One Thing Entrepreneurs Get Wrong | Be More Confident and Crush It

What if the secret, one of the biggest secrets to success is not working on your weaknesses? What if working on what you're already good at and becoming amazing at it is how you get to your next level of life? I'm not good at a lot of things. I still can't spell. If I literally typed you one paragraph and I didn't spell correct it, I promise you there'd be 30 misspelled words. I spell so bad that if the spell checker in word or in an email could talk, it'd be like, dude, I have no clue what you're saying. Like, literally, I will try to spell a word three different times so the spell check can pick it up and try to correct it. And it still finally I just delete it and put a word like happy, joy, excited. Like that's how bad I am. And I used to be so insecure. Especially when I had teachers like Ms. Thompson in seventh grade say, just sound it out. Are you stupid? Or something, like literally. But I know that's not my gift. I know how to tell stories. I know how to tell stories. So I might tell a story with a lot of misspelled words. If I tell a story good enough through authenticity to impact lives, I can pay someone who's great at spelling and editing to clean up my mess. And then I can impact the lives lives with my book. Take that money and pay for my shortcomings. Now, you might say I don't have money to pay, but here's the part I want you to tell you share with you. You might be able to barter. Maybe you're someone who's a great at being organized, but just think on the creative side. Like, my daughter will draw a picture like, oh my God, where did that come from? I couldn't think of that. She's creative, intuitively creative in that way. I can't do that. Maybe you're the creative and someone else is the organizer. Can you swap? Don't try to get good. Listen, I mean, think about this. It's because we're taught in school, we have to be alone, figure things out. It's the biggest fraud we've ever been told. Taught to work on our weaknesses. What a lie. So we can feel crappy about ourselves. I mean, think about this in life, if I'm good at math and you're good at science and someone else is good at something else, we just collaborate and we all rise, right? If I'm good at marketing and you're good at accounting and someone else is good at Operations. We get together, we can start an amazing company the way we're taught in school. We're supposed to be good at all of them. It's not possible in school. If I was good at math and someone else was good at English and someone else with history, if we all got together and shared each other's answers and helped each other all get better, you know what that'd be called? Cheating. But in the real world, that's the only way we get ahead. Talk about a conflict. Talk about messing with your mind is like, I'm supposed to be good at all of it. Bullshit. I am so bad at so many things, but I got really good at a few things, and that's all I needed to live a life that I never thought was possible. You know, I gotta tell you a story. There's a gentleman named Ned Hallowell. Ned Hallowell has been on Oprah seven times. You might recognize the name. He's Harvard trained, he's a Harvard professor. And Oprah called him the world's leading ADD doctor, right? So I became friends with Ned. Good dude. And I'm talking to Ned one time, and you know me, I'm like, well, you know, hopefully you know me now, might have a little ADD myself. And I wanted the answer, like, how do you cure so many people of ADD and if they don't need meds, you get them off the meds? He said, I just take a different approach. I'm like, okay, so what is that approach? He said, so let me give you an example. And this is the story he told me a long time ago. He said, let's picture Johnny's in school and teacher says, time to read today. Johnny in class. And Johnny sits down and they say, read these 10 pages. We'll wait here. And they open a book. And all of a sudden Johnny's trying to read and he just can't sit there. His ADD is kicking in. He's looking around, he's trying to figure out something to do. It's a little uncomfortable. He starts tapping his foot and his teacher says, hey, Johnny, you better sit there and read. Time's almost up. All of a sudden Johnny gets up. Now, not only does he have add, he's a little hyper. So now he's got adhd. And then we medicate him and we hope that he slows down. So he said, medication is for some people. He's not anti medication. He just likes to do this other strategy first. He said, I take a different approach. You see, I talk to Johnny's Family, friends and teachers. And I find out what Johnny is good at. Sometimes it's his sports, sometimes it's always one, like one of his of his classes, right? He's good at math or history or art or science. Because I find out what Johnny's already good at and we just help him. We collectively work together to help him be amazing at that. So Johnny's good at science. We get him science books, we help at home, we help with the teachers, we help friends that they can help. And all of a sudden, Johnny starts getting so good at science that you know what happens? Johnny's confidence goes up, his security goes up. He doesn't feel like he's going to be rejected or made fun of. He feels amazing about himself. His confidence is high. He goes, guess what? You fast forward three months later, Johnny's sitting in the classroom reading the book. He said, we had a confidence problem. He's like, add is a gift, Dean. You have it. He literally looked at me, goes, you have it. ADD is a gift. He goes, the biggest problem with ADD is ADD is you got a Ferrari engine and you have bicycle brakes. And I thought that was really funny. And he said, all I do is teach you how to put the brakes on. And when you have ADD and you got a Ferrari engine and you understand the brakes, it is an absolute gift. He said, but it's not a gift if you don't understand how to build the confidence. And that it kind of anchored in, like his message anchored in with me so much because I felt, how could I be a businessman when I can barely