The Locus Of Control - FDDTC #24

Hey, guys, this is Devin Zander, your host. You're listening to the From Delivery Driver to CEO podcast. Today I'm actually playing a recording for you from a talk I gave at a conference a few years ago.

Whoops.

A few years ago.

Here's your girl.

So this is called the Locus of Control. It is one of the favorite talks I've ever done. So I'm going to go ahead, play this and hope you guys enjoy.

All right, I'll let you go ahead and get after it. Man, this is gonna be a really good mindset and methodology presentation that Devin's put together, so I'll let him take it away.

All right, guys, so number one, sorry, that I'm talking about mindset. I'm gonna get to that in just a second. Number two, Justin, you better throw some fucking fire after this, bro, because people are gonna be like, jesus Christ, this dude just taught his mindset. I need some fire ass ecom shit so I can make some money. But today, what I may be discussing with you guys is something that I've taught our customers before. I think it's extremely important. I'll go a little bit into why it's important in the next slide. But today we will be discussing the locus of control, which most people have never heard of. It's totally okay. And we'll also be discussing how it affects your life. And this is super important. But first, I want to talk to you guys about who I am. As Tony said, I am Devin Zander. Fun fact. Tony and I are getting burritos after this. In fact, we made plans to get burritos tonight. Forgetting about this somehow. It's just like one of those things that randomly slips your mind. Would have been a little weird if we didn't show up, but I'm the CEO of SCUP. We've been around since December of 2015. I founded this company because I had owned a Boston Terrier Shopify store. This was a long time ago. And I was like, dude, what the hell? I can't make good upsells. Why can't I make good upsells? And I was using, no offense, Bold. Bold's a great company, but in 2015, the Reps app was pretty shit. Sorry, guys. So, hey, we founded one, and that's how we got in the world of Shopify apps. Now, my partner store at Scup, we use this to base all of our training to make our apps, things like that. Currently making $1.8 million per month. It's been running since 2016, which I think is kind of important because sometimes stores aren't around for a long time and they make good money and that's totally cool. And learning their strategies is really good. But something that's really important is also seeing how to make stores grow for long amounts of time and remain consistent. So that's something that's very important to us. We also have done over $20 million in core sales in the past few years. I know that probably doesn't mean much to you guys, but I want you to understand is that we kind of know marketing. We know what we're talking about. Our apps five star rating on the Shopify App Store, 96% satisfaction ranking on our theme. Please check it out. Theme is great. Best thing ever, 100 million plus in customer earnings. And I also understand E commerce from every single aspect. So when most people teach E commerce, it's because they do it. And that's great. Those are the best teachers. But I also have a lot of, I guess, perspective on different ways that happens because I've worked with tens of thousands of store owners through courses, apps, themes, all these different kinds of things. So I understand how it works and I've seen it from multiple perspectives, not just from doing it myself. And the reason why I'm talking about mindset today is because I actually think mindset and hard work is more important than knowledge. So for those of you guys in the chat, we got a couple hundred people on. Let me know, give me just a one. If you've ever bought a theme. Sorry, a theme. I was reading Tony's comment. If you've ever bought a course. Ever bought a course. So we should get a ton of ones here. If you guys aren't saying a one, you're probably lying. A lot of people are saying 1, 1, 1, 1, 1st, 1, 1, 1. Now this might be like a little insulting or you might take this the wrong way. Please don't. Because my honest intention is to help you get results, change your life and go from where you are to where you want to be. Courses aren't necessarily the answer. It's really good to get courses. I sell courses. And yet here I am saying the course isn't going to change your life. And really all you need is one course. And anybody who is on today, I haven't gone through their courses, but I'm sure that their courses are more than enough to get you where you need to be. Now the thing is, is people are always looking for that golden nugget, that next course. But my question to you is, do you Think you've already bought, let's