Dan Martell - How the Rich Think About Business

00:00:00.000 Some people, they're kind of playing, they're dabbling.

00:00:03.280 They're not really being in the business.

00:00:05.560 They kind of like have ideas about being in business,

00:00:07.800 but they're not showing up and attacking things.

00:00:23.380 Hey there, everybody.

00:00:24.580 Dan here.

00:00:25.040 Today, I want to talk about the mindset of motivation

00:00:27.780 trumps knowledge.

00:00:28.680 You know, I get asked all the time, you know,

00:00:30.580 because I've built multi-million dollar companies

00:00:32.520 and scaled teams and, you know, built marketing programs

00:00:36.140 and I've got this YouTube channel.

00:00:37.560 People ask me all the time.

00:00:38.400 It's like, where do I learn how to do stuff?

00:00:41.240 And, you know, I obviously would love them

00:00:43.180 to consume every one of my videos.

00:00:44.760 But the truth is, is what I've discovered for success,

00:00:48.480 it's not about what you know, it's how you show up.

00:00:51.400 When I was 18, I actually cold called 20 different,

00:00:54.740 kind of not billionaires, some of them were billionaires.

00:00:57.200 So I cold called Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban,

00:01:01.280 and I literally found a list of like the 20 richest people

00:01:04.720 in tech or like most notable people.

00:01:06.880 And I asked them the question.

00:01:08.200 I said, you know, if I'm a young entrepreneur,

00:01:11.080 if I was trying to be successful,

00:01:12.720 what is the thing that's gonna allow me to stand out?

00:01:16.200 Is it what I know, is it who I know,

00:01:18.440 or is it my motivation?

00:01:20.700 And I got very few replies,

00:01:23.720 I think I probably got seven or eight replies out of 20.

00:01:26.400 So it's not nothing.

00:01:28.380 The one that I love the best was Mark Cuban actually said,

00:01:31.900 do all three when everybody else is trying to pick one.

00:01:35.820 But I really leaned into that

00:01:37.000 because over the years I've discovered,

00:01:39.060 it's not what you know,

00:01:40.340 because if it was true,

00:01:41.380 then you'd have a bunch of millionaire PhD doctorates

00:01:44.500 in universities, right?

00:01:46.060 If it was just about knowledge,

00:01:47.820 then people that read a thousand books

00:01:49.900 would just magically be successful.

00:01:51.660 And what I've discovered is,

00:01:54.380 If you're struggling with fear, uncertainty,

00:01:57.820 imposter syndrome, self-doubt,

00:02:01.880 the truth is, is we need to overcome that.

00:02:04.040 We need to overcome that through motivation.

00:02:05.920 I'm gonna share three specific strategies

00:02:07.880 to help you go from a place where you're feeling like,

00:02:11.220 you know, I'm not sure if I'm built for this,

00:02:13.580 I'm not sure if my family's gonna support me,

00:02:16.360 to a place of, you know, confidence,

00:02:18.680 where you wake up and you just know you're on your path,

00:02:20.860 you know you're on your journey,

00:02:21.700 you know that it feels right.

00:02:23.380 And I remember the first time that I really understood this,

00:02:26.560 I was building a company called Spheric Technologies.

00:02:28.500 I had saved at that point, I was 23, 24.

00:02:31.780 I'd saved 75K.

00:02:33.400 I worked for three years, saving all my money.

00:02:36.800 I start this company.

00:02:38.600 I go back to the first place I'd ever worked.

00:02:41.740 I reach out to my buddies that I was,

00:02:44.200 essentially I started the job with

00:02:45.840 to try to recruit them away to join me on this crazy journey.

00:02:48.760 They were 22 years old at the time.

00:02:51.380 And I remember asking the two guys like,

00:02:54.240 because I needed three people.

00:02:55.760 Okay, well, four total, but three to join.

00:02:58.420 And I asked the two guys like,

00:02:59.460 who is the other person that you work with

00:03:02.220 that you think is like motivated

00:03:05.460 and would like jive well with us?

00:03:07.080 And I had this like really, you know,

00:03:08.440 I had customers lined up, I just needed people.

00:03:10.880 And they said, oh, there's this guy, Andrew, at work.

00:03:12.860 Let me talk to him and see if he'd be interested.

00:03:16.340 And they reached out to him,

00:03:18.180 got him to kind of take an interest.

00:03:20.720 I had a meeting with him and I could just tell like,

00:03:23.500 okay, this is a guy that gets it, right?

00:03:25.720 He's young, he's motivated.

00:03:27.300 He had some real estate projects he's working on.

00:03:29.080 Like he's just somebody that's a hustler.

00:03:31.660 He's gonna do what it's gonna take to be successful.

00:03:33.680 So I offered them the job.

00:03:35.640 And I mean, this was a big deal for him, right?

