entrepreneur?
Speaker 1: And the answer that no one's going to like is
Speaker 1: that it's actually up to you. So there's kind of
Speaker 1: like good failure and bad failure. So good failure is
Speaker 1: like I tried something and I saw that it didn't work,
Speaker 1: and I realized what I need to do instead, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to iterate continuously.
Speaker 2: Bad failure is where I have.
Speaker 1: An assumption that the world of the conditions were going
Speaker 1: to be this way and my assumption was false. And
Speaker 1: so if I believed that people really wanted to have
Speaker 1: dog zoom calls or whatever right zoom zoom made for dogs,
Speaker 1: Let's just take a ridiculous example. Well, then I would
Speaker 1: have to take a couple of need to believes. If like,
Speaker 1: in order for this to be successful, these four things
Speaker 1: would have to be true. If I find out after
Speaker 1: starting submiterations that one of my three or four assumptions
Speaker 1: that underpin this being successful long term is not true,
Speaker 1: then I should not keep trying to pursue this. And
Speaker 1: that is where I would say, we need to pivot.
Speaker 1: In a situation where none of the conditions that I are,
Speaker 1: none of the need to believes have changed, All of
Speaker 1: those conditions are still the same, and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a deficiency and skill, then.
Speaker 2: That is where I would push.
Speaker 1: Now, how long will it take is going to be
Speaker 1: completely predicated on how quickly you can learn and the
Speaker 1: quality of that feedback. And so to your point, I
Speaker 1: think you said coach community.
Speaker 2: And what was the other one commitment? Commitment?
Speaker 1: Yes, and so the commitment part if you want to
Speaker 1: increase your commitment anything, So I define commitment by the
Speaker 1: elimination of alternatives, right, So marriage is the ultimate commitment.
Speaker 1: You eliminate all alternatives, right, And so it's like, we
Speaker 1: want to get married to this opportunity. We get married
Speaker 1: to this business. We have to liminate alternatives, which means
Speaker 1: when your friend says, hey, I'm a ten grand dow
Speaker 1: this thing, you say, that's amazing. I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about that. And I know I know two months of
Speaker 1: suffering from this one, and I'm going to start at
Speaker 1: zero there, so I'd rather be two months in on
Speaker 1: this one. But with that push or pivot, we have
Speaker 1: to just take things to the natural extreme, which is
Speaker 1: how I like to do it, which is okay, Well,
Speaker 1: if I do this for ten years and I keep
Speaker 1: getting better, do I think it's.
Speaker 2: Likely that I'll succeed?
Speaker 1: And the answer is usually yes, And so it's like, well,
Speaker 1: then I just need to keep paying down those iterations.
Speaker 1: And I think Navall said it's not ten thousand hours,
Speaker 1: it's ten thousand iterations.
Speaker 2: And I tend to believe that.
Speaker 3: Your new books quote one hundred million dollar money models. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, I think there'll be people listening
Speaker 3: who like, I just want to make one hundred k. Yeah,
Speaker 3: there'll be people saying I want to make one hundred
Speaker 3: k a month, and then there'll be people saying, we
Speaker 3: want to make one hundred million dollar business. What's the
Speaker 3: difference at each of those levels, and what do you
Speaker 3: share in here that you haven't shared in the hundred
Speaker 3: million dollar series before.
Speaker 2: So I'll take those questions one at a time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'll start with the second question, which is
Speaker 1: what's different about this book? So offers answered the question
Speaker 1: what do I sell? And so as an offer so
Speaker 1: good people feel stood saying no. So basically broke down
Speaker 1: the components of an offer. So we give a little
Speaker 1: example of one five hours for free. That's a very
Speaker 1: simple offer, right, But there are offers that you can
Speaker 1: include guarantees, you include scarcity, you can include urgency, you
Speaker 1: can include bonuses, and then the actual core value of itself.
Speaker 2: There's a way to increase the value of anything.
Speaker 1: So we use something called the value equation, which is
Speaker 1: probably the most known framework I have, which is therefore
Speaker 1: people say like, create value, But when you say, how
Speaker 1: do I operationalize that? If I say to a five
Speaker 1: year old, create value, They're like, I don't know what
Speaker 1: that means, And so how do we break that down
Speaker 1: in behaviors? So one is that some dream outcomes are
Speaker 1: going to be more valuable to somebody than something else.
Speaker 1: So if I go to a guide and say hey,
Speaker 1: I can make you rich or some or I say hey,
Speaker 1: I can make you good looking. Most men in general
Speaker 1: we'll say i'd rather be rich if you go to
Speaker 1: women and flips the other way. But for them that
Speaker 1: means that the outcome itself is going to be some
Speaker 1: outcomes are worth more than others. That's one element of value.
Speaker 1: The second element of value is perceive likely of achievement.
Speaker 1: How risky is it, how likely is it to occur?
Speaker 1: So if I said, hey, I can make you rich
Speaker 1: and it's guaranteed, it's going to be significantly more valuable,
Speaker 1: then if it's you have to take age amount of rest.
Speaker 1: The third variable is going to be speed. So from
Speaker 1: the time you make the decision to the time you
Speaker 1: get what you want, Hey, I can guarantee that you're
Speaker 1: going to get rich, but it's going to take twenty years.
