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we literally climbed over the fence we sm we're were on the red carpet with our little beat up cameras and when we started showing that people would like it looks like we were watching something we're not supposed to and that's really started the whole red carpet some people dream of building an empire while others actually do it larry na wasn't supposed to become a media mo a kid from brooklyn who started as a cable repairman ended up creating one of the most influential entertainment brands in history we had over a hundred rejections one which even at the meeting the guy literally threw the business plan on my head at that time starting a tv network was somewhere closer due to a hundred million dollars the worst thing you could do is say to people just a imagine you've lost them they can't imagine this is larry na c cofounder of e entertainment television a pioneer who redefined how the world consumes media and a relentless entrepreneur who's never stopped building this isn't just a story about television it's about vision resilience and the courage to bet on yourself when no one else will once chat jb became ubiquitous now i'm getting done in one hour well used to take me five days as human beings we all have a finite amount of time on this planet it the best thing we could do is use it efficiently or effectively find something you're good at work your butt off and become graded at it and then that will become your passion so larry you went from sp and cables in manhattan sewers for ninety bucks a week to building a seven billion dollar entertainment empire spans a hundred and forty two countries you've had the number one tv show in russia you're the only american allowed to run media in china and you created the kardashian phenomenon you've literally lived through the entire evolution of television but what i found the most interesting because i was listening to some of the shows that you've been on before was that your real passion wasn't originally entertainment so talk to me about this accidental discovery of entertainment and how you actually gotten into this game sure i i was i i was the first kid in the family ever go to college i got a degree in economics and i thought i would either become an economist or a teacher and then i quickly found out there weren't really jobs for either of those so i i had friend whose dad was in the electrician union is in new york city and they said oh we just organized this thing it's called cable tv i'm not really sure what it is but you know here's the name of the shops that would go see him tell them the union sent you they'll give you some temporary job and so i did that and they gave me a job literally under the streets of manhattan so i was i was an assistant underground fly over ninety bucks a week and so i i thought i'd be there for a few months until i figured out what you do with this degree but i started to like it and stuff and you know very quickly people will come to me and saying pete how did you learn how to use the equipment so quick you know usually takes people a year and you're doing it after a week you know and it was it was very simple i'm like well i read the instruction booklet and it wasn't wasn't rocket science but i i you know i went from assistance slice at a splice and then you know kinda moved up the ranks of the operations side so being a construction guy then a a installer than a service guy and and then what have it was time incorporated which at that point was still a publishing company they had made a a decision that over ten years they were gonna become a media company this is pre time warner away before time warner and so they bought manhattan cable i was the company i worked for and so i i somebody in hr said hey you know trying to figure out what it is these guys do you know they go under the streets every day you had the all the harvard yelling on one side and then you had us on the other and somebody in nature hr said wait a second there's a guy you know who does that who's an the economics degree maybe so i kinda became to translate between those two worlds between that tech world building it and you know the the auburn yell and and then after a while guy that the timing put in his president guy named nick nicholas who who later went on to become the chairman of time warner after the merger you know he kept to get me to come into management and then finally he convinced me so i ended up it was like really crazy i was twenty five years old and i risen through the ranks of of management becoming the director of operations of manhattan cable which is because cable system in the country and so i i did that and then kind of like nineteen eighty all the big cities began to realize the cable was more than a more than a vehicle for good reception and a lot of the big cities started issuing franchises to be built and but the one caveat that most of the big cities had was they didn't want the the the wires to go on telephone poles because it was incredibly un unlikely they all want them to go on the ground well you know there's only one on the ground system built in the us and that was from manhattan gable and i was the guy who was running operations so i ended up getting recruited by a it was actually a canadian company won the franchise for los angeles to build the first sixty one channel two way interactive cable system there was but all underground so i got recruited by that company you know they made me the proverbial offer you couldn't refuse literally paying me like four times what i was making in new york and rented me a house with a swimming pool and all of that stuff and you know but your so we we billed that and i started now i had programming and marketing and finance reporting to me as long as well as other things and you know you're a new york kid and all your neighbors in la are go to parties and and hanging out with celebrities and stuff and i'm like hey that looks really cool i wanna do that and you know i call the studios and they go no no your utility you like the gas company and you know we're not putting you on the party list so finally i met a somebody in marketing at one of the studios and i said like you know i really don't understand this the most effective marketing vehicle you have a movie is the movie trail or that two minute thing that they always show before you know the the movies they said but the only time i ever see the movie trailers is when i'm already in the movies i said wouldn't you want me to see that while i'm at home to make me wanna go to the movies and they said yeah but you know it's too expensive to buy two minutes of tv time so you know we don't do it i said great you give me those trailers i'll put them on tv for free and you put me on the list for the you know all these movie screenings and stuff and they went sure so you know we did that and i hired a kid and literally we just looped them together for you we did like an hour real of the movie trailers but when we started doing market studies of the audience you said what's your favorite channel and they go oh i love you know espn i love cnn i love that trailer channel i'm going wait a second i'm getting the best two minutes of a fifty million dollar movie then movies are only fifty and i get that for free and people telling me it's one of their favorite channels right and i kinda filed that in the back of my head and then the company that i worked for the canadian company they had actually sold and they went back to toronto and they were like okay larry when coming up to toronto and i'm like no i said i didn't go from new york la to go to toronto i said i'm done with cole i'm not doing that and so a friend of mine my friend alan mu who also from the east coast you know we were talking and he was out there on you know a project then had something to do with francis ford cop studio but he was more on the real estate side and we said you know really like la let's think of something that will keep us out here and he goes yeah i've been playing with this idea you know like entertainment tonight twenty four hours a day and i went wait a second i said you know this is the time when mtv was actually showing music videos and i say you know you have mtv puts a host in front of a green screen and they point to the screen and go and madonna has a new video i said i could get all these movie trailers for free and people love it and we'll send a host in front of a green screen and ago in sc has a new movie so we we you know so basically we turned the idea at to mtv of the movies and yeah we wrote a business plan we thought we were really smart and you know then and then it was before you actually did all the stuff digitally so you actually had a business it was like two hundred pages and and stuff but we were a little naive at that point nobody there's never been people regular people that have actually ever started a tv network you only big media companies do that and that's kinda what we got you know people going you know what larry it's a good idea but you're not rupert at murdoch in not time warner and you're not fox or universal you can't just start a a tv network you know we weren't smart enough to listen so we just kept calling but three and a half years later we we finally we met this guy that was just took over investment banking for what was a bond house on wall street and somebody we knew introduced us somebody at this time we were beaten up you know we had over a hundred rejections one was even at the meeting the guy literally threw the business plan on my head and said how dare you insult me with such a piece of junk and we we finally we met this guy we go in his office and he's got movie posters on the wall and he said you know he goes i really love this i wanna do it and i'm like at that time starting a tv network with somewhere closer to a hundred million dollars kinda a low end with sixty but it's still very expensive yeah and we you know we've had a rent satellites and all old studio equipment was expensive and we we he goes i really wanna it i said well great could you give us more like the hundred million so we could do everything that we know we need to do and he was like no no no he goes i'm only a allowed to sign for two and a half and i'm like what is that gonna do i said you know i can't even buy the cameras for two and a half million dollars and he goes well let's all them all allowed to sign for and you know alan and i just said you know what chances saw nobody's ever gonna give us sixty or a hundred million dollars so we'll take the two and a half and i had i had a friend who's was teaching radio television film in university of texas in austin and i called them up and said brian you know do you have kids who need intern jobs and he goes yeah we had a lot of trouble placing kids here i went send them send everyone you got and yeah and people don't realize that yeah because he is in a hundred forty two countries and valuation is you know crazy seven billion and yeah arguably is now the the number one influence or pop culture in the world by far and so we so people assume that it's a it started with a big company but it really started with me and allan allen eleven employees and including us so nine employees plus me and allan and thirty one interns that university of texas as soon as we got on the air everybody who came to us and said oh my god that's what you wanted to do we would've have given you a money three years ago and so you know we were an overnight success and i think in the first year we ended up expanding the thirty fourteen countries and my friend brian wanted to kill me because half of the kids they started out as interns at the beginning of the summer and by the end of the summer half of them were vice presidents we just grew so big so quickly if so it took off fast it took off very fast when you got back yeah but it really taught me this lesson that when you're pitching something that people have never really seen or experience or something to really compare it to that the worst thing you could do is say to people you know you give them what's in your head by saying well just imagine and that's it you've lost them they can't imagine so it really gave us both really good lessons on learning how you pitch stuff and and then how you had to explain it because what we were thinking in our head clearly wasn't getting across the people until they saw it so that was that was a good life lesson actually when you think about what made it so popular what was the kind of programming that you figured out just hit that blew because i mean like that you you blew up fast the beginning but then if you look at your other wins i mean talk soup the kardashians howard stern so you have an eye for this i'm sure there's a lot that didn't work but we could talk about the ones that did what was the difference well you know we well first of all the whole thing of of celebrity reporting was incredibly stiff it was things like entertainment tonight so if you had a new movie you would fight forget twenty seconds on entertainment tonight so it wasn't really in up coverage and everything was done by big studios yeah the paramount and the disney's and stuff and was very stiff and very corporate looking and very but very polished because they could afford the hundred million dollars ours because we didn't have a lot of money we had to be very invent we didn't even have professional broadcast equipment we ended finding some company that had like hold equipment that they're using to make sales training tapes so we bought that but what happened was again because alan and i didn't come out of that hollywood world so we looked at a lot of stuff and go hollywood is funny stuff let's not make believe it's rocket science so a lot of stuff looked very pirate because again we didn't have a lot of money and you know we didn't have the fancy cameras that the effects or the editing equipment all that and people would watch it and go oh my god i never thought i would see like a half hour interview with my payment my favorite director or now i learned about movie music because we would do a we would take these movie trailers and slice and dice in like twenty different ways so you know we would have movie music we would have foreign film we would have indie film you know we literally had every different kind of film and film related person and but again it looked very pirate but you know one of the things that really i think broke us through was the first year we applied for credentials to go to the academy awards and they rejected us they basically said well you know you're not really interesting to us if you're more like a a utility you like the gas company or the phone company and they wouldn't give us credentials and what happened is we literally me and the crew climbed over the fence we snuck in we're on the red carpet and you know then everybody was still doing the same old so mister cruz tell us about your next movie and you know we were there like we were like well we stuck in can't believe it you know hey tom those are great shoes where you get those so we were just asking the questions that really interested us and you know and again with our little beat up cameras and stuff like that and when we started showing that people would like send us information like letters and calls and go wow it looks like you know we were watching we were flying on the wall watching something we're not supposed to and well the fact is they were you know we got caught and thrown out but you know we had enough footage that we made good shows and people love that and that's really what started the whole red carpet you know thing i mean the the way the carpet gets covered changed dramatically because of us you know and that led to things like joan rivers is doing talk you know fashion police and stuff like that and then we you know we kinda did that and then well we started getting a little bit of traction and we started getting a little bit of money we went from just showing movie trailers and but again we didn't have a lot so we had to be very creative and event of you know the you know i went to the team and said hey i have this idea i wanna do a tv show that makes fun of tv shows and they were like last they go that doesn't make any sense nobody will let you do that you know and that show was talk soup and you know that was the first breakthrough more traditional thirty minute tv show and talk soup just then greg ka blew up and you look at all those people that have followed on talk soup that have become famous from it i think we counted seventeen people who are talk soup posts that ended up getting jobs i'm like we call them real tv and you know so that that show while it started out as people thinking allen and i were out of our mind i think ran twenty six years you know something and then the next one you know we met this tall guy in a of elevator in new york and he was telling us about he's a radio host and we're like yeah okay great you know as a guy if you haven't realized radio have been dead for like forty years and he's going no you gotta come and see the show and we went and watched this radio show you know because i you i think we were living in the same building and you know so we said oh we're gonna run into this sky it'd be kinda rude if we didn't go and see a show and you know then we just loved it and we went back to the crew and said hey we wanna put cameras in this guy's radio studio and they were like larry when you wanted to do you know with fox soup we thought you're out your mind they they go radio dead why wouldn't anybody watch a radio show and i said you know what you don't understand they used to be a tv show a sitcom called w k and cincinnati and it was about a radio crew an ensemble crew but it was a comedy i said this is a reality tv version of of that show and yeah know because it was an ensemble comedy i mean now it wasn't just hour it was that whole i'm entourage that he had you know and then howard broke you know broke and then that we grew i the first year i think fourteen countries and because we realized that a lot of people were paying attention that you know for us cable networks if you're doing something like the weather channel yeah it's a great utility you know instead of having to watch tv at eleven thirty every day at night to find out what the weather be tomorrow you had a channel that would let you see the weather anytime you wanted but that was very local if you didn't live in that city you know or or in that country you couldn't care about what the weather is in london or anything like that but we said celebrity and celebrity culture a popular role over the world and that had turned out to be very very true so but you get you go back to the origins of the idea at that time we looked at cable and said you know what it's like an electronic newspaper yet cnn is the headline espn is the sports and q is a home shopping network is the ads but what was missing so obvious alan and i was the second most red section of any sunday newspaper which was the them pages so you know we went from you know mtv of the movies to you know the entertainment pages of the hollywood newspaper you know it's what america wants to know about hollywood nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market interest rates are rising they're falling honestly at the end of the day we just need a crystal ball but until then over forty two thousand businesses have trust and future proof themselves with nets suite by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one cohesive platform with one unified business management suite there's one source of truth giving you the 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indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need you know it's very interesting because you keep coming up with all these ideas that have never been done before everything in your life is doing things that really have never been done before and not listening to everybody who's telling you that it can't be done and what i find really interesting so i read your book and if anybody wants to get it's called off script and your real passion is cooking now i find that interesting because that means that you built your entire career and all of e on something that you're not actually that passionate about you're not passionate about entertainment cooking was the passion so when you're going up against the grain when you're doing all these things that have never been done before when you're not even inherently that passionate about the thing that you're doing what is the advice to keep going when you get told no when it's not working out when you're doing something that is completely blue ocean never done before because that's a skill set in and of itself yeah well you know i i was a cook cooking since some twelve because both my parents worked and my choice was either learn how to cook or eat peanut butter jelly sandwiches for dinner every night and but you know i liked it and i was good at it and i just kept reading cookbook and learning more and more and diversifying but what what i say to people you know a lot of times people get confused between what their passion is and what their hobby is and we all have the same realities of life we gotta make enough money so we could pay na rent and educate our kids or pay our college loans or whatever it is so would i tell people i said find something you're good at in my case you know i obviously was pretty good at the television stuff i said then just work your butt off and become graded it and then what happens is that becomes your passion and then you could use that to make enough money to be able to pursue your hobbies and that's what cooking you know the whole cooking was for me is you know look tv was obviously pretty lucrative i pretty good at it and i still am pretty good at it and but it let's you know it gives you the ability to you know then focus on your your hobby whenever you feel like focusing on your hobby without knowing like oh my god i'm gonna be able to pay to rent next month i think that's wise advice i think and i'm also very curious what you think about all about new media and content creators and everyone trying to become their own media channel and media station and i feel like a lot of it is just copying the other creator you know my podcast is probably a copy of you know fifteen other podcast podcasts and that tiktok channels a copy what would your advice be coming from an entertainment tv background for somebody that wants to create something unique how do you look at the world how do you create something that's never been done before the way you did it well i mean i i embraced new technology i mean a lot of people like like oh my god we're never gonna when not when i go allow that ai stuff to happen and yeah i said say look look at the music industry when digital music came around yeah i said now they they bitch and moan that oh my god itunes has so much power as spotify has too much power i said but the you as an industry music spent ten years fighting it as opposed to embracing it and you would have owned it you know and now you're complaining that you know somebody was had the brain power and and the wherewithal to go after it while you were rejecting it the same thing with ai there are certain things that yeah there are a lot of things that can go wrong with it we need rules and regulations and we need ways to keep it orderly you know there right now there's no deter for bad people who you know to do bad things with it but the fact that no matter is it's a great tool and it's gonna exist whether you like it or not you know screen actors guild or writer's guild and stuff like that so you know you better learn how to prompt and learn how to do this stuff because it's not going away and but storytelling it's an art and it's practiced really well only by humans and stuff so i use i've been using ai and stuff for the longest time from even before it became you know world known if i have a new idea for a tv network or tv series and stuff and i wanna write like do a little bit of market study and research and do budgets and stuff but it you should take me five days to come up with a basic idea you know once chad jb became ubiquitous it takes me thirty seconds to plug it in it takes me an hour to clean it up because it's never a hundred percent so it it so but now i'm getting done in one hour what used to take me five days and you know i say to people i go how do you not love that i mean as human beings we all have a finite amount of time on this planet and you know the best thing we could do is use it efficiently or effectively i said so now in one hour i get done what you stick me five days i could either do more of them and make more money or you know now i got a little grand baby i can spend time with my little grand i could learn how to speak spanish i could go on a cruise and i mean i've reclaimed the most valuable thing that all of us is human beings having that's all of time so you you gotta embrace it you you gotta make sure that you know again you need rules and regulations you can and and i always give the example of like driving a car a twelve year old kid can't say hey give me the keys i feel like driving you know you gotta be a certain age you gotta take a class you gotta take a test and then there are rules of the road and if you don't obey the rules of the road there are penalties for that with the ai and stuff there's there's a rules regulations need to catch up and a look and that's kinda you know where where that's at but like i say when you come up with something new and it's in your head you gotta i i self assess every night i come up while i wake up in the morning i have had new ideas what the time i go to sleep i realized most of them with dope but i'm very honest with myself i i could i i'll sit you on and go okay sounded like a good idea this morning but no you know and again i'm shrinking the time frame but technology change people taste changes the economic environment changes just wanted to be honest and go you know what sounded like a good idea but now i realize it's not what's next and just move quickly on to the next thing of course again we're back to that issue of maximizing the value of your time i love it and you're right like with ai you can you can adopt new ideas quickly you can brainstorm new stuff quickly you can you can realize that it's a bad idea quickly and move on but also to your point everybody in any media sort of legacy media anyone in film tv if they don't learn how to use ai the people that work in those industries will also get replaced so whether or not you're a content creator or you're working in those industries you gotta you gotta adopt it yeah it it's it's an incredibly a valuable too i mean a good example you know after gotten us twenty years of people you know telling me i gotta write a book i got write a book i finally did it and in the book when best seller in four days and people going what did you do you treat you know you well it's impossible your for your best seller in four different categories or four days and the they're fact of the matter is is i used actually i was still in a chad gb days i used gb to design a marketing plan for the book and i followed the marketing plan and you know the ai understood how to use the algorithms much better than my human brain could and literally by following the plan done by ai we became a best seller in four days you know people are going no it usually takes months how did you do it well that's how i did it i love it talk to me about talk to me about the kardashians because you built out i mean we spoke about talk soup howard stern kardashians is a cultural phenomenon how did you discover it how did you know that it was going to be good or did you well at at the beginning though we were i alan and i were friends with bruce and chris and it's it's a whole long story and i think it's in the book at one point we were gonna do another tv network called fx tv fitness and exercise television and our partners are bruce and chris jenner and kareem abdul jab you know a bunch of other folks but also one of our partners was o j simpson and obviously that didn't turn out well but you know so i was friendly with bruce and chris you know chris was always like oh we gotta think of something to do with the girls the girls are so good and whatever and know bruce and chris between them i mean they were like ten kids you know because they all came from other marriages and but the but the kids were under underage when we first met them and you know again we didn't have a lot of money so we had to be really careful so we couldn't afford to do the things that were needed to have young kids on the set i mean you needed to have tour tutors and you don't don't need to a certain number of hours a day or a week so we just said you know hey the kids are great but you gotta wait till they turn you know off age so we don't have to deal with the those restrictions and but you know look he gave them the platform but quite honestly you know and i say to people the the mom chris she's the brains behind it all she those those girls and guys just learned what they did from their mom who was a great driver and stuff like that and then yeah so yes we did give them the platform and they probably couldn't have become what they became without that platform but the real driver of that family was the mom chris like in twenty twenty five are there any people or trends or ideas that you're excited about that could be as big as the kardashians yeah i i i think that kind of stuff is cyclical i mean looked the kardashians have done amazingly well but you know i get people all the time saying i wanna a tv show i wanna be this i wanna be else i mean you know the one we haven't talked about is ryan s you know which that's where ryan got to start but you know we you and i actually had this mutual friend natasha g and yeah i must get a hundred people a year who come to me wanting to be the tv host and you you need several components the main ones being you a you need to have the personality but then you have to have the work ethic and a lot of times i mean people that who personalities is are great but then you get to the issue of work ethic and you know they i go okay you wanna be a tv host in daytime so that means you're gonna be up at three o'clock in the morning you're gonna go the hair and makeup up till five you're gonna shoot till eleven you're gonna go home you're gonna have lunch you're gonna go to sleep and you're gonna