00:03:39.180 Like he was leaving a really great opportunity

00:03:41.620 just like the other two guys to join this crazy startup

00:03:44.680 that had no revenue, no customers, literally day zero.

00:03:48.260 And I remember messaging him on the weekend,

00:03:51.160 saying, hey man, I'll stop over on Sunday

00:03:52.900 with some paperwork, like some generic legal stuff

00:03:55.420 I probably found on LegalZoom.com.

00:03:57.700 And I show up to his house.

00:04:00.120 First off, I thought it'd be an apartment,

00:04:01.540 because I lived in an apartment.

00:04:02.880 I show up to his place, it's a house.

00:04:05.660 I knock on the door, and I'm waiting,

00:04:07.980 and all of a sudden, this little blonde-headed girl 1.00

00:04:10.180 opens the door, and I'm like, oh.

00:04:14.220 I go, is Andrew here?

00:04:16.320 and she turns around and she screams dada. 1.00

00:04:19.440 And I'm like, oh geez, I didn't know Andrew had kids.

00:04:23.620 And then Andrew comes up from downstairs,

00:04:26.560 it was like a split entrance, front,

00:04:29.280 you know, like a house split entrance,

00:04:30.780 and his wife comes out of the kitchen, she's up top,

00:04:35.080 and she's full pregnancy mode,

00:04:37.320 like seven or eight months pregnant.

00:04:40.640 And I just look at Andrew and he looks at me and he's like,

00:04:43.680 oh, you met my daughter and my wife?

00:04:46.600 And I'm just like, yeah.

00:04:48.980 What Andrew didn't know is I didn't realize he had kids.

00:04:53.020 And I don't know about you,

00:04:54.660 but like when you do things, when you take action,

00:04:58.280 when you move things forward,

00:05:00.000 and you have a certain assumption

00:05:00.980 about like the impact of the downside,

00:05:04.200 like my downside in my life at that point

00:05:06.260 is I'll just go get another job, right?

00:05:08.020 And that's true for a lot of people.

00:05:09.360 But here's a person that just left

00:05:10.880 one of arguably the best places to work

00:05:12.600 in the city he lived in, to go join me.

00:05:15.920 Unproven, two failed startups at that point.

00:05:18.880 You know, a dream, some motivation.

00:05:21.760 And I just remember there was something that clicked for me

00:05:23.820 where I was like, getting him to sign that paperwork

00:05:27.400 meant that there was no messing around this time.

00:05:30.160 There was no way I could not make it work.

00:05:32.420 And what happened is, three to four months later,

00:05:36.060 we were, you know, had the money, hired the people,

00:05:38.780 got the laptops, we were flying around,

00:05:40.960 we were meeting with customers and things were going good.

00:05:45.380 But what I didn't realize at the time

00:05:47.560 was the way I structured the business,

00:05:50.220 the way I invoiced our customers

00:05:51.920 and the timing of them paying me,

00:05:54.480 I got to a place where I had a cashflow problem.

00:05:57.200 And you know, my dad, if he's listening to this,

00:05:59.260 he'd smile because he used to say this to me all the time.

00:06:01.680 Like, you gotta manage cashflow,

00:06:02.780 you gotta watch your cashflow.

00:06:03.660 It's not what you make, it's what you keep.

00:06:05.220 It's how, it's when it comes in.

00:06:07.460 And I was like, don't worry about it.

00:06:08.640 I had customers lined up

00:06:09.840 and literally the thing he warned me against happened,

00:06:12.960 which is the way we were working with customers,

00:06:15.840 where we would hire people, train them.

00:06:17.860 I put them on payroll from day one.

00:06:19.860 It took me like six weeks to get them to a place

00:06:22.080 where they understood the technology,

00:06:24.540 got them working on site, had to spend the money,

00:06:26.840 fly them there, work with the client,

00:06:28.580 install the software, get things going.

00:06:31.920 Eventually invoice, right?

00:06:33.640 So you like sign the contract, eventually invoice.

00:06:35.880 Then there's this thing called net 30.

00:06:37.320 So they've got 30 days to pay the invoice.

00:06:39.680 Then they're paying with the cheque

00:06:40.940 and then the cheque comes in the mail.

00:06:42.320 And because I was a new company,

00:06:43.580 when I went to deposit in my bank account,

00:06:45.480 the bank says that we do a 20 business day hold on the cheque.

00:06:50.160 Now I'll tell you one thing,

00:06:51.700 I can be patient to get paid, your team won't be.

00:06:54.500 And when all of a sudden they're demanding,

00:06:57.360 and look, this is, I didn't, I was definitely nervous.

00:07:00.500 They didn't demand anything,

00:07:01.740 but I just literally looked at that 70 grand,

00:07:04.640 75 grand just windled down to nothing.