Speaker 1: Plenty of people make that, but a lot of people
Speaker 1: are like, wellw but now that's twenty years. I want
Speaker 1: to get rich tomorrow, right. So time is going to
Speaker 1: be component of it. And then the fourth component is
Speaker 1: is effort and sacrifice, which is two sides of the
Speaker 1: same coin. Effort is all the things that you must
Speaker 1: do that you don't want to do as a result
Speaker 1: of this decision. And on the flip side, sacrifice is
Speaker 1: all the things you have to give up that you
Speaker 1: would prefer to do but you can no longer do
Speaker 1: as a result of the decision. And so if we
Speaker 1: want to make the most valuable offer, then we want
Speaker 1: to create something that is a huge treem outcome that
Speaker 1: happens guaranteed, that is immediate, and that they don't have
Speaker 1: to do anything for now. No offer is that good,
Speaker 1: But those are the hypothetical extremes the ideals that we
Speaker 1: strive towards. And I think that's a beautiful thing for
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs is that all we try to do is just
Speaker 1: get closer and closer to all four of those pillars.
Speaker 1: So that is the core of the offer's book. The
Speaker 1: leads book is the core four. So we went over earlier,
Speaker 1: So how do you promote anything? And so that book
Speaker 1: takes all eight of the component's core four you do,
Speaker 1: and then the core for the other people do on
Speaker 1: your behalf and breaks down in nittigrity totals by step
Speaker 1: how to do them. This book answers the question how
Speaker 1: do I make money right? And so it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well I know what to sell and I know how
Speaker 1: to advertise it, but how do I turn that process
Speaker 1: into making money?
Speaker 2: And so most people like.
Speaker 1: The thing that separates when I look back on all
Speaker 1: the companies that I've owned advice sold, the thing that
Speaker 1: separated the businesses that were moderately successful from the ones
Speaker 1: that were exceptionally successful is that they had a better
Speaker 1: money model. And a money model is the core economic
Speaker 1: unit of the business. So it's a deliberate sequence of
Speaker 1: offers that is ideally tailored to do one financial outcome,
Speaker 1: which is you collect enough cash from one customer in
Speaker 1: the first thirty days to get and service two more customers.
Speaker 1: And so when you have that amount of cash up front,
Speaker 1: then it unlocks cash flow for the business to grow
Speaker 1: as much as it wants or a least until the
Speaker 1: next you can train of the business. And so when
Speaker 1: I looked at all the money models that I created
Speaker 1: is there's basically four different objectives to make that happen.
Speaker 1: So one is how do I get more people interested?
Speaker 1: So that's going to be the nature of the offer.
Speaker 1: You know, bui X, gety free giveaway, things like that
Speaker 1: like Okay, I can structure this thing in a way
Speaker 1: that makes way more petrol interested than just saying hey,
Speaker 1: by my thing. The second element is, okay, how do
Speaker 1: I get those people to spend more money than they
Speaker 1: otherwise would, So there's different money models around that. The
Speaker 1: third is going to be how do I make them
Speaker 1: spend their money faster? How do I pull that cash
Speaker 1: flow forward? And then the fourth element of good money
Speaker 1: is a money model is how do I get them
Speaker 1: to do it again and again and again, which can either.
Speaker 2: Be recurring in a membership or reoccurring.
Speaker 1: Like Coca Cola, you still buy it again and again,
Speaker 1: it's just not on subscription. And so if you have
Speaker 1: all four of those things, then you have a business
Speaker 1: that can create tons and tons of demand, get lots
Speaker 1: and lots of money up front, and get people to
Speaker 1: buy again and again, which then creates its ability and
Speaker 1: cash off the business long term. And so that is
Speaker 1: basically the four pillars of the book, and it's broken
Speaker 1: down in those four steps. Of these are the front
Speaker 1: and offers that do this. These are the transition points
Speaker 1: to how do I get something to take the next
Speaker 1: thing that's going to be more expensive, or how it
Speaker 1: gets to take the bottom thing, or how to create
Speaker 1: pain points, how to create down cells, all of those
Speaker 1: components which ultimately make businesses significantly more successful. And I
Speaker 1: started writing this in twenty nineteen. It was the first
Speaker 1: book that I started. So it was actually called lead Life,
Speaker 1: The Generation of Monetization Structures, which you know, very very
Speaker 1: sexy name, but this was I had a mentor where
Speaker 1: it told me, hey, you're in the sale process right now.
Speaker 1: You should document all the artifacts kind of crystallized knowledge
Speaker 1: at that point.
Speaker 2: And so that is what started that book. Now, offers and.
Speaker 1: Leads were basically that book was like this thick, and
Speaker 1: I was like, this is I can't So I actually
Speaker 1: peeled off offers and then finished that first, and then
Speaker 1: peeled off leads and finished that second, and then finally
Speaker 1: I can get to the money models, which.
Speaker 2: Is actually what I started six years ago.
Speaker 1: And so I have not publicly talked about any of
Speaker 1: the structures in this book. And I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: giving birth. I've been I've been pregnant for six years,
Speaker 1: conceptually pregnant, and I want to give birth to this
Speaker 1: thing because I think that this will make the largest
Speaker 1: impact on business owner's bottom line of anything that I've
Speaker 1: ever made, and it's been the source of the vast
Speaker 1: majority of my material success is being able to do
Speaker 1: this because when you have a superior money model, it
Speaker 1: gives you padding to be bad at everything else because
Speaker 1: you finally make more money per customer than anyone else
Speaker 1: does in your space, which means your advertising doesn't have
Speaker 1: to be as good.
Speaker 2: You don't have to be as good at sales.
Speaker 1: You're like, the offer itself might not necessarily be as good.
Speaker 1: But when you sequence these things together properly the right way,
Speaker 1: then you can unlock skill on the business and then
Speaker 1: with that cash flow, buy down that ignorance stet and
Speaker 1: then give yourself time to get good at all the
Speaker 1: other stuff.
Speaker 3: And what starting point would you say this book's aimed at,
Speaker 3: Like where is someone at in the gene You.
Speaker 2: Can start at zero because you could start it.
