Elon Musk: If you need encouragement, don't become an entrepreneur

The Small business show episode 315 for Wednesday, February 17, 2021. Greetings, folks, and welcome back to the Small Business show here at BusinessShow Co, where small businessing is a verb. And we are here to help because we're small business owners, too. Here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave.

Hamilton, and out in Lafayette, small businessing every single day. I'm Shannon Jean.

It's like. It's like a bad habit, except it actually works out pretty well. So there you go.

I love it, man.

There are worse habits to have. I guess.

There are. There are. It's a lot about this. Embracing opportunities or. I don't know. I think it's a mindset, a framework that causes you to constantly think this way. And I think you get deeper into it the longer you are into it. Right.

I like that. Yeah. It's true. You know, when certainly when I started a business, my first business, I was just into doing something so that I didn't have to work for somebody else so that I could control my own fate. Right. But I wasn't. But it was selfish. I mean, it's always selfish, right? We're always focused on ourselves. But it surely was this, like, okay, I can't deal with working for somebody else, so how can I figure this out on my own? But you're right. As you get deeper and deeper into. Becomes a mission, right?

Well, it's kind of a way of life, if you think about it.

Yeah, it's a way of life.

It's that lifestyle that you're always thinking. I'm just always looking at or listening and, and, and reading about and going, well, that's an interesting idea or that's an interesting opportunity. And it, it can really lead you down some terrible paths. But hopefully enough of them that are. That are turn out good that you get to lead this charmed life that we talk about here every week.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

It's all. And. And, you know, it's about being an entrepreneur. And, you know, I heard a quote this week that just really hit me. It was so obvious, but I've never really heard anyone say it this way before, and I would love to take kind of a deeper dive into it on the show today if.

All right, well, let's. Yeah, let's do it, man. Yeah. What's the quote?

So the quote came from, you know, Elon Musk. He's got kind of a different way of looking at things. Thank goodness. Helping us get off the planet and all that Kind of cool stuff. So he was on Clubhouse, which is kind of a. I don't know how new. It is new to me talking. And someone asked him, he was asked what encouragement he could give to a new entrepreneur. And Elon replied, if you need encouragement, don't become an entrepreneur.

Ooh.

And I just was like, wow, there's, I mean, serious truth in this. If you, if you consider the challenges you're going to face as an entrepreneur and, and I, you know, if you're that person thinking, oh, you know, I, I want encouragement, I want encouragement. Well, there's, there's not very many places. Well, let me, let me, let me back up. You're going to have to change how you define encouragement.

I was going to say, yeah, I, like, I am encouraged to, to move forward by thinking, in fact, all the way back to that first thing that sparked me into this. I don't want to work for someone else. Right. And I understand and embrace, in fact, that being an entrepreneur means I work for lots of different someone else's. Right.

Many bosses.

I have many bosses. It's not that I'm my own boss. I mean, certainly I could paint a picture and tell you that I am, but the reality is I have many bosses and I, that's actually, that's way.

More, in my opinion, stable.

Right.

Than just having one boss.

Totally, totally. Yeah. Because you're always going to lose one. So what happens when you only have one to begin with? Right? So you're in trouble, you're in trouble. And then, and of course, we, you know, we call them bosses, but you can call them clients or whatever you want. If, if the bulk of your work comes from one client, you might not be as self employed as you think you are, and that's okay. We all start our businesses, often not all of us, but often our businesses are started that way where we have one sort of anchor client that helps us pay the bills and from there that gives us the opportunity, the springboard, to create something else. But we have to take that opportunity and the encouragement of knowing that one of your clients could always go away. To me, that is actually encouragement to me. But, but I get what Elon is saying here too, that if you need somebody patting you on the back and saying you're the wrong, all right, you know, do this. I had one business partner years ago, and we were talking and this person wasn't, was, was sort of steering the ship, but not steering the ship. And we were having one of these, you know, heart to heart. So I think they're called come to Jesus moments. And, and I remember saying to them, you're not really steering the ship here. We need somebody else to steer the ship. You've contributed a lot to this project, but this isn't what you're good at, essentially. And they said to me, they said, well, nobody ever told me what to do, so how can I be blamed for not doing the right thing?

Flashing red lights right there. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Alarms going. Yeah.

