00:34:01.000I look at it as saying, I got to get clear what I want now at this level and what the
00:34:05.780increases are and then what's gotten in the way and then what am I going to do?
00:34:09.680go get what's in the way out of the way and then let me create some daily practices that virtually
00:34:13.920guarantee it it's kind of awesome to watch because even six years ago i've seen your approach to your
00:34:19.600interventions kind of kind of evolve right they're they're a little different they're softer and we've
00:34:25.360got um so much to dig into i'm just curious why this book like why why choose to i was telling
00:34:32.640you earlier that it's like you there's a difference between retail investing and professional
00:34:37.600investing you went into the world where all the rich people you know the people say it's a rich
00:34:42.400get richer you went to where the people that know how to make money they shared their strategies
00:34:48.560why this book why now well it's the final it's a trilogy and i didn't expect to write three books
00:34:55.040i wrote the first book a little 670 page little monster number one new york times bestseller
00:35:00.080still the best-selling financial book of this century century's only 24 years old but still
00:35:04.400i'm proud of it because i wrote a book i wanted my billionaire friends could get value out of but
00:35:08.800so could a person who's just beginning the journey so i really am proud of that book and it's like
00:35:12.480soup to nuts and i learned so many things by interviewing 50 of the greatest investors in
00:35:17.520the world at that time that's why i did it i thought i knew a lot i certainly did i worked
00:35:21.600with paul tudor jones one of the top 10 traders for 24 years hadn't lost money during that time
00:35:26.480so i learned a lot from him but i want to learn from everybody and i learned four things fundamentally
00:35:31.760I learned don't lose money is their first focus, which that's not most people's, because they know, you know, if you talk to Warren Buffett, you know, his rule is rule number one, don't lose money.
00:35:41.020Rule number two, see rule number one. Right. Well, that's ridiculous. Of course, you're going to lose money.
00:35:45.100But their focus is not to lose money, because if you're only trying to make money, you don't look at the downside.
00:35:50.640You're going to get hurt. And if you have a stock that drops 50 percent, you don't need 50 percent to get even.
00:35:56.080You've got to get 100 percent return to get even. Right.
00:35:59.300So the way they do that is the second principle.
00:36:01.440No matter whether they're a macro trader or they're a value investor, it didn't matter.
00:36:05.980They all look at the way to protect themselves as having the right asset allocation.
00:36:10.420That's one of the reasons I wrote this book.
00:36:12.220Because asset allocation is big words for some people,
00:36:14.540but all it means is if you add $1,000 or $100 million to invest,
00:36:19.360the most important decision you're going to make is not whether you're going to invest in Apple
00:36:35.96020%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 70%, whatever it is, is going to go in a place where it's low risk.
00:36:41.420And less returns, so it's going to take longer to get there.
00:36:44.860But because it's low risk, you're going to get there.
00:36:47.140It's like the turtle versus the hare type race.
00:36:50.100Then how much are you going to put that's in a risk bucket?
00:36:53.040Now, on the risk bucket, you have the potential for huge upside,
00:36:56.120but you also have the potential for big downside.
00:36:58.060And so what is that? Is that 50-50, 60-40, 70-30, 30-70? And, you know, explain to people how to do that. But what I found out over the years, and now there's plenty of reports to back it up, is that the ultra-wealthy have over 46% on average of their money in private equity, private real estate, and private credit.
00:37:18.660That is very different than 90% of the population.
00:57:34.220Now it's like, okay, you go to Robert Smith and you've got a SaaS organization.
00:57:38.020He has built a system where you can take any SaaS company and grow it.
00:57:42.060He knows how to bring the right CEO in the place, what the marketing piece, who are the right people, how can you advance the technology, how can you cut the cost?
00:57:49.060So he makes it so valuable, and then he sells it to a bigger company or takes it public.
00:57:53.460So every single one of them was obsessed with adding value, and that is really, really unique, but they do it in a different way.
00:58:02.100You know, if you go to Veritas Capital, you know, Ramsey, he was partners with a guy 12 years ago and a guy committed suicide and they had a $2 billion fund.
00:58:15.280And the fund was, you know, it had a clause in your agreement as a limited partner that if anything happened to the original founder investor, you could take your money back.