Speaker 1: So what essentially about those four things is that you
Speaker 1: don't need all four, You just need one and over time.
Speaker 1: Because if you were trying to do a business that
Speaker 1: had all for it, you had a recurring you have upfront, like,
Speaker 1: you would be completely inundated. So we would start with
Speaker 1: the first thing, which is some sort of attraction offer.
Speaker 1: How do we get something that's that's more designed to
Speaker 1: get more customers or more people to engage in your
Speaker 1: original reach out, your paid ad, your content, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And so I have the five most successful structures that
Speaker 1: I have used and detailed stuff by step exactly how
Speaker 1: to excute them. And what's interesting is that this is
Speaker 1: the stuff that so the Offer's book when it came out,
Speaker 1: there wasn't a single other book about offers, which is interesting,
Speaker 1: and then it became kind of a household name, which
Speaker 1: is it was this massive gap in the space. But
Speaker 1: as soon as you you're like this is everything, you know,
Speaker 1: like this is how all of it works. I think
Speaker 1: that money models will be that same thing where there's
Speaker 1: not a single book that ties those concepts together. And
Speaker 1: as soon as it I think it will, it will
Speaker 1: exist in that huge gap that once you see it,
Speaker 1: you can analyze any business in that same way, and
Speaker 1: specifically your own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love it, honestly listening to you today, and
Speaker 3: I've consumed your content for a long time now, listening
Speaker 3: to you in person consistently for this long around. The
Speaker 3: models that you've built is a real treat man. It's
Speaker 3: it's so well thought through it's so systematic. I love
Speaker 3: the way you think, the way you've been able to
Speaker 3: train yourself to realize that everything's built on behaviors, and
Speaker 3: the ability to even something that you said to me,
Speaker 3: that's really going to stay with me because I think
Speaker 3: about it in such a similar way. But it's so obscure,
Speaker 3: Like we have a lot of similarities in our beliefs,
Speaker 3: but some of them are a bit more.
Speaker 2: Different angles, which I love.
Speaker 3: Yeah, from different angles, but some of them are a
Speaker 3: bit more They're from different angles, but some of them
Speaker 3: are a bit more widespread held. But you're one thing
Speaker 3: you talked about today about how when you watch people
Speaker 3: say what they regret, and I think about that all
Speaker 3: the time. I'm like, of course you regret you didn't
Speaker 3: spend enough time with your family, but you're totally taking
Speaker 3: away from all the benefits you just got right now.
Speaker 3: And I'm not saying people shouldn't spend time with their family.
Speaker 3: It's just when you said that today, that was one
Speaker 3: thing that I was like, I can't be like to
Speaker 3: have the ability to think it through to that level,
Speaker 3: to not just take something at face value. And I
Speaker 3: think that's that's the skill I see you have, Like,
Speaker 3: that's the expert you're at is that you don't take
Speaker 3: anything at face value. And that's hard because it requires
Speaker 3: you to dig deep to figure out, well, what is
Speaker 3: the behavioral science here?
Speaker 2: Is?
Speaker 3: What is the exchange here?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 3: What emotions are we talking about? I picked out some
Speaker 3: of my favorite alex Monmose quotes because so many. But first,
Speaker 3: here's a quick word from the brands that support the show.
Speaker 3: All Right, thank you to our sponsors. Now let's back in.
Speaker 3: All right, you've touched on some of this, but it'd
Speaker 3: be good to get your reaction to them again. All Right,
Speaker 3: So this one I love because I think it's so true.
Speaker 3: Most people want to become millionaires because of what being
Speaker 3: a millionaire allows you to do, not because of what
Speaker 3: you have to do to become a millionaire. What do
Speaker 3: we do about that mindset?
Speaker 1: It's wanting the view without the climbs. Jimmy Carr has
Speaker 1: a great quote on this. It's everyone wants what you have,
Speaker 1: but not what you did to get it. I think
Speaker 1: that if we make who we become the goal rather
Speaker 1: than the thing we achieve, instead of winning once a decade,
Speaker 1: we can win every day because you can continually get
Speaker 1: better at being who you are, and then the achievement
Speaker 1: is just one milestone along the path. But at least
Speaker 1: in my experiences, as I've actually approached milestones, when it
Speaker 1: becomes increasingly likely that I'm going to achieve it, it matters
Speaker 1: less and less. When I was in the lifting world,
Speaker 1: if I thought whatever my lift was and added one
Speaker 1: hundred pounds, I'd be like, oh my god, man, if
Speaker 1: I lifted that, that would be insane. The time you
Speaker 1: actually do lift that, you also lifted five pounds less
Speaker 1: than that before, and you'll lift to ten pounds less
Speaker 1: than that before, so you're like, well, it's really not
Speaker 1: that big of a stretch anymore. And so it actually,
Speaker 1: in some ways it's it's not even nearly as fulfilling
Speaker 1: as you think it is, because by the time it happens,
Speaker 1: you're so close to it it seems obvious, and so
Speaker 1: shifting from who I become rather than what I achieve
Speaker 1: or who I become as the achievement has been a
Speaker 1: wonderful reframe for like, sure, you want to be a millionaire,
Speaker 1: but we really want to do is become the person
Speaker 1: who can become a millionaire, and that you can win
Speaker 1: every day, and then that takes away the I don't
Speaker 1: want to do the things that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that comes to one of the things you
Speaker 3: talk about a lot that I love is sense control
Speaker 3: like that that to me. I think one of the
Speaker 3: earliest clips I saw of yours was someone had asked
Speaker 3: you something like, you know, what's a trait you see
Speaker 3: in successful people? And I think you said three things,
Speaker 3: and I loved hearing that that third one. The first
Speaker 3: one was, I think you said something like, you know,
Speaker 3: they're all people who who have high standards, so they
Speaker 3: want to they expect a lot from themselves. Yeah, second
Speaker 3: was but at the same time, they're good at not
Speaker 3: being that hard on themselves when.