do it fifty weeks a year and they're like oh no no i i i spend the summers in ibiza i spend the summers in a hampton i can't do that and so you realize they have one of the other but very rarely be a fine part people who have both of those those traits but then i met natasha and and and several things number one she's not from the us which i thought was a plus but you know she had this great backstory his single mom living in london literally homeless you know cut to now eight years later she's living in be air and life coaching will i haven't and steve bio and and all of that but she's motivational inspirational as opposed to promotional and for me that was important because i said you know you got all these guys in late tv here we had no we have no women in late tv in america and they ordered the same show it's a guy sitting behind a desk and he's got a couch and you know it's the same so mister the cruz tell me about the next mission impossible and i said particularly after covid we we need i wanna go to sleep with a smile on my face i wanna think tomorrow is gonna be better than today was and so she's you know had the motivational inspirational but then i would test her you i'd be like in china and i would intentionally call it knowing it's three o'clock in the morning a time and she would actually pick up the phone and it's stay on the phone with me for hours and i said okay you got the personality she's the motivational and the work ethic clearly is there so we created this the this talk show late night talk show which is gonna go on this winter on national tv cole natasha at the dark and you know and that you know that's just a great example of how you could take something and again we we couldn't go and pitch it and explain it to people so we had to shoot a pilot and cut sizzle and then show them how different this show was from anything else that was on i love it and that's i mean if anybody's listening like the traits that you just described that like make a successful talk show host anchor just successful person in general the work ethic the personality that's showing up i mean if you just emulate those traits in any industry you're probably gonna be pretty well off i think that those traits are are those are the prerequisites to to build anything meaningful whether or not it's a career and tv or career and anything really one of my favorite ideas that you discuss is that you reinvent yourself every few years every i think when i listen to this it was every seven years a lot of people really struggle to reinvent themselves ever and they're the same person at seventy as when they started their career when they were twenty five twenty twenty five talk to me about reinvent why is it so important yeah people go why did you stop doing e you know running a size i stayed on the board but you know quite honestly i got bored you know we became huge and you know this this great thing but when you get to the issue and it's kinda like when somebody convinced me to write the book that i really began of focus on this i said you know what i do have like all these kinda seven eight year periods where i'm a totally different person yeah so i have my brooklyn years and my manhattan cable years and my valley cable years and my e years my russia years my chinese years my post covid years and stuff where yeah know just entirely different and and stuff i i gotta admit china does keep my interest because it's just so huge and it's so much different opportunity there but it's it's basically saying fresh and stuff up and staying up with new i mean i'm really keen on making sure that whatever the new technologies are that are coming down the road that i'm i'm there before the big companies get there because it takes them so much time to you know they they study they write plans they have board meetings and you know they get this stuff probably a year or two years later than they could or should chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run 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get your ticket today you know you mentioned china what are the things that first of all why are you excited about china what are the things that we could learn about how they do media because i think that you predicted linear tv's death a while back i know that china's always sort of cutting edge in terms of media and social media and a lot of different things so what's what's china doing what what gets you excited what's stuff that we should maybe try and emulate first of all the you know two different things there so there was no legacy media there you know to speak of it you know everything was government control so cellular and you know in digital and stuff we're all new there so you you didn't have to spend a lot of time taking away old habits you you would just had to spend them on creating the new habits and they're much more open to stuff and plus a very simple thing because here are big media is controlled by public companies so they're very slow to adapt because it really means writing off old date you gotta write off the old before you can get to the new i mean i talked to like people a chairman of like tv networks and i'm going like why are you still doing linear tv i mean it makes no sense and know like i well you know it would be like a seven billion dollar write off and i'm gonna retire in two years and i'm not walking into a boardroom or you know shareholders meeting saying i'm writing down seven billion dollars they go retire let the next guy deal with with that so has nothing to really do with what's right or what you should do a reality but there are these other things in play that you know kind of restrict us but in china we do tv film internet content content i we do immersive we do all kinds of stuff there and you people who watch our tv shows well first of all we're successful in china because we we make stuff in china in mandarin language specifically for the audiences in china so we don't take what we do in australia and you go here you know well subtitle in english for you and go with it china's three or four times bigger than the united states and people in china very proud and happy to beat chinese and you know what people have said to me early on they look if you don't really wanna do something in here in our language for our people you're in the wrong place and i think rupert murdoch learned that pretty early on because he got bounced out pretty quickly so but it just takes the tv shows we do there and seventy percent seven zero it's probably a little more now i'm going back a year and the people who watch our shows watch them on us on the five inch screen watch them on a cell phone and so we've had a learn to adopt production and editing and stuff noting that you know if we're gonna shoot a wide shot you know which looks great on a fifty five inch tv it's gonna look horrible when you put it on a on a cell phone so a lot of stuff we shoot you know is a little more a lot more close ups and head shots and so do it and which really you know that whole phenomenon led to the the whole thing going on now with vertical vertical programming is now beginning to take care in short film two minute movies and things like that we've been doing that stuff in china for years so i think there's almost eight hundred million people in china with a smartphone now so you know through it's a pretty good base through experiment against i think that that i think that you know i i look at some of the other stuff coming out of china and there's like commerce trends that are coming out of china and the way people shop and the way people buy the way people consume content for sure i think that's gonna be i i always think that a lot of the things that we see coming out of china in terms of just behaviors they're gonna make their way to the us eventually yeah so just a matter of time just a so use said seventy plus percent of people consume just on phones not surprising you were also doing something really interesting in china where you create movies broken down into two minute segments and then audiences by them piece by piece i don't think that's made it to the us but that's another form of like short content that i think you could see in the us too so again that's like short content vertical and this is something that creators should pay attention to like okay what am i seeing in china how can i adapt my content to that because that's what's gonna be coming down the pipeline yeah i well you you all you gotta do is just go to the app store and you'll you'll find that there are a bunch of you know i need the market they need to catch up but that that has become that's come over here already and interesting most of them are actually owned by chinese companies but the theory and again we come out stuff from a different place we look at whatever we create as media play has to be financially sustainable we don't do it because we think it's wow we're so creative but we love it but if you can't sustain it financially don't do it course eventually you know like i said the reality of life take over but with with short films you take and an or serial film you make a ninety minute movie you know most of them now are like rom comm very inexpensive three hundred four hundred thousand dollars for movie but use of folks who are really good at soap opera writing because soap opera writers is learned to write in two minute arcs because and if you you watch the patent of storytelling in the soap opera they literally all are broken down into two minutes in the little cliff bang it two minutes and a little cliff hang so you you make a ninety minute movie divide it up into forty five two minutes segments more or less two minutes you don't have to time them out and you give people the first ten episodes for free but that episode eleven is like the equivalent of a dollar you so it's not a big deal i like say that was good i wanna know what happened you know does jamie kill them you know okay if for a dolly to find out if jamie kills them and you know then on and on and on but you look at the financial model there so you then have thirty five segments that you're getting a dollar for so on a three hundred of four hundred million you know a million movie you're getting a thirty five dollar ticket price yet look at marvel spending two hundred million on a movie and getting a nineteen dollar ticket price who's got the better model do you think that i mean at one point you had you know a hundred and forty two plus country broadcasts now we have all these individual creators these podcast these youtube channels do you think we're moving towards infinite like fragmentation of media or do you think that we'll ever see like unifying media sort of taking hold because i see all these individual podcast is sort of like and and media channels as the new age like the joe rogan the the the i mean pick pick a youtube channel the mister beast it seems like infinite fragmentation of media yeah you'll see you know whenever new media comes out and i hate to say i've been i've been involved in probably new media is seven or eight times in my fifteen years when when it first comes out people are very forgiving of of quality and and content but over time or now there's like some crazy number of podcasts everybody thinks i'd buy a camera for forty dollars and stick it on my laptop and i put a lamp of my head and i'm i'm a tv star well it doesn't exactly work like that but but then you get to the audience and at the beginning of any new technology people are very forgiving of poor quality he is a great example he forgave us for you know using industrial equipment but over time the eye and the brain begins to expect more and more and more so we actually dove into the podcast world this year because in post covid i started doing a lot more in the us again and you know we just said we know where it's going we know that yeah that people are gonna want better better quality out of their and and their podcast so rather than start at the low end we decided that our white has gotta start at the higher end so we actually shoot we we we do a lot of women empowerment related stuff because we thought that was a niche that really could be you know develop well but we shoot our in four k we shoot it with four cameras we switch live we edit it we audio engineer design the audio and lighting guy design that and stuff so when you watch it it really looks like television i mean the the first one we did is called s talk and you know it looks like a younger hip cooler version of the view and stuff so you know more and more i we love pot stand of because there are no barriers to entry there's no gatekeepers but you got at the end of the day you gotta be good and you know we think there'll be a huge shake out and you know a lot of the stuff that's going on now i mean for several reasons you know the economics are just not there big advertisers need mass they can't afford to keep buying audiences of a few hundred people and stuff like that so you gotta you gotta build them up and you gotta get sponsors to keep them self sustainable and and stuff like that but it it it's not it's not this or that i mean a lot of times i need stuff quick give it to me quick i'm a big tiktok say i love tiktok you know but it's during the day you know i'm in the car i'm on the boss of the train and i'd i just give it to me in two minute bites and i'm good or forty second bites and i'm good but then i come home and you know what i wanna lump out on the couch and have a beer and so i i want the those i want those half hour shows i want the spielberg of the world to tell me their stories because they do them better than you know my college room roommate it so it's not this or that it's really both and they both fill in need at different times and people's daily routine of their life yeah and so i think that you know really the the answer is maybe we're over fragmented but eventually we're gonna consolidate like the best podcast or the best tiktok channels or the best youtube channels that's what's gonna sort of be like the go to's and and i think you're already starting to see it now you're you're watching the big guys you know jump in and forced the consolidation i think sirius radio just did a big deal with tribune to you know to really push simple cast and stuff like that and they're yeah it'll be consolidation we we look at it i mean our our podcast stuff we're building this women's block because we said okay with one podcast maybe we get ten thousand which means you could only go to what kinda of local advertisers but if i do five and i get the same demo of course five i now have fifty thousand i can now go to l'oreal or you know p g with it larry where do people connect with you where do people get your book i'm assuming i'm assuming you can get you can get your book wherever you get books amazon whatnot but what's the socials what's the website you wanna send people to well you could go to the the name of the book is called off script and so you could either go to off script podcast or off off script book dot com and find it or you know people eat my the email that i actually get myself and i do answer all my email myself is l j n at l j n media dot com but yeah the book is available amazon barnes ingram everywhere all the usual places i'll link i'll link everything below last last question just to pull out a couple final thoughts from you you've had an incredible career if you had to you know look at not what you've learned but what you had to un learn to be successful the thing that you think held you back the most what would that thing be well you know i grew up my and i grown up in a very poor neighborhood i grew up from brooklyn but before it was trendy brooklyn i grew up in eric coney island which is still the hood i mean you go through that today and it's still a war zone you know burnt out buildings and stuff like that it's beginning the gen fights but you know my parents came from you know immigrant mentality and their you know wishes for their kids were get a civil service job and be able to retire at sixty five and you know so i spent a lot of time having to listen to other people's design for my life as opposed to what was gonna what i knew was gonna make me happy and so i guess the greatest thing i learned is just you know follow your heart follow your gut and again so so second you say to people just imagine you you've lost them just if it feels right to you and you and you gotta be honest you gotta to evaluate i like i say i come up with ten new ideas every day and by the time i go to sleep i realize most of them with dope but i'm i'm honest enough about myself to go stupid idea always i think and what's next just don't waste your time on stuff i love it and you and if but if you do believe it it like you have to commit to it you gotta like i say you know find something you're you're good at and work your butt off and become graded at it and then that will become your passion the last thing that i wanted to ask you you've given over a lot of wisdom and you and maybe just go us a a level deeper on this thought because say you could only pass on one life lesson to your kids because it was the most important life lesson that you've ever learned you've given over a few but what would be those final words of wisdom that you'd pass over to your kids well i think you know we're we're all on this planet for finite amount of time and i think our purpose here is we're here to leave this place better than we found it in every way from people to the planet to animals and stuff and the to me the object in life and i've always had this conversation with my mom when my daughter would be dating my mother would say well is it serious and you know made me start to think i'm going well what does that mean she goes well are they gonna get married and i'm going you know what my wish for my daughter my all my kids is to be happy the wish for myself is to be happy it's not to be rich or whatever but it it really that's that's the object find your happy place

in today's lessons episode we're gonna talk about ending and exiting things that aren't serving you anymore and why your inability to do that is draining your energy and basically wasting your life you know those expired relationships you're still keeping up with the job that you should left two years ago the girlfriend of the boyfriend and you know that it's not working out the meeting that should have ended thirty seven minutes ago but didn't people have a really hard time ending things and if you're carrying around things that ran their course hours or even years ago you're maintaining just friendships that of guilt you're lying awake thinking about conversations that you should be having with that special person but you're not this podcast is for you i'm gonna show you why your brain literally can't let go of unfinished business so why you need to end stuff why the way you end things is the only part that people actually remember which is why it's so important to do well and the exact five sentence formula for ending anything with grace instead of ghost like a coward this is an underrated life skill knowing how to end things gracefully most people either ghost or drag things out really painfully or just explode in frustration when they're trying to cut something off instead i want you to recognize when something has run its course whether it's a conversation and meeting a job or relationship and want you to state your intention clearly acknowledge what was valuable and exit while there's still mutual respect because the way that you leave determines whether door stays open and how you're remembered because every ending is also someone else's story about you let's talk about this i think this is one of the most important things that i've ever learned in my life how to exit let me paint a picture for you're sitting in a meeting that ended thirty seven minutes ago everybody knows it the decision that was supposed to happen in that meeting happen in twelve minutes but here you are watching grown adults repeat themselves in slightly different words because nobody knows how to say we're done here you're you look at your phone it's two forty seven the meeting was supposed to end at two that is forty seven minutes of your life that you'll never get back sacrificed to the collective inability to end a simple conversation and this is just one meeting that relationship that you're in it's been dead since twenty twenty one that friendship that you maintain out of guilt that is a corpse that you've been dragging behind you for three years that job that makes you die a little each morning you knew it was wrong by week two you are not living you are performing cpr on things that need burial the concept of exiting the concept of ending things has fascinated me for a long time so much so but i've researched and i've studied the idea of exiting and ending things that don't serve you anymore i've looked at over a thousand resignation letters i've analyzed breakup conversations i've interviewed people in the podcast who've ended things well and people who burnt everything down and i've discovered something that changed how i see everything the way you end things is the only part anyone remembers there's a lesson that well there's actually a conversation that led to this realization but there's a lesson that i learned from a funeral director the funeral director let's call him charlie he had been burying people for thirty one years when he told me this nobody remembers the middle of anything they remember how it started and they remember how it ended but mostly and we were sitting in his office it's morbid but a funeral director has casket catalogs all over their office right that's their business scott i've watched families spent thirty thousand dollars trying to fix an ending trying to rewrite the last conversation they never had the last i love you that they never said the goodbye that they avoided but think about your own life know that that you data for three years you don't remember year two you remember meeting them you remember the explosion at the end the job that you had for five years remember the interview and then you remember when they escorted you out when they let you go or your friend from college you remember meeting freshman year and then you remember the fight that ended every thing obviously there's a lot of endings in life they don't have to be so serious and so permanent is what charlie was talking about with the funeral home but the point stands the ending isn't just the last chapter it's the lens through which the entire story gets rewritten but we don't know how to end things first of all we don't know how to do it properly and when we do end things we do it in the wrong way that is actually science behind this too so daniel ken you want a nobel prize for discovering this your brain judges every experience based on two moments the peak which is the most intense almost everything else to some degree is deleted and he proved it with a cold water experiment so participants in this experiment put their hands in fourteen degrees celsius water that's about fifty seven degrees fahrenheit it's un comfortably cold like a mountain stream water level of cold for about sixty seconds and then he did it again but this time for ninety seconds so there was still sixty seconds of the fourteen degrees celsius fifty seven degree fahrenheit cold water plus thirty more seconds at fifteen degrees celsius or fifty nine degrees fahrenheit still cold just one degree warmer and then he asked which experiment would you rather repeat and sixty nine percent of the participants chose to repeat the longer trial which doesn't make any sense because they did the same amount of uncomfortable hand in cold water for both so people literally chose more pain because it ended marginally better this isn't motivation this is actual neuroscience your brain doesn't count minutes or measure suffering it takes a screenshot of the worst moment and the last moment averages them and calls out your memory another example a colonoscopy that ends badly feels worse than one twice as long that ends better a vacation with a terrible last day becomes a terrible vacation a relationship that explodes a races three good years we remember the ending but we don't know how to do it properly this is why i decided to count how many mental corpses i was dragging around that i hadn't ended yet so january twenty nineteen i didn't an audit of my life there were seventeen things in my life that should have been dead killed off canceled exited there was a business partnership that turned talks about a year before there was a client who hadn't paid me on time since twenty seventeen there was a personal training package with about twenty three sessions left there was a there was no longer a friendship there was a romantic situation that was neither romantic nor a situation there was a newsletter that i hadn't sent in eight months there was a domain name for a business that i'd never start there was also a storage unit full of things that i never needed so there was seventeen zombies each taking up say three percent of my mental ram that is fifty one percent of my brain running background programs for dead things and it was no wonder i was exhausted i was stressed out and there's actually research that shows about why this mental math matter so much there's something called the z nick effect so your brain treats unfinished business like this fire alarm that just won't stop so every incomplete loop every une ended thing it oc mental space until it's resolved if you look at the math that conversation that you're avoiding three percent of your mental energy the job that you should quit three percent for sure the relationship that ended but didn't three percent the project that you'll never finish three percent that friendship that you're maintaining out of guilt another three percent five une ended things equals fifteen percent of your mental capacity gone ten thirty percent seventeen fifty one percent you are operating at half capacity because you will not bury the dead but when you end something cleanly you get that energy back immediately with compound interest and this isn't just about personal energy this idea is destroying entire economies bad endings cost us businesses one trillion dollars annually not million not billion but fifty two percent of people who quit could have been saved with one conversation but that conversation never happens because managers don't know how to have ending conversations and employees don't know how to start them and the replacement costs are one employee fifty percent to two hundred and thirteen percent of their annual salary and the productivity loss from someone mentally checked out but physically present one point eight trillion more and that's just money human cost is worse we've been so terrified of ending things that we invented a whole new way to avoid them there's a ghost epidemic sixty five percent of americans were ghost last year the average person ghost three times washington dc leads the nation seventy six percent of residents ghost annually averaging five point one times each seventy seven percent of gen z admits the ghost someone thirty five percent of job candidates ghost employers sixty one percent of job seekers are ghost by companies we've become a society of coward words who cannot end things and cannot say goodbye there is actually a group of spanish researchers who studied six hundred twenty six adults who who'd been ghost and the result significantly less satisfaction with life higher helpless and crushing loneliness the damage from avoiding a five minute conversation lasts years so why do we do it fifty percent say conflict avoidance we rather inflict lasting psychological damage and have one uncomfortable conversation but honestly after studying all those resignation letters after sort of reading into why we don't exit things properly i've actually discovered there's a very simple formula that can solve all of this even if we don't know why we all do it there's actually a solution to ending and exiting things the right way so every graceful ending or exit it could be in business it could be in personal relationships it doesn't really matter it has five elements so recognition ownership appreciation clarity and benedict addiction let me go through these recognition not denial means you're saying something like this isn't working for either of us could be friendship relationship job number two is ownership not blame i need something different number three is appreciation not i value what we shared number four is clarity not ambiguity this is my last day this is goodbye and lastly number five is benedict addiction don't be better i wish you well this isn't working for either of us i need something different i value what we've shared this is goodbye i wish you well some version of those five sentences that's it you can end almost anything with five sentences and you can end it and you already know exactly what needs those five sentences because you know what it is you've been thinking about it this entire time the thing that should have ended six months ago or two years ago or ten years ago you know it's dead they probably know it's dead you're both just standing there staring at the corpse pretending it's sleeping it's not it's dead you gotta exit you gotta end it and here's what you're actually afraid of you're not afraid that ending it will hurt them but you're subconsciously afraid that they'll be relieved that they've been waiting for someone to finally say what you've both been thinking that the only thing worse in staying in something dead is discovering that the other person wanted out too so let me make it simple for you here's the five sentences to fill in the blanks this is what you say to them you write it out you say it to them in person say it on a zoom call say it on a phone call whatever i've realized that blank isn't working for either of us i need blank at this point in my life i valued blank about our time together end it and say i wish you will send it say it today not tomorrow not after the holidays now when you're ready today because something magical happens when you finally master endings you stop being afraid of beginnings because when you know you can end something gracefully you can start something boldly when you trust yourself to leave when it's time you can fully arrive while you're there you stop hedging you stop keeping one foot out the door you stop holding back thirty percent just in case you need to run so you can go all in knowing that you can get all out that's when life actually starts but you're still listening to this podcast instead of doing it this podcast depending on if you listen to it at one or one point two or one point five x probably took you about ten to fifteen minutes to listen to the whole thing now in those fifteen minutes you could have ended that meeting sent that resignation at that conversation and made that call but instead you're listening the podcasts about ending things and that's the trap we all fall into this trap i don't feel guilty and just i'm telling you you do have to take action but we always read about change instead of changing we listen to youtube we listen to podcast about change we don't actually change and then we plan our endings instead of actually ending things and then we think about the conversations that we have to have instead of having them and then we never take action right now you're listening to a podcast about ending things properly the une ended things that you're thinking about that are in your life right now that you have to kill off those corpses that are not serving you anymore that are taking up that mental clutter and that mental bandwidth they didn't get ended while you listen to this podcast they got about fifteen minutes older fifteen minutes dead and fifteen minutes heavier so here's what happens right now that thing that you needed to end it's not getting better it's not gonna fix itself they're not gonna end it for you and every day that you don't end it is a day that you've decided to keep dying slowly every week that you wait is a week deleted from your life every year that you tolerate it is a percentage of your existence that you will never recover stop living like you live forever that life is infinite because it's not a formula give yourself a better life to end the things that are no longer serving you it's in this podcast five sentences very simple your whole life's is gonna change and the moment to change your life is right now the only question really is whether or not you're gonna use it because whether you end it or not eventually it's attending anyways everything ends the only choice is whether it ends with grace or with you ghost whether it ends with a period right now or an explosion whether you remembered to someone who had the courage to say goodbye or you're a coward who disappeared every ending is also someone else's story about you take control of the narrative grow a pair do the right thing cut off the things that aren't serving you i want you to use this ending framework to regardless of what someone else thinks about you in your job in your friendship in your relationship they cannot say and they cannot tell a story about you not having the courage end things properly to your move