Alarms. And it's like, okay, well, here I am in this very heartfelt conversation. I can't scream at this person and tell them, oh my gosh, are you seeing what's happening here? But that's certainly what was going through my head at the time.

Yeah. And it doesn't mean there's not a place for that person.

Right.

Everybody's the wrong place skill set. Yes. That was the wrong place. And I think that I, I do like this concept of changing your, your, how you frame this, you know, encouragement and, and if you're a young entrepreneur or a new entrepreneur, whatever your age is.

Yeah.

And just getting started. I, I would love to give you some tips on ways to change how you frame encouragement to, to help you as you face the adversity that, you know, there's just going to be tons of things in your way. Right. And all kinds of naysayers. There's going to be deep, deep lows and hopefully, you know, eventually high highs.

Right. Yeah. And then deep blows again, might come.

Back like, oh, yeah. Guaranteed.

Yeah.

I don't know anybody that has just been a one way trip up. I mean, it just doesn't.

I think, I think you need to have, I mean, I say this to rationalize my own experiences, Shannon. So, you know, let me have this moment. Don't burst my bubble. But I think you need, I need to have, need Ed to have that, you know, that crash of sorts. Right. Like where, you know, you get started, you get a little bit lucky because you need some of that. Right. You have the right mix of clients, you have the right drive to get things rolling. And you're like, oh, look at this. I'm unstoppable. I can do no wrong. And that's only because you've done no wrong. And then you do wrong. Right. You're in it long enough, you're gonna make a mistake. We talk about why we're, how we're such big fans of mistakes, and this is why, because we have to rationalize the mistakes we've made. Otherwise we can't go to Sleep at night. And so that's why we love mistakes. But they do teach us things. But one of the things they teach you is never get complacent. It doesn't matter how much current success you are experiencing. Never get complacent because if you do, you will experience something other than success.

You, you're going to crash. There's two ways. You're going to crash. There's two ways. Look, I also think that if you're not crashing occasionally, you're not trying, you're not trying hard enough, you're not trying to do things and. Yeah. And you don't want to crash your entire, you know, revenue stack that we, you know, so lovingly embrace. Embrace on the show. But as you build that stack and you kind of create this foundation of success, you want to go out and try new things and those things, inevitably some of them are going to crash, but they're not going to wipe you out, but you're going to go, oh, okay, I, I, I learned this and I, you know, this kind of thing, we talk about it all the time with our own experiences here on the show. Ways that, you know, we've made mistakes, but the things that we've, we've learned from them. Yeah. And I think that, you know, kind of back to this encouragement thing, when I was getting started, it was a big shift for me to kind of wrap my head around the fact that, you know, there's going to be a lot less encouragement for you, meaning me, myself. And in addition, at the same time, you have to become the primary encourager.

Right.

Because you're going to be encouraging your employees, your customers, your partners, you know, all this kind of stuff. So you kind of, what I did is you just kind of to flip it on its head and you become the encourager and that it gave something to me and made me feel powerful because then you can see the results of that encouragement, which hopefully feeds this cycle. You know that that kind of comes around and keeps you wanting to do it and helps you become more successful.

No, that's really smart. And that's a good trick to do. I'm not great at that. I have to remind myself to keep doing that. It's not automatic for me, even still today. It's definitely something that I have to.

Yeah, I was going to talk to you about that, Dave.

Yeah.

But it is hard.

It's hard when people say it's lonely at the top. I think that this is a little bit of what fuels that. You know, there's no one there to say you're doing great. You know, you, you have to be the one to say you're doing great. And it's rarely if ever said back to you, and that's okay, you know.

And yeah, and I think that's. You need to be prepared for it and just kind of adjust, you know. And again, this, this framework that you're creating, you're not going to need that encouragement that attaboy as much because in a few minutes I'm going to share some methods that you can get encouragement that it's just going to happen naturally based on your actions and you're not going to have to go seeking that. Oh, I want somebody to tell me I'm doing a great job because I can tell you those are few and far between. But there are ways to. We all want that, but there are ways to get it that I think are more nuanced and more sustainable long term as a small business owner.