Speaker 2: They don't get the emotional control.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then the third thing was like sense control,
Speaker 3: if I'm.
Speaker 2: Not wrong, yeah, yeah. The other one was, so it's
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 3: Did I get wrong?
Speaker 1: No, No, You're it's like you have this inflated sense
Speaker 1: of self, so you believe you can achieve great thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, that's it.
Speaker 1: You have this crippling insecurity that pushes you away.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then the third is that you can control
Speaker 2: your emotions.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And that that and I've always thought it's the
Speaker 3: high standards, high grace. That's been my language around it.
Speaker 3: But the third one of that self mastery. What do
Speaker 3: you think is the number one emotion that people don't
Speaker 3: know how to control that leads to failure.
Speaker 1: That is such a good question, fear, because I think
Speaker 1: one of the one of the most one of the
Speaker 1: wildest questions that I read that you know, kind of
Speaker 1: stuck with me, was like, what would you do if
Speaker 1: you weren't afraid? And I think that it's just such
Speaker 1: a such a powerful question to ask, because every person
Speaker 1: has the fear is the thing that gives you the
Speaker 1: hundred reasons. And what's really interesting about this is that
Speaker 1: we are our brains are exceptionally good at finding problems,
Speaker 1: which is why I'm a big fan of inverted thinking.
Speaker 1: So how can I think of it all the ways
Speaker 1: to kill my business and then do the opposite. You'll
Speaker 1: your brain is so much better at spotting problems than
Speaker 1: spotting opportunities, and so it's like use that problem, that
Speaker 1: problem finding thing, and then just flip it. And it
Speaker 1: sounds like, oh, well, I would just think of the
Speaker 1: opportunities that way. It's like it doesn't actually work. You
Speaker 1: actually have to think for the threats and then flip them.
Speaker 1: But I love that it's Charlie Mongerus, that's you know,
Speaker 1: you know, rest in peace. But from a from a
Speaker 1: fear perspective, it's I think it's playing it out. It's
Speaker 1: like what am I actually most afraid of? And so
Speaker 1: fear typically only lives in the vague, not in the specific.
Speaker 2: We tend to catastrophize to death.
Speaker 1: So if I make this post and people laugh at me,
Speaker 1: I'll get shunned and then I'll eventually go alone and
Speaker 1: then die right, So it's like everything just goes to
Speaker 1: like death right, And so playing it out into the
Speaker 1: specific is like, Okay, well I make this post.
Speaker 2: Some people will like.
Speaker 1: It and some people and maybe I'll get some negative comments.
Speaker 1: If I get naked hommuts, I'll get more reached, so
Speaker 1: maybe it's not a terrible thing. And then and then
Speaker 1: that night I will have dinner right, and that night
Speaker 1: I will go to bed right, and so making making
Speaker 1: it really really specific. And then just to add one
Speaker 1: more thing on that, the other really big downside of
Speaker 1: being human from an opportunity of money making perspective is
Speaker 1: that we underestimate the upside and we overestimate the downside,
Speaker 1: and that has been incredibly valuable for us to stay
Speaker 1: alive and not very valuable for us to make money.
Speaker 2: And so when you if you're in the developed world,
Speaker 2: the absolute worst.
Speaker 1: Case scenario is that you still have a say, fortress,
Speaker 1: you still have a cover, and you still have food,
Speaker 1: and you still have air, and you still have water,
Speaker 1: because in the developed world all those things are available
Speaker 1: to anyone, and so it's like, okay, so the worst
Speaker 1: case scenario is that I live and I'm completely free
Speaker 1: and no one bothers me. It's like, you know, that
Speaker 1: actually sounds not so bad when you actually play it
Speaker 1: all the way out. And so I think playing it
Speaker 1: out and actually really thinking what would I then do.
Speaker 1: I probably reach out to say and she would let
Speaker 1: me sleep on her couch, okay, so, and I would
Speaker 1: ask her.
Speaker 2: If you complain it.
Speaker 1: I'd be like, hey, Sarah, if I were to do
Speaker 1: something and I were to fail, how long would you
Speaker 1: let me sleep on your couch. You're like, I'd give
Speaker 1: you six months, and you're like okay. So it all
Speaker 1: of a sudden it becomes concrete, and I think that
Speaker 1: that starts to really evaporate fear rather than like oh,
Speaker 1: I will die totally.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I remember that when I when I made the leap,
Speaker 3: I was like, and of course I was in a
Speaker 3: position to be able to say this, but I was like, Okay, well,
Speaker 3: I'll just go back to what I was doing and
Speaker 3: if this didn't work, I would just go back, like
Speaker 3: I'll figure out a way get the job back, and
Speaker 3: I'll get the job back and I'll go back to
Speaker 3: do it. And that was the reality. And of course
Speaker 3: it was still at the time when I felt this
Speaker 3: was taking up all of that. All right, another one
Speaker 3: that I love. This, This one really really hit me
Speaker 3: and I feel it's going to resonate with a lot
Speaker 3: of people if you haven't heard it yet. People fail
Speaker 3: not because there's some magical list nobody has. They fail
Speaker 3: because it's an obvious list nobody does.
Speaker 2: I'm so happy you like that one.
Speaker 1: It didn't like I just just just to give kudos
Speaker 1: to Jay here. You picked out tweets that were not
Speaker 1: like super Bang or high performers, but like I wrote
Speaker 1: these and I was like, this is like, this is
Speaker 1: a thing.