in this lessons episode discover how high achieve outgrow old identities to pursue bigger visions understand why treating the organization as the product lets leaders scale beyond personal strengths explore top down design with talent first hiring and learn how abundance and detachment fuel bold creation without burnout tactics how do you manage that idea so an example maybe you are great at selling and you jump on calls the time and that's how you build your business so how do you remove that out of your formula yeah i mean most people's edge they'll call it selling they'll call it their their copy skills they'll call it their their leadership i'm the ceo i'm the vision maker they'll call it their their heart their kindness and whatever it is right their direct here's here's what i would encourage people to consider who you are today is not who you need to become to achieve what you want because if you were you'd have it period full stop you don't if people i i hope people get my life isn't a byproduct of a decision i made today my life is a byproduct of a decision i made six months ago a year ago four years ago the reason i made those decision is because an identity that i believed i could become and i knew i needed to become that version of me to bring those things into my life because if you were actually given that you know this man it's a jim jim ron talk about this back in the day said you should hope you don't be given a million dollars because if you're not a millionaire yet you'll lose it all people think having a million bucks makes you a millionaire my definition of a millionaire is not a person has a million dollars in bank count because any one of the people listen right now i can why you the money like i've been thinking about doing this because i think it'd be a great deal obviously i'm but you don't even have to do it because you look at lottery winners we just watch to happen with the pandemic yeah everybody got the money it ended up back in the same pockets period full stop so so that's that's the thing i want people to understand it's it's not the it's who you need to become to achieve and and that's why i went for me i'd like have people get crystal clear on their vision and then make that silly list and i love this because here's the thing i teach them how to be crazy whole grateful enough at any moment right now from that place now we create that's the beautiful part from this place i'm not saying you know create because that a lot of people she's saying i should just hang on the beach and k combine and home i'm like no you were created to create your creators it's the human experience it's why you want a new new and you're inspired by people who have nice things and you don't live on the street you know you know what i mean like just accept it this is not a capitalism material thing this is just human experience but it's why we create and i wanna create from a place of abundance of pure creation a pure giving a pure enough of pure like and guess what those people that's your steve jobs that's your walt disney's that's your elon like what's driving him elon he don't need to do anything now he's just he's just living in this place of i just wanna build not from a place of not enough like there's not enough no like i almost i don't know what the numbers is and honestly i think it's different for everybody because you have that thirty seven billion you know russian book killed himself lays down on the train track i think it's it's and and that's why it's so powerful the person who needs nothing is the most dangerous person in the world like you can't control literally the person who needs nothing from anybody is dangerous to everybody else to competes against them in the same token if that person wakes up and they start building and creating because they don't need anything there's no emotional response to not initially achieving because to them there's no need to achieve again they're they're just like i'm in flow i'm in the process i'm creating this is this is bone this is crazy ass you know what i mean and that's where i just gotten to it's my favorite thing to introduce people to what is the most important difference or distinction and how you build now outside of mindset what are the what is the thing that you did is it is it you build sop and that's how you structure your organization you bring more balance you focus on shutting off at a certain time like there's all these different ideas it's a great question i'm just scanning my brain trying to pattern match what i do before what i do now number one thing is i focus on building the organization as a product i don't get involved in the product so what happens is most people when they start a business that's the thing they sell they they honestly they do the thing they sell like they're they have a they help people get fit the the trainer and then if you're lucky you know and i gotta plug my book because it is one that buy back your time is the process for getting out of the doing to the managing owning kind of face right if you're a trainer now all a sudden you own a gym and you have trainers the creation step i'm at is thinking of the problem i wanna solve in the world and then designing the company that attracts the talent that that gets involved in the business and i refine the business as a product itself and that's where i play when you talk to like people that have sold and exited their companies most of them when they're doing their next thing the first question they ask is who's gonna run this when richard branson decides to get into cruises right you got into virgin cruises his first question he didn't like go try he didn't start talking to ship makers and buying shifts he said who's the numb this is louie i talked about this he said who's the number two at the number one company and he goes and hires the coo at carnival and ask them do you wanna be the ceo at virgin cruises he said wow yes and now all of a sudden he's got an organization he gets involved at the brand level right he shows up for the p stunt he's looking at it through that lens that's the biggest difference i always say when you start from zero you start bottom up if you're blessed to have success next time you do it you start top down and that is a hundred percent the difference and why is that beautiful it's a it's an easier energy it's not a grind it's not in the business it's a not even on the business it's of the business it's like i'm designing the thing that everybody else plays and it's like i'm i'm like starting a new sport and i'm deciding how the sport works and i try this and all that didn't work the engines are too long or the bat i need to make like you know and literally oh you you attract you i mean i don't wanna sound cliche but you build the culture that attracts vision is a hundred percent vision yeah if you think about it two things have to be true you have to solve a big problem do you know why elon is so wealthy also the biggest problem big do yeah the biggest problems stuff that's wild like i have in my office like because i i just it's so wild to me as i've been watching elon at zip two i'm a software guy so back in the zip two days to the x the x axis first company right yeah zip two sold that then he did x and then merge with paypal really and then over the years and i was in silicon valley so every once in a while you'd show up at a party or he'd show up at a dinner or whatever so he's around and then he does the tesla and solar city and then the spacex and you just watch this person attack problems they're not even problems like humans didn't know they have a problem not being able to go be multi planetary he made up a problem because he's and and what happens is if you actually think about it is it his iq is it his work ethic they could like think about what makes him is is his level of risk you know he's famous for saying i had a hundred and sixty million after i sold paypal i put a hundred here fifty you know what i mean most people wouldn't do that most when looked down their personal net worth or cash position and say half here half there all you know what mean like all in what's that no okay but guess what that's not it because risk so if you look at it the thing that makes him different is that he thinks bigger dude to so if you think about this most people think their neighborhood they think they're street how big do i think compared to my neighbor if you're successful a little bit successful you think your city are you're not thinking your street no you're not no you're a city but even then that's limited super limited hopefully you get exposed to some mentors some people that say hey how about your your state yeah let's go nationwide elon doesn't even think the little blue dot that he lives on he goes galaxy that's wild but you have to balance that influence what i mean by that is that influence is good to help you think bigger but in terms of even people that mentor you you need multiple different types of mentors as well so you need people that are just beyond you like a couple years people that are even at the same level as you i think people even teaching for me is my favorite form of mentorship because because when i teach something then i understand all the gaps in my knowledge so you need this like this whole array but i think that people more often than not lock that really big thinking so they can fill all the other gaps it just proof by their container i always say you can tell somebody psychological context how they think about themselves based on their container what's the exercise you do to even understand if you want to play that big because not everybody wants to play that they do they don't wanna admit it if you're a human you have a heartbeat you know you're meant for more like i will fight i will die on that it's just true if you're hearing my voice right now and you're listening to this podcast you know you are here to do something way bigger than what you're doing right now now making that decision is scary because it's probably gonna need some really tough conversations with people you love in your life and and obviously who you are today is it's not who you're gonna have to become to achieve that thing and all that is scary changes scary i get that but i'm if if today was your last day like it was your last breath i guarantee most people most people ninety nine point seven percent population would have massive regrets for not starting or creating or doing that thing so it's like do they wanna play at that level my philosophy is this you were created to expand i mean it's just the fact that you're human create what you can accomplish that's actually not your choice i don't believe it is my choice i don't know what i can do i just know the expansion is available to me and there's a part of me that wants to do it and i can do it and it can be effortless see that's a part the story you tell yourself that makes it see and it sounds hard and it's gonna crazy that's the x factor right because most people think sure i can i can do whatever i want i think listen especially listeners of this podcast are very aspirational and they do have big dreams to compare to probably ninety nine percent of the population but the issue is well if i build something that is i'm a nine figure entrepreneur of build multiple companies if i build anything meaningful that means sacrifices and all the of all the other areas of my life right but i know and i wanna talk about eventually how you've built a beautiful relationship you have a great all of it with your kids somebody body buy yeah yeah i've seen your health journey dude like so you have it all i don't have it all i just have a direction that i'm on that demonstrates that there's a different way and i'm gonna be the first one to say i'm still trying to figure it all out but i can just tell you year over year there's obviously expansion i mean right now like i'm playing at the billion plus level over the next three years it's all modeled out it's it's not it's inevitable it's like one of those things where when you design it and it's and it's not like why do you wanna be that like i don't need to and if it doesn't happen i will i will lose zero sleep at night i just got i just literally just got back from five days in the woods by myself no devices in a van with me and my thoughts and i thought i was gonna go crazy before i did it i was like i don't wanna do that i don't know if you've ever done scott never but that's wow think about it not talking to another human that do the they go into a cage this spot yeah it was a black okay yeah yeah like to me as an ex word i love people i love talking obviously like i i was like i don't wanna do that by the third day i fell in love with nature and myself that was a cool thing i really really you know what i mean like i love myself i didn't know what that meant and then i experienced it and it occurred to me because i had so much fun day four day i dude i was supposed to be home at nine i didn't get back till noon i was driving around just they call it you know windshield therapy it was just beautiful and what i discovered for me and i and i wanna to invite people to understand it's available to everybody is that when you realize like it's kinda so the whole space into i don't wanna get into like is time real but if you take every human off of earth trees and birds don't think in time it's a man made construct and if you believe that you're you're more than just your body which we are then as i'm driving around i'm just laughing at how much i make meaning of stuff that is an illusion of importance that's everybody though i know and it's so cool once you realize it because then from that you can actually go create massively because in in one sense it doesn't matter in the other sense it does and it does it's say it's kinda crazy man that's kinda where i got so that's why like when you say what's difference about the way used to build versus now it's i truly look at the exercise of creation of the thing without any need so i think it was ram said involve not attached i think that's the best way for me to explain beautiful line involve not attached we create it works out cool it doesn't also cool thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

in this lessons episode discover why humans are wired to think about the future and how this instinct can create both opportunity and anxiety learn how to distinguish ambitions driven by fear from those rooted enjoy explore practical ways to align decisions with presence rather than pain and understand why mindfulness and awareness are key to building a life grounded in wholeness instead of wounds i don't know if that's a correct assumption you can tell me do you feel like this is a the the stress of what's to come as a modern invention or our humans sort of genetically or historically coded to always worry about what's to come and whenever we try and focus on the present we're actually pushing back against the way that we were built well there's a very strong scientific argument evolutionary argument that our orientation is to focus more on the future the psychologist doctor martin sal he wrote a book called homo prospect which is making the argument that at our core we are future thinking beings our unique capacity is to imagine a future that hasn't yet happened and then organize resources to help bring that future to reality no other animals or or that that we're aware of and maybe this has changed in recent years are understanding but like have that same capacity to do that to imagine a future that doesn't exist and then create it so i would argue that at our core that is that is more a capacity than to just be present we can also talk about it in a bit how they're not necessarily contradictory because anything anything the the future doesn't exist in the future in the past doesn't exist in the past they just exist they're all arising in the present moment and so where so many people get stuck with meditation and mindfulness is they they think they shouldn't have these thoughts about the future in the past and then they end up judging themselves for having those thoughts and then judging themselves or judging themselves and they're just like i suck at meditation why didn't even try so the big thing is like make space for all of that but when like when i as someone engaged in this work like i have to have future thoughts all the time i a kid now and we had like plan for his future we have to save money and i have a teaching business as well so i'm i'm planning things the the question always for me is like it's the thought about the future that's pulling me into the future is it coming from a place of fear anxiety trying to get safety and control or is it coming from a place in me that is more free and spacious and i i'm often tracking like the the the decisions that i make that inform especially big things that i do with my life i i really don't want them to have the resonance of being a decision i i almost want them to have the resonance of being a receiving as if i'm just like relaxing into myself in the deepest most spacious place in myself and then seeing like what arises from that place when i'm not acting out of fear anxiety and worry of like am i gonna be okay and many people think that when i do that like if i just meditate and i like let go of everything related to the future in the past that i'm just gonna dev dissolve into a puddle of nothingness and i'm not gonna get anything done that's not true like you're you there's energy that moves through you and even the most awakened and enlightened state right that has to express itself through your body and through your mind it just expresses itself differently than the energy of what do i have to do to get safety praise love and connection and so the the exploration of what it means to build a life from presence and even like from the resonance of wholeness and happiness rather than emptiness pain and desperation is really the exploration of how do i rest in that most spacious wear place and myself and then listen for what wants to come through and then use the resource of me my human capacity and agency to help assure that into existence so that's a way that we we blend this work of presence and mindfulness with our capacity to create a beautiful life but we wanna create that life on the foundation of the place in us that is already whole rather than the the place in us that feels empty and if we do the ladder this is where you get people who build businesses to try to get a sense of worth and praise because they have a a wound that their dad didn't love them or their mom didn't love them unless they work super hard so they're constantly just playing out that pattern and then you build an entire empire that's on the foundation of pain and not actually coming from the truth of you or a a place in you that really gives you joy it's just helping to protect you from having to feel the trigger of that discomfort and not of not feeling good enough so yes well the the first response to the original question is like no i i i think our actual state is to be future thinking are we more do we have more hooks to get caught in that future thinking now in a negative way yes the psychologist of alberto so as we experience more stimulation in one week than our ancestors experienced in their entire lives which is not too hard to think about even just like in the context of what i'm looking at right now i have a screen i have a ring light there's towns in the background like most things around me are artificially built versus like being in the forest so instead of having like one line that you're contending with every couple of weeks like it's just constantly coming at you and there's so many things for the mind to get hooked on to to get addicted to and that i think creates a lot of noise that makes it difficult to parse like what are the thoughts that are actually gonna that are future related that are coming from a place of presence and rooted ness and my inherent wholeness and which ones are just coming from my mind attaching to things that it's scared of or or craving in my environment and i'm building my life from there my question really is when we look into the future and say we're ambitious and we want to build the company we wanna be an entrepreneur we want to i don't know think about all the things people get excited about they want to be in better shape they want to be in a great relationship they want to get a promotion at work is there a way to tell if those things are being driven from a place of fear or true happiness and excitement because that to me would be the and maybe maybe you have to do the work maybe you have to look inside and and be more mindful and to meditate to truly know but i think that people that are bought intimate bot into meditation already and i say that meaning that some people don't do it just to be very candid and some people don't do it is there a signal they should look for when they think about how they operate through their day that should be sign hey i'm not doing this i'm not doing this trauma free i'm doing this from a place of hurt or a wound or something that i don't quite understand and that is a great signal for me to maybe look inside be you know alone with my thoughts a little bit more is there something that people can sort of tap into that helps them understand why they're doing the things you're doing and if it's in a positive way or a negative way if that makes sense yeah i'll give you a a few things the first is you can ask yourself the question what comes up for me when i think about not doing this if it is a motivation coming from a wound you will probably notice a lot of fear arise in your system and it will be loud and anxious and buzzing it will almost have like a the resonance of survival in it like no you need to do this that is typically what could be referred to as a protective part of you that developed a belief emotional and behavior around who you need to be and what you need to do in order to get certain needs met and so when you confront that part with the question well what if we just didn't do that it will usually come online in a loud way and convince you why you need to and it will it has very clever ways for doing that but the thing you want to track is does it bring a lot of noise is it really trying to convince me does it make me feel very scared if i weren't to do this that is one in general telltale way to know that this is coming from something that is guarding a lot of pain another thing you can start to do just to get a sense of like what is the resonance of things and motivations that arise from the place in me that is grounded happy excited inspired versus the place in me that's scared and control fearful is to just track throughout the day the moments where you feel most grounded most present most connected and most loved maybe it's a walk in nature maybe it's when you're with your partner maybe it's like a few a few moments like while you're in the bathroom at work and nobody needs anything from you and just like you don't have the fear in your system that's coming online that's constantly gripping and telling you what to do when that subside you just pay attention to how does my system orient in those moments what do i think about what do i desire where does my energy want to go and then throughout the day track what are the moments when i'm most stressful where i feel the most amount of fear what is my system orient to in those moments what does it think about what does it feel what behaviors tend to come online as a pattern and you'll start to see typically that there's a difference there than in my most relaxed state it's just like oh i i feel more possibility like i feel a draw to start that business in my more fearful state i feel like no i i i really just have to stay in this job or like your patterns of control come online in a big and it feels very compelling and convincing in the early stages of decipher this you're just trying to sense that there is a difference there because most of it when we're living on autopilot it just feels like noise the thought is a thought is a thought there's not a all coming from wisdom there's not a thought coming from fear it's just noise in the system a lot of different emotions sometimes they're happy sometimes they're not and same with sensation in our body so this is a way that you can start to break down the category of like oh yeah when my system is relax when i do feel good this is what wants to come through and when i'm helping people try to figure this out or what it means to like build a life that is not only an extension of your wholeness but also allows you to live in a space that reinforces you being in that place thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