All right, well, I definitely want to hear about this because I need this. I also want to tell you about our sponsor for today, which is remote HQ@remoteHQ CO SBS. So look, we're all working online these days and that's gonna stick around for many of us for a long time, right? We need a good way to collaborate online, either synchronously with people or asynchronously people. Remote HQ is your collaboration hub for your team. It's very cool the way this works. You bring all your apps in and set up these remote workspaces, right, where you can have things like a Google Doc and a shared browser and Trello and, you know, Window and all of that stuff and a video conference happening all kind of in the same thing. And it's very customizable. You gotta check this out to see it. They've got videos on their site that explain how this all works. It's fantastic what they've put together here because it just pulls it all together in a way that allows for true collaboration. Right? You got the video chat, you've got your web browser, but it's a shared web browser, right? Everybody gets to use it together. All the things are able to be used together. So you've got this sort of streamlined, all synthesized editing and experiencing, just like you're in the same room together even when you're not, or perhaps especially when you're not. And then you've got your videos that are normally along the side. But again, you can just customize these things. Very, very cool what they've put together here. And it Makes things super easy with these customizable workspaces and searchable digital trails so that you can go through and find what you've done and log all of that stuff. It's fantastic. And of course, you can save all your page layouts so that when you come back to a meeting, boom, that meeting is laid out exactly the way that you're used to the other meeting. The next meeting you go to will be the laid out the way that meeting used to. Right. It's all this very customizable stuff and it persists. Very cool. So you got to head to Remote HQ Co SBS for your free trial. And when you're ready to launch, make sure you use code SBS and you'll get three months for free. Very cool stuff. Our thanks to Remote HQ Co SBS for sponsoring this episode. All right, man, tell us about what you've got.

I will. So again, it's, it's a, A framework. You know, there's a quote. I don't know who said it, but I, I kind of stole it and use it frequently. But, you know, when you want to give encouragement or just. So as a, as a business owner, when you want to give encouragement, you should look out the window and when you want to critique, look in the mirror. Right. And I really think there's something to that because again, you kind of create this cycle. And so when you're trying to learn how to do this and you're trying to shift your framework of looking for encouragement, you need to seek encouragement in other ways. And one of the ways is to recognize small victories every single day. Right?

All right. Really important.

And I think a lot of people miss it. And when I talk to business owners that are maybe struggling and, and I talk to people almost every day, I always been pointing out, like, wow, man, you, like, you're open and you've stayed this. And you found this great location and look at, you have these employees and look how sharp they look in their uniforms or whatever and this and that. Look at your marketing, how cool it looks and your website. But often as we build it and create it, we take it for granted. That just like, oh, that's the way it is. But, you know, you need to look at small things. And that even can be as simple as just getting out of bed in the morning and getting into work. Right?

Yeah.

Making your bed. I mean, and I know it sounds kind of weird, but I, I will tell you, there are going to be times in your entrepreneurial journey that you don't want to get out of bed. And I can tell you, you know, I've. I've told this story on the show a number of times of how I made some bad decisions, and it cost me a million bucks to. To get out of. To make it go away. And I had to go home and tell my wife, and then I had to come back in the next day to my office. And let me tell you, getting out of bed the next day was a huge victory for me. Right?

Yeah.

And so I do recognize that sometimes you just lay in there going, oh, my gosh, I just. I got to deal with.

I got too much to deal with. And it only starts after I get out of bed. Right, like that.

And.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you. If you listen to lots of motivational people, they'll tell you that is. That can be a big deal, especially if you're shooting to get out of bed at a certain hour and get things going, all that kind of stuff. So don't under. Don't underestimate these little things. The other thing that I think is. Is really important if you're looking for encouragement, is to start to create your story, your. Your small business story as soon as possible. Because as you develop your story, the why. Why you're doing this, your culture, and you continually add to it, it's going to encourage you to. To move forward, and you're going to feel better about it, because when someone asks you what you do, you're gonna go, oh, you know, I'm a. I'm a plumber or I'm a web designer. Well, no, you're not. What is behind that? I love this. I did this. My dad taught me how to do this. I'm a small business owner. I create jobs. I do all these kinds of things. Take change how you think about your business, and start building your story, and you will feel more encouraged.