Speaker 3: I didn't pick them based on performance. I picked them
Speaker 3: based on like I was like, I read this, I
Speaker 3: was like, yes.
Speaker 1: Like, I like that, So just kudos to you for
Speaker 1: that because it makes me feel good. But yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean this is a super known one, but like
Speaker 1: the magic isn't the work that we're not doing, right,
Speaker 1: it's the obvious list. If you were trying to get
Speaker 1: in shape, you know, you should eat less and you
Speaker 1: should move more.
Speaker 2: You know that.
Speaker 1: And so I used to even do these with when
Speaker 1: I would have a weight loss customer who come in
Speaker 1: the door and they'd be like, so, tell me more
Speaker 1: about the and I would just say, like, do we
Speaker 1: really need to get into it? Like you already know
Speaker 1: what you're supposed to do. The question is why you
Speaker 1: aren't doing it. That's what I'm here for. And so
Speaker 1: in a lot of these situations, like you probably know
Speaker 1: that if you're going to invest, you should, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: wait ten years. And if you're not willing to wait
Speaker 1: ten years, then you shouldn't buy it, which means that
Speaker 1: if you're like, well I don't have the time to
Speaker 1: do that research, then don't invest. Increase your active income, right,
Speaker 1: and so and all these things like okay, well how
Speaker 1: do I increase my activit? Well, I know I need
Speaker 1: to do more than I currently am I know I
Speaker 1: need to put my stuff out there. And so one
Speaker 1: of my favorite frames around this is it's the Solomon paradox, right,
Speaker 1: And so for theose W don't know. In the Bible,
Speaker 1: Solomon wise man, they called Solomon paradox because he gave
Speaker 1: amazing advice, but his life was in shambles. And so
Speaker 1: the thing is that we're exceptionally good at giving advice
Speaker 1: and very good and very bad at following it for ourselves.
Speaker 1: And so what's interesting is that they actually did studies
Speaker 1: on this where they had people they whitewash someone's existing
Speaker 1: circumstances and their conditions and had the same people, not
Speaker 1: knowing they were criticizing themselves, give critiques to this person
Speaker 1: what to do to improve their lives. And the thing
Speaker 1: is is that none of the people are doing it.
Speaker 1: And so the thing is, I like that frame because
Speaker 1: if you parachute your sorry, protect yourself in the future
Speaker 1: and look back and say, Okay, what would eighty years
Speaker 1: old version of me tell me to do?
Speaker 2: For some reason, it kind of like.
Speaker 1: Disembodies yourself a little bit, and you can get back
Speaker 1: and say, well, I would tell myself to do this,
Speaker 1: this and this, and the thing is is that you
Speaker 1: have complete context on your situation, and so sometimes it's
Speaker 1: some of the best advice you can get. And I
Speaker 1: know this is kind of like the inverted thing where
Speaker 1: you'd be like, oh, well, I just actually go through
Speaker 1: the process and say, I'm going to write down a
Speaker 1: conversation with myself that's eighty years old.
Speaker 2: What would he or she tell me to do?
Speaker 1: And it probably is that obvious list that no one does,
Speaker 1: not the magical list that no one knows. Because the
Speaker 1: thing is is that like the clues of success are
Speaker 1: in plain sight, it's just that the sweat that's required,
Speaker 1: the price tag associated with them is the one that
Speaker 1: people don't want to pay. So people don't really give
Speaker 1: up on their dreams. They give up they see what
Speaker 1: it takes to get their dreams and then decide it's
Speaker 1: too expensive. And I think that's the big thing is
Speaker 1: is they think it's mispriced. And maybe it is, and
Speaker 1: I think that's okay. But my preference would be that
Speaker 1: many people say, you know what, that's not worth it
Speaker 1: to me, and then be like, great, you've won. Like
Speaker 1: you've won, you don't need to get anywhere you've already won.
Speaker 1: Where you're at So that's at least my thought on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love that. How does someone who listens to
Speaker 3: this episode versus someone who applies this episode live differently
Speaker 3: today or tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Well, if someone just listens to the episode, tomorrow will
Speaker 1: be the same for you. So that's an easy one.
Speaker 1: This was just entertainment for you. Just define in terms
Speaker 1: of actions what you were going to do. I mean,
Speaker 1: that is really it. And so like you can prove
Speaker 1: to yourself that you learned something from this podcast rather
Speaker 1: than just being entertained by this podcast, by simply doing
Speaker 1: something different, taking and action. And so maybe it is
Speaker 1: just recording that self a video and texting it to
Speaker 1: one hundred people.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: You could just do that and you would have I mean,
Speaker 1: you would be so much further ahead than you were yesterday.
Speaker 1: And what's crazy is that the amount of progress that
Speaker 1: you make in that first twenty hours is greater than
Speaker 1: any amount of progress that you will likely make over
Speaker 1: the remainder of your career, because going from absolutely terrible
Speaker 1: too proficient happens so fast.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: To be clear, all of the gains come from going
Speaker 1: from proficient to master, which take a huge amount of time,
Speaker 1: but It's one of the most exciting times because like,
Speaker 1: all right, look I can build an app. Now, oh
Speaker 1: look I can build a web page, or look, I
Speaker 1: can show the people out of self stup, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: And I think I would just want to get to that,
Speaker 1: like get to that fast learning curve as fast as
Speaker 1: you can.
Speaker 2: And the only we can do that at starting. I
Speaker 2: love it. All right.
Speaker 3: Here's another one. I don't know if it's a popular
Speaker 3: one or not, but deleting work life balance for a
Speaker 3: season nets you more work life balance over a lifetime.
