How to Become a Successful Entrepreneur (Entrepreneur Advice)
A conversational interview (Jason with Dean Graziosi) exploring how childhood circumstances and innate disposition jointly shaped Dean's drive (he attributes roughly 50/50 to nature and nurture). Dean recounts early motivation to become wealthy at age ~10 to help his overworked mother, and emphasizes that personal growth and mindset (resilience, purpose, persistence) were decisive in his success. He reframes repeated failures as learning steps or a "paying success tax," arguing that perseverance through successive failures builds the lessons and grit needed to reach the next level.
Chapters
How much of where you are today is a reflection of what you went through when you were younger with your family and with the work that you had to do to get ahead? How much of it was that and how much of it is just who you are as a human being, Something that's inside.
It's like nature versus nurture.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, that's a really great question, and I don't think I've been asked that much, that balance, like nature versus nurture. I think it's, listen, you don't have to have a horrible, horrific childhood and no money and live in a trailer park and have dyslexia to be successful, Right? We see people from all walks of life. I hope my kids are massively successful in their own way. And they're not. They don't have the struggles I've had. Right. But I think for me personally, I would bet to say it's 50, 50. Like I always had this hunger for more. I didn't know how I was going to get there. But if I think back to my oldest memories of wanting to be successful, I bet you it was 10, 11 years old. And I remember, just as a naive word, I remember saying, I want to be rich at 10. But it wasn't because the Internet didn't exist back then. So I didn't see visuals of people in Lamborghinis and flying in yachts and private planes and partying in Vegas. I didn't even know any of that existed for me. I wanted to be wealthy because I watched my mom work three jobs, literally not be there for us, not because she didn't want to. My dad and her split when I was three. He didn't help financially. So she cut hair, cleaned houses and painted houses all week for less than a hundred bucks a week. And she'd come home at 8 o' clock at night and her back would hurt. I mean, she was, I think back, she was in her 30s, her back would hurt, her feet would hurt, her hands hurt from holding paint brushes and cleaning houses and being on her knees scrubbing, right? So. So I remember wanting to be rich at 10 years old to take care of her, right? And I got hair standing up on my arms because I think that's a lot different than just wanting to be rich for rich sake, right? Like I had a freaking purpose, right? That's a perfect word. And so I'd better say it's both. And here's the thing I'd love to share with everybody I know in my 20s, if someone when I wanted to be wealthy, if someone said, hey, you gotta work on your personal growth. You gotta work on your mindset, and then you'll be bulletproof, I'd be like, yeah, whatever, I'm a hustler. Give me the tool, show me how to make the money, I'll do it. I'm not going to jump up and down and practice aligning my chakras and meditate. I'm just going to go. And I was wrong. Like, when I look back in retrospect, what got me there was my personal growth, my mindset of saying, I am retiring, my mom, I am not letting this shit happen, and there's no one going to get in my way. Not a brick wall, not failure, not insecurities, not my friends telling me on my nuts. My sister literally sat me down like an intervention in my twenties, telling me I was a dreamer. Stop. You're not capable of this stuff. You're gonna fail. Right? But what kept me going, it wasn't, yes, I discovered real estate, but I also did well with the tow truck company and fixing cars and selling cars. It was that unstoppable. Like, nothing's getting in my way. And if I could give anyone a gift, that's the gift I'd give.
That may be the most important thing that I've ever heard you say. Because here's the thing. I work with a lot of new entrepreneurs. Now for the first time in my life, I'm working with new entrepreneurs. And I've always been a very big on mindset. Even going back to, like, listening to Zig Ziglar and that guy, just putting positivity into my life and into my mind. But now working with new entrepreneurs, it's one of the things that I notice more than anything is, like, it's not you. You have all the capabilities, like, you can do this. You lack the mindset for that sort of thing. Let me ask you a question related to that. So you talk about, people talk about. And one of the questions I get asked all the time is how if you haven't had any successes, like any significant successes, you've just kind of been faced with failure after failure. How do you create a mindset conducive to greatness? How do you follow.
