Mission = Resilience

I think if you're working on a business that like you, that has a mission and a vision and you think is making the world a better place, it's a lot easier to stick with it when it's hard. And, you know, when I talk to entrepreneurs, you know, over the years who are doing things that could be fine businesses, but, you know, they're things that aren't necessarily like making the world a better place. You know, I always remind them, like, hey, it's going to get really hard at some point. Like, do you want to look back and be like, man, I spent five years building a Facebook game, right? And you know, when that was a thing, right? And so I always tell people, like, look, it does take 10 plus years. And I was lucky enough back to education. The school that I worked at, Pacific Collegiate School, one of the big donors that school was Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix. And through the early years, Reid and I became friends. And I remember talking to Reid one day and I said to something that seared into my brain, I was like, hey, Reid, this was like 2013 or 14. I was like, what do you think about this red box company, the red box kiosks? I was like, it seems like they've come out of nowhere. Dollar DVDs. This is when Netflix was really a DVD company. He's like, james, that company has been at it for over a decade. That's the Coinstar guys. These guys have been working super hard for more than a decade. This stuff takes a long time. And for whatever reason, that really stuck with me that this stuff takes a long time. So I always have Reid in the background when I'm like, as long as I'm working on something I care about. He's been at Netflix since 97, you know, and so 25 years, right, of passion and purpose. And I think, I think that's a good, that's a good way to think about the world.