01:00:17.240So I think really knowing your market, really knowing your ideal customer, coming up with products and services that produce raving fans, coming up with an irresistible offer, which is a lot of what they do each time, an offer that is so good that people say, I got to at least try it, and then they over-deliver.
01:00:34.980They all seem to have that in common, even though they're doing different industries in different ways and have different forms of expertise.
01:00:41.520it's so great i love the idea because a lot of people they struggle with like should i go all
01:00:46.640in on my primary business because i they hear diversification but it's like all these people
01:00:51.920mastered their game systematize it created ways to get the asymmetrical results um i think that's
01:00:59.040awesome the the question i want to kind of get closer as we wrap up is how has having a child
01:01:04.720as a 61 year old person change your perspective on life toady i mean when you guys shared that
01:01:10.320staging yourself it was inspired for me i'm like wow this is really fascinating like
01:01:16.160how how does that change your perspective on life and how you show up and how you think about your
01:01:20.080time right because i wrote a book i'll buy back your time how has that impacted where you allocate
01:01:24.880your time well it's interesting you know before you know i have five kids and five grandkids and
01:01:29.360my oldest uh daughter is 48 gonna be 49 in about a month and my youngest daughter's coming up on
01:01:36.400three pretty soon it's two and three quarters so i got quite a quite a spread but um the answer
01:01:41.440to your question is i didn't want to have both my wife and i uh she couldn't carry because of a
01:01:47.440problem with her body so we went through ivf and went through all these processes for years
01:01:53.120and then our life was on the road she's with me all the time and we don't want to be apart and i
01:01:57.120was on the road 250 days a year so like i didn't want to bring a kid into that experience just too
01:02:02.240hard especially at this stage of life so when COVID happened and I found a way I could talk
01:02:07.920like I'm doing a seminar by the way I should mention for your audience I do a free seminar
01:02:11.280every year I started with COVID because you know people are trapped in their homes I was doing
01:02:16.240stadiums and suddenly stadiums said I could put a hundred people in a stadium instead of fifteen
01:02:20.480thousand I'm like so I built these studios and I started doing these events and I said I want no
01:02:25.280one to stop by money if they're stuck at home I want to be able to show them how to change their
01:02:28.960life from their home, and I want to have to travel, obviously, and so we put these events
01:02:33.900on for three days. There's one coming up January 25th through the 27th, starts at 2 p.m. Eastern,
01:02:38.940but we have people from 195 countries have come, and we had over a million people last
01:02:43.580year, and we give you the way it's called Time to Rise. If you go to timetorisesummit.com,
01:02:48.640timetorisesummit.com, you get tickets, it's free. You can do it from your home or your
01:02:53.460office, bring your family and your friends, but the reason I bring this up is when I could
01:02:58.040reach millions of people and go deep and do these giant events now like instead of 10 or 15,000 I
01:03:04.260got 40,000 people in the event and they're from 195 countries all over the earth at once I was
01:03:09.220like we could have a kid and we could be home more I still travel but nothing like I did and so we
01:03:14.980tried one final time and God blessed us and answer your question is it's been the greatest gift of
01:03:19.100my life because I'm proud of how I've been as a father when I was in my 20s now I married a woman
01:03:23.080who was 13 years my senior in my first marriage and she had been married twice before and had
01:03:27.440kids from both their husbands, and I adopted them all. So I was, you know, 24, a 17-year-old,
01:03:33.400and an 11-year-old, a five-year-old, and then went on the way. So at this stage, it's very
01:03:38.140different. You know, I've got a lot more to, even more to give. And Sage is such an unbelievable
01:03:42.620mother, and we have such incredible family. So it's, it's changed things so that now, you know,
01:03:47.600I have rituals, like I have dinner at 6.30. I've never had dinner a certain time before,
01:14:51.060And honestly, it wasn't until I was in Switzerland at his house,
01:14:56.360aka lodge 16 bedrooms 20 staff massive in that living room sitting in that couch
01:15:05.320and richard comes out from the back and actually comes in and says hi to everybody blah blah blah
01:15:10.120that i actually believed he was showing up well you guys gotta understand you want to talk about
01:15:13.400imposter syndrome oh it was so strong in that group of people was tim ferris the the founder
01:15:21.320of Square. You guys know Brian Johnson, the blueprint guy right now? He's doing all those
01:15:26.080like weird life hacking stuff. He was there. He just sold Braintree for 600 million. And there's
01:15:31.340this Canadian kid that I got invited because some guy that I invited to a dinner liked what I was
01:15:36.420building at the time and said, do you want to join? And I was just like, Dan, just don't say
01:15:41.780anything stupid. You can only go downhill from here. You made it in the house. Don't get kicked
01:15:49.620So I just shut up and paid attention. And I'll be honest with you, all I was looking for, I wanted to understand how does a guy, some of you may not realize this, Richard Branson has 400 companies in the Virgin Group of Businesses. That Virgin Group of Businesses, that holdco, has two CEOs.