say like 15 courses, 20 courses, 100 courses. Do you really think number 21 or number 101 is going to be that magical answer, that one thing that changes your life? It's not, and I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but for you to find success, what you're going to need to do is reshift your entire outset on work, success, self and kind of life. I didn't even talk about the photos. I have to mention, guys, that this is my beautiful fiance. We just got engaged. Sorry. And to mention her, she's wonderful. Her name's Patricia. But now that we've introduced Patricia. The reason why I think this is also important, guys, is because with the knowledge is good and feel free to digest as much of it as you want. But your mindset and your hard work is what's really going to make that difference. Because at the end of the day, a lot of our courses do. They're the same. I hate to point us out, but we're the same. So today we're going to be talking about the locus of control, as I mentioned, and there are two types of people in this world. There are two locus of controls. There's the external locus of control, and this is most people, and you could almost say they're cynical or something like that. And then there's the internal locus of control. So the external locus of control. Things happen to you, so shitty situations happen. And instead of saying, how can I fix this? What you do is say, God, why is this happening to me again? Why the fuck? Why me? You know, it's frustrating, but it's the wrong way to look at things. People with an external looks of control think they have no control over their future. They say, why bother? And they think that the world happens to them instead of them putting, you know, their impact onto the world. And that's how most people are. It's a little silly, but I'm going to get into why that's a thing in just a second. And then there's the internal locus of control. So this is where you need to be. And this is. You make things happen, happen. So instead of saying, why bother? Like, God, it's already. So let's pretend, let's go with an E commerce thing, right? God, this niche is so saturated. Why bother? It's like, oh fuck yeah, look what I can do. I'm going to get in there, I'm going to fucking do better than all these guys. I'm going to show Them what's up? Right? And by the way, guys, I did forget to mention this, but I can take e commerce related questions at the end. So if you guys want to do e comm or marketing related questions at the end, let's do it. But we'll save those for the end there. And the most important thing about people with an internal locus of control, though, is they make things happen. They set out, they put their eyes on something and they make it happen. Now I want to give you a tale of two dogs. So this is a real story, by the way. I'm not just. And it wasn't me, I'm not the scientist, I'm not shocking dogs, but a tale of two dogs. A team of scientists put two dogs in two separate cages. And then what these scientists would do is they would ring a bell, right? And when they ring the bell, the dog's floors would become electric, so it would shock the dogs. So dog number one in the first cage, they could escape, right? Like there's this partition in the middle of the box. And that dog, look at him, dude, he's like, he's got ups. He's over that, onto the no shock side. Dog number two, there's a big X blocking him and he cannot escape. He just sits there and he gets shocked. Ah, poor dog, like, kind of sucks. And what dog number two did this is the dog who couldn't jump over to the other side is he developed something called learned helplessness. And this dog endured pain even though he could escape at any time. Because later on, what these scientists did was they took dog number two and they put him in dog number one's cage. So this dog now has the ability to jump over the fence to escape and to escape pain, to get away from the shock. But he didn't do it because he has that external locus of control. At first he had no control over what was happening to him, right? So now, even though he does have control and he can't escape the situation, he doesn't. He just sits there and he endures the shock. And this happens with like a lot of entrepreneurs. And I don't want to get into this too deeply because it's totally something that I'm not qualified to discuss. But a lot of bad shit happens to people in their childhoods and things like that. And they might have parents or something that say, oh, you can't do that, you're not good enough. Your friends tell you, oh, you can't do that, you're not good enough. And a lot of that Comes from a place of envy, because these people actually aren't strong enough to do it themselves. So they're trying to put