00:07:08.060 And I got super motivated.

00:07:11.400 I got super focused.

00:07:13.800 I got super out of fear at the time,

00:07:16.960 just driven to solve this problem.

00:07:19.120 And I picked up the phone,

00:07:20.320 I called anybody could help me.

00:07:21.980 Like, hey, I've got these receivables

00:07:25.100 where the business is going,

00:07:26.520 but I'm literally gonna run out of money to make payroll

00:07:28.960 and I can't do that to my team.

00:07:31.560 And through a bunch of conversations

00:07:33.760 with some of my mentors,

00:07:35.560 I realized that there's this thing,

00:07:37.220 Well, they told me there's this thing called factoring, okay?

00:07:39.640 Factoring is essentially a payday loan for businesses

00:07:41.800 where you can go to a place and they,

00:07:45.460 or to a place, to a company,

00:07:46.680 and they will buy your receivables.

00:07:48.280 So they will buy it from you.

00:07:49.460 So you issue the money that the company owns to you,

00:07:51.980 but they'll take like 25, 30, 40% of the money.

00:07:56.260 So if you need cash today in your business

00:07:58.400 and you got receivables,

00:08:00.160 there are companies out there that will buy them.

00:08:02.780 It'll cost you a ton of money.

00:08:04.640 The risk is still on you.

00:08:05.840 If they don't get paid, they still come to you.

00:08:08.320 You still guarantee that they're gonna get paid,

00:08:10.040 which is crazy.

00:08:11.500 And I ended up solving the problem.

00:08:14.360 I solved the problem because I was motivated.

00:08:17.100 And I think that's what happens is

00:08:18.540 some people, they're kind of playing, they're dabbling.

00:08:22.860 They're not really being in the business.

00:08:25.520 You know, they kind of like have, you know,

00:08:27.260 ideas about being in business,

00:08:28.920 but they're not showing up and attacking things.

00:08:31.820 And that's what that situation taught me

00:08:33.960 is that if I want something,

00:08:35.680 I need to show up as if somebody else's livelihood 1.00

00:08:39.240 depended on it, and it did at that time.

00:08:41.900 You need to show up for your customers,

00:08:43.880 you need to show up for yourself,

00:08:44.960 you need to show up for your family,

00:08:46.020 you need to show up for your community.

00:08:47.400 People are paying attention.

00:08:49.300 And if you think you can just play around

00:08:51.720 in this game called entrepreneurship

00:08:53.440 and not attack it with a real motivated sense

00:08:57.800 of success and accomplishment,

00:08:59.820 you're just gonna miss out on opportunities.

00:09:01.360 So here are the three things I wanna share with you

00:09:03.580 to really help you crystallize these beliefs.

00:09:05.780 Number one is the drug addict obsession, okay?

00:09:09.140 I share this story because it's just such a powerful

00:09:12.740 and potent example of what's possible

00:09:15.380 when you're motivated, okay?

00:09:16.880 I grew up in a really challenging environment.

00:09:18.560 A lot of you guys may not know my story,

00:09:20.040 but you know, drug addict, rehab, jail twice,

00:09:23.720 all as a teenager.

00:09:24.560 You can search, you know, the power of belief

00:09:27.460 on my YouTube channel.

00:09:28.220 You'll see the videos of me telling the story.

00:09:31.400 But what I learned at a young age,

00:09:32.920 really helped me and inspired me as an entrepreneur was seeing these these drug

00:09:38.260 addicts these alcoholics okay I me being one of them wake up in the morning with

00:09:43.580 zero money zero opportunities zero resources okay in the morning and

00:09:50.020 getting to a place that by 3 4 5 p.m. at night they were drunk or high why how

00:09:57.300 are they able to do this what did they know and and what I've realized is that

00:10:02.020 that a lot of people say, well, you know,

00:10:03.820 I need this money from this investor.

00:10:05.460 I need this customer.

00:10:07.100 I need this team member.

00:10:08.920 And those things may be true, but the truth

00:10:10.780 is what you need more than anything

00:10:11.900 is you got to be obsessed.

00:10:13.100 You got to be obsessed to the same level.

00:10:14.660 If you think of like drug addict being, you know,

00:10:17.080 trying to get high or drunk at 10,

00:10:19.460 some of you guys are showing up at a 1.5

00:10:21.640 and you're expecting results, OK?

00:10:23.500 You need to like really bring it, OK?

00:10:26.860 So that's the first thing.

00:10:27.900 The second thing is essentially non-motivated actions, OK?

00:10:32.020 To me, it's not what you do when you're motivated

00:10:37.020 that counts, it's how you show up

00:10:40.700 when the motivation is gone, right?

00:10:43.160 It's the habits, and to me, the habits take over

00:10:46.340 when the motivation is gone.