what is happiness not what do people get wrong about happiness the number one reason that people aren't happier than they are is because they have the wrong definition they think it's a feeling it's not a feeling it has emotions attached to it joy and happiness are not the same thing arthur brooks arthur brooks is a harvard professor best bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on happiness and purpose with decades of research into human behavior leadership and fulfillment he's helped millions reframe success and find meaning their lives we only have had the data and the neuroscience that can get behind it relatively recently this is compounded by the fact that mother nature doesn't care if you're happy at all so if you follow your impulses you're gonna feel miserable a lot of the time the human brain says you want really fourth things money power pleasure and honor and this all comes from evolutionary pro so the result of it is that you think if i live up to those impulses then i'm automatically gonna be happy but that's across circuit his insights have shaped global conversations from boardroom rooms to ted stages and today he's here to share the science of living a better life you can live the life that you want but if your goal is the money you'll never be happy you actually have to work for the happy this wall you do beautiful big things happiness is love if you don't know what to do make the decision to alone art i'm really excited to hear i wanna kick this off in a sort of simple way because you talk about happiness you teach about happiness but just in a very very short sentence what is happiness not what do people get wrong about happiness that's smart question because the number one reason that people aren't happier than they are is because they have the wrong definition they think happiness is something that it's not specifically they think it's a feeling when i ask my students on the first day class because after that they know but i lead him down kind of the p path i say what do you think you're studying kids they're not kids they're twenty eight years old they're mba students at harvard and i say what do you think you're studying what's happiness and they say whoa i can't quite put it into words but i know it when i feel it or it's how i feel when i'm with the people that i love and i say wrong i mean beautiful but wrong happiness is not a feeling any more than the smell of your turkey is your thanksgiving dinner the smell of the turkey is evidence of dinner it's not the same thing the dinner is something very specific i mean maybe it's ingredients maybe it's dishes or maybe if you're a science science nerd and a fitness nerd like me it's protein carbohydrates and fat that's what you're thanksgiving dinner that's not very poetic but that's the truth and happiness works the same way it's not a feeling it has emotions attached to joy and happiness are not the same thing happiness is a is a discover study phenomenon it's a combination of of not protein carbohydrates and fat but rather enjoyment satisfaction and meaning and each one of those things has a huge literature attached to it and is a big project in and of itself so why do you think that people get it wrong so often if if all these smart harvard mba students probably all have the same answer to your question there's some sort of programming there there's some sort of misunderstanding that's culturally accepted or or just accepted in general the the reason is because mother nature doesn't care if you're happy so for example if we had a natural tendency to become happier we'd put a lot more attention and effort into figuring out exactly what it is in studying it now that said there's a lot of us who are actually studying happiness there's somebody at almost every major university on this topic and and happiness is the hot course at every good university these days but that's recent it's only in about the past thirty years before that it was all you know psycho analyst like freud and young talking about how to not to be a completely miserable so and and before that it was just you know that happiness one point o was aristotle and company kinda you know hypo sizing about it we only have had the data and the neuroscience that can get behind it relatively recently and and this is compounded by the fact that mother nature doesn't care if you're happy at all and so if you follow your impulses you're gonna feel miserable a lot of the time you're gonna survive and pass on your genes but you're gonna tend to do things that actually make you unhappy as opposed to happy and so you might conclude well i guess i just don't get those feelings and and call it a day and you don't need to do that what is the because i know that there's a variety of different things you've studied about happiness when i was listening to one of your past podcasts you're talking about the reverse bucket list and i thought that was an interesting way to uncover what because that kind of is the bucket list and achievement and he on treadmill and pursuing everything and anything i think that's how again we're talking about what you know lay just assuming what happiness is even though they're incorrect that's what they pursue they pursue just more and more and more and more and more so talk to me about talk to me about where this idea for the reverse bucket list came from because i think it plays into this idea of what a lot of people think will give them happiness but what doesn't actually give them happiness yeah so i know my audience here i know who i'm talking to we're talking to drivers we're talking disproportionately to people who are in the first half of their lives and they're ambitious and their hardworking is smart and by the way i completely admire that i i admire what you're doing i admire what your audience is doing because the truth is if it weren't for drivers and entrepreneur we'd be living in caves you know if everybody was just kinda slack goof around waiting for somebody else to do the work we wouldn't even have wheels and fire at this point it was an entrepreneur who figured out the secret to fire and and everybody listening to us is trying to figure out the next secret to fire now and and they think that if they actually get that breakthrough if they get those resources if they have the admiration of other people if they get the recognition for the things that they're doing then they'll automatically be happy that's a across circuit in the human brain your the human brain says you want really four things money power pleasure and honor which is the admiration of other people and this all comes from evolutionary pro you know in our in our ancient environment you need more resources and you need to feel good those are proxies for passing on your genes and for surviving another day and getting sufficient calories that's why modern humans who have the same brains and the same genes as people did two hundred fifty thousand years ago that they they want they don't want more flint and animal skins in their cave they want a ferrari but it amounts to the same thing you're more likely to get mates with a ferrari you're more likely to get you know to show that you have sufficient resources to support a family if you have whatever i mean everybody understands exactly what i'm talking about here so the result of it is that you think to if i live up to those impulses then automatically gonna be happy but that's a cross circuit happiness doesn't come from just serving your animal impulses doing the things that will make you happier that's the divine part of humanity that's living up to your moral app inspiration is not giving into your animal impulses is the way that that works and so to do that you have to be very very conscious and strive more than anybody else one of the things i find with strive is that they believe that if they get more money power pleasure and fame then they'll automatically be happy and what i have to explain and i'm gonna tell you this i'm gonna say the sentence that actually works and it's gonna make you feel insecure when i say that because of one word okay so listen for the one word scott if you shoot for happiness by understanding how you get that instead then you'll be successful enough enough what's the word they're bummed you out enough all these drivers hear that by the way slack are like awesome awesome so tell me how to be happier professor like not the problem for prescribe is that word enough because there is no such thing and the second this the reason that strive are resistant to the happiness science it's not like gonna believe it they're resistant they do believe it they're resistant to it is because if they embrace the concept of enough they've given up and they won't be hungry and i'm here to tell you no it's actually not true you can live the life that you want you can be you can discover the next big thing you can be unbelievably successful but if your goal is the money you'll never be happy if your goal is the power you'll never be happy you actually have to work for the happiness while you do beautiful big things and so that's sort of my pasta that's my mission is to spread these ideas because it's me too man i'm a lot older than you but i'm a classic driver doing this and that my whole life number one baby for you know i've got my idol just like everybody else you know so i've been able to you know do a lot but happiness was hard because i got this wrong and awful a lot so you asked a specific question about the reverse bucket list this is an example of how to stand up to mother nature so that you can be both successful and happy your brain tells you that you'll get satisfaction in life if you have more more what more all of it money power pleasure honor admiration instagram followers whatever you're thing is right but the truth of the matter is that your satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want and the most successful people the cases of entrepreneurs for example that amaze us the most or where you see somebody who's making billions of dollars and they don't own a house if you ever noticed that okay when they own in six houses you're like cool but one of them is like yeah of course i rent a place what do i want a house for you're like that's dude that that dude is is awesome and it it scratches you in just the right way because that person doesn't just have more but also wants less that's the secret you gotta work the denominator halves divided by wants work the denominator of these worldly things which will free you up to do the most amazing magic that you could ever dream of so i like that formula and if we detach ourselves from all these worldly things how do we how do we not lose our ambition how do we not lose our our because i think for a lot of people let me let me rephrase i think for a lot of people that are kind of similar to myself and to you even though you've done a lot of work so you've detached yourself at some point in your life your identity was tied up in your achievement and i think that and i think that it's very common for people to say if you're gonna build a business you have to do it for reasons other than money and people can buy into that because nobody no no no you know entrepreneur thought leaders saying hey go build the business just to make money even though we all wanna make money at the beginning i think everybody sort of says okay you gotta build it for other reasons but then the other reasons our achievement are whatever it is like you mentioned a few different reasons why we build but if our identity is wrapped up in this thing how do we un it how do we d up our identity from it yeah so there's a a couple of different things to think about it to begin with entrepreneurs actually aren't very materialistic as a rule you find that government employees i've got the data on this government employees tend to be more ac ac and and possession and money oriented than entrepreneurs are including successful entrepreneurs for most entrepreneurs money is points on the board it's just a way to measure how things are going and so you could be making five million dollars a year ten million dollars a year and it's going great and the next year you're in seven million dollars a year after earning ten you're like that'll like it at your way over your needs you're way wait the pro the reason you didn't like it is because the points were going in the wrong direction which is an indicator that maybe you're not creating the value that you thought you created pay attention to the value more is the whole thing now that's the first thing to think about i'm actually not that worried about entrepreneurs and subscribers taking my message it probably people are watching us right now going yeah i totally agree less wants fewer wants i wanna be like that so how the real question is not why is it so hard but how do you do that and the way to do that is to recognize that you probably have one idle that is your best score and that score we'll start controlling you the longer you do it the more the less you you you pay attention to it so even though there's i bet you there's nobody watching us today who's a serious entrepreneur an i'm ambitious person who truly cares about getting a boat it's like i mean that you'll get a boat because you can afford to have a boat and somebody convince you that a boat is kind of fun but you won't go out on it very much because what you really care about is your work and then the boat will bother you because it's just like sitting there and lake have suit or something like that and and and like the boat well you know it's fine that's the the entrepreneur i know that they have the boat they actually turned it into a business somehow and they use it yeah to rent it today course totally totally let's make it into a lucrative asset you know let's make a generative at the end of the day but there is something that is your favorite way of measuring how much value you're creating and it's always one of three maybe four things now this comes from the work of aristotle believe it or not aristotle who has a as a philosopher was way ahead of his time scientifically i and he was just he was actually doing natural science not just behavioral science that was incredible and all of it was brought to sort of semi modern audiences in in the middle ages most notably by thomas a in twelve sixty five wrote this book called sum theologian i know you were raised catholic and so you know you kinda have this have this reference he's a great catholic saint but but he's at more than anything else for everybody he's he is the philosopher the middle ages and a aqua keep out of aristotle he said that human beings are all be which just to say that they have an idle in one of four things and they are money power pleasure and fame i've mentioned it before but everybody has their one specific metric they're one specific idol that they fall prey to so everybody watching is here especially if you're under forty even more if you're under thirty if you know your specific idol you'll recognize when you're falling prey to it you'll avoid it and you'll be much happier and more successful so the way that i do this with my twenty eight year old nba students is we have a game called what's my idol to figure out which one it is you want you want play guys play let's do it let's play okay you're you're good sport here so everybody in in radio land give a hand scott for plan what's my idol in front okay okay so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna look at those four items and i'm not gonna ask you which one but dials you the most i'm gonna ask you which one bi dials you the least and you don't care about and we're gonna start taking them away until we're left with the one that is most problematic now now most attractive i should say now when we take one away it doesn't mean you don't have it so if you take away money for example it doesn't mean you're poor it just means you're the most average person totally average now strive don't wanna be average but if it's not your idle you don't care is what it comes down to okay now we all like all of them but let's let's let's let's play so let's think about it money is you will all know what money is we all know money can do we all kinda know what money can't do power means influence over other people you wanna do stuff it happens it doesn't mean you're a man act it doesn't mean you're present in united states it doesn't mean you're a dictator it means you have the ability to snap your fingers and things get done pleasure is really really feeling good it includes comfort the comfort that some people really like that and and and then and then fame this is this is a little tricky i mean that that doesn't necessarily mean like internet famous kardashian famous it means the right people respect you and admire you right and so it might be you're admired by lots and lots of strangers it might be like in my profession i'm a professor you'll walk into the room everybody like oh there's arthur brooks so he's the great guy who's the guy who wrote that that little known book on you know tropical animal husband in two thousand three they got referred to fourteen times by the right people it doesn't matter you got your version of this whatever it works a fame you know as being admired by the right people okay alright so thinking about scott's life i think you've got already know the way no okay well which one do you kick out because this is gonna be illustrative for the audience and i want everybody in in in radio land in podcast land to be playing so which one do you kick out so the one the one that i immediately kick out i can i kick out two or no well we're gonna go next to number two out number one i think pleasure i kick out first and the reason i kick up why yeah is because i feel uncomfortable and i feel like i'm not doing enough or i'm wasting my life away if i'm not building if i'm not working even even in you know in my my my hobbies are you know busting my ass in the gym like if i don't have a good workout i feel like it's not a good day so i don't love comfort okay comfort and pleasure we kicked out that means you got three left which is money power and fame which is next i think i would kick out money and the reasoning is because the second i make money i just spend it on business i just spend it on building i don't buy my i don't like buying myself anything gonna get to waste some money i i don't i mean i don't spend money on luxury really anything if my if my better half didn't ask me to go on vacation i'd probably just stay home and figure out how to put another twenty k into a new way to advertise the podcast or hire somebody new or try so i just the money goes right back into the business okay so you'd get rid rich so you're are perfectly willing i mean your podcast are and you're well known so that's an extreme statement because to say that that means that the the being known part of doing this show presumably you go to an airport and people recognize you and it's like no more no more of yeah but i know more of people being like scott scott cla he's got some gay man yeah but better because you have to think about why i do this right so i don't i don't do this to be recognized i do this because i get fulfillment when i see so it's this started you know when i was very young i used to coach tennis and i used to see somebody who used to come to me as a student and they learn a couple things and they'd improved dramatically over the course of a summer and that to me was one of the most fulfilling transformations you could ever see in somebody and while i started this podcast was to teach my younger self a few things that would hopefully make life easier so i think that if the things that we speak with on this show actually impact people it it's great to feel recognized at the airport but like at the end of the day who gives us shit like if you change somebody's life then that means i'm doing the good i'm doing the right work not yet i could be known for a million different things i could i could start a you know like a prank youtube channel i could do a whole bunch of different things that would get me known but i feel like i'm not like contributing any value to the world got it got it okay so what what we've established is not that powers is bad because power not bad when used for good powers is unbelievably helpful in virtuous the problem in our lives when it comes to happiness is when we per sue influence for the sake of having the influence and that's the temptation because what it means is the influence that you actually have is a way that you're gonna be marking your success and then you're gonna start managing to the metric which is what people always do and when you manage to the metric that will become the goal and when that becomes the goal you start to get unhappy and that's what you gotta keep your eye on that's what you have to give so you know somebody says i'm gonna buy your and make you ceo and they'll be like you're gonna have six hundred employees and you're gonna like holy cow i'm gonna be able to do anything i want because and and that in and of a itself will be s productive that in and of itself will beg dial you and that's the problem and that's what all strive need to be paying attention to for me number one i'd kick out his power i don't want it your number your number one is my number four i'm a i'm a college professor for a reason i don't want anybody to have power for me and i don't wanna have power of anybody else i was a ceo for eleven years the i think that bummed me out when people call me boss it felt passive aggressive to me i'm like radically non hierarchical right and that's just my values it's just kinda how i see the world i hated it so it's easy for me to kick that you do have that's what's so ironic about this because of i don't have influence you the way that i've set it up is i have i have a non hierarchical situation in my life except so far is that you know i have i don't even have kids that do it what i say because my kids are grown up you know and they didn't do it what i said when they were you know adolescents either so you know and god knows was my wife doesn't so you know it's so i i pretty much i mean we all have influence will all have influence people do a lot of what we say if we're if we're if we're somewhat well known if we're public figures but that's not my goal man and and money at this point it's kind of a nice way to figure out if things are going well in my business but but you know not so much either and then pleasure you know like i'm in the gym every day too you know i'm i'm i'm getting a hundred and eighty grams of carbohydrates love protein a day too and and and cutting carbohydrates even though i love sweets i go a long time without feeling good but having people recognize what i do that's my idol you know this the applause that's my idol i do a hundred and fifty speeches a year outside of the university i'm traveling constantly i want people to appreciate the fact that i do this work and that's my weakness and look i'm sixty one years old i can i can i can say it openly and not i feel so crummy about it anymore and certainly not feel ashamed and wanting to be recognized is not vice not a bad thing it's when it becomes my goal in life and the measure of my worth as a person so you so so the the lesson is you have to know like these can all be okay things but just don't do just don't do what you're doing in pursuit of these exclusively totally all of them all of them mean power when you have influence over other people and wield it for their good and they go to society money you can do amazing things with money with the admiration of other people look when people admire you they'll do what you do and if your life actually enrich riches theirs and they act in a way that's more virtuous more loving more moral more ethical because they admire you that's great and pleasure it's great that's how babies are made i'm pro baby but the whole point is don't let to get out of control with people who aren't her yeah well the thing is these these these these idol they can they can actually they can multiply your life or they can complete destroy it that's what so that's what's so difficult people the people that's what's i think hard people to understand right they these idol don't have to be a bad thing but how do people draw the line as to how much idle versus how little and i think that that's what people screw up quite often is it your goal is it an intermediary goal to get something to something bigger something better something more beautiful something more other focused or is it your primary goal that's the way to assess it is it your 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that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire fast and with sponsor jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need talk to me about talk to me about for people that are entrepreneurial striving people super ambitious where does conquest because you spoken about conquest and how it's a like a drug it wears off in a few minutes but how does conquest play into happiness because the a conquest is not one of the idol you mentioned but it's something that people actively pursue all the time yeah well what it is is a goal orientation is characteristic of a prescribe and and it's really really important because a goal orientation that's the essence of purpose and purpose is part of the meaning of life meaning of life has sort of three parts to it the coherent why things happen the way they do the significance why your life matters to others and purpose which is your goals and direction goals mean that you you have a an end point something you're trying to achieve and that's the essence of conquest that's the essence of what you're actually talking about and that's incredibly important the reason is because we need to make progress we need to make that's the reason by the way that all diets work every day works you've done that you've been involved in natural body building so you know perfectly that you can make the scale go down in lots and lots and lots of different ways the problem is when you hit your goal because once you hit your goal that your reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life congratulations that's the same reason that olympic gold medal they tend to fall into a depression in the month after they win their gold medal because they got there it's terrible hitting your goal because you realize that the goal per s was not that satisfying it was having the goal of making progress toward it that really really mattered and so what i talk about all the time is nothing wrong with goals but you have to hold them lightly don't become attached to the goal have an intention a strong and intention and a value creating process for getting there and enjoy that process the saddest thing i ever see are people who believe that if they they finally achieve this thing then their life is gonna be s law and they hate every minute of getting there it's awful it's awful to actually see that and i see that constantly i see people in my profession they're working to get their phds and they're not interested in what they're studying but they think that once they get their phd their life is gonna be so much better and they get the phd and they're like oh oh yeah i remember you know when i was a young professor right i was trying to get tenure which is like your big professional goal when you're a a young academic and and and i'm like it's gonna be so great and i thought about it and a permanent contract that i'm gonna feel so good and and i got there in the day i got my tenure letter my wife and i went out here to celebrate and all we talked about was the fact that our one of our kids who was really young had bitten another kids in school that day and i was like it that was like it you know and by the way happy ending of that story he grew up and became a scout sniper in the os marine corps so you know turns out that the violent ones do good for america i think that this idea of this is the idea of moving your own goal posts or he treadmill or whatever you wanna call it how do we get off that treadmill so that we don't constantly keep setting new setting new goals and forgetting what we've accomplished yeah so the the the the the goal or the the formula the buddhist of a very nice formula for this it solves this problem it doesn't solve the problem what it is is it's it's a a way of living more than a than a hack and by the way when it comes to happiness no hacks just like when it comes to you know permanent weight loss or you know more muscle mass or business success or loving your wife no hacks only habits like no hacks all it's like habits not hacked that's the way to think about it right because everybody wants this one thing and then it like the internet is all this one weird trick right and the trick knows like one little habit it involves changing your life forever and that's all that's really what it's all about so the buddhist the habit that they have in place for this is called intention without attachment have the intention understand the direction that you're going make sure that the direction itself and the journey itself are inherently meaningful but don't be attached to the endpoint be like christopher columbus he thought he was going to india right and he he got to the dominican republic and thought well this is awesome too the point is he had to have some sort of a straight line that's called the rum line and sailing you gotta have a rum line be able to chart your progress you gotta know where you're going and wherever you get that's where you get is the way that you actually think about it now why is that possible and the reason is because your your life that you're building your ordinary life that you're building is so incredibly rich and meaningful that anything that you could possibly get from that goal as merit as it is pale in comparison to your ordinary life and it's really important for me i mean it's a lot the you know when i'm i'm i'm releasing a book i wanted to open a number one in new york times best seller list right but even if it does that's nowhere near as awesome as my marriage and and nowhere near as awesome i live with with with my grandchildren and it's like nowhere near as awesome as goof off with my grandchildren you know i wouldn't give up a month with my grandkids for a day on the best seller list i wouldn't i wouldn't do it i think about it and so the result is i've built an infrastructure on around my life on the basis of my faith my family my friendship and how much i actually love doing the work that's way way way better than the goal even though i recognize i must have a goal so that i can be direction i can have this kinda i can have a goal orientation that makes progress possible and this is you've spoken about you know having a calling before this is sort of a synonymous with that right having a calling across your life because even if you look at your your own life you have killed off past versions of yourself several times and i know that you speak about reinventing yourself every you know seven to twelve years when you started out you were a french horn player in barcelona making fourteen grand a year and you've killed off several versions of yourself since then does that is that the reason why calling is so important so that you can kill off past versions of yourself past careers and then pursue something greater or something different or something more meaningful without again having your identity so wrapped up in who you are at the moment that it sort of para you from anything else yeah and a calling is really about the why of your life not the what and how the what and how we're gonna change the why of your life is the mission of your life and that's what you're meant to do and that's your calling and that's bigger than your job it's bigger than your current enterprise it's bigger than the number in your bank account that stuff is small potatoes in comparison and so what i recommend that everybody do is to figure out what their life's mission is i love that do you think that i think i i think i know the answer but gonna ask you anyways do you think that people need spirituality to find that calling or are there other ways just to find what you're put on this earth to do like is there is there a science method to to emulate that walk that somebody could go on yeah yeah and it does not require my faith i mean i love i'm all my catholic faith i'm strong proponent of it i think and again i'm not talking about the meta physics and what's cosmic true it's beyond my pay grade for sure but as a social scientist i will tell you there's lots and lots of ways to get that peace in perspective what you need to do is to transcend yourself so that the the signal to noise ratio is adequate that you can get knowledge is what it comes down to when it comes time to get that discernment and most people need more discernment that they're currently getting you need to turn down the noise so you can get more signal the way to do that is to transcend yourself there's two versions of us because of this big prefrontal cortex in our brain that allows it's this i mean it has like the equivalent of a supercomputer with eight hundred and eighty trillion transistors there's nothing like it in the unit ai is not gonna come close it's just not and and the result of it is this big brain that we've got is that we have we can we have consciousness which means i know that i know and i know