Speaker 1: So I love this frame shift, which is everyone talks
Speaker 1: about work life balance, but no one talks about it
Speaker 1: over what timeline. Paul Graham said this from my Combinator.
Speaker 1: He said, in order to make a million dollars, you
Speaker 1: have to endure million dollars worth of pain. And so
Speaker 1: you might be able to endure a million dollars with
Speaker 1: a pain over forty years, or you can crunch it
Speaker 1: into four crazy years and then after that you can
Speaker 1: have whatever you want to have afterwards. And so I
Speaker 1: think about life in seasons rather than on microcosms days
Speaker 1: and even weeks, and I think that shifting that perspective
Speaker 1: will really only solve one core problem for people, which
Speaker 1: is that they feel like they are doing something wrong
Speaker 1: by making a sacrifice today, and there's always going and
Speaker 1: again it's an eternal question how much do I risk?
Speaker 1: How much do I consume versus invest? These are classic
Speaker 1: human problems that will never have a correct answer, And
Speaker 1: it's more what's the correct answer for you in your
Speaker 1: season right now, based on the goals you have? And
Speaker 1: so I think, if anything, I would want that quote
Speaker 1: to give some people permission.
Speaker 2: To work a weekend every once in a while, to.
Speaker 1: Take the five to nine on both sides of the
Speaker 1: day and say, you know what, I Am going to
Speaker 1: be unbalanced. And that's okay because at least in my
Speaker 1: observation and probably yours, I have yet to see a
Speaker 1: hyper successful person who doesn't have a wildly unbalanced life,
Speaker 1: or at least for a significant period of time. And
Speaker 1: we want to just make sure that we're not looking
Speaker 1: at someone once they are a billionaire and saying what
Speaker 1: are they doing now? Because they might be in a
Speaker 1: different season now, and so don't look at what you
Speaker 1: know Warren Buffet's doing now when he says I have
Speaker 1: I make two good decisions a year I've had a
Speaker 1: good year.
Speaker 2: Well, if you make two good decisions a year, you're.
Speaker 1: Still probably not gonna You're not gonna be warm Buffett, right,
Speaker 1: And so I think about that as my as my frame.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't read someone's chapter twenty when you're writing your
Speaker 3: chapter one. It doesn't make any sense. I remember growing up,
Speaker 3: not growing up. I remember a few years ago when
Speaker 3: Gary Gary's version that I loved, which is like in
Speaker 3: his words and so I'll say each ship for two
Speaker 3: years and then eat cavia for the rest of your life. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And it was so interesting to me how much you
Speaker 3: could do in two years if you just went all
Speaker 3: in as opposed to this idea of like I'm gonna
Speaker 3: be really balanced for ten years. And I was thinking
Speaker 3: about the other day and you said seasons. And I
Speaker 3: was saying this the other day when I was on
Speaker 3: tour storing to Jesse. It'sler and I said this to Jesse.
Speaker 3: We were talking about something similar, and I was just like,
Speaker 3: I would never want a day. A perfect day is
Speaker 3: not a day where it rains, snows, sun and fall, right, Like,
Speaker 3: that's not a perfect day. Like you wouldn't say that,
Speaker 3: you wouldn't say I hope it rains today. I hope
Speaker 3: it snows today. I hope it's sunny, and I hope
Speaker 3: the leaves shed. Like that's not a perfect day, but
Speaker 3: that's what you want every day. And Nature's already showing
Speaker 3: you the cycles that work. But we're trying to go
Speaker 3: against nature by saying I want everything to happen today.
Speaker 1: And I want all my days to be over the
Speaker 1: halfway line.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I think about this from a law of
Speaker 1: large numbers perspective, which is, let's say you have three
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty five days in a year, and there's
Speaker 1: going to be if you change nothing the bottom ten
Speaker 1: percent of days, you're gonna have thirty six days in
Speaker 1: the year that are bottom ten percent days. That there's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with the day, it's just that this happens
Speaker 1: to be a bottom ten percent day. And so I
Speaker 1: think a lot of suffering comes from just the normal
Speaker 1: volatility or variation that exists in life and then somehow
Speaker 1: ascribing meaning to it and saying, oh, and because this
Speaker 1: is the bottom ten percent, it is bad. Rather than
Speaker 1: it is sunny, it is rainy, and I need rain
Speaker 1: in order to appreciate sun, right, And so it's like
Speaker 1: we can't have just upside. It's the trade offs, Like
Speaker 1: I want all the good without the bad.
Speaker 2: But the bad is what makes the good good.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, and the bad is what sometimes what keeps
Speaker 3: you going. Yeah, because if it's just good, maybe you'd stop,
Speaker 3: maybe you'd yeah. Well, last one of these that I
Speaker 3: wanted to pick out, which I think is going to
Speaker 3: help a lot of people because I've been doing it
Speaker 3: a lot. I'm writing my third book right now, and
Speaker 3: this has changed my life. It's amazing how much you
Speaker 3: can get done if you work for twelve hours without
Speaker 3: your phone. So, I mean, it was simple yet so profound.
Speaker 1: So I defined so that here's the number one the
Speaker 1: highest value productivity hack that I can give anyone. So
Speaker 1: this is the hack of productivity. Do nothing except for
Speaker 1: the task you set out to achieve.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: So everything that people do in order to increase productivity
Speaker 1: that is not working on the task at hand is
Speaker 1: by very definition.
Speaker 2: Making them less productive.
Speaker 1: Like period. And so I think people have these very
Speaker 1: long routines. I think they have these like I got
Speaker 1: to get in the mood.
Speaker 2: I got in this.