you down, but because you've been conditioned that so fucking long, and they keep telling you that you're this dog. You're like, shit, maybe I can't. And then you just sit there instead of putting yourself out there, and you endure the pain even though you could escape at any time. And a lot of us have seen this image, right? Or you've heard it. You know, someone's given something similar to this, and it's the elephant that's attached by this tiny little stake. And look, this stake is like this big, right? It's in the ground a few feet. This is a gigantic elephant. He's thousands of pounds, but he thinks he can't move because he was trained to be this way. And this is how so many people are living their lives. And I see this every single day in all kinds of forms. So we have, like, tens of thousands of customers. And like I said, we have people who buy our themes. We have customers on our E commerce store. We have customers who buy our apps, our courses, like, all these different kinds of things. And. And I see it. It's the learned helplessness barrier, right? So so many people. And I'm just gonna go with you guys as an example, because a lot of you are getting into E Commerce. You want to start getting into it. And I'm not doing this to be an asshole. I'm doing this because you deserve success. And the first step to success is identifying these problems, identifying these barriers so you can destroy them and get to that pot of goal, right? Anyways, so all these people right here, there's this little wall there, but they think they can't get around it. It's this small wall, but they don't realize because they're too lazy to go and peek around the corner. And they say things like, let's just wait here until they tell us what to do, otherwise we might get in trouble. But on the other side, it's just a literal pot of gold. There's nothing in the way. And I see this all the time, especially with the E commerce coaching space. So many people have these silly questions. It's like, should I do CBO or abo? Like, that's being asked a lot. And, hey, that's a fair question. But a lot of the time when you're asking this, you might be waiting. You might be pondering on it for days, weeks, a fucking month, but it's like why didn't you just test it? And I know not everybody has money to throw around, but you think you can't do it. You think you're not capable of doing this yourself. But all you had to do was test it. And, hell, maybe that pot of gold was right there on the other side. But still you have this learned helplessness barrier. Where you think that you can't do it for some reason. You think, oh, man, there's nothing I can do. I'm stuck here. I don't know. It's totally obnoxious. And then there's, like, so many different things, right? This is silly, because you're a pro, but what about the beginner? Well, here's the thing is you've already gone through the courses and stuff like that, right? You said you've gone through the courses. I asked that question. And like I mentioned, almost every single thing you need to know is covered in those courses. Unless it's a really shit awful course, which, I don't know, maybe those exist. You will be able to just get out there and try it. And remember. What about the people who didn't have courses in the first place? They just went out there and did it. There was no roadmap. And this is that kind of question, right? You're thinking that you aren't in control. You can't get out there and make it happen. Now, I want to talk to you or give you a little example about Muhammad Ali and Gorgeous George, okay? Gorgeous George. A lot of you guys don't know who he is. But back in 1960. I think it was 1960, don't quote me on this. Muhammad Ali was becoming a big deal. He had just won the Olympic gold medal. And, you know, people were starting to hear about him. But he wasn't the household name he is today. And he probably never would have been if it wasn't for Gorgeous George. Now, don't get me wrong, he still would have been the best boxer, like, of all time. But greats come and go, and they don't really ring a bell or stick around like Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali did. Now, the reason he did is because of what he learned from Gorgeous George, okay? Because remember in the 1960s after he had just won this medal. He wasn't huge yet. Nobody even cared about him. In fact, when he went back to his hometown after winning that medal. He wasn't even allowed to eat at the restaurant, right? Because it was whites only or something. People were assholes to him. Even though this guy, he's one of those famous people in the world now. But I got a quick video with you guys. I'm gonna share it here and hope it doesn't bore you guys too much. I'm gonna meet myself.