01:16:06.620notes. I wanted to understand how he thought about scale and leverage. And I just watched.
01:16:14.820I watched how he interacted with his staff. I watched how he managed his time. And this
01:16:19.280is what I saw that I didn't expect. At the time, I had a virtual assistant. I had assistants
01:16:23.480over the years, right? We've all had them. What was different was watching Richard.
01:16:29.380Essentially, anything that came into his life went through his assistant, Helen. And every
01:16:35.740morning for breakfast, they would sit there for 60 to 90 minutes, depending on what was on Helen's
01:16:39.880list. She would review only the things that she didn't know how to deal with. She didn't know how
01:16:44.380to route. She thought Richard would want to know about. And they just had breakfast. They talked.
01:16:49.820And then the rest of the day, he came skiing with us. That's how he ran 400 companies. Do you guys
01:16:55.920want to learn the other stuff that I learned from Richard? Yes or yes? Perfect. This is the
01:17:00.160replacement ladder. We start at the bottom. We work our way up. Why? Let me tell you two different
01:17:05.340things. One, it's the lowest cost to pay somebody to do the work for the biggest
01:17:12.300time purchase back in your life, if you do it right. So that's why there's the
01:17:16.920outcomes. So level one, you might be feeling stuck in your business, it's
01:17:20.400because you don't have somebody to support you on your account and you're
01:17:22.680in your admin work, but the key is to do like Richard did and give your
01:17:27.960inbox and calendar to your assistant. Some of you guys are getting a little, you
01:17:33.000guys, does that make you nervous a little bit? Anybody? No, you guys are all good just giving
01:17:38.320up your inbox and your calendar to somebody else and letting them figure it out and hopefully you
01:17:41.540show up at the right meeting at the right time. Does that make you nervous? Anybody? Trust me,
01:17:46.360my assistant laughs all the time. She's like, Dan, I could tell you to show up at the edge of a cliff
01:17:50.080and write in the description, jump, and you would do it. I go, well, don't do that, but
01:17:55.000I mean I trust you and it's because I realized that if I can give up the
01:18:01.780the inbound your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list of other
01:18:05.860people's goals on your time write that down your inbox your email is nothing
01:18:11.320more than a public to-do list of other people strangers requests on your time
01:18:17.200and you allow yourself to be addicted to that so step one is admin number two is
01:18:24.100your customer success, your fulfillment. This is where you have somebody that helps you, but the
01:18:28.360key is you got to give away your support and onboarding. So when I enroll somebody in any of
01:18:33.500my companies, okay, now I have CEOs that run them, but when I was doing it, the first hire after admin
01:18:38.720would be somebody to help me take the deal that I just closed and move it forward. In real estate
01:18:43.920it's a transaction coordinator, right? Like you need somebody that'll work with the customer and
01:18:49.320do all the stuff. You can still be the specialist, but give that to somebody else. Level three is
01:18:53.440marketing right now you want to start building and designing a playbook to
01:18:58.440generate leads okay because if you don't do this I'll tell you what happens
01:19:02.200sales is for because you as a CEO will always be able to sell better than
01:19:05.880anybody else you hire and you know it you know it some of you guys are world
01:19:09.820class sales people 70 80% win rate nobody's gonna ever be able to sell like
01:19:15.560that and I'm challenged if you hire too quick and you don't have the systems
01:19:19.120underneath what happens in six months is you either fire them because they're
01:19:22.980not performing because they don't have enough reps and they don't have enough deals, or they quit
01:19:26.760because they're not making any money. Anybody resonate with that? Anybody? Yeah, exactly. It's
01:19:31.340literally the six-month mark, depending how much they like you. Four months, they like you six
01:19:36.140months. And the highest level is the ELT. Write this down. Executive Leadership Team. Some of you
01:19:44.680guys call them leaders and managers. Here's my rule. Do they come with playbooks? Do they come
01:19:51.260with process. If you hire people or, you know, promote people up that has no experience, then
01:19:58.200you're just creating more work for yourself. So when I say at that level, everybody else, the first
01:20:03.300hire in marketing, and those are all people you can hire, train, etc. Because you're going to give
01:20:06.860them a playbook. But when you start hiring leadership, they should come into the company
01:20:12.220with knowledge. Okay, that's the replacement ladder. And if you follow these five steps,
01:20:18.600Some of my clients that I coach, they'll get there in 45 days.