Speaker 1: But it's like, what if you could start taking action
Speaker 1: despite your mood and then get into the mood faster
Speaker 1: through taking the action. And so all of the things
Speaker 1: that have made me more productive in life have been
Speaker 1: through elimination, not addition. And so it is eliminating outside
Speaker 1: stimulus besides the one task that I'm working on. And
Speaker 1: so if we think the hypothetical ideal, our hypothetical extream
Speaker 1: of the most focused person in the world is that
Speaker 1: that person would do literally nothing besides that one thing,
Speaker 1: which means the wouldn't eat, they wouldn't sleep. Now at
Speaker 1: some point they're like, okay, well, in order for it,
Speaker 1: he has to eat and he has to sleep. Okay,
Speaker 1: So every other hour is just this one thing. And
Speaker 1: so if we take that as the hypothetical extreme, we
Speaker 1: want to approximate there or get as close as possible
Speaker 1: to that extreme as humanly possible. And so for me,
Speaker 1: it's good night's sleep knowing what I'm going to start
Speaker 1: on the day before. Caffeinate ear plugs, I double earplug.
Speaker 1: I put the plugs, and then I put the things on,
Speaker 1: and I work in a room that has no windows.
Speaker 1: Now some people are like, that's depressing for me, But
Speaker 1: for me, it'll laws me to lose myself in my
Speaker 1: work not get distracted by something that's going on outside.
Speaker 3: Well, I was just about to say, I'm glad you
Speaker 3: brought up environment because everyone has an environment they thrive in.
Speaker 3: So I'm the same. I need I need instrumental music.
Speaker 3: I don't can't have music with lyrics when I'm thinking that,
Speaker 3: I just can't do it. So I have some artists
Speaker 3: that I'm happy to listen to instrumentals of. It also
Speaker 3: can't be songs that I know. Trust me in music
Speaker 3: that's totally unpredictable and totally random because it helps me
Speaker 3: with creativity.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 3: Then I do need windows, any natural light, but I
Speaker 3: need to not see anything real happening. It's like sky
Speaker 3: treat It's like it's nondescript and there's not like yeah,
Speaker 3: not people exactly. And I can't work in noisy coffee
Speaker 3: shop like I can't work in environments like that. And
Speaker 3: to me, the environment is more important than this whole
Speaker 3: mood builder thing because that's like deep work, like you're
Speaker 3: in the cave doing the thing.
Speaker 2: Can I tell a wild example?
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I believe you if you control the conditions,
Speaker 1: you can control the outcome, right, if you know all
Speaker 1: the variables and so if we want to be productive,
Speaker 1: we want to control as many of those conditions as possible.
Speaker 1: And so to take up hypothetical extreme power to say, hey,
Speaker 1: I guarantee that everybody who's listening to this, if we
Speaker 1: were all in one room, I could get everyone naked
Speaker 1: without saying a word. He would hear that and be like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's insane. What I would do is
Speaker 1: I would lock all the doors, and I would turn
Speaker 1: up the heat to two hundred and then just wait
Speaker 1: and eventually everyone would get naked. And the point to
Speaker 1: that is that we can reconstruct the environment to get
Speaker 1: the desired outcome if we control as many of those
Speaker 1: variables as possible. And so if you don't feel as
Speaker 1: productive as you want, you get distracted easily. You might
Speaker 1: not have even given yourself a shot. Right if you're
Speaker 1: trying to work while having your notifications on, while letting
Speaker 1: people text you and call you, and you're at you know,
Speaker 1: in an area where people are coming by and like
Speaker 1: is this chair free? Is this table free? And you're
Speaker 1: constantly getting pulled. It's like you haven't even gotten a chance.
Speaker 1: And maybe you have a roommate who walks in and
Speaker 1: out and maybe they listen to music. And the thing
Speaker 1: is that many people are in those conditions and they're like, man,
Speaker 1: I think I think I have a medical condition. I
Speaker 1: think I need to get medicated. It's like, dude, you
Speaker 1: give your self a shot. Like Jerry Soindfeld talks about
Speaker 1: how his writing condition is he has a desk in
Speaker 1: a room that has nothing else, and he's got a
Speaker 1: pad and he's got a pen, and he's he doesn't
Speaker 1: have to write, but he can't do anything else. And
Speaker 1: so if we define commitment as the elimination of alternatives,
Speaker 1: then we need to commit to the work. Right it
Speaker 1: focuses anything that is not the work, is not the work,
Speaker 1: then that's it. And so I think that we get
Speaker 1: there through elimination, not thro adition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I felt that. I think it's going to help
Speaker 3: a lot of people. And you're so right, Like even
Speaker 3: it's so funny you say that. Up until six months ago,
Speaker 3: I started to think. I was like, that's my brain
Speaker 3: just been rewired by TikTok, Like I was like, have
Speaker 3: I really lost my ability for deep work? And I
Speaker 3: was having this thought probably like six maybe twelve months ago,
Speaker 3: because I was racking my brain about a new brook
Speaker 3: and it wasn't as clear as it used to be
Speaker 3: and whatever, and I just started to do what I
Speaker 3: always used to do, and all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 3: all gone away. And I was like, I'm writing, like
Speaker 3: for eight hours a day Saturday and Sunday, or a
Speaker 3: new book every week because I loved it in the zone.
Speaker 3: I'm in the room that I write in, and I
Speaker 3: was like, oh, it's right there. I didn't give myself
Speaker 3: the opportunity because I was trying to do it with
Speaker 3: the other discission.
Speaker 1: Trying to squeeze it in. So you can't squeeze in focus.
Speaker 1: Let's say it's a jealous mistress. It requires all your.
Speaker 3: Attention, Alex. We end every episode with a final five.