He was not great at talking. He was not great a talker till he met Gorgeous George in Las Vegas.

I saw a wrestler once named Gorgeous George. And the place was jam packed with people cars. Was an eye not enough for mouth. They had hated Gorgeous George.

They wanted him be.

But they paid $100 for ringside seat. So Gorgeous George walked out with his pretty silver hair. And he was walking so proud. He was throwing popcorn at him. He said, ah, your bums. He was hollering at the fans, oh, I don't care nothing about you.

And like, I can't lose. If I lose, I'll cut all my blonde locks in the ring.

Look at my beautiful blonde hair. If he mess up the her, I'll kill him. I'll annihilate the bum.

I can't lose. I'm the greatest.

So I got this from Gorgeous George. I said, this is a good idea. Look, he's getting rich. So I start talking. I am the greatest. I cannot be beat. I'm too pretty to be a fighter. What he's doing is he's taking the American culture, what's in the air at the time. And he invents something called Cassius Clay, the greatest. It's a self creation.

The birth of the guy that we know today. Now there are two types of people like we talked about. Muhammad Ali could have been like, man, I wish I was like Gorgeous George. I wish I was like that. I wish I drew crowds like that. I wish I had that attitude. I wish I was that person. But he did not do that. He said, I determine my future. Look what I can do. I make things happen. And he became the person that he is today. Now, he could have sat there, he could have been, why am I not this person? But he didn't. Because you are in control of your life. And you need to let that sink in. So this goes back to one of the questions that we saw earlier, which was, this is silly because you're a pro, but what about beginners? And for that I have an answer, because I knew people would ask that. Now, this is from the book Grit. I'll put that in Chat by Angela Duckworth. Absolutely outstanding book. Okay? Absolutely outstanding. And basically, what this chart is saying is. And I'm going to go through it with you, so don't worry. So I'll help You understand? But what it's saying is effort is so much more valuable than talent. So it doesn't matter that I may be more talented or he may be more talented. Because though. And obviously, you know, I'm not part. But those who can put in more effort, typically, now, not all the time. Some people are just fucking obnoxious, okay? But typically effort will outweigh skill, and the basic. Or. Sorry. Will outweigh talent. And the basic way that you can see this is that effort is in the formula to twice. Now, talent times effort is how you get your skill level. So let's say that I have three times talent, but I have 10 times effort. And this other guy has 10 times effort. Or, sorry, 10 times talent. This part, I need to, like, write this down. I'm so sorry, guys. This part, when he gets into the math, I always screw it up. So talent times effort equals skill. Let's say I have 10 times talent, but I have 20 times effort. So it's 200, right? And some other guy has 5 times talent, but 50 times effort, it's also 200, right? So even though the first guy is much more talented, since the second guy is much more effort or putting much more effort in, he can achieve more. Because then you get skilled and then you multiply it again by effort, and that's how you get achievement. So I know that's gonna be a lot of over a lot of you guys heads because it's difficult to explain really quickly, but the basic thing is effort appears twice in achievement. Now, this is not something that I'm just making up a lot of research done by Angela Duckworth and her team. Absolutely amazing book. I definitely recommend you guys check out Grit. But the moral of the story is those who work harder often achieve more than those who are just talented. Now, if you have a talented person who also works really hard, then it's like magic, right? But effort is the most important thing that you can do in your business. And so many times people will ask this question, what's the minimum amount of hours I can put in to make this work? If you've ever asked that, it's like, but why? Right? It doesn't matter. And I know that some of you guys don't have all the time in the day to do things, but you need to spend every single waking hour you can trying to better your life, or else you will settle for mediocrity. Because you. What people mean when they ask that question is like, well, how much or how little can I change my life? Or how little can I change my habits and find success? That's the wrong question. If you want to change, you can't have those same habits or else you're going to be the same person. I hope that makes sense. But someone's asking about the author, Angela Duckworth. It's great. I just put it in the chat for you guys. Now, I want you guys to know that the amount of wisdom, I guess, or how smart you are also isn't set. It's not static. You're not stuck at the level you are now. You. You can, and you probably do get smarter every single day. Think of it as like a video game, okay? You play a video game a lot. You sucked at first. You got better. It's the same with everything in life. It's the same with E Commerce. It's the same with just how strong or how good your brain functions. And it's all because of this thing called neuroplasticity. Now, we're going to ignore this bottom part about things not changing. But if you want to get smarter, if you want to get better at things, your brain is ready to do it. All it needs is a little help from you. So here's how neuroplasticity works. Here's how you can get a little smarter is by doing synaptic activation. Now, you want strong, infrequent activation. Way you can do that is by getting on events like this. Tony, thank you so much for hosting. Can't wait to get tacos with you later tonight. And what happens when you start to do this frequently. Okay. When you start learning frequently is synaptic structures in your brain start to change, which means your brain's making little new connections. Everything's moving around in there, and everything's running a little more efficiently. Then these connections strengthen over time. However, there are issues now. Seminar style training is not enough. No offense, Tony. What we're on now is like a seminar style training. And what that means is you cannot just go to a seminar one time and then expect to be smarter and expect to be different. It's just not how it works. You need to constantly reinforce what it is that you're doing. Now, there's two ways to do that. Number one is to keep researching it. Number two is to keep practicing it. Okay. Absolutely huge. You need ongoing reinforcement. And then you can use things like technology to keep activating your synapses, which I honestly like. I don't even know what that means. I'll be completely honest with you guys, and I'm not Afraid to admit it, but applied learning is a must. Now, applied learning means two things. Number one, it means as you're learning something and you're, like, reading it, for instance, or you're taking Justin's training after this, you need to imagine how you're going to be implementing it into your life and into your business. And then number two is just actually implementing it into your business. But the reason it's so important is learning is experience. How the hell is. Who switched my slides? You guys got to calm down. Learning is experience. Everything else is just information. So you can learn all you want, right? But if you're not actually implementing it, it's useless. It's just information, okay? And it's so great to know things, but it's like you're kind of wasting your time if you're learning things and you're not using it. It's like, well, I'll save it for a rainy day. Maybe I get on who Wants to be a Millionaire or something like that, right? It's like, it's cool. Don't get me wrong, it's cool, but it's not going to help you in your life unless you're actually implementing it. It's just information. It takes up space in your brain, and it doesn't do anything for you. Final words. I really think this is true. It all comes down to how willing you're hard to work and how much you're willing to put in. And, guys, I hope that you've enjoyed being bored by mindset and a little bit of science, but whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right. And that mindset is going to be huge in your success. And trust me, guys, I've been doing this a long, long time. All right? Whether you think you can. Anyways, I didn't come up with that quote, what you did. Henry Ford, this guy, super cool. Never met him, but heard good things. Heard bad things, too. Who knows? What's up, guys? Let's do questions. Now. Someone says, can you introduce a book for mindset? I actually have a free book on mindset. I can do it as a handout if you want, Tony. I sent it to you earlier, actually. You cool with that?