01:20:22.000They see this, they go, got it, and they execute.
01:20:24.960Admin, free up their time, sell, make revenue.
01:35:28.420Does that bug anybody else when people show up late for meetings?
01:35:31.940Perfect. Okay. Principle. If you're on time, you're late. Does that make sense? That's my principle.
01:35:38.100You may not even know you have these unexpressed expectations, so we got to document them.
01:35:41.740We got to codify them. If you're on time, you're late. So if you're late, you're super late.
01:35:45.740That's the principle. I learned this the hard way. I had a client. I was supposed to meet them.
01:35:50.260I didn't show up on time. And as soon as I showed up, they said, you missed the deal. I'm going with your vendor.
01:35:55.180Nobody's late for meetings ever again. And I embarrassed myself.
01:35:58.420you tell your personal story. Okay, you can do a two-minute story, you can do a ten-minute story.
01:36:04.640So depending on the executive, I might tell a ten-minute story, really make it land. And at
01:36:09.100the end, this is the third part. So first part is principle, second part is story, third part is
01:36:14.140takeaway. I'll ask them, what did you take away from that story? What did you learn? And they'll
01:36:21.400say to me in that example, if I'm not three minutes early, I'm late. That's awesome. Then
01:36:27.240commitment. Will you make a commitment that in the future you'll always be on time? Yes.
01:36:31.100If I did that with somebody, what's the probability that you think they're going to be late in the
01:36:35.040future? Low. Because they understand that it comes from my heart and that I learned this the hard
01:36:40.120way and I don't want to have you learn this. Right now it's low stakes. We just started working
01:36:43.380together. I need you to know. Most people don't follow this process for coaching, okay? So this
01:36:49.080is the transformational leadership. We start with the outcome. Where are we going? Then we go to
01:36:54.080measure? What is the one number? And then we coach them whenever we see them violate anything and we
01:36:59.360teach them our thoughts and our stories, our experience. Anybody that's had a great leader in
01:37:04.800their life, a great boss? Anybody have a great boss? I had this guy Darcy who's just awesome. Exactly.
01:37:09.320They probably did this to you and you didn't even realize they were doing this. That's what made
01:37:13.000them great. Here's my big belief. Delegate the outcome, not the task. Write it down. Delegate
01:37:19.840the outcome, not the task. Stop telling people what to do. Start telling people where we're going
01:37:25.960and let them figure out how to get there and coach them along the process. And that's how we build
01:37:31.040people. That's how we coach up. The third and final hot principle is the 131 rule. This will
01:37:37.940absolutely transform your life. Anybody that has a team of people and you're frustrated that your
01:37:43.020phone is always blowing up and they're always calling you and they're always emailing you and
01:37:45.540they don't seem to know how to figure anything out. I'm going to solve this for the rest of your life.
01:37:48.760do you want to learn how to do that yes or yes awesome here's how it works you know why they
01:37:53.600call it a bottleneck because it's at the top so you think the problem's your person on your team
01:38:01.600i'm telling you it's the person you're looking at when you look in the mirror so you've taught
01:38:06.940people this and i'm going to teach you how to unteach them this okay so a few years ago i the
01:38:14.880one-three-one rule and I'll tell you how it works is culture in all my companies
01:38:18.960like you won't meet anybody at any area of the business that doesn't understand
01:38:22.440what it is because we use it as language and I remember I had this director of
01:38:26.520HR this recruiter on the team and he messaged me he's like hey we got a
01:38:30.960problem I was like what's going on dude he goes we need to hire 12 people in the
01:38:36.360next 30 days I go yeah he goes well I don't know how to do that
01:38:41.880Wow. Well, what do you think I should do? Oh, I don't know. Well, I've never done it. I said, Adam, I mean, I hired you the director of HR. I hired you to do that job. I don't know how to do that job.