spell? How can I be a businessman when I have dyslexia and reading is really difficult? I listen to books. I listen, I watch videos, right? I speak from my heart. I don't have a script today. I have some notes here, but I don't have a script because that's me. That's my gift. I was judging myself by an outdated scorecard. Johnny was being judged by an outdated scorecard. Johnny could be brilliant at a million things if we fuel what he's good at. So what have you been holding on to? What have you been thinking you're not good at and you're trying to get better when you just gotta ignore it and say, this is it, this is me. This is who I'm gonna be. When time allowed, I would do high end masterminds. So I get around to Tom, and I would bet to say at the time, Tom is 65 years old. Let's just say, awesome, dude, Love the guy. So I Get around to Tom. And at the time, Tom had got into real estate, and he had done four real estate deals, and he had averaged about $15,000 of profit now on each one of his deals. Now he had retired. He was transitioning into this, and Tom wanted to take this to a whole nother level. And he was having so much fun. He was so good at finding deals and flipping them and making it happen. It was so cool. But when it gets around to Tom, I said, hey, what can I help you with? Of all the things he could ask me, all the things he can ask me, you know what Tom said? He goes, dean, I am so unorganized. I'm so unorganized. I mean, I could clean my car. And a week later, it's a mess. Three days later, it's a mess. He goes, my home office, now that I'm doing this business from home, it looks like a bomb went off. I try to straighten it up, and it looks bad again. He said, so you know what I need to do? I need to get a filing cabinet, and I need to just spend the day and fill out all those little tabs and get an organization process and get. And he's telling me all these things he's going to do. And when he was done, I looked at Tom and I said, hey, Tom, you done? I said, you're full of crap. And he's like, what do you mean? I said, you're not going to do those things. I said, tom, how old are you? He said, 65, 67? I said, can I be honest with you? You're going to be a slob and sloppy for the rest of your life. And he looked at me like, wow, I paid all that money to hear that. Thanks. And I said, but celebrate it. That's who you are. I said, I would bet to say, brother, that you. You probably got told you were sloppy by your mom, sloppy by your teachers, and maybe your wife feels that way now. And I watched him go from a smile to, like, emotional. He'd been carrying this baggage around of being unorganized and sloppy. And he wore it as, like, a scar. And I could tell, like, literally about to have tears come out of his eyes. And I said, time to let it go, man. Because you know what, Tom? You've got four deals under your belt. You've only been doing this for a few months. You have a unique ability of finding deals. He goes, oh, my God. Yeah, I find this. He got all excited. I do this. I do. This is how I find these deals. I said, you have a great, unique ability of putting people together to rehab. Oh, my God, yes. I use my cousin and this guy and this guy and this guy, and he's on fire. I said, what are you doing next? He's like, oh, I got two more deals in the pipe. This brilliant, amazing guy who's doing this incredible things in his retirement has the ability to ask me any question, and he wants to fix this broken part of him that means nothing. I said, tom, let me ask you a question. What if you did just one extra one of those deals a year? One extra. Do you think you could take that money and pay someone to come in and organize and structure and keep you on track? And I know that sounds so simple. You're like, oh, yeah, why wouldn't everybody do that? But they don't. We just think, no, no, I have to be better at organization. No, go do another deal, generate revenue, and pay someone to do it. Do you know? I had the ability to follow up with Tom. He had a breakthrough. He had tears in his eyes. His eyes were filling up, I should say. His eyes filled up with tears. And I helped him let go of that holding on till he was bad at something and let it go and let him recognize how great he was at something. So during the break or during that night, he went and called his wife and told her, and she got emotional, and she apologized to him, and she said, I guess she was finishing a school career, she was a teacher, and. And she was an organized teacher. And he said to her, she said, one of them said, why hire? Why don't I do it for you, as long as I get a shopping spree once a month? And literally, we found out I could get emotional. We found out like a month later, two months later, that she was organizing everything. She got all the receipts. He wasn't in charge of any of it. He went and did his thing. He found the deals, he got them rehabbed, he flipped it. She had the organization, the paperwork, the title, and they made this magical team. And he never had to worry about his weakness ever again. What weakness are you focusing on? What's holding you back? You don't get confidence when you work on things that you're not good at. I'm going to encourage you to go deeper on what you're already good at, to realize that there's another level of life waiting for you. When you realize that the strengths you have is really your superpower. And all we have to do to invoke that superpower is to fuel the right wolf to fuel the inner hero and recognize these pieces. Recognize these pieces that fuel that inner villain, that tell us that we can't. You know, the modern word in today's vocabulary is imposter syndrome. I've heard that more in the last three years than anything I've ever heard. I do it, but I have imposter syndrome. I feel like I'm an imposter. Where does that come from? Like, it's not just imposter. Go upstream a little, that inner villain, killing your confidence, feeling like you're not good enough. What about if we bust that inner villain, raise our confidence, that imposter syndrome just fades away, it just dissolves.