Speaker 3: These questions get asked to everyone and so these are
Speaker 3: your final five. They have to be answered in one word,
Speaker 3: one sentence maximum. So question number one, Alex, what is
Speaker 3: the best advice you've ever heard or received?
Speaker 2: Do so much work it would be unreasonable for you
Speaker 2: not to be successful.
Speaker 3: Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever heard
Speaker 3: or received?
Speaker 2: Follow your passion?
Speaker 3: Question number three a piece of advice you wish you
Speaker 3: received sooner?
Speaker 1: Find people better than you and do whatever you can
Speaker 1: to get them to help you, including helping them first
Speaker 1: without expectation.
Speaker 3: Question number four A lesson that took you far too
Speaker 3: many times to learn.
Speaker 2: Focus one thing all in and.
Speaker 3: Fifth and final questions, And we asked this every guest
Speaker 3: has ever been on the show. If you could create
Speaker 3: one law that everyone had to follow, what would it be?
Speaker 2: Everyone has to give all their wealth away at the
Speaker 2: end of their life.
Speaker 3: I love that one.
Speaker 1: Not to your kids, but it has to be yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: has to be.
Speaker 3: Given away to kids or ever or it doesn't matter. Yeah,
Speaker 3: not to your kids, Like yeah, yeah, are you saying
Speaker 3: beyond your kids?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: My friend just told me the other day that his
Speaker 3: dad just took him out the will and his dad's
Speaker 3: given all his money away to charity and all the
Speaker 3: kids are our gayet anything. He was hot broke. He
Speaker 3: was like, oh God, I thought I was gonna pass
Speaker 3: them wunny.
Speaker 1: So there's a sanscrit saying around that, which is, if
Speaker 1: you have a good son, there's no need to accumulate wealth.
Speaker 1: If you have a bad son, there's no point to
Speaker 1: accumulate wealth. And so at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's my worldview, which is the reason
Speaker 1: that I want the reason that I would want the
Speaker 1: game to be structured so that everybody has to give
Speaker 1: all their stuff away at the end is because if
Speaker 1: you look at second and third order consequences of that,
Speaker 1: the people who are the best allocating earth aggregating capital,
Speaker 1: the people are the best at making money would be
Speaker 1: the ones who are also the best at allocating it.
Speaker 1: And so you would actually have the best tools and
Speaker 1: the people who are best skilled to use them. And
Speaker 1: so if you know you have to give it away,
Speaker 1: then at some point near the later part of your life,
Speaker 1: you would stop trying to amass and start trying to
Speaker 1: you'd focus on giving. And I think most people who
Speaker 1: do give get addicted to giving because they realized that
Speaker 1: actually it fills a hole that the wealth never did right.
Speaker 1: And so what ends up happening, though, is that from
Speaker 1: a societal perspective, is that if all the best allocators
Speaker 1: of capital then try to solve all the world's problems
Speaker 1: with the capital they had, so many fewer problems would exist.
Speaker 2: That would the whole world would get better.
Speaker 1: The other downstream effect of that is that it would
Speaker 1: get rid of a huge amount of the kind of
Speaker 1: the cronyism, the nepotism, the things where you know, these
Speaker 1: these seventh generation massive you know, wealth trust fund, you
Speaker 1: know kids who like it doesn't serve the kids either.
Speaker 1: You look at those families, they're a mess.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, on on so many reasons.
Speaker 1: And so I'm a big believer in equal opportunity, not
Speaker 1: equal outcomes. And so if everybody's slate was clean day one,
Speaker 1: because no one got daddy's inheritance, then everyone starts at
Speaker 1: zero as close as possible. Obviously genetics, you know, can
Speaker 1: play a factor there, but I think that' says as
Speaker 1: equal of a start as we can get, and then
Speaker 1: everyone starts as zero, and and the ones you super
Speaker 1: win then turn into super givers.
Speaker 2: And I like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And if you don't One thing I've learned about
Speaker 3: that as well is if you don't give now, you
Speaker 3: won't give later. This feeling of like when I get
Speaker 3: a million dollars, i'll give more, it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 3: It's a purport, Like it will hurt ten percent at
Speaker 3: a million dollars, it will hurt ten percent at one
Speaker 3: hundred k. Like it's not that's not going to change.
Speaker 3: And another phrase that we'd always hear in the monastery
Speaker 3: was God doesn't see how much you give, God sees
Speaker 3: how much you hold back. And so that's why I
Speaker 3: like your law a lot, because it's that feeling of like, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, at the end of it, I gave it all.
Speaker 3: The book is called one hundred Million Dollar Money Models,
Speaker 3: part of the one hundred Million Dollar Series, Alex I
Speaker 3: hope this is the first of many many conversations we
Speaker 3: have online and Offlan truly loved our time together and honestly,
Speaker 3: I've become a bigger fan of spending this time with
Speaker 3: you and this This was a masterclass for so many
Speaker 3: I'm going to be sending this to a lot of
Speaker 3: people I know who need to. There's some podcasts that
Speaker 3: you do and you're just like, yeah, I'm going to
Speaker 3: send this personally to people in my life who I
Speaker 3: think this is going to change for us.
Speaker 1: So thank you so much, man, I'm super humbled and
Speaker 1: very honored. So thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 3: If this is the year that you're trying to get creative,
Speaker 3: you're trying to build more, I need you to listen
Speaker 3: to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break
Speaker 3: into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods
Speaker 3: that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving
Speaker 3: what you do. If you're trying to find your passion
Speaker 3: and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you?
Speaker 3: Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value,
Speaker 3: like as an artist, if you like it, that's all
Speaker 3: of the value. That's the success comes when you say
Speaker 3: I like this enough for other people to see it.