Is phenomenal. So I'm totally cool with it. Thank you for asking.

Ladies and gentlemen, the success Handbook is going to be shared with you. So this is actually for people who go through one of our courses. So when it says stuff about the course, just, well, it says, like the course title. You can just ignore that because Just take it for what it is. I put that in the handout section for you guys. It's the success handbook. It's pretty cool. What's your biggest loss on doing E Commerce? Biggest loss? I mean, honestly, we haven't had much of a loss. The big thing, I guess. Last year, one of our suppliers totally, like, fucked up, and we had to refund hundreds of thousands in orders, so there's that.

Always fun.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, Cool guy. Cool guy. Oh, yeah. You know what that's like, you know, like, you know, something.

50 orders or a hundred orders that just, like, haven't been shipped out. And I thought they were. That was a great time.

Yeah, bro. It's a shame. All right, guys, come on. We got four minutes for questions, and then Justin's going to. Come on. What's your Instagram? I don't do Instagram. I have an Instagram, but I'm not gonna give it to you because I don't really do it. I don't post, so I'd be wasting your time. How can you easily bounce back from failure and rock it again? Well, I'm glad you asked because I have a great recommendation for you. This little book, it's called the Obstacle Is the way. Back in 2015, I spent $50,000 developing a software, and I had no idea how to develop software. I didn't know how to do anything like that. And I was like, you know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna develop software. So I hired an engineer off upwork. I didn't know what to look for. I didn't know what was going on. Like, six months later, I was like, hey, so much software, dude. Because he'd been billing me $10,000 a month this whole time. And he was like, oh, one more day, one more day. He wasn't like, Indian or anything. I don't know why I did that word accident. But one more day. And I was like, dude, I need someone to help me. I need someone to look at this guy and see if he's actually doing anything. So I actually got David Abrams, Tony to take a look at it, and it turns out the guy was an iPhone app developer, and he did zero work. So five months later or so, I was $50,000 gone. And back at the time, I only had, like, $100,000 to my name. So I know some people are like, well, $50,000, you guys are rich. Well, you know, first of all, no. Second of all, I didn't have that much money. And, yeah. So I found this book the same that day because I was like, well, I have two options, right? I can be upset and cry about it, and that's not going to do anything. It's going to take up, like, your mental space and you're never. It's like literally never going to give you a return. Being upset will never give you a return on anything. Or I can take this as a learning experience, get back at it and make something happen. And now we've got a software company that fucking kicks ass with tons of great customers. So it's pretty good. But what helped me make that shift is the Obstacles the Way by Ryan Holiday. Now, this is an absolutely outstanding book. Any single person on this call who wants to be an entrepreneur, failures will happen to you. This call will get you through them every single time. I swear to God, I could. I will. Literally. This is the book. This is the key, guys. It's insane. Okay, what was the first business book that inspired me? Oh, that's a good question. I think Rework by the. Rework by the guys from Basecamp. It's pretty good. I read that back in, like 2013, 2012, and that was pretty good. Tony typed a book in chat. Guys, it's the Obstacles the Way by Ryan Holiday.