I like it. Yeah, no, I've been doing that. I told you. I'm teaching this class, the business of podcasting. And we started with the end. I've begun. I told the students, here's what we're going to create. Here's what we're going to. And we're sort of building that end of the story together now at the beginning. And it's making our path that much more obvious. It's giving us direction. It's giving us. We have a deadline because we got to finish before the end of the semester. So that's perfect. Deadlines are awesome motivators, right? But. But being able to see the end, knowing what we are going to create. Together, because this class we're gonna. It's the business of podcasting. So we're creating a podcast season. Right? Yeah, it's great. So we had to pick a topic, which we went through, but, you know, now we're focused on why. Why are we picking a topic? Are we wandering aimlessly forward? Well, a little bit, but not entirely aimless.

Right.

Like, we know where we want to get. We might take some detours on the path, but we know where we're going. We're going to release this thing, we're going to make it happen. And is it going to be what we think it is now? Probably not exactly. In fact, if it is, like you said, I think we've failed. We haven't experimented enough, we haven't crashed enough. We're going to make some mistakes.

Yeah, yeah. Are you going to be able to put those online for anybody to watch after it's done?

Absolutely, yeah. No, this is, this is meant to be shared with the world. That's the. That's, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely have to link that.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love that, you know, you get to create your story by knowing how it's going to turn out. I think that's a great concept. And yeah, you're going to adjust along the way, but thinking what you want or where you want to be, I love that.

Thinking. The way I look at it is this way. And I steal this directly from you, you know, the. Write your own story. But it's way easier to edit than it is to build from scratch.

Oh, that's really good.

Right. So if you start with even, even a. A not fully formed end, but like this, we know at this point we're saying, you know, I've broken the class into five groups of five. Each group is going to do one episode. So we're going to make a five episode series. We've picked a topic. I'm not ready to share that yet because it's not public, but we picked a topic yesterday. We are, you know, we're now picking subtopics so that we can all serve the same, you know, bigger topic. And, and each group is going to create their own episode. And so now we know that's what it's going to be. Now, is it possible that each group could create two episodes or one group could create two and another might create three because they've got ideas and they move a little faster than the other groups? Of course it is. And if we wind up with eight episodes, this is not A bad thing. And quite frankly, don't tell my students this. If we wind up with four, that's also success. Like, we've pushed out a podcast series. Is it something that's cohesive? Is there a thing like we can edit the end story, but it's way easier than it just being this blank slate of us finding out what it's going to be once we get there.

I love it. Yeah, you definitely get this concept because even when we went to start this show six years ago, you know, I can just, I still vividly remember you telling me, hey, it doesn't have to be a certain length. It could be. If it's 15 minutes, it's great. If it's a half an hour, it's great. So it's finding, you know, you're already going to be moving in the right path, feeling good about it. If I nailed, I never done a podcast in my life. So, you know, if we had 15 minutes, man, I was like, oh, we nailed it and we've got some great content, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I, I think you, you, you have it, you know, you have it figured out.

The remind reminders don't hurt. And, and so thank you for the encouragement because that's the, the first bit of encouragement that I've gotten in like 10 years. So there you go. So.

Yeah, that's right. I love it. So, and Now I have three, three other things that we're already, by the.

Way, at 21 minutes. So, you know, speaking of how long an episode should be, so there you go.

Yeah, that's perfect. So these three things I think should encourage you and, but you have to sometimes you got to seek them out and one of them is when you can watch your, the people that work for you or work with you succeed. Right? That success, if you're involved in their, in their day to day operation, part of that success is from you. Okay, so think about that. The other thing is when you see this great company, company culture developing and having a positive impact on people's lives, I mean, that's a big deal and you should feel really proud about that and that should be part of your story as well.

I like that I want to do an episode talking about culture because, and I know we've sort of done them in the past, but I want to, I am the master at finding people and putting them together in ways that sometimes creates negative culture. So. And maybe that's not my own fault, maybe it's just how it works out. And, but I think there's there's, there's. It's worth digging into that a little bit. So, yeah, lots of things. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. And so the last one is, you know, when your customers love what you're doing, right. When you get that customer feedback, that, that's your encouragement. So you're building this encouragement engine, if you will, from all these little things that are going on in your personal life, your story that you're creating, that you're repeating that story all the time. So, but these last three things, seeing your people developing that company culture and when your customers love you, if you're not seeing that develop over time, I think you need to sit down and figure out why and then implement changes. Because if those three things don't become part of this encouragement feedback loop that we're trying to build here, it's going to be very difficult for you. And there's something else going on that's not right. And you don't need. Maybe all of them, all of them are not going to happen at one time, you know, maybe at the same time. But those are the little things that will happen as you build this successful business, and that should fuel your encouragement. So I think it's really important to analyze that.