that i know that i know i'm aware of my awareness this this weird elliptical warp ability to know about my own existence and so not only am i observing the world like my dog can but i'm actually observing me all the time as well that's amazing because it allows me to be the dominant species human beings but it's also a torture because you're thinking about yourself all the time and that's the noise in this signal to noise ratio that makes it impossible for you to listen to what you're supposed to do is opposed to thinking about what you wanna do all the time the way to get more signal and less noise which is called the eye self not the me self signal is to do something where you you purposely make yourself little and you make the universe large that's one of the reasons that students in my university they love astronomy one zero one it's not because they wanna be astronomers but because they go into class on thursdays and they're like i'm like having a bad time with my girlfriend and and and i come out and i'm like i'm a speck on a speck on a speck and it makes you understand yeah it gives you it gives you clarity it gives you clarity you're in the eye self signal is up and the noise is down and you can get that through religious practice you can get that from vip pasta meditation you can give that from you know our friend brian holiday talks about studying the stoic you can get it from studying the stoic you can get it from listening to the music of y sub sebastian bach you can get it from walking before dawn in nature every day for an hour without devices there's a lot of literature on that everything i'm talking about i'm not just making this up there's literature on each one of these particular techniques but you have to transcend yourself and get small is that why is that why when society moves more secular and there is no sort of institutional religion and people don't really know what to replace it with is that why there's depression and anxiety mental health crisis is that correlated or no yes that's one of the reasons so it's related to the fact that we people don't know the meaning of their life you can't know the meaning of your life you can't know the why of your life when it's all noise no signal you won't know you're gonna be chasing all kind you're gonna who not you're gonna be watching stupid reels on tiktok you're gonna be wasting your life if you do that because you'll be distracted constantly is what comes down to and you need something where you have a a transcend sentence like that now that's not the only way there's a whole bunch of things you need to get more meaning in your life have a book coming out next april april of twenty twenty six called the meaning of your life finding purpose in an age of emptiness that talks about the neurological correlates of a the sense of meaningless this that so many people feel and what they used to do that gave them a sense of meaning life and that in modern life you don't do anymore one of them is is seeking transcend sentence another is looking for the calling in your work we already talked about that another is finding beauty which people just don't do now i mean it's really interesting the research on music says that music has people like it but it's objectively less beautiful than it's been in the past people have spend less time in nature you find that people they don't understand suffering which is one of the best ways to find meaning your life is understanding suffering they try to eliminate suffering the whole therapy industrial complex is about i i feel sad anxious i have to make it go away or i'm a broken defect active person which is completely false are you kidding me it means you're a human being walking the face of the earth falling in love it's another way that people find meaning and people are doing that less than they've done in the past and so there's a suite of techniques that actually will bring meaning into your life and the spirituality or transcend is one of them and i don't wanna i don't wanna maybe explain the difference between happiness and meaning meaning like finding the meaning of life because to me the tube ideas almost seem interchangeable but i think there is nuance to to what one means versus the other yeah so happiness has three parts to it enjoyment which is not feeling good it really is it's a fully human experience of pleasure with people and memory around it that's that you have to enjoy your life the second is satisfaction which is taking having getting a sense of joy in your accomplishments and your achievements after struggle struggle is a super important component of that and the last part is meaning so meaning is is a sub component it's a macron nutrient of happiness is the way that it works you can go a long time because you know you're a very self disciplined guy as am i as is everybody who's you know watching us because you know that's why they watch us and because they want they want the habits right and they happens they're never easy and so you know so they can go a long time with that and enjoyment and satisfaction but you can't go ten minutes without a sense of meaning of your life and actually count yourself a happier person but i think a lot of people i think a lot of people aren't happy i people are one reason that's the number one reason the data are clear that that's what's down in the current generation so if you look at it there's no change in enjoyment there's no change in satisfaction but but meaning in life has tanked for people under thirty five years old and that's the number one reason for the increases in anxiety depression people will say it's cause of social media people say it's because boomers wrecked everything or because houses are too expensive or income in inequality of the environment or whatever your favorite thing of the week is u u it's because meaning is getting hard to find because the practice is to find meaning or are less and less present in the lives of young 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business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today this goes back to your point how yes you don't have to be spiritual or subscribed to like an institutional religion but they did offer some framework for meaning and now we don't have a blueprint or a playbook for that and i'm i guess i'm curious you comment on that if you want but i think i'm more curious about sort of your journey because you also spent a lot of time studying buddhism and i think that you know you are probably better qualified than most to speak about spiritual non spiritual religious or non religious practices that lead to meaning in your life so obviously there was some reason why you chose to study buddhism is there something that it's figured out that a lot of people miss is there are there other things that help people find meaning you mentioned like again like walks music etcetera etcetera but again you spent significant time studying it so why was that in the same reason that i studied philosophy or behavioral science or mathematics it's because there's a lot to learn about the the way that life works that i didn't know and the truth of the matter is that the buddhist have been i mean it's unbelievable when you dig deep or the hindu for example hindu is a it's not a it's not one religion it's really a family of religions but it's six thousand years old and and so when you talk to i have you know major significant hindu teacher sri sri ravi shank is somebody that who's really helped me a lot sri en trauma in tam in southern india has really helped me awful a lot but i've also spent the last thirteen years working very closely with his h to dal lam in tibetan buddhism and i've sat with and learned the techniques of tibetan buddhist meditation at his modest area with his monks and and i've read a great deal and worked with him we've actually c and and made a documentary film together as a matter of fact and so i've learned from that friendship and seen him one once or twice a year every year and and in so doing it's made me a by the way it's made me a much better catholic because this helped me to understand that how my path actually works in the context of universal ideas of what we're actually trying to do as human beings now again i'm not gonna make a pronounce about you know who's meta physically cosmic correct on all these types of things because you know the truth is i don't know and and i can't know that's the beauty of it is not knowing but doing something nonetheless in getting really really great at and then it was at dolly lam himself who told me he said i want you to be a better catholic man that's interesting because he said that's your path that is your path and and that's a beautiful thing so yeah no i'm i'm up for everything if you put it in front of me i'm gonna a study it and try to pull the best of why did he say because when you first met him he said hello old friend for the first time before ever even knowing why did he say that he's a adept he has knowledge beyond my understanding he's believed by the tibetan buddhist to be buddy sought which is to say a living a person with a living buddha in nature somebody who has transcend sam sa which is the endless cycle of birth and death but who chooses not to come back who chooses to to continue coming back as opposed to achieving nirvana for the good of other people to bring other people more to enlightenment that's what a body thought does the the great thing that we misunderstand about buddhism in the west there's so many western buddhist and they so called western buddhist and the reason that they meditate is because they wanna feel better that's exactly wrong the reason that you meditate is you want other people to feel better because you wanna lift up other people because you wanna create more enlightenment on earth you wanna become more effective in creating an an ecosystem of peace and goodness and love and compassion around you that's the reason to do it and and that's what he does as the most prominent living body in the world the reason of that is that he has acute knowledge of who we are and seeing us for the true people that we are when he said hello old friend he meant it and from the very first moment i felt like i was talking to somebody who's known me for centuries that's a beautiful i love that it's absolutely beautiful i i have this thesis that is proven with no data whatsoever but i do have a thesis that i think give people lived in optimal circumstances meaning they didn't have to do anything else they weren't worried about money or income or just surviving i feel like most people would derive meaning from helping other people i i do genuinely believe that if you are given the opportunity to do that and you lean into it i mean for me at least it's been probably one of the the most fulfilling things i've ever done in my life is to help somebody else go through their own problems or their own struggles i i don't know if that's a universal feeling but i think that if people are seeking meaning i think not a hack but a very quick way to have a little bit more meaning in your life is to give a little bit back to somebody who's who's struggling i feel that's a human very very just human nature i don't know no no i've actually i did a lot of research on that early in my career and what you find is that the number one way to re orient yourself to to to to you know reset the breakers emotionally is to is to get into the me the i self from the from the me self the fastest way to do that is to go help somebody to go love somebody that's one of the reasons by the way that family life is so magical you know and that's why people who have you know i i know that you and your wife practice your religion and and the whole idea is that you're responsible you're her guru and she's your guru and your marriage is an antenna to the divine it's like you feel god's love when she loves you and she feels god's love when you love her which means you have an incredible responsibility to go love her more do not deny her god's love dude and then by the way and one of the the number way that it all ties together with a behavioral science you know if you wanna raise kids who are happy you know the number one thing that you can do scott to make your kids grow up to be happy people love their mom love their mom have them see you loving their mom that's the number one predictor of them having growing up and having successful relationships and happy marriages and being good to other people it's like it's weirdly simple but it comes down to loving others not loving just loving yourself is what it comes down to people say yeah you know i just i live in the west in america and i should be going and helping poor people and and that's great go help poor people get more money away do a mission trip if you want but the poor that you have near you are your kids they're the poorest ones that you have near you they're the ones who actually don't have anything and they're defenseless without you and taking care of your kids is so critically important and the number one thing you can give your kids is love and values love and values man don't mess it up don't neglect them and don't be gone all the time and don't let them see you be a materialistic so and don't let them see you get drunk or you know scream insults out of the car window at another driver i he it was like it's it's so weirdly simple so one thing that i wasn't gonna go here but i think it's interesting just because we're sort of on the topic of relationship and spirituality you've mentioned that one of the most intimate things that people can do is pray together more intimate than sex and it's even more uncomfortable because it's something that is i don't know just something that i think is not normalized praying together i think that everybody knows with your spouse you're gonna have sex you're gonna make love but to sit down and pray together that's a really meaningful event and a lot of people get uncomfortable with it but i don't want people to hear that and say well listen i'm not super religious so how do i have that level of intimacy with my spouse because we we we don't you know we're not dev devout muslims catholics christians jews whatever so i don't wanna miss out on a huge part of life so what do i do yeah meditate together read poetry to each other do something that's truly sublime and it touches the soul and where you bury your soul and she bears hers that's what it comes down to now it turns out that if you're religious is simple because there's that you know let's talk to god together and i'm i'm gonna let you see me talking to god that's very uncomfortable that's really really embarrassing for people to be sure but to have something that is your link to the sublime that you share with another person and in that vulnerability you're with that other person together that's when it becomes a kind of a tri add that when it becomes not just doing the sublime but the two of you together and that's when your relationship can be an antenna to the sublime that's that's that's how it works so if you're not religious it shouldn't stop you at all just gotta find your thing three things are required for happiness enjoyment satisfaction and meaning what happens because you mentioned meetings at an all time blow so what happens if somebody goes through life with just satisfaction and enjoyment what kind of person do you turn into you'll feel empty you'll be a person that has a a profound sense of emptiness you'll have a you'll have a you'll you'll always have the sense of the wander somebody who's looking for something more and the result of it is that that you can't have the kind of happiness the kind of peace in your life that you actually need and that's a huge problem now i don't know has anybody ever completely failed to do so i don't know because i don't have the data on that you know meaning is actually weirdly it's it's the realm of philosophers that but behavioral scientists haven't touched it very much so this book that i'm writing right now is looking for the absolute best data for the best scientific treatment that we can have in it but it's hard this is a hard thing to look at but the bottom line is that when i'm looking at people right now who are going day after day week month year after year without a sense of meaning in their lives these are the these are the hungry ghosts you know the tibetan and buddhist talk about the realm of how people come back and the hungry ghost is kind of a a hungry creature trying to satisfy an appetite that can never be met one idea about happiness that and is that we need unhappiness to be happy so explain this paradox because if somebody's listening so far they would say that okay i got i got satisfaction i got enjoyment i just gotta find some meaning and i'm good but that's not it or they assume that because they suffer from a lot of unhappiness that they can't have happiness and and that's a misunderstanding i mean a big misunderstanding of the relationship between happiness and unhappiness they're not opposites we have a tendency to think that unhappiness is an absence of happiness or that happiness is an absence of unhappiness that's wrong and the reason is because the experience that we have the feelings the evidence of happiness and unhappiness are actually processed in different parts of the brain physically different parts of the brain we have gear in the limbic system of the brain dedicated to both positive and negative emotions and they exist for different evolutionary reasons the there are only four negative emotions fear anger disgust in sadness they exist in every single person and they exist because they're a defense system you know your sadness is a defense against you ruining relationships getting kicked out of your tribal band and wandering the frozen tundra and dying alone sadness means i don't wanna lose the people i love you know that's that's you know an advanced warning system against loss discussed against pathogens fear and anger against threats in the amygdala of the olympic system and positive emotions work the same way interest and joy they say that the there's some opportunities and you should approach those opportunities but that's what they're all for and they're in different parts of the brain and the result of them is that they're sep the average person spends forty one percent of their day in a low grade positive state they spend about sixteen percent of their day in in a more intense negative state they spend thirty three percent of their time in a mixed state which is kinda positive pun by negativity and then about ten percent of the time in a state that they can't classify what that tells us is that we're going we're oscillating back and forth we're going back and forth all day long and it also tells us that you're not gonna get unhappiness out of your life you're gonna have unhappy emotions and you're gonna have unhappy experiences and you have two choices you can learn and grow from those things and appreciate them which will make you happier or you can try to eradicate them by going to some therapist and saying you know i'm all screwed up because i'm feeling sad and anxious which by the way those can be medical problems when they're exaggerated and and and dis regulated don't get me wrong clinical depressions is a real thing i'm not making light of that and anybody who suffers from it needs to go to the doctor for sure but the idea that when you're said anxious that this p evidence of defective wrong and by the way who has the highest levels of negative emotion entrepreneurs the prescribe they're called the mad scientists of business for a reason they have very very intense both positive and negative emotion and they learn and they grow from it and that winds up being part of the the the the recipe for their greater happiness well i think that also most entrepreneurs and and just high tumors in general there there's a significant portion of that population is neuro to some degree and that well definitely can compound both ways yeah totally for whatever that whatever that means in a lot of cases right i mean that the truth is that there's so much that we don't know and that we put the neuro label on we know for example the people that are classified on the office of spectrum they have unbelievably high levels of activity in the left hemisphere of the brain and that makes them extremely good at a lot of technical tasks so you can say okay yeah it it's a it's a disability maybe it's a strength people who have so of adhd for example they're they have a hard time focusing on things that they think are boring i mean that's that that's what characterize that the things that you and i are you know if you don't have that you can do stuff that you think is boring but people who have adhd like one of my kids but when they find what they're really good at they're better than the average in the population and focusing on that thing so everybody listening to us if you got a kid with adhd your job is to find the thing that that kid is really really good at and likes and that kid will be a big success and a happy person and those people by the way it's like my kid is a sniper yes you know how boring it is to be a sniper sitting in a bush he's like yeah dad i was in a bush for five hours yesterday in the desert it was a hundred and ten degrees and i had a tarantula on my arm and and like that sounds awful he's like it was awesome it's so but i think that that's a that's the point right so i think that a lot of people that are highly ambitious again define neuro virgin however you wanted to define it but if you're not aware of what makes you happy or what what creates meaning in your life there's a greater chance of unchecked unhappiness because i think you can skew both ways to to the extremes and that's what people have to beat paid attention to especially when you are like an ambitious person oh yeah and if you let people tell you that some weird thing about you is a disability that that can be a huge problem if you go to the doctor and doctor says you have fill in the blank you know problem then you're gonna become that problem to a very large extent you know the truth of the matter is we all have problems we all have these these weird characteristics to us and yet the in our in our in our weaknesses we find our strength this is a classic line from the the christian bible i mean saint paul says in my weakness i find my strength the thorn in my side he was probably talking about the fact that it was epi as a matter of fact and so doing he was able to connect with other people he was he was witness to the fact that he had you know he he was physically frail and and this made his his witness his ministry better that but the same thing is true in your strength you find your weakness because you're unable to connect with other people i tell us all the time to my you know to my mba students at harvard i say you wanna connect other people's as a leader don't tell them you went to harvard because this is not is them connecting to anybody except for like the you know the fourteen people who went to harvard what would be what would be the single most i don't know thing activity event whatever it is that can sabotage your happiness that you have to be careful of yeah it was a single and most important thing that would sabotage your happiness oh there's so many there's so many things that you can do wrong you said lot of meeting is a quick way to to be on sale fabric it's not something that it's not a big mistake that you make yeah so the biggest mistake that people actually make from day to day that sabotage is not their happiness just their happiness but also their success is the unwillingness or inability to manage their emotions so the number of one thing that i teach my mba students is emotional self management through management in limbic system of the brain the limbic system is the console of tissue talked about a minute ago it creates emotions so that you have signals about what's going on around you that's all emotions are is an advanced warning system that something is going on that you need to pay attention to and if the emotion is negative it means you'd you need to avoid something and if the emotion is positive it means you need to approach something that's it there's no such thing as good feelings there's no such thing as bad feelings bad feelings are more likely to keep you alive because they're they're a warning system about threat good feelings so called good feelings are an advanced warning system and there's berries on a bush or you know a potential mate it's it's not urgent right is is what we see when people don't understand that and they they they become prey to their emotions they make all the mistakes in their life they get into they get into they they engage in acts of violence they say things that they don't wanna say they're unable to show that they have proper emotional regulations so that they have opportunities they make decisions that they later regret that's the number one thing and so the way to deal with this is a whole suite of techniques called meta cognition where you move the experience of your motions into your prefrontal cortex makes you the manager of yourself and in so doing it can dramatic increase your likelihood of making decisions that lead to happiness and then also lead to success do you have a website or social you wanna send people to before i ask a couple more questions yeah arthur dot com arthur dot com is where i have all my columns it's you can follow me on social media instagram is arthur c brooks gotta put in that middle initial because there's probably some even more famous arthur brooks who stole a handle before that but but then you can actually see a lot of the stuff that i'm working on have a lot of shorts up there and kinda give you a flavor for what whatever is on my mind these days if people were gonna pick up this book we've touched on a lot of different stuff as it relates to happiness and people are gonna up this book and you wanted them to leave with one idea that would just radically change their life the most important thing what would that thing be so this book is thirty three chapters that means short that means they're short chapters their essays it's meant to be read in about a month so read the book over a month read to you know one chapter a day so that you can actually think about it each one of the chapters has do these three things like remember this do that super practical it's all super science based it's very science based about how neuroscience and social science can help you do that but here's the big idea about insights on working life your life and everybody's understand this who's watching this show that's why they watch the show your life is the startup up that's the whole point of the book it's not i mean right i don't know what you're doing i mean you're doing some business right that's great maybe you're setting up vending machines or opening laundromat mats or you're gonna open a car wash or maybe you're starting you're writing lines of code great but that's not the start up the real startup is you incorporated and and and since it's an enterprise an entrepreneurial enterprise and you're the founder you gotta treat it as such what does that mean that means you gotta be willing and able to take the right kind of risk for unusual rewards and you gotta know the denomination of the rewards we're talking about this in this conversation they're not money and power and feeling good and and you know online pla and applause no it's love and happiness are you building a life that is a lifelong enterprise where the love and happiness that you seek is more and more abundantly yours or not and if the answer is is not you're in the wrong line of work in in the business of your life the whole point of this book that will progressively provide your consciousness as you read these things chapter by chapter by chapter is i'm the startup founder i'm the entrepreneur this is me incorporated what does it actually mean for me to be a happiness and love billionaire i hope by the end of the book and i'm confident that people will know i love it last thing i like to ask and you know what i'm gonna tailor this question just to happiness because next time we chat it'll be about something different but out of everything that you've ever learned about happiness say you only have the ability to pass on one idea or one lesson to your kids because it's the most important idea but would that lesson be and why happiness is love full stop if you don't know what to do make the decision to love love is not a feeling more than happiness is a feeling it's a commitment it's an act it's a positive decision if you don't know what to do go love love somebody love a stranger love a friend love your family love everybody through the way that you earn your daily bread love god but when you love you've in inflicted your happiness is the one thing you need to know and the one thing in life that truly matters