Awesome, great question. And, you know, it's funny, you're asking me really awesome questions. So I'm glad you're here. I'm glad we're getting it. Because when you ask, it's like, I have 14 different versions, like, feel like they're downloaded once That I want to share. Do you ever have that, like ask questions? I could go down 20 roads right now with that answer. But here's what I'd say is what's the opposite of not getting it done? Right. There's two things. If you don't continue, you can already design your future, right? So if you don't get over the next hurdle, if you don't keep pushing, if you don't overcome the obstacles, I could bet to say it's really easy to decide where you're going to be in five years. You could write it down on a piece of paper, right? You'll be stuck with what you're doing, with the same worries, the same goals, but on the other side of your next failure, the other side of the thing that hurt the most, the person that let you down, the money didn't come through, the marketing that didn't work. If you keep going, on the other side of that is your next level of life. You just don't know which one of those obstacles or failures is your last one. Now, I think of two things. So one, I'm going to go back over to the other thing. I can tell you here a lot of stuff that I share, and this is a silly word, and maybe you've heard me say it before, but what if your failures were nothing more than paying success tax?
Yes, I love that principle, but I.
Want you to really think about that. What if. Let's think about this. What if, Whether it's God, the universe, karma, whatever you believe in. I believe in God. What if God had a success auditor and said, you really want to impact the world? You really want a next level? I'm not giving it to you easy. Listen, Jason, in your life, has anything come easy? Like, have you ever woke up one day and you got the stimulus check in the mail? Someone said, here's a million bucks, let's be partners and go invest. You spend the money any way you want. Your parents and friends came to you and said, I'm so proud you want to be an entrepreneur. I'm all for you. Has it ever gone that way? I think the world thinks that everything I've done has been blocked with adversity, blocked with 500 no's, people letting you down. My own self doubt, saying, you're crazy, you're not going to make it. That's just part of it. So what if those failures were actually designed for you to learn? I can't dabble. I gotta go deeper. This isn't the right thing for me. I Can't trust other people, or I need to trust other people more? What if all that was designed and you don't know if it takes three failures or 13 before all of a sudden you're allowed into your next level? Like, I think of crazy stuff, but what if it was the end of your life and you met your maker, right? And we're sitting down like this, and you got. God says, okay, so tell me how it went. It's like, you know, I was dying to do my own thing and impact more people's lives, but, you know, I tried, and that partner took the money, and it didn't work out. I tried the marketing, and then freaking Facebook changed the algorithm. So God be like, so, what'd you do? Well, you know, it failed. So, you know, I went to this. I got this job, and, you know, it was good. I had a good life. I made good money. I got to be a pretty good dad, pretty good husband, pretty good wife. I picture God being like, oh, my God, another one. You had three more failures, dude. If you would have got over three more in those three more failures, you would have learned what not to do. You would have learned the route. You would have navigated new territory. You would have built more grit. You would have realized that marketing comes before figuring out the product. I had all this design for you, but you gave up. All right, thanks. Next. Like, think about that, right? Yeah.
That's awful. That's an awful feeling. Yeah.
And then you go, oh. Oh, shit. Can I do it over? Like, nah, sorry, sorry. Your time's up next. I'd be like, no. Like, I think about that shit. I still approach things like, I'm broke. I do. I still approach it like, I'm five points down and there's five seconds left. My team is always like, how do you have so much urgency? It's because I want to just keep squeezing out of life everything I can. So what I want to share with you on that note is I'm sorry if you failed. I'm sorry if people let you down. But what if the real me is not sorry? What if that was designed exactly for you? The path you're supposed to be on and all the crap you think went wrong was actually all the ingredients for what's about to go, right? If you have the stamina to keep going. What's up? What's up? Hey, before you go, you need to watch these next few videos. They're absolute game changers. Hurry up and click right over here and watch them, and I'll see you there?