01:39:01.360Out of both of us, who do you think should learn how to do that job? And he's like, well, I mean, do you have any ideas? I said, what's your 131? And he goes, oh, man, I don't know. I don't have time for this.
01:39:11.000And I said, I don't know how to help you, okay?
01:55:00.080See, in the early days of building my first company that finally made money called Spheric Technologies, I realized that I wasn't very good at selling, world-class at writing code, really good at hiring other engineers.
01:55:10.000But when it came to talking to normal people and trying to get them to buy from me, I used to get nervous.
01:55:17.580I would just say yes, and I would get dragged along on this long sales process of people that were never intending to buy in the first place.
01:55:25.080But learning the mastery of sales became my new passion.
01:55:29.520So learning how to code was my first high-income skill,
01:55:32.260but then realizing that if I really wanted to grow,
01:55:34.820I had to get really good at communicating in sales,
01:56:52.200And they're like, oh, I'm making 100,000 a year.
01:56:54.100And you might say, oh, wow, that's it.
01:56:55.780Depending on the conversation, you have to bring the buyer into the pocket where they're able to make a decision because they're not underconfident.
01:57:03.500They're not overconfident in their abilities.
01:57:05.560They're right in the perfect pocket, which brings us to month seven, which is to hire somebody to help you deliver your product or service to your customer.
01:57:13.080A lot of people get busy doing the thing that they sold.
01:57:16.100So the more they sell, the more they got to do.
01:57:18.520And if they have the opportunity to double, maybe triple the business over the next few months, it means their calendar is going to get double or triple more.
01:57:24.760And then when they have these opportunities, instead of pushing on the gas, they push on the brake because they don't want to end up creating all this emotional shrapnel around them from their team, their family or their friends that never see them anymore.
01:57:36.520So I want to teach you how to hire somebody to offload that work and support you in delivering for the customer.
01:57:43.320So this is the second hire in my framework, the replacement ladder.
01:57:46.380Essentially everything from customer support to customer success, to support tickets, to product support, setting up a customer intake.
01:57:55.480After the sales conversation happens and you get a credit card, the person shows up and you have them deal with every aspect of the customer experience.
01:58:04.600You might still be involved in doing the work, but you have this person help you in delivering that value.
01:58:10.500So you're not the one trying to coordinate in your calendar.
01:58:12.720they are. They're the ones pulling the reports together so that when you have your weekly
01:58:16.360meeting with your customers, you can show them how you're doing. Having somebody else that's
01:58:20.180responsible for everything that's involved in delivering your product or service so that you
01:58:23.820can buy back that time is huge leverage that you can then reinvest in either doing more work to
01:58:28.980make more money or increasing your skills so that you become more valuable. Which brings us to month
01:58:34.280eight, which is to hire somebody to help you with marketing. One time I had this friend named Rachel
02:05:45.960How do we make sure that the delivery of what we do is so world class that every one of
02:05:50.300our customers is referring other people to our business?
02:05:53.200That is how you build the replacement ladder so that you can get to a million in the first
02:05:58.220year, which brings us to month 12, which is to build your personal brand.
02:06:01.900Every one of your dreams, your goals, your vision for your life gets easier, will come to life on the back end of people knowing who you are and how you can help them.
02:06:12.280I've been online creating content for 15 years.
02:06:14.960I have millions of followers across different platforms, but I started with zero.
02:06:19.140And it doesn't matter where you're at today, you're going to have to start at the exact same place I did.
02:06:23.260What benefit you have is you have folks like me and many others literally unpacking the blueprint for you to follow to build your audience as fast as humanly possible.
02:06:33.360And the key is, is you want to focus on channels where you would love to express yourself through.
02:06:38.300So if you are more of a video person, create video.
02:20:03.360So, transformational leadership is a simple concept that when you have people that report to you, okay, there's two ways to do it.
02:20:10.460You can do transactional leadership or transformational.