in this lessons episode discover why balancing relationships and business success starts with prioritization learn how treating family commitments with the same weight as work deadlines preserves connection learn why time is the ultimate measure of wealth and learn how setting boundaries creates harmony between ambition and intimacy i always laugh when people say they can't balance a relationship with their business when you have somebody who built one of the biggest companies in the world who did it just fine and who's still happily married and speaks about the importance of his wife and his relationship and his success so that's one strategy always be dating always setting time aside what are some other ideas as you grow as a person as your goals grow as as you change assuming you're not changing for the worse you're changing for the better what do you what do you see works in terms of keeping couples together as you go through this sort of journey yeah look it's all about prioritization i mean that's the bottom line it's all about prioritization and and you know the life balance is such a topic right now for people especially women you know how do you balance at all how do you have life balance and you know life balance is kind of like a a stop portfolio you know when you're when you're at work be a hundred percent at work when you're at home be a hundred percent at home and and you just have to put life in buckets you know in your stock portfolio you're not gonna have all one hundred percent high risk stocks yeah you're gonna have some of this and some of that and some of this and some of that and so you know that's how that's how your life should be you you can't be at work a hundred percent of every day you're not gonna be there twenty four seven i mean now are there gonna be some where you've got you know some big board meeting coming up or some big m and a thing or some big something where you've gotta be there and you've gotta be a hundred percent there and it's gonna take a lot of your time yes then you're gonna have the thing at home or the you know the kids choir concert that takes priority or the tuesday night date night that's priority and you've just got a put your boundaries up around that you know and that deserves every bit of the same importance as the big deadline at work and you've just got to treat it that way and if you don't treat it that way then eventually that relationship will fail or the relationship with your children will fail you know if you don't put boundaries around what is it that's important to your child you know their their soccer game you know whatever that thing is you've got to put the same importance in the same boundaries around that thing as you do around that very important thing at work and if you don't then that relationship will fail and you know and and that's just that's how it has to be and and it has to be the buckets you know and and and it just has to be a priority for you and and you know all that we have all that any of us have is time you know we can we can say that we have money money is just the barometer that we you know that we place here on earth with the importance but what we really have is time and and we you know how we spend our time is really our wealth you know that's how our children judge our wealth that's our spouses judge our wealth is based on our time so you know we all are given the same amount of time that's the that's the great equalization is our time so you know the the the guy that owns netflix you know the homeless guy on the corner you know we all that's the great equalization you know we all have the same amount of wealth because we have the same amount of time beyonce has the same twenty four hours in the day as you do as i do like we all are the same with the same twenty four hours and and that's the equal factor so you know so it's how you spend that time in your day so so equal that and that's how that's how you say what's important to you that's so such good advice i think that this is why i like when people take risk early on in their in their life when they're young because then they can afford to they can they can afford to not have as much balance they can say i'm not dating i'm not married yet i don't have kids i can put ninety five percent of myself into my business or my career but the issue is when that mindset doesn't just exist for a season of your life but it exists in perpetuity and that's when you get into trouble and that's when people end up going to you because they've maintained this imbalance for thirty years and people people the sad thing about divorce and relationships at break is is most people put so much energy and effort into trying to fix it for years before it ends up getting to the point where it's actually divorced and those are painful years they're very very painful years so i think you're just being cognizant of where your priorities lie where your time everything you just said is so so important you know i think that i think that a a lot of people spend a lot more time you know in the in the catch they spend some much time and energy trying to catch it than and to keep it why is that why is that yeah do you know you have an idea i think i think the chase is more fun once you've got it you know it's not as much fun to try to keep it that's one it's the most important and that right that's i mean that is when it's more important but but it's also not as much of a challenger as much fun but and i think that's also maybe societal you know maybe we don't place as much importance or you know as much prioritization on on the keeping i think we should i think i think that i think that you know maybe there's a little bit of moral and ethical decay and society i mean you see it you see the numbers in the data i don't think it's healthy yeah i and i think that outside you know can make an argument about why people get married or don't get married but i think that by people not getting married and by not having families i don't think that people are more fulfilled being single i think that there's a lot of anxiety and depression about dating about finances about cost of living about what is my life gonna look like so i don't you know people push back against religion and people are more secular and people sort of in some you know parts of the world they pushed back against this or the nuclear family but i don't see the mental health of people that pushed back against that being any better at all well what about a year ago the surgeon general came out with a study that said that that post pandemic yeah that we are we are the lone in america that we have ever been that's odd mh post pandemic like coming out like we are we are not in the pandemic anymore now we're lone and we are lone than we have ever been and and and we can go out and socialize and you know be in restaurants and everything still but we are lone than we've ever been and we because that we don't somehow we are missing connection even after we can go out and and reconnect with each other and and to me that that study that came out really kind of emphasize that point that somehow we are missing something about how to actually connect with each other and and that that says so much just about friendships about marriages about you know what like we said businesses or relationships i mean just just about how to just connect i wanna i wanna ask a couple more questions about entrepreneurship money relationships because i think you have a front row view to a lot of this because you work in all these you you're like the perfect blend of person that deals with all this stuff at the same time so i i'm curious if you see and the entrepreneurs you work with are they more successful when they're with a spouse or a partner or are they more successful when they're single do you find there's any comm there's any trend between those two i think it just depends on the quality of the relationship you know if you're in a relationship that is bringing you down then i don't think that that suits your success in the business world i think that if you're in a relationship that is uplifting you and and good for you as a foundation then that helps you rise you know in your business so you know to me it it it just so depends i think that if you're if your relationship at home is is bringing you down then you might be better off without that you know you your business world might be better off if you didn't have that bringing you down so i see a lot of my business clients you know they they may be more successful after their divorce because they're not having this weight bring them down at home that's then keeping them kind of weighted down at work and then post divorce they they then are kind of set for for rising after after they get divorced you know and then i have other of my business clients after they get divorced they may have you know a new a new marriage that is very good for them and sets them up to rise have one client in mind who got remarried after his divorce and the new marriage just is is got wind in his sale and he's just risen incredibly in his new marriage and has has been very successful in his business after his new marriage thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

in this lessons episode discover why traditional sales methods like band fail to uncover real buyer needs learn how ref framing questions creates deeper conversations understand the role of tonality and building trust and explore why connecting to human motivations shorten sales cycles and drives meaningful results if you think about everyone you're selling to at the end of the day they're all humans they're all worried about keeping their job pressing their boss getting a bonus getting raise getting in promotion and anything they're buying from you in theory can accomplish that to some degree so how do you tie back into what they care about and also it's interesting when i when i was in sales we weren't we were we kind of at a surface level knew that if you actually solved the the person problems you they would champion you to solve the company problems but to shorten the sales cycle it was always about finding intent yeah so it was always about finding somebody that was already looking for your solution as opposed to going in cold i've never heard of using like a human connection to shorten a sales cycle which makes it makes a ton of sense when you think about it like that because we were always told just like if you focus on properly qualifying the leads god you but your laughing just don't tell me they taught you banned yes oh god so there's here's my problem because they try to teach me ban when i got into b b and i'm like like guess suspect so many holes through that i'm like you're asking them what their budget is in the first five minutes of a conversation before they even know what the real problems are how they know what their budget is for some things they don't even know what needs to be solved like you're you're you're really suggesting that these prospects understand what their root problems are when you first start talking to them unlikely nobody does they might understand that they have like one problem and that's the problem with with with most sales train is they'll teach you like the prospect tells you a problem yeah and then they start selling to that problem but the thing is is prospects don't don't know what they need right it's like it's like an analogy of you know you you have this like crazy ass headache one morning bad migraine and you're like i need some medication i have a headache can you go to the urgent care and they're like you know they they don't ask you any questions they're like here just go take this right how do how do you know that it's actually solve anything but instead you go to different doctor she starts asking you some questions about the pain and where do you feel the pain and and how long you felt the pain and what the pains preventing you from being able to do and suddenly her questions start to get you to internalize it you might have a much bigger problem than the originally thought you had the attic and maybe and then she suggests you might wanna do a cat scan and it comes back you have a a tumor it's terminal and you got two weeks to live so see now you start to understand what your real problems are okay but most salespeople are giving you an example there's one of our our newer clients i i went did a a workshop for them couple weeks ago in california they're a big precious metals still like gold and silver and their salespeople like a prospect would would come in and most of their prospects are usually a little bit older you know fifty sixties they're like armageddon you know the skies you know the end the world is ending maybe it there's those people to buy i all they i need to protect everything with gold yeah and so their big thing is they would come in and they said well hey what what's caused you to look at at precious metals that was your first question and i'm like well i wanna hedge against inflation and then like well let me show you how we do that so they give them a problem and they sell that problem i'm like well what happens though if they go home that night and they turn on fox news and fox is like inflation going down the new president's doing a really good job the new administration's getting everything down well now they're like well maybe i don't need gold because inflation is going down and then you lost the deal because you try to sell to one problem but i wanna build a huge gap i don't wanna help them find this one problem they think they have i want to help them find two or three or four or five other problems they didn't realize they had now the gap so big that even if they go in and turn on the tv and it says inflation is going down there's five other reasons why they wanna change they're still buying that's a difference what would be the strategy for b to b or b to start to uncover those things outside of building true rapport not like surface levels it's it's not just how you've it's it's how you framed the questions and it's how you ask in your tone that's gonna determine if you see doubt or not in the current process because if i'm like what what's some some surface level consultative questions can you tell me some of your challenges mister prospect can you tell me two problems that keep you awake at night can you can you tell me some issues you're having your prospects know where those questions lead right every especially in b2b every every company asked like the same generic surface level questions right and so that's why most of them give you vague generalized surface level answers back so i just need to reframe that question and i might say so you you've you've been with x y z company the last four years i mean what's caused you to feel like you might wanna look at someone else see rather than me saying what are your challenges see how i reframe i'm basically asked that same question but i reframe it a different way and the prospect doesn't recognize that pattern see our brains as human beings we recognize patterns and so if you ask the same type of questions that most salespeople people asking them they recognize the pattern and that's why they stay service level but with the way i frame that question and i would probably make it more specific depending on who i'm talking to what i'm selling that's a generic version so you've been with x y z company the last five years i mean they're fairly decent i mean what's caused you to feel like you might wanna look at something else well you know we like them but and now they start to tell me what they don't like because of how i frame that question and i used to the pattern that makes sense it makes a ton of sense but you're also very purposeful with your tonality and your inflection in your pauses yeah so and in a real sales situation it's gonna be a little bit different there i'm kind of telling everybody what to do in exaggerating that but your tone is there to see doubt with what they have or don't have that triggers their nervous system to be like oh maybe we don't maybe we do have a problem with that but i can see that with my doubt there's five types of tonality you have to master if you wanna be top one percent in sales influence persuasion you gotta master the curious tone let's say if i a market agency so walk me through what do you guys do to generate new leads and clients now that's a curious tone there's confused tone now why would i use a confused tone i'm i'm not saying you've got dementia confused like oh i don't know how this thing works but let's say save if a prospect says something like oh gosh i'm feeling so much pressure with this x y z problem pressure or oh how how do you by pressure i'm confused now what that does subconsciously is their brain immediately says to them oh he didn't understand what i meant by that i need to explain that better and you see how now they start to open up yeah well what i mean by pressure is and that they start to tell you see the the two biggest emotional drivers that causes a human being to wanna change are pain and the fear of future pain pleasures of distant third okay most people don't just change because they want like something cool it's pain of their current state or past history and then getting them to feel a fear that this pain is gonna keep going or could happen in the future and that causes them to feel urgency to wanna do something about it and change that's how i could speed up my sales cycles right then you have like a challenging tone you know i'm not gonna do that in the first part of the conversation because i don't have much trust credibility but later on i can challenge him or something what happens if this doesn't actually get solved k that's generic and then i have a concerned tone it tone that shows empathy what's really holding you back what's really holding you back john you know if they're not moving forward it and then have a playful tone right let's say if i sold life insurance and you know that's a that's an industry where the the male will be like oh i or know i'll just you know i'll just let my wife you know she'll have to deal that with her new husband that she mar you know and they kinda blow off yeah like it's like an objection so how am i gonna get that prospect to lower their guard i might leaning him like what's going on man she already looking to replace you or what's going on over there man all oh no she's not looking to replace me well i don't want you sleeping on the couch tonight if she heard you say that and no was serious since though how many months would she be able to pay for the house without your income to the tone shift yeah so but you make real tone and then i go into like that serious like i'm concerned for you tone because i am remember i'm doing it for them not to them but the playful tone that gets into laugh i'm doing that for i'm doing that to disarm them because it releases dopamine their brain it's a disarm it just disarm them that their guard comes down right and remember i'm not doing that to them i'm doing it for them because if i can't get them to let their guard down they don't become open to what i'm offering and i'm the one that's there to solve their problems yeah know when i think about sort of your methodology you combine the behavioral with the the very very tactical but if you look at other you mentioned tony robbins i know you've spoken about nlp before for you're talking about tonality and pausing what other behavioral components or psychological components yeah are valid and and is there any validity in nlp or any of these others yeah for sure but what is a lot of that is used for more stage selling but it's it's see a lot of people like they get this concept that if i say the words it should work but it's not necessarily how you say it it it's how you say the words yeah the tonality so any faqs is my methodology the in stands for neuro which stands for nervous system k so if i if i trigger the prospects you know into fight to flight mode their nervous system is up their guard is up so the stands for nervous system e emotional connection k if i can't connect with them emotionally where they feel like i understand them more than their best friend you know i'm at a disadvantage so how do i do that okay it's it's the tonality it's my body language it's even my facial expressions because your facial expressions i always say the remote control to your the thing called your tone try having a confused tone with the straight face be really hard to do that right so you can't do that so even if i'm on the phone and they can't see me does my body language affect this yeah it does because if i'm just sitting there in the chair i'm standing up like motionless when i'm talking i'm gonna sound more like a mono robot i always say mono body language equals mono tonality and so many salespeople people do especially they cold call because they just sit there it's like they sound like tele you know the piece stands for persuasion and the queue stands for questioning so any methodology that has to do with the emotional connection the nervous system like nlp tony robbins teaches a lot about this i don't i can't remember his methodology what is called those type of things are going to influence the prospects and get them into an emotional state a buying state thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

when you see something that makes so much sense and you see how much money is being made don't go do something else what what happens with a lot of these entrepreneurs they start becoming successful they get criticized by their group because here's the thing success comes with a whole new series of condition and then you finally see those same people say oh they got look this is brandon dawson he built his first company at twenty six and sold it for millions but that was just the beginning over the next two decades he mastered the game of scaling businesses taking one to evaluation of over one hundred fifty million dollars then he walked away not because he had to but because he wanted to build something bigger you looked at the top three reasons business owner state to fail which is a majority of business owners it's because they ain't no demand for service can't find great people or can't make money all three of those are an excuse and then you say well there's no good people good people don't work for shitty business owner day key partners with some of the most ambitious entrepreneurs in the world but the road here it's filled with lessons few dare to share and the blueprint you're about to hear could change the trajectory of your entire business the rules of investing are simple invest in yourself invest in the thing that generates the money and then when you have access capital go invest in something that you don't have your energy into and let it compound for you what i found in life is the more interested you are and somebody the more interesting they become to you if you can't be something for somebody else nobody can ever be that for my favorite part of your story is that all this started with a two point four gpa yeah so take me back to that two point four gpa brandon talk me about a major inflection point this sort of pushed you on the path that you're on today well i mean you know i hate it i hate a school and and and and so and i wasn't good at it i love sports and i only was reasonably enough good enough to get out of school so my dad wouldn't because he told me you don't get at least a two point four you can't play sports so i was a two four two point four yeah if you said three i don't know that i would've played sports right but but i could not wait to get out of this little town and i wanted to do something cool i wanted wanna do something fun i was a hard worker i loved making money i like to be an independent those things i like but i couldn't stand sitting in a classroom i mean i just that wasn't my style and so as soon as i got out of high school then i moved up to portland on and i thought well i'll do a little bit of college report on state and get a job and i got a job selling inside sales one day a week i was making money and i loved the inside sales job and i hated sitting at portland state so i dropped out and when i dropped out six months into it an outside sales rep territory open for the company i was working part time in and i was so good selling over the phones they offered me they opened a new facility and the territory open and they said you can go sell over the phones in atlanta full time and so i moved to atlanta and i was like oh here we go this gonna be amazing when you think about now you teach like nine figure mindset yeah that's that's that is sort of what you've adopted that's the name of your book that's what you that's what you teach entrepreneurs about how do you think somebody starting out because when you're talking about your order or you're in atlanta like you don't have a nine figure mindset yet and i don't even think that when most people start companies just exciting dollars and i have the nurse tell me what's exactly so when somebody is starting out mindset everything tactics are important but mindset is very very important getting off the ground what's the advice to day zero start to have a nine figure mindset that would would have made your journey maybe even a little bit quicker yeah shorter or better yeah so for me i love the fact that i was my own person you know as i was i was nineteen i could be do anything you know it's the first time i moved to atlanta because in oregon i still had family real yeah when i moved to the atlanta and i landed there and they're like here's because i was supposed to be an inside sales rep and they're like the outside sales rep got sick so starting today at the airport when i landed you're an outside sales rep i'm like i don't what what what's that mean you get a ford taurus and you're gonna travel eleven states and so for me i felt like i was i was an explorer an explorer right because i didn't never been to the south didn't knew anything about the south i've never been on my own and i was just so excited about figuring it out but if i could go back to that guy yeah and say couple things i had the heart i had the competitiveness i had the desire to but i i wasn't even what i wasn't think about money i was just thinking about how to learn to do anything right and then be good at it but the one thing i will say that i thank god for that brandon and back because i was like smart enough to go like who's it the best in this whole company that's doing what you want me to do what's their routine yeah so when i went to that first sales meeting and matt the number one outside sales rep i'll never forget this because there's like two hundred of them they gave an award and i was smart enough to go meet the guy i was a the youngest guy in the outside sales team and i was like how do you do it and he be friend me and he said here's how i do my call reports here here's how many cities did go here's how i speed things up here's the kind of conversation and i studied for that guy and i just mimic what he did that's smart and so thank god for the for that brandon who didn't just drift around and take it for granted right but if i could go back and tell him something i'd say to a man when you see something that makes so much sense and you see how much money is being made don't go do something else because i two or three times where i was right in the middle of something so huge and i didn't see it for what it was and i went away from it whereas if i would've have made that where i put my career or i would have adjusted my career and did those things oh my gosh i gotta i could've killed it a lot of things happened in innovation in in in the nineties and two thousands no i missed a lot of because i i saw it i knew it's was gonna be unbelievable but i didn't do something with it so you mentioned when you sort of starting off your career you're hungry you're you're super excited which i think most entrepreneurs are but you made an interesting point you weren't looking at the thing that made you the most money you weren't looking at the thing that was like the best possible opportunity and i think a lot of people that are just starting out and i know that you're more focused on after they figured it out they scale up but i just think the one little bit of wisdom that you have there is when you're first starting out like where do you put your energy how do you identify that opportunity that you should actually be putting energy and time and yourself into because i think that too many people get excited and they jump to the first thing that present self to them well a couple things happen okay so let's look at the macro stats yeah about eighty three or eighty four percent of businesses aren't started from somebody who wants to go build a high net worth and be an entrepreneur be an executive and if you go back all the way to email almost fifty years now they all start it because they're good at something and they don't want a boss they don't wanna be told what to do they don't want a limitation on their earnings they don't wanna be to accountable and they're good at some so i'm gonna go start a business and be my own person and then and then what happens is as soon as they hire a few people they wanna back off of the thing they're actually good at because they've been doing a long time i'm tired to be in the technician i'm tired of do it so i'm gonna have somebody else to i'm gonna hire a kid to do it i'm gonna you know and they start throwing people at the different components of the business and they're not leading the people doing the things they don't know how to do so let's just take this for like say i'm a roof i'm about great roof i can go to any house convince any owner to have me do their roof and i can collect the money and deliver the roof faster and anybody else and it's beautiful and they always refer three friends to me i got i'm i'm i'm natural well i hire someone to clean up the mask to drop the stuff off to over order the inventory to organize it to make sure that my vendors are getting paid to make sure that we're logging in the names the information sitting out the right somebody has to do all that around me and so it's not my expertise so what happens is they get excited and they go to the thing that they're good at and they actually get are so successful at it everything else breaks down behind them because they have no idea who to put in that position how to orchestrate it with them how to organize it with them and how to hold those people accountable and then the thing i'm good at and i actually like i don't like it anymore because now what am i doing i'm solving all the problems i'm fixing all the the broken things i'm getting yelled at by clients that and and now all of a sudden building a business is hard it's painful and maybe if i just went back and they don't say this but maybe if i went back and controlled everything i wouldn't have these problems and then they lock themselves staying small i think that most people end up i you believe this for sure they end up building themselves a job they don't know how to get out it they don't know how to scale it they don't know what to do with it and i think that listen i i i love entrepreneurship i love building companies i think this is something that is beautiful but i need too people will rush into it without thinking and then they find themselves locked and trapped and they don't know what to do well remember if you listen to my stat and i think it's important for your listeners to hear it and and the validation of this is email i mean it's been going on for fifty years they didn't start a business because of what they wanted they started the business because of what they didn't want and then they struggled because they're hiring people think about it if i started my business because i didn't want a boss i didn't want a limitation of my earnings i didn't wanna be held accountable and then i hire someone them am i gonna treat them the way i wanted to be treated or am i gonna treat them differently so