When does Facebook remove daily ad spend limit? If you created a brand new business manager and ad account, they have to see, like, at least weeks, if not months of like, consistent or, like, promising ad spend and also you not violating the policies. And then if you have an existing account where you already have, you know, spent some money on it or you've had it for a while, it's typically capped at 5,000 a day, which you can go ahead and request it to be raised. Depends on, you know, your relationship with Facebook or, you know, your previous ad spend. But I've gotten my accounts raised pretty easily in the past. I haven't had too much of an issue with it.

All right, Kamal's saying, I forgot to answer his question, bro. You missed my entire rant. Okay? The way that you bounce back is you have to view failures lessons, dude, because there's zero return on interest. Like, you can sit around, you can be upset, you can be like, oh, fuck, why me? Which, you know, remember, the whole point of this was not to be this guy that deals with those upsets, but you or those losses and shit like that. But you're like, okay, well, what can I do about it? How can I turn this into a win? How important do I think school is? That's a good question. I think school is important for the right kind of people. I dropped out of high school. I don't say that to be an Internet cliche. I say it because my dad kicked me out and then I moved in with my grandma and I was a good student. I mean like I could have done fine but I live with my grandma and I wanted to play World of Warcraft all day, so I did. But school I think is important for the right reasons. If you want to be an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor or you know, an accountant, these are all really good professions. If you want to do it, I think school is a great option. If you want to go for an MBA or something like that, I wouldn't do it. I think real world experience is better. What drives me, really what drives me is the opportunity to live life the way I want and hopefully allow others to do the same. Also, I'm really into E commerce. The reason that my software company exists is because we always want to be on the cutting edge. I think we're moving towards this really interesting place where AI is going to drive a lot of Internet sales and E commerce and I think it's very cool to be a part of that. Pretty soon what you guys do is you're going to be able to just launch ads on Facebook. Facebook's going to instantly find targeting for you. It's going to instantly do all this and it's already starting to with cbo but and like the dynamic creatives and all these different things. But we're trying to do that for your upsells and shit like that as well. So that really drives me. And then another one is when I met my fiance, soon to be wife. I hope you know she fucking deals with me. I told her everything I do, I do for us so we can never have to live the way that my grandma did when she raised me by herself. So there's that guys, there's more questions but I got to respect Justin and I'm going to let him on. Thank you guys so much for your time. I seriously appreciate it. You guys are all awesome. Round of applause for Tony for these events, dude, doing them absolutely free to help everybody out there during these tough times. And guys, E commerce is banging right now. So you guys are in the right place with the right people. You guys are all awesome. I hope you guys can look within when you're doing those external or fucking know those external looks of control moments. Look within, recognize when this is happening and then practice that internal looks of control so you can kick ass and dominate your life. Take it easy, guys. And thank you again, Tony, for having. Enjoy your night, everyone.

Thank you for showing up. I appreciate it. Devin absolutely killed it.