Yeah.

And so the, I guess these are.

The things to pay attention to. The. Like you said, this can be your definition encouragement. Right. Positive customer feedback. That's, quite frankly, that's the closest you're going to get to raw encouragement for you as the business owner. Right. That positive customer feedback. I mean, if you're looking for your boss to give, to circle back to the beginning of the episode, if you're looking for your boss to give you encouragement. Well, we said at the beginning of the episode, you have many bosses. And who are they? They're your customers. So when your customers come to you and say, thanks, you did a great job, that's it. There's your encouragement. That's. That's how it works.

But you just have to realize it, and you have to, you have to.

Realize it in the moment. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Recognize it. So a couple of more points I just want to mention is, you know, critiquing your own actions. I, I mentioned that, you know, look in the mirror, you want to critique, you kind of need to work at it. So you're critiquing in a positive manner. You want to replay things in your head, critique what happened, come up with, okay, how can I change that? And then measure it and look for positive changes. Right. And this should all be in a positive loop in your head. Not something that tears you down. It's something that I'm continually trying to get better at. I yelled at this guy in the office today. Let's say, for example, how can I handle that better next time? So, you know, that's not a positive experience for your employee, or you said something in front of an employee at some time, or you let your anger get. I don't know why I'm focusing on.

This, but just happens you can screw up in front of your people. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And so think about how do I, how do I, you know, go back and say something about that, hey, you know, that we all get angry sometimes I let it slip, whatever. But constantly thinking about that, and that's part of your own personal success story. It's like, wow, you know, I used to yell at my people all the time or whatever if that happens, or I used to this or that, and I made that change. Well, that's, you know, you should feel encouraged from that. Right. And overarching this concept, you kind of have to become a data miner for your own life.

Right?

You have to be able to tease out what you've done, that that's worked, what, you know, what didn't work. And then you just kind of keep building on those small successes, however small they may be, you know, and if the thing is like, to your point, you have to recognize them. If you don't recognize those small successes and you're only striving for home runs every time I'm a big, you know, whatever, I'm making big deals, this. And the thing, without those small successes, I would argue you won't have that strong foundation in place when you get those huge opportunities to hit a home run or whatever, whenever those come around, because you're just not stable. So it builds your confidence over time, you know, and you have this kind of framework of self encouragement because you've seen how it works. You know, man, I feel better and it's easier for me to get up at, you know, 6:00am or whatever. You want to get up in the morning, you know, to use this very simple concept. Or I know I go work out and I, and I go for a half hour every, every morning or four days a week, and that works for me and I feel better. Don't forget that.

Right?

Because you, because you did it. That may be easier for your, your partner, your neighbor, whatever, to get up and run 50 miles a day. I don't know. But it's Maybe it's not easy for you. It's not easy for me. So when you make the, you achieve those things, you gotta find this self encouragement, you know, loop here.

So. Yeah, yeah, so.

So listen to that. Make it part of your story, you know, and tell us how do you encourage yourself? What have you learned over time, you know. Feedbackusinessshow co we would love to share your tips here on the show. If you want to come on the show and talk about what you've done to figure things out and how you've set your, you know, your framework up, I think that would be really helpful for all of us because we're all trying to help each other succeed here.

And if you want an invite to Clubhouse, I have a small number of them. So you if email us. Feedback, Business show and first come, first serve. But I'm happy to, to invite you folks to Clubhouse. I think, honestly, I think you and I could have some fun on Clubhouse too, Shannon. So yeah, let's do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think there's some interesting things. There is a nice, it, it is possibly a nice augmentation of doing a show like this, you know, that's cool. I think, I think so. Yeah, yeah, I, that's.

That sounds encouraging.

Yeah, see, there you go.

And you know, I encourage you to go back and also mine the data that's up at businessshow Co there's, you know, six years of shows and interviews that we've done about, you know, hundreds and hundreds of topics that you will benefit from or maybe your employees will benefit from listening to or your partner or whatever. And I, I really think that, you know, we love helping you and we help ourselves at the same time and we. Thanks for listening.

That's how it works. We all help each other keep living that charmed life, folks. We'll see you next week.