now i start hiring people when i ignore them because i think they're gonna be like me but people aren't gonna be like you if you look at every study of every employee segment they wanna be led they wanna be nurtured they wanna be incentivized they wanna be they they wanna be inspired and then they wanna be paid paid is like fourth or fifth now compare that to the person that started their business i didn't want a boss i didn't wanna be told what to do i didn't wanna be held accountable i didn't wanna let me take so so there's this huge disconnect and then their frustration and if you look at the top three reasons business owners state that they fail which is a majority of business owners it's because they no demand for products or service can't find great people or can't make money well all three of those are in excuse because if you an hvac tech and you work for an hvac company there is definitely demand for the product or service so you can't say that and then you say well there's no good people no good people don't work for shitty business owners so what you get are you get the people that don't know what they're doing either and they work for someone that doesn't how to help them do it so it's chaos and when there's chaos it's no longer fun and the thing you do that you're good at you're no longer excited about that because you got problem and you're not in your zone a genius we're doing everything else assets under management with card owned ventures where are you at now well we've engineered six point eight billion in businesses we've run nine point four billion through our educational platforms and we manage about two point three billion right now so i say you work with one or two businesses right when you think about the the segment that you're serving too so you're serving a lot of smb and and mid right well there's thirty four point five million businesses between one million or between sorry between one hundred thousand and a hundred and twenty five million and that's really our sweet spot we do have larger businesses they they get my attention but but those are all in that segment and the reason i ask that is because i always hear about all these business owners that are sort of living what you just described this chaos and and this is not conversation that i usually have about entrepreneurs entrepreneurship a lot of people figure out or a lot of people wanna hear how do i start you know what what should i what should i focus on how do i find my first fifty customers that that's all great but then once you get that and now you're stuck in this spot and that's who you're helping and that's who you're serving so when you think about these this massive amount of businesses all i keep hearing about is wealth transfer one of the largest wealth transfers all these business owners that are stuck in chaos that don't know what to do they don't know if they want to sell their business they don't really know how to scale it because they've sort of and they don't know how to sell it they don't how to sell it maybe their kids it's interesting because i find that most business owners like sub thirty forty million that i've met their kids for some reason don't wanna take over the business i don't really know why that is but they don't no i don't maybe we just discussed what it's because it's chaos they've been cut they've been listening to their parents come home and bitch about everything for the succession plans anymore so like why would you if you're a kid and your dad's coming home or your mom's coming home and it's like we got all these problems people are letting us down we're pissed off fighting because if something happened at the office and now you're sitting there looking at that you're like the last thing you wanted to take your family business over yeah that's really what's happened it's so hard to build a business and if you're second or third generation you've been working in those companies here's the problem owners treat their kids like you should work for less and you money you should do more because you're my kid and i need you to be an example i'm not gonna commit to you how much of this business you're ever gonna own and one day it's gonna be yours so just suck it up because that's what i do with my dad because that's how the dads got it from their dads or their moms got it from their moms we're in a different world today so so and that's where we we're experts in family businesses and if you don't engineer that family business so that the family members understand they need to work as much or as hard as your best people but then they need to be compensated as fair as your best people so you get this weird thing that happens with family where it's like we don't shouldn't pay you as much because one day it's gonna be yours but you're not making the kind of money other people around you are making and everybody thinks you're making more than you should and it's easy for you because you're the owner's family so you you're there's so many lose loses when you're in a family business because all the employees are like yeah that's the owner's son or daughter oh yeah they get everything they want oh yeah they don't have to work as hard and then you have your family saying you need to work harder and everybody else and you should be willing to make less money and so you're getting pounded on on both ways the first thing you wanna is get the hell out of there and it's sad because entrepreneurship should be a positive it should be something that it's hard work but it shouldn't be something that tears your family apart shouldn't be something that rooms of relationship with kids so i'm i'm assuming this these are you know you help businesses scale and and card owned ventures helps businesses scale but behind the scale there's all these interpersonal dynamics that you have help a business owner through and help them understand if they're really gonna try and take the business the next level or sell it or do whatever with it so when somebody comes to you where are they in their business life cycle we just sort of describe the chaos or dealing with but then like what's the first piece of advice for them to figure out which direction to go in well okay so so that's that's a loaded question because they you know if you're a hundred thousand dollar a year person yes you're gonna have to do something entirely different than if you're a million dollar person only nine percent of the businesses between between a hundred thousand and a hundred and twenty five million only nine percent actually break through the million dollar barrier so so you're talking about you're you're talking about under a million businesses out of thirty three and a half million here's an interesting thing going back to your wealth transfer there's five trillion dollars of wealth transfer happening in the small business space k it's a sixteen trillion dollar market right now and those are businesses that range across the spectrum most of the reason the transfer is happening is our owned by baby boomers who either cantor or don't wanna work anymore those businesses don't have high valuation that's why the kids don't wanna take them over because no one's making any money like think about it if you're if if your dad came to you and said hey son our twelve million dollar business the one that's been paying me to have the new trucks every year the rolls royce the six homes the private airplane that we take on vacation the speed boat for the lake you know you've been a good sun and i'm tired so i'm just gonna give it to you and you can start paying yourself two or three million a year you think that second generation wants that business they're like they're fight over of course but that's been bleed out for twenty years complaining and there's no money fighting with their spouse all these problems frustrations anger drinking whatever it is can't go on vacation because the next guy left and i gotta go fix everything do you you're not gonna take that business over so who gets that business nope they don't know i'll tell you who somebody that's listening to you and me right now this says if that's real what do i need to do to prepare myself because the dumbest thing to do in the world today if you wanna be a business owner to start a business but hardest thing to do well you don't have any money the smartest thing to do is to go in and train and learn what a great business looks like learn from people that are building learn your communication skills learn how to sell things because if you can't sell anything then sir and then go work as an apprentice in a five to ten million dollars business and look around and part of your interview process ask owner do you have anybody that you've already identified that's gonna take this business over one day and if the business owner says no i'm still just trying to make it work you say i got an older business owner i got a business been around for ten or twenty years if i learn the technical aspects of how to make this business work i could exit this business owner and that owner will give you a sellers note they'll be like you know when i make a hundred and fifty grand two hundred and fifty grand we had this kid is twenty two we we bought a fifteen million dollar business for two hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a year for ten years to this the the contractor is tired and we immediately two years later turning it into a fifty million dollar company i mean people that are tired and that don't wanna change and they have that same broken mindset it's so hard and there's people involved this market sucks and nobody's good to me they're never gonna move the business beyond where it's at that's the reason it's suffering they're not open minded to it a young person comes in there and they're like hey just i'm excited and they bring the enthusiasm to it now if they learn the technical aspect of the business they could blow that thing off the lid and that's what i would say to my younger self instead of working in a corporation and then we and on my own and starting a business from scratch the first one and trying to raise capital just go find somebody who's got a nice five ten million our business that's tired and worn out nets sweet is a success story partner now what does the future hold for business if you ask nine experts are gonna get ten answers the bull market bear market rates will rise rates will fall honestly i just wish somebody would invent a crystal ball but until then over forty one thousand businesses have future proof their business with nets sweet by oracle the number one cloud erp bringing accounting financial management inventory in hr into one fluid dynamic platform with real time insights and forecasting you're peer into the future with actionable data and when you're closing the books in days not weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next if i had needed this product this is what i would use whether your company is earning millions or even 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any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need what when you when you're talking to that person i i love that idea i absolutely love that because i know that the cody sanchez of the world they're talking about talking wash or she's talking about laundry mats yeah like you know like cody von and all that cody is awesome but she's going after a that's a different that's a cash flow business that's a business that can make pay you and you don't have to do anything that's she's an expert at that because she is really good at that and she's good at communicating about it i'm talking about you know the the people that speak the way i speak the people that know what i know those are her mo us natalie and i talk about it there's there's you shoot i figured what the other guy's name is i'll think of in a second there's but there's probably three to five people that are speaking the right language to the right people that see this opportunity know about it and know how to go get it so for the for the you know young entrepreneur that sort of deploy this strategy they've never scaled the business beyond what you know they're going in they're learning everything about it and you're saying well you know we could take this business from here and we got to fifty million dollars and two years you're thinking how the hell do i do that different levers you can pull right obviously you know with the the marketing the sales the talent you bring on yeah well what do you teach people what do i teach people about scaling business or anything i mean what's what's your so so my my thing is mostly about how do you how do you have the mental fort two to stick with it for a long in a period of time that's really the game that's right so so if i was that kid i'd come learn from you how to have that mindset because if you can stay in the game long enough yeah you can figure it out okay then then what i do is i'd go to alex and and leila and spend a couple days with them you know what i do next i'd go over to lee edge or a brandon dawson or grant card owned thing i would go find the three to five people that are communicating in a way where i'm like all three four or five of those people are legit yeah i i can buy into what they're saying i don't understand it and i'd spend a year the rules of investing are simple invest in yourself invest in the thing that generates the money and then when you have access capital either go buy something else that you can add to the thing that generates the money or go invest in something that you don't have put your energy into and let it compound for you okay if i'm watching this and i'm someone that's like man and i don't i just don't know how to figure go learn from three to make it a point to actually invest in yourself and go to three to five people that you've respect that are speaking a a language that you're like i wanna sound like that i wanna think like that and go deep don't just go to a tony robbins seminar and say i'm changed like actually go freaking deep right like i'm sure you've got a master class for people so go through go at the beginning and get to that master class and then go do it with alex and leila go do it with brandon and natalie go do it with grant card own and then all of a sudden sit back and go i'm gonna go and while you're doing that start reading about buying businesses and start going subscribe for twenty nine dollars a month to a business buying brokerage account in your market where you can start looking at stuff and then go to our ten how to buy a business program it does there's enough information out there that if i really could sit back and say to myself i wanna be wealthy i wanna do it the fastest way possible i wanna do a legal moral ethylene compliant there's five of us that you could start really studying under for a year or two and go kill it you know what my favorite thing about your story when you first started working with grant you already were incredibly successful more than you know ninety nine point nine and nine percent of people on this planet and you still put money into sitting at growth con and sitting up front and learning from him and i think that the the takeaway from that that kills more dreams and more entrepreneurs than anything else is you remove the ego because there's a lot of people that would sell a business for nine figures and be like i don't need to learn from anybody else i figured it yeah was already i worth seventy well at the time i was worked on ninety million like i don't i'll tell you i'll tell you what that you know how that doesn't stop it's one thing to show up and not have an ego but you wanna know what solidified grants respect of me because i was a new entity he he said people make all sorts of promises and let him down two years our relationship i bought my first aircraft and i sent over the paint that i had put on it and it said card ventures on the tail and ten x on the point i didn't know it at the time but he had two other executives sitting there with him and he goes that dude has no ego nobody buys their first aircraft and doesn't put their own initials or their own name on it nobody i didn't think to do that because i'm his partner his name is bigger in my name so this is the thing it's not because i think that the biggest issue is when someone like becomes a great salesperson and they're all cocky look just remember no matter what you ever accomplished in your life i and i don't care what that is there's always somebody that's ten x bigger more successful more accomplished than you and so if you think you're all that shit because you've made your first hundred or your first million or your first ten million and you think that makes you special just remember there's people that are twenty fifty a hundred a billion ten billion a hundred billion two hundred billion and you ain't that good there's no end so if you act like you've arrived you're never actually gonna arrive at any other destination because anybody that could help you spots that in two seconds i don't want anything to do with this person and that's the fatal mistake and this is the part of about mindset you were talking about one of my most impactful mentors is john maxwell and when john maxwell was speaking at that grant card event john pulled me side stage with natalie and i didn't even know what he was doing and he was pointing us out and it was all this chaos thirty four thousand people and i'm like john we're gonna sit back down i don't know what you're trying to do and he gets backstage he said i i he said i just wanted grant the seed the two of you because on the way to backstage i looked at grant and i said grant card if you can meet those two people i'm just gonna tell you this no matter what they tell you you got thirty four thousand people here no matter what they tell you it's the truth and grant the next day ran into me and he was like man you got one big endorsement from john maxwell i says because i've been working with john john i love john john's a second father to me i helped him double his business in two thousand thirteen that's why i learned so much stuff about leadership and operational it and work alongside them it became so close to you need those relationships and at any point if i always this you see this people come and take your classes and you see them trying to do a a social media and they sound like you they're using your content but they're not quoting you yeah and you're like that son of a bitch i'm spending all this time trying to train him and they're acting like it's them i have never done that so john maxwell why did john fall over with me because all he heard everywhere where i was ever on a stages john maxwell i'm sharon le and jim collins and i always ing negotiate those people that affected me and i always give gratitude to what they did and how they taught me and then i put what i did with it of course yeah and then a simple hack then i'm like if you wanna bypass reading hundreds of books in twenty years of mistakes i'll teach you how to do what i learned from them in the next twelve months okay but i don't have to act like i'm the smartest guy in the room and people who act that way nobody wants to help them one of my favorite ideas is just make yourself easy to help make yourself easy to root for and i think that everything you're saying is that it's like if you just humble yourself you remove the ego it is shocking at how many people wanna help you win and see you succeed the right people yeah the right people i mean the thing you have to address with that this is the problem most entrepreneurs we're talking about entrepreneurs too so what happens with a lot of these entrepreneurs is they let's say they'd start becoming successful they get criticized by their group because they're oh you're working too hard you don't care about your family anymore everyone starts picking them apart because here's the thing success comes with a whole new series of conditions and if you actually go do something that group of people you're around if they're not doing it instead of actually cheering you on they have to face the fact that if you have the courage the wisdom or ability to go change your life and they're not trying there's this thing that happens with there because you're mindset coach there's a thing that happens with their mindset which is i'd rather see you fail that because that meant all of yeah because they're looking in the mirror going why don't i have their courage why don't i have their ability why am i not why don't i have their strength or their stamina why am i unwilling to look stupid when they're willing look stupid and then you finally succeed you know what those same people say oh they got lucky because it's the only way they could justify you breaking out and doing something resilience is an important thing as an entrepreneur that wants to succeed and the mental fort and strength to be willing to leave behind and move forward and elevate yourself up has to be a core strength it's tough it's a tough realization grand speaks about this a lot to get something good you have to let something go yeah hundred percent people are everything whether or not it's a people that you surround yourself with that are either you know pushing you towards your goal or the ones that are holding you back business partners like i mean you had a home run with grant but i know that first company you did not have a home run with those people to push you out of your own company so you've learned what those weren't people that was a financial institution and but it's a group of people the people yeah but they're also you know look i had to take ownership the if people listen to me talk i go back and look at all the mistakes i made and today if i was investing in a company like my company back then and i had to do the same thing i would do it in two seconds i just knew have that per perspective back then because i made a lot of mistakes and i i i was a cowboy and i lost their confidence and then when they could get all their money plus all their money plus a hundred percent they took it like same thing i do today if i was back in the guy that i was back then so reflection is critically important it's only through reflection that you gain wisdom because in present time you never know if anything you're doing is a good decision bad decision or a great decision you don't know until you look back and go that was a great and a lot of people find themselves in situations to where they could have had a great situation but they blew it well what changed me is when i finally was able to look in the mirror and go you blew it dude it wasn't their fault they were doing what they were supposed to do protect their investors money ships station is a success story partner do you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and when makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your products you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai for three incredible days in san francisco the global epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with aldi these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today two things can be true at the same time so the first thing is that yes you have to take ownership with the situation you were find your cowboy you weren't you weren't acting in the best interest of their investors but also say you have a little bit of self awareness and you and you you know you realize you're not perfect but you're you're kind of on a journey and you're and you and you wanna align with people that will not only support your business and your professional goals but to also support yourself development goals so that you can sort of like grow together with that person so you're looking for investors it's not just about money there's a lot more that comes with investment than if you find the right investors okay my real question what i wanna find out from you is how do you find out who those right people are that you should align with on your journey with business with investors with with peers i mean employs is a whole other conversation about people but what is like the human characteristics that you would advise somebody to look for when you are bringing somebody into your world yeah well it's a great question and and unfortunately people out trying to find money and stuff don't ask that question they just get stuck in their thing and try to go sell everybody on why they know what they're doing yeah the most important thing if you were to ask me nineteen years old and you were to say to me brandon i'm gonna tell you what the most important thing is forever it's the quality of your relationships and you'll never have a high quality relationship if you can't be a high quality relationship so you ask me about investors or business partners or things in fact top three reasons businesses bust even the successful ones is busted partnerships egos get involved i say there's two times people fight no money too much money you said earlier it's all about people so if i'm unclear the kind of person i am and if i'm unclear the kind of person i wanna become and if i'm unclear about how committed am to making that happen i am going to be unclear about who to attract it into my life if i am transactional just trying to get something done like i just need money so i could start my dream you're gonna accumulate a lot of problems there because you probably don't know what you're doing and you're probably gonna lose the money so friends and families is not a good way to raise capital by the way so i would look at the person if you wanna and if you want an investor i would go look at what that what has that person done i would never take money from somebody early days that with their money to wouldn't take an active interest in me in helping me because i know i don't know what i'm doing but right and so the people that help me even in my first company that i screwed up they didn't invest enough in into the company because they were all really super wealthy so you know putting a million bucks in a million half bucks and they they all papa john papa papa bear mark mar all all those initial five doug du doug doug good was his name so i come doug but but these were all my original investors all older guys that were worth with money but you know what they loved me because i loved them and i was appreciative and i listened to him you just play golf and pick their brain you want the right investors take an active interest in successful people in what they've done and really respectfully try to learn from them what i found in life is the more interesting you are and somebody the more interesting they become to you if my interest if i'm being interested in you because we're playing call of duty and smoking and dope and getting drunk on the weekends i'm gonna gravitate to that and you're probably not gonna help me much if i go find a successful local business owner and i said i'll work for you for for for the cheapest do you ever paid anybody for the next two years i'll becoming your most valuable employee i'll never ask for anything with the hopes that if i prove to you that i could be the best apprentice you've ever had here i'll do anything at any level give me two years that if i proved to you i could master this business and create value and have the humility to never ask for anything and always be the best example would you consider expanding this business and making me a partner in the future imagine somebody coming into a business owner and asking that question what would most business owner say to that yes for sure unbelievable but no what do they do i demand more money i not be treated fair this isn't i want more like like like that's how a majority of people think and act and those people are always gonna struggle so the more you can lay yourself out there ing the the the people you want to mentor you respect them and actually really care about them and try to drive so much value for them because here's what i've learned if you can't be something for somebody else nobody can ever be that for you why am i a great partner with grant card because i'm a great partner if i couldn't be a great partner for grant grant would not be a good partner for me grant would spit me up and chi me out and he has multiple partnerships because people didn't do what they said they're were gonna do people weren't respectful people wanted to tread on his brand and then spin off other companies i mean we just had a situation where we had a partner we had to exit because they were setting up all these side companies using our relationships and our vendors and all this and that and hide things with family like that's shit that's not a good partner so so you will attract what you are so if somebody wants to know how to be successful define what you are and then choose what you're gonna become last thing i wanna ask i know that people's lives change after they work with card owned ventures and work with you when they understand themselves when i understand the right people to bring into their world when they understand all the tactical scale strategy direction that they wanna go in just paint a picture for the before and the after when somebody leans into all the ideas that we're talking about today what's the outcome it's a great question here's the thing you have to know about scaling anything is that there's three levels of expertise you have to have to scale first is personal second is professional and third as financial there's no such thing as scaling to massive of success and not having all three of those things have to scale because if you professionally are scaling and you're smart you're blown away but you don't scale your financial acumen and awareness and understanding you'll bust out if you become the most successful business owner you throw everything at it and you ignore your family and your friends you'll bust out personally and you're also guaranteed in those break points as you're getting big and encountering all these new things because you're gonna have to change as a human being literally break point one three million or less break point two eight million or less break point three fifteen less break point four twenty five less break point five forty five less break point six seventy five less and break point seven one twenty five and then eight nine ten eleven to a billion dollars okay every time you enter a new break point you will be an entirely different person that entered the break point before and if you haven't personally professionally