00:10:47.840 So a lot of people, they're like,

00:10:49.140 I don't feel motivated, so I'm not gonna do the work.

00:10:51.180 I don't feel motivated, so I'm not gonna take that meeting.

00:10:52.820 I don't feel motivated, this, that.

00:10:54.200 It's like, wow, that's not the thing

00:10:58.980 that's gonna make it work.

00:11:00.060 You literally need to show up when you're not motivated.

00:11:04.240 You need to create that muscle.

00:11:05.620 You gotta create that habit.

00:11:07.320 The last thing I wanna leave you with on is a metaphor

00:11:10.440 and really a story that I shared once with my brother

00:11:13.020 to kind of crystallize the idea

00:11:15.480 that motivation trumps knowledge.

00:11:16.600 And that's that, you know,

00:11:18.560 I remember sitting down with my youngest brother

00:11:20.840 and we were talking about finding new customers.

00:11:23.760 And you know, the way he was sharing his desire,

00:11:27.580 I really felt like it was more, you know,

00:11:31.040 interested, not committed.

00:11:32.980 He was interested in an outcome,

00:11:34.520 but he wasn't committed to the outcome, right?

00:11:36.700 Like a pig is committed, a chicken is interested, right?

00:11:40.540 A chicken doesn't have to, you know, like,

00:11:42.540 it's a bad metaphor, but you guys get the idea.

00:11:45.140 Like there's a difference between interested and committed.

00:11:47.300 So I start to tell him this story.

00:11:49.160 And the story goes like this, is I first asked him,

00:11:52.460 I said, you know, what's the probability of you

00:11:55.820 achieving this goal right now?

00:11:57.040 Like based on what you shared with me, 90 days,

00:11:59.160 if you said 90 day goal,

00:12:00.080 what's the probability of achieving this goal?

00:12:01.260 And he's like, I don't know, like 30 or 40%.

00:12:03.840 And I'm like, cool.

00:12:05.760 Now picture this, picture a world

00:12:08.000 where the person you love the most,

00:12:09.500 at the time you said his girlfriend,

00:12:11.560 you knew that in 90 days, if you didn't achieve this goal,

00:12:14.800 that her life would be taken, right?

00:12:16.960 And it's an extreme example,

00:12:19.600 but it's worth considering to understand what would change.

00:12:24.520 And I said, if you truly believed in your soul

00:12:27.820 that not achieving that outcome

00:12:29.400 would have that kind of dire downside or outcome,

00:12:34.860 what's your probability now that you could achieve that goal?

00:12:37.400 And he said 110%.

00:12:40.580 Interesting.

00:12:42.100 What changed?

00:12:43.900 Right there, you went from 30% to 100%, what changed?

00:12:46.780 And he said, I would just do whatever it would take.

00:12:50.000 Perfect.

00:12:51.380 That's what I'm trying to say.

00:12:53.080 A lot of you think it's knowledge.

00:12:54.740 A lot of you, it's, I need to read this book.

00:12:56.500 I gotta buy this course.

00:12:57.460 I gotta watch this YouTube.

00:12:59.060 I gotta listen to this podcast.

00:13:00.240 I gotta go and meet these people.

00:13:02.380 And what I'm telling you is that for 90% of you out there,

00:13:06.260 this is a motivation obsession game.

00:13:08.900 This is a, I'm deciding no matter what,

00:13:11.780 I'm gonna make this work.

00:13:13.300 This is a, I will do whatever it takes times

00:13:17.000 to kind of a mindset.

00:13:18.840 And if you show up and you play reserved

00:13:21.480 and be interested and not committed,

00:13:24.240 you're absolutely not gonna win the game.

00:13:26.300 You're gonna have your competitors out there.

00:13:28.280 You're gonna wonder your whole life,

00:13:29.720 why did everybody else succeed?

00:13:31.880 Why are all these people crushing it?

00:13:33.720 What did they figure out that I didn't figure out?

00:13:36.100 And I'll tell you, this is the topic.

00:13:39.000 This is where you need to come back to.

00:13:41.100 So that's what I wanna share with you.

00:13:42.200 I really hope that the ideas of motivation trumps knowledge

00:13:45.620 inspires you to really double click

00:13:48.060 on how you're showing up right now.

00:13:50.180 What level out of 10 of obsession, you know?

00:13:53.740 Because your obsessions becomes your possessions, okay?

00:13:56.420 What level are you showing up

00:13:57.800 and is that gonna support you?

00:13:59.340 So I want you to leave a comment below.

00:14:01.580 Let me know what you got this

00:14:02.700 and I hope this video finds you incredibly well.

00:14:04.340 Talk soon.

00:14:05.180 Peace.

00:14:06.020 Later.

Dan Martell - June 06, 2022

How the Rich Think About Business

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