02:20:12.780Most people, if you've never been taught any different, it sounds super logical that you do transactional leadership,
02:20:18.420which is you hire somebody, you tell them what to do, you check that they got done, and you tell them what to do next.
02:20:24.060Most of us have experienced this in our work capacity.
02:20:26.500This is how we've always done it, and it sounds super normal.
02:20:29.660The problem with that is that as you hire more people, and it usually happens around a dozen folks on your team, direct reports, where you'll wake up in the morning with all the motivation to get a bunch of stuff done, and then you check your inbox, and then you realize this person's working on the wrong thing, and then, oh, what about this new person we just hired? Are they being trained?
02:20:47.620And you literally spend the whole day doing a tell, check, next loop to only find out that after you had dinner and you put the kids to bed, that none of the projects you touched ever got done.
02:20:57.680So then you work from 7 o'clock to 11 o'clock at night trying to actually get your own work done.
02:21:02.040And that's where you hit essentially what I call the pain line, where anything more that you want to do in your life becomes really painful.
02:21:09.160So you might be sitting with an opportunity, sitting there like, I could go do this, but I can't do anything more because I'm stuck in this transactional leadership style.
02:21:15.540versus transformational, which is number one, it's outcome focus. So I don't tell anybody on
02:21:22.740my team what to do. I tell them what it looks like when it is done at the highest level.
02:21:27.820And my team's here. You can talk to them. This is just how I am. And sometimes they'll pull me
02:21:31.580into that. Like, what do you think I should do? And I literally act like a six-year-old.
02:21:37.260I go, I don't know. Anne's laughing because I do it a lot. But literally it's like,
02:21:43.260I was like what do you want to do and they're like but I I'm asking you I know but I don't know
02:21:49.120of course you know pretend like I don't if I wasn't here what would you do well I'd probably
02:21:55.400hit the internet or I'd probably call this person I said that sounds like a great idea
02:21:58.820so I focus on outcome then I go to measure which is what's the what is the numbers that we're
02:22:06.580going to agree upon means you're making progress so if I said we're going to take that mountain
02:22:10.560i might say well let's measure the daily elevation gain per per day right and every day if you text
02:22:16.420me how many feet of elevation you made then as long as you're moving upwards we're good but if
02:22:21.180all of a sudden you report back a negative i'd be like did you fall off a cliff you know or did you
02:22:26.260take a wrong turn and then they'd be like yeah i got lost it's like cool what could you do not to
02:22:31.320be lost i don't know you tell me i don't know what you know i mean get it outcome so we're going to
02:22:36.920the mountaintop that's the outcome measure every day and they might come back with ideas like I
02:22:42.040should probably get a map that sounds like a great idea where could you get a map I don't know map
02:22:45.720store maybe somebody else has you know been up this mountain okay good good go find that out
02:22:49.960and then what I do the third part is coach right and coach is what's funny for a lot of us to have
02:22:55.720communities like we do we actually do this naturally or maybe you've been a coach like a
02:22:59.780real like you know athletic coach you use those same principles so I don't tell people what to do
02:24:19.200Next thing, I turned around, and it was a $26,000 mistake.
02:24:22.200So I've learned in the future, sometimes it's better to slow down and measure twice, cut once.
02:24:27.300See, and then at the end, this is the third part of the coaching, is you ask them,
02:24:30.180Based on the story I just shared with you, what did you take away from that?
02:24:33.980So notice I didn't tell them anything.
02:24:36.580I created a methodology for evolving my people.
02:24:40.540And my whole philosophy and big thing in the book, and that's why it's a productivity book, but it's also a leadership book, is you build the people, the people build the business.
02:57:12.300But you know what you actually have there?
02:57:13.720You don't have an outreach issue in this case.
02:57:15.720If they're going to be a client, you have a business model issue.
02:57:17.860You have a business that is a service, not a productized service that you can standardize, that people actually can fall into.
02:57:24.540You have both of our least favorite types of businesses.
02:57:26.800He's the SaaS king because he wants to build, wants, sell continuously.
02:57:30.400And I bet his advice to you would be something like create a productized service that allows somebody to buy some component as opposed to RFP for their time, which is what you're doing when they're like, can we talk first?