and financially grown at the same time you're going through those revenues you will break as certain as gravity something is gonna break you and you won't see it coming when we interview thousands of business owners that went broke one consistent thing what caused you to go broke you know wanna what everybody said the thing i didn't see coming it was never the thing they worried about so you're not gonna see it coming so contrast act to people what allowed you to succeed think about this i didn't see it coming because they relied on them me i my the people that succeeded i surrounded myself with loyal great people and we were in the trenches together i might not have seen it coming but my partner or my friend or my my loyal employee did so we were able to attack it before it killed us strengthen numbers but if you can't be it you wanna attract it where do people connect with you where do people find it about card on ventures a card ventures dot com you can go to ten health system dot com you're gonna find me you and go to b dawson dot com you can go to at brand and m dawson on my instagram and social media that's been shadow band for the last three months now you'll find me youtube you can find me on youtube but i'm pretty i'm pretty out there we post consistently my beautiful wife is blown up right now on social media and if you just google brandon dawson i'm gonna pop up and you can find me however you wanna find me look if you're ambitious you're excited you wanna do something great you gotta listen to this guy you gotta listen to the people that are proven experts out there stop wasting your time getting sold a bunch of bullshit stuff go find the experts go find people who have really done it that are willing to commit you know how much time energy and ever you know it takes to do all this and you waited on me and for i'm so sorry you waited on me i wanna cram as much in as i can but here's the thing we're doing this because we're trying to add value to some someone on the other side of that that's it at the end of the day and if they don't respect that well then they should go play call duty every answer that you ever need is out there he's gotta be willing to listen pay attention and here's the thing if you don't know what your destination is you haven't set that it doesn't mean you have you don't have to go i wanna be worth the hundred billion okay you know what the biggest impact for me was when i asked my mentor at twenty six years old how much money do this guy's worth hundreds and hundred maybe even billions i said how much money papa john how much money do you have to have we you never have to work again and he literally was like well if you had five million and then twenty five million at seventy five million a hundred and fifty million and here's what your life could look like due do and he said but look at warren buffett at twenty seven warren buffett was worth a million at thirty seven he was worth ten million at forty seven he was worth seventy five million but at fifty three it compounded to three hundred and fifty million and then boom took off because warren lived like he was making a hundred grand a year and all the access capital he threw into a compounded event for him i never forgot about that i wrote it all down i sketched it all up twenty at twenty seven i was worth a million i was worth ten million sorry and i'm like i'm i am ten years ahead warren buffett that's right but the problem was my that was at twenty seven thirty two i was back to zero but when i sold my company at forty seven think about this so twenty seven thirty seven forty seven warren were seventy five million i was asked how did you set the price to your company because it was such a high price nobody's ever paid that for a business i said because i had partners and my employees and after taxes i needed to put seventy five million dollars in the bank because that was my target from twenty years and i did i put seventy six point two million after taxes if i had not had that conversation and i had not thought about it i might have sold my business for fifty million and been happy i got twenty five this is why grant talks about those targets when i at grant i shared that story i said but i have a new problem and grant says three hundred and fifty million i'll solve that one for you so we partnered i'm now fifty seven we partnered six years ago in six years from dead stop hitting the best what i have the best way have putting it together with my wife as partners we built an enterprise that that last year did two hundred and forty five million in revenue and it's worth about seven hundred and fifty million dollars right now and this year ago over worth it'll be over a billion and for context that is revenue for the org not this portfolio companies which is that is my revenue that is your revenue i am managing partner c founder chairman and ceo of card ventures and grant my wife and i grant my wife and i and grant are fifty fifty and then card ventures i bought ten health inside of it is a little one million dollar one point five and today that business is a hundred and fifty million so between card ventures a hundred and twenty in health we ended last year they both were one twenty from zero invested capital zero debt all internally cash flow we owe ninety nine percent of the equity of card ventures and tin health grant my wife and i and when we do what we're gonna do with that that'll be worth about three and a half billion dollars in another eighteen to twenty four months that takes care of the three fifty but that takes care of the three fifty and can i tell you grant's like grant laughed at me when we were doing the math two years ago when i hit my three fifty number he goes i said i knew you're gonna help me to do it know what he left ace says the thing that surprised me almost blew the deal brandon and i go away he goes you were thinking so small i said i wanted a three fifty net worth he's thinking why don't you want a billion or two billion you know when i spoke to him he was telling me about how he wishes he was ten everything from day one he would've have been worth tens of billions at this point the guy's a machine dude and he's he's he is a direction north star and direction is so important i'm gotta pick your target and then you gotta look for the clues to get you there if you're drifting and wandering it's gonna be horrible if you're intentional and you take the right action log of attraction like it's not a real thing but it is a real thing if you do it this way if you have intention you take action towards the right objectives eventually you attract your target and that's how you get dude thank you for having appreciate you so much thank you so much

in this lessons episode discover the strategy of pre and how it transforms businesses from transactional sellers into trusted advisors learn why prioritizing a client's best interest deeply understanding their needs and re framing your role as a life changing partner creates lasting loyalty and understand how challenging perception sets a brand apart in competitive markets what is the insight for somebody building a business and to understand the current state of the consumer and how to capture them and sell to them properly well and and you studied some of my work i have so much that it would be improbable to think you've studied all of it but one of the earliest things and i was fan about with something i called the strategy of pre i'm telling you this not to go rogue on you but to go right to the answer actually this was this was actually we haven't even gotten and that was the first thing that i was gonna go into but then you started to get interesting so then i pushed it back a little bit i need correlates here so i studied i studied mean i'm i'm like a closet student of the human condition and so i studied for years is i was doing this you know the people who own preemptive and preeminent and and i went from from people that had that had significant what's the word i would use they were prominent and then i looked for preemptive and then i looked at preeminent and it was a very believe it or not if you look at gradients and i'm into i studied and i'm not a mathematician but people don't realize this everybody and by the way i'm a poster boy for adult attention deficit and i'm like a nat that has had a lob bottom so you'll have to tolerate me going rogue on you and me and myself but i studied everyone talks about the ten x moon moonshot i'm gonna get to pre in just a minute the ten x moonshot you know exponential growth and i i studied it for a little bit and people don't realize that in math if you study math which i did i just did some research on it there are five or six gradients that are literally above and beyond fractionation it's called hyper operational rationalization and it's patient and and you couldn't even correlate it'd be like to infinity or beyond and the point is you can really take performance so much higher for the same time effort opportunity capital access to the market human capital etcetera now back to your answer for the consumer i created after studying a lot of people that were operating in this literally preeminent world what it was about them that was profoundly different and i'll send you a deck that i did on it because just for yourself you'll love it and you're welcome to share with anybody and it basically had many facets but to give you the short takes about three three hours to explain it it's deep but number one they they were seen as the most trusted adviser in the category the only viable solution you could turn to and the reason was they did not give information they did not try to sell they always tried to advise and tell their market what they felt was in the market's best interest irrespective of whether that was in the company's best interest and secondly whether that whether the cup that whether the consumer purchased what they advise in the and the combination the quality the consistency that they advise they always told what they believed was in the best interest i used to tell story if if you came to j abraham bottled water shop and water bar and you asked me for one half of a of eight cup of water and i took your money without first verifying that you knew that your body needed seven and a half more of these every day scott for your body to function your cellular a health to be at prime your your creativity to be optimal your digestion or your your ex and everything to work for your stability for your stress level and i didn't go out of my way to make sure you knew that irrespective of whether you upped your purchase from me i would be disturbing you talking about being preeminent if you came every two days and bought eight glasses but i didn't make sure that somewhere not necessarily me but somewhere you were getting the other eight and didn't go out of my way to make sure you knew what i believe was in your best interest i was stealing from you so the first thing in being preeminent is being seen as the most trusted adviser the only possible source or or or or place you could turn to and that is only possible by doing that the next is understanding and putting into words what your target audience wants and doesn't want in ways and it dimensions that no one else has ever articulated and you cannot do that if you don't really go to great depths to understand it and i can tell you later on a way that anybody can do it i call it the mind of the market and that's another methodology we've produced next is that you basically want to make sure that no matter what business industry you are in you don't fall into the mistake of falling in love with your company fastest growing company inc magazine fortune five hundred russell one thousand or you love your industry or you love your product you wanna fall in love with the people you serve and you have three kinds of clients and you wanna call them clients because if i call you a customer if you look it up scott and webster dictionary it's somebody who it it's somebody who's buying a commodity or a service if i call you a customer but i wanna be preeminent what i'm really saying implicitly if not explicitly is i am a marginalized commodity and i'm lucky is heck you're dealing with me and not my competitor or an alternative form if i call you a client if you look it up it's somebody who's under the care the well being and the protection of another it has a fiduciary connotation when i see myself being your most trusted adviser and i see my responsibility and i get that that that everybody in the company sees that and we're on a mission and crusade in behalf of that market of the of the prospective client and we see our role as being integral no matter if we answer the phone get the package to the you know to shipping faster that it all helps achieve our purpose that is very profound the other thing is literally you've gotta stop thinking transactional if i think that i sell water and i don't think about what happens when that water is acquired by you and it's starting to serve your your body then i've i i've i've marginalized myself got a good example and you can you can throw a monkey wrench and stop me because i can go i can go wrong no i i i i'm gonna i'm going to no go go ahead and tell me the other example and right give you a great example yeah i've had i mean and you know this because we've talked offline i've had a thousand industries around the world i've helped so i have a lot of of ex experience in this one time i had the largest first time home builder in all of mexico they had eighty seven facilities they had three thousand salespeople they were doing billions they were traded on the new york and the mexican stock exchange and they wanted a break and so i actually flew out there and i i i spent time with not just the sales management with many many many of the salespeople and i asked them what they did and they said we sell first family homes now the first family home market there i don't know if it's still the same because i've been back for three four years the government had a either if you work for a legitimate company that pay taxes they would make your down payment and they would then structure your mortgage payments to conform with your income so you could afford a beautiful home in a brand new development with security walls with with all kinds of wonderful facilities pools etcetera you it was in wonderful new areas where there were there were dedicated teachers now put that in the advance so these people said we sell new we sell first time homes i said well what happens when somebody buys a first time home nobody asked them i said let's look at it first of all a couple that normally had only two options they would live in terrible area in an apartment where it was very non conducive for a good environment for the wife it was non conducive in a good environment for the kids and and the husband wouldn't have a lot of pride or they live with the parents who would micro manage the family it would be just terrible on the relationship between husband and wife parenting etcetera because the grandparents would try to parent you know both the the the husband her wife wherever were their child was and the kid when they get into a new development first of all there's pride of ownership it's a beautiful home the husband feels like his work has produced something he works harder more exciting gets promotions makes more the wife hangs out with quality people so do the kids their success probability is enhanced dramatically the teachers are young and still wanna teach they're not jade and cal about the whole process more importantly they are building an asset that will give them security for the rest of their life if they can't afford it they can rent it and get somebody else to pay for it for them if they get it paid off and their parents die and they inherit the house now they've got an asset that we'll give them a higher quality of retirement or living or it'll pay for their children to have the education of a lifetime anywhere they want and i went through all these things there's a lot more and i said no you don't just sell first time homes you transform hire family lives and every morning we started our day saying how many lives are we going to transform today and it was game changing using the positive aspect i'm just give you a few examples of that i was gonna say i was gonna say a lot of this strategy hinges on you challenging the customer's perception you you challenge their worldview to a degree so that that places you in a position of trust because a lot if a company is just transactional then they're just accepting what the customer wants and that's and they're they're going to sell it to them but this preeminent strategy seems a challenge so that you are not only just understanding what your customer wants you're also trying to get them to see the world through a different lens and then that would be your that would be your company do you that is that fair yeah it's it's it's a alley it's trying to see your business through a different lens but it's also trying to have people see you in contrast to everyone else if you think about its divide and conquer there's everyone else and then there's you and and you know we we've got i'm talking about something that's very sophisticated when you exert execute but that's only one of about ninety seven methodologies we've given but but what we try to do whenever there's a lot of competitive a landscape and we're trying to get someone to be very preemptive when people challenge them about somebody else we we don't say oh scott's is a is ratchet and swine and there he's a he's discussing he's he's his stuff is crap instead we always say look there are a lot of very quality people in our in our end as street and we know all the the good guys and women and and they work very hard and their products are very good and their people are very dedicated and they they give a good value and then we add the we that were where the penny drops are the brick drops for what they do but we don't even play in that world we operate in our relationship with you and and how we engineer our products or our services and what we are committed to deliver and how we go above and beyond the the you know the expectations and how we basically design everything as if it was for ourselves in a bunch higher strata so we we don't even we don't see ourselves even be compared and you do things that are very different than most people would if you're competing thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one

in this lessons episode discover how luxury car brands were brought into real estate to create unique high value properties learn how a patented car elevator system redefined convenience privacy and exclusivity for residents and understand the financial strategy that turned parking into a major revenue driver pushing the boundaries of innovation in property development what was the idea about bringing in because trump was a sort of like a well known real estate brand porsche arm armani bentley these are not with well no one are let's say brands right these are these are car brands right or are these are luxury brands car brands but when you decided to do this strategy to bring in these names what was the thought process it was you had the idea of brand with trump right what was the next thing that made you wanna do this it was it was an evolution of thought process so we heard that port so we started out with porsche design okay you have to understand how i got to these car brands it was difficult at the time they didn't want anything to do with the real estate but porsche design was the the was the part of the porsche company that did the sunglasses and the lighter and they had the retail stores so i went to the porsche design company and they were the ones looking to do licensing knowing that they had the name porsche and the logo in their name that they can maximize on their porsche design yeah at the time i i believe the whole porsche design part of the company was doing something like eighty million dollars unit revenues oh it's small very small yeah right it's a it's it's the tail of the whole porsche gonna porsche company doing nine billion yeah here is okay so easy to get too easy to make a deal with and we made a deal with them it was a porsche design tower what had happened in half afterwards was volkswagen did a leverage buyout on porsche they took over the company and they forced the sale of porsche design which was owned half by porsche of the car company half by the porsche family so they forced the porsche family to sell out and then i got tucked into the volkswagen group and that's how i got my way access to bentley and all these other brands that we have that we've been talking about too and and so that's that's how that happened they were they were okay so like the small subsidiary willing to realize they it was not easy it was not easy i had to raise said look donald trump the only thing he has is his name and he gave it to me right he doesn't he didn't have wasn't they didn't have a product he wasn't manufacturing cars or anything like that these guys you manufactured cars you need a lifestyle component yeah and we'll you know we sat down with them they were we really guided them through the process because a lot of the things that we taught them you're dealing with executives who are not at the same level as our customer pool if you will you know and so i'm representative the customer pool and say this what the customer wants this what they need this is one they and they oh yeah that's great great great man so you know they didn't say no me mean i not few things they they we had to stop production of our brochures because the brake caliber were not red things like that they were they were obsessed with the details oh for sure they it's still still till today i mean they they checked the building and everything else to make sure that you know yeah of course no that building is a hundred percent porsche i mean it smells breathes looks everything porsche and the same way bentley is gonna be the same you know and so the concept of the car elevator started my father owns a ability in new york city which is a car dealership on two seven eleventh avenue called manhattan motor cars and it's a porsche of rolls royce bentley dealership with there and it's a five story building and you drive in you press one of five buttons on the elevator goes up open the door he's driving right out we said okay how cool is this gonna be maybe instead of pressing a button you will have an rfid id or not yeah we go to the fire department with it design hey you drive in yeah picks you up yeah it's it got they said this is great great great no fucking way and you know because they said we don't want you starting your car in the middle of the building and so that was a whole other process of of how to of how to what what is porsche you have to do with real estate we said let's make the building for the car lover for the guy who wants his car in his living room and that was what our idea was what really happened was there something i didn't think whatever of but based on the fact that we have only south american customers they love the fact that it was the security and the privacy and safety of them going up and down from an apartment without seeing anybody without seeing you know with everybody know who where they are instead of jumping on board right and being like and i know you probably have the patents and the ip locked type but instead of being like okay how do we replicate this right is a really cool feature this serves the same clientele as us it's like the immediately it's like the blockbuster to netflix right yep they're just they're people are so slow they're afraid of to evolve they're afraid of new things yeah and when they don't understand something they're quick to say now and if it was a little education and especially the developers i would have expected by now the developers would have figured this out what i'm doing yeah figured out that that this is you know the the whole reason we're sticking an eighty five million dollar elevator in a building right you understand why yeah wars what well because it's a privacy it's a convenience it's a it's people don't get it no that's the abstract effect of it but there's a financial reason there's a financial reason i went patent into this shit yeah what's the financial reason the a you know understand real estate you buy a specific plot of land yeah it has a floor area ratio a r in europe they call g growth floor area alert the fa on that site allows you to build in the case of the bentley tower six hundred thousand square feet of net sell square feet yeah okay that is the actual inside of the apartments not including the balconies and i'm including the stairs not including the elevators not including the parking so by now placing the parking adjacent to the unit yeah i got an i sell it as part of the unit and i'm picking up an additional fifty percent on the building so my my a was six hundred thousand square feet i'm selling now nine hundred thousand square feet what does that turn into in writing i'm picking up i'm selling my square fifty percent more revenue than the neighbor on the same size plot on same size land and yes it's costing me an elevator but three hundred thousand square the math i'm doing at fifteen hundred bucks a foot that's an additional four hundred and fifty million dollars of revenue you spent eighty five million for foot okay so yeah that's why that's where the i mean if if if you were to ever call me a genius that's where the genius comes in because we figured out how to milk every single penny out of this building by adding value by creating this elevator system but every other developer gives away parking and i'm selling it at the same price per square foot as a unit so it's an aha moment any and and and i am surprised that every other developer in the world is not calling me to do the same thing i i don't get it i don't understand where it but again it's because something new they're not used to it some others are trying some others are trying to you know to do buildings where you drive and drive out which yeah fire departments are gonna shut them down on it i'm the only system where you don't have to start the car that's my patent you come in with your passenger in the car there's a little satellite system slides out yeah lifts the car and these a little like chopsticks the same way kinda like a tow truck it gets the front we do all four wheels so the cars in park passengers in the car engine off pulls you into the elevator the pulls you up to your floor spits you out in your own personal garage two steps away from your front door and because there's two steps away from your front door you have to buy that garage and if you don't wanna buy the garage this bill is not for you you can go next door have you had pushed pushback oh yeah oh you charge me for the road yeah well it's part of unit you know i mean they don't charge me next door okay that's we they don't have it that's where you need to live they'll have some valet sweat and sweat in your car and bang the car up all day yeah if it's not important to you you know if just not important to if you really think about it and do the math again i have i'm selling four spaces it comes to square footage wise about two million bucks not cheap yet it's five hundred thousand dollars parking space which if you go to any city anywhere in the world and you wanted to buy a parking space that's the price alright and in hong kong they're going for two million new york they're going for a million so to spend half a million dollars to have the car right there in front of you how do you do something that's never been done before so i i know people that build technology software that's never been done before building something physical that's never that requires engineering architecture it's like it's not easy there's a lot of people expensive it's i'm consuming well i i here's what here's what i i gotta be honest and say i didn't do anything that's never been done before i just put components together in a way that's never been done before meaning what we took his automated parking that's been around since the seventies but never was always done to save space to put cars next to each other save the driveway you know and and make it a more efficient parking garage because garages are expensive so i just took that same thing and adapted it in a way where where where i'm not looking to save space i'm looking to bring a passenger the car so we had to put a lot of passenger safety and the answer is i'm yeah i'm not an engineer but we hired the right engineers who said hey how can we get closer to this and how can we get closer to this and guys would pop in at an nowhere and i didn't understand what they were doing but later on became some of the most valuable guys in the whole project you know i'm the only elevator in the world with a sprinkler system in it should the car catch on fire you know there's a sprinkler system in a moving elevator we're traveling and so you know at at first we said oh we're gonna have a a traveling water cable yeah and he said that's gonna be a fucking problem you can't do that so so we went head to to a high miss system with these huge scuba of tanks that sit on the cab and they missed out of it yeah i mean but you just gotta sit in the thing and figure it out everything available today yeah everything can be done today you know and if it can't be done is easy to make it today three d printers or whatnot anything can be made yeah that's true so it's very true and and like listen i don't know you just never take no for an answer when it comes to innovation when comes to building i know like i i because i truly believe that there's always a solution you know and there really those really is there's always a solution you just gotta think you know and sometimes i'm not in the position to think because i don't know the solution but i gotta i sit there and i force my people to think yeah and i ask them questions a three year old child would ask and get that juices going to you know but why can't we do it this way and why can't we do it with even though i know that their answer is are gonna be but what about this and what about that and what about this and what about that and just force experts who their experts they've been doing this their whole life you know force them to think you know forcing them to think the other thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one