02:58:16.520enables you to buy back your time yeah i mean john maxwell wrote a great book sometimes you win
02:58:23.620sometimes you learn and that's just the way i think about it so i just start with the premise
02:58:28.880anytime i start any company this might be a little weird for you guys i just assume i'm wrong
02:58:32.540what a crazy frame if i start a new business the first thing i believe is i am wrong now i'm on a
02:58:39.200journey to validate that i'm right so my conversations my approach are completely
02:58:44.520different so when I fail I actually get excited because I'm like that doesn't work let's not do
02:58:49.960that again perfect how fast can I move through an experiment to get to a place where I learn
02:58:54.640and that I would say that's actually like when we think of like poor mindset rich mindset
02:58:59.320that's the difference between the people that are wealthy is that they don't call it failure
02:59:05.200like I can't remember last time I was like I failed nope I learned I got to a place of experience
02:59:12.780Yeah, I think I have the same take on that.
02:59:14.700The only thing that I might add there is the other thing that I've noticed really successful people don't do is there's not a lot of blame.
02:59:22.180Like I've noticed on my team sometimes somebody will go, oh, that's my fault because I did X or Y or Z or like I should take the blame for that.
02:59:27.740I'm like, why would we ever use that word blame?
02:59:29.620Like the only reason that you should blame yourself for something or you should accept quote unquote fault is if you did something on purpose repetitively.
03:22:36.280speaking at different conferences about the concept of a lean startup, and then he eventually
03:22:39.920signed a deal to write it. Let me tell you this. This book changed the game for all startups in
03:22:45.240Silicon Valley and all businesses in the world because it showed entrepreneurs a completely
03:22:49.460different way to build companies. The big ideas in this book, I mean, there's so many, but the
03:22:53.560first one is startups must adapt and adjust quickly to succeed. It's all about pivots. We need to be
03:22:58.680able to make decisions and pivot quickly. The other area is validate business ideas through customer
03:23:03.140feedback. No business plan survives first contact with the customer. So you need to talk to your
03:23:09.320customers. The whole structure of the book is built around the build, measure, learn loop,
03:23:13.620and it's crucial for building your business. We always want to build something, measure it with
03:23:18.320the customers, look at the analytics, and then learn, and then feed that back into the next
03:23:23.100iteration. The other key area is focus on minimum viable product for early testing. You don't want
03:23:28.740to overbuild. Too often people overbuild their business. They build so many features into their
03:23:33.740software just to launch. And that is a recipe for waste. And the other final idea that I think is
03:23:40.100so important that I've read in so many other books, but it really is crystallized in this one
03:23:44.480is continuous innovation is the key to long-term success. So if you want to learn how to build a
03:23:50.980business and take shots on goals and learn and move quickly, then get the lean startup.
03:23:56.520Number 10 is such an important book for me and it's called The Innovator's Dilemma. As a software entrepreneur, as somebody that innovates, that creates technology, this really became the blueprint for building businesses. There was so many incredible lessons and Clayton Christensen is not only a great author and mind, but he was also just an incredible person.
03:24:18.260I mean, his other books are also really great reads
03:24:20.960and just the way he lived his life in general.
03:24:22.980He left a meaningful impact just outside of creating innovation
03:24:26.760or teaching people how to think about innovation.
03:24:28.740But the big ideas that are going to help you is one,
03:24:31.280that companies can fail despite good management
03:24:33.760if they ignore disruptive technologies.
03:24:36.180I mean, think of Blockbuster, BlackBerry, Kodak.
03:24:39.860All these companies essentially had market position, number one,
03:24:43.520and got disrupted because of technology.
03:24:45.760and disruptive technology often initially underperformed,
03:26:42.340At 26 years old, one of my mentors told me to take half of what I'd made at the time and I've earned and put it into a stability bucket, essentially an investment where I wouldn't lose my money.
03:26:53.360So what I did is I dollar cost average myself into the index funds.
03:26:58.000Why? Because it didn't take any thinking.
03:27:00.140You know, a long time ago, I was reading books on investing and I came across like John Bogle's book on index funds and many others.
03:27:06.180And the whole idea is that if you can get a low cost fee structure,
03:27:09.980then you dollar cost average yourself into it.
03:27:12.700It doesn't sound very sexy or a lot of fun.