10 Lessons from Today's Greatest Entrepreneurs on How to Dominate Your Competition

When the other people are happy, you'll be successful. You will be happy. All right, so in this video, we're going to talk about 10 ways where you can smoke your competition. These are 10 lessons from some of the world's top entrepreneurs. Take a look at it. And before we even get started, actually, I do want to share one quote from one of the entrepreneurs that you're going to get in this. And by the way, if you stay till the end, one of my, my top entrepreneur, one of my most favorite ones is going to be at the very end. So stay till the end, check that one out. But before we get started, Warren Buffett once said that the best investment you can make is not in stocks, it's not in businesses, it's actually in yourself. So without further ado, let's begin with number 10. The day we started Apple Computer, IBM was far more powerful in the computer industry than Microsoft and Intel are today. The day we started Apple, because they not only controlled the technologies, they controlled the customer. They had direct contact with the customer. And so we should have just given up. I mean, Woz was— I should have just nudged Woz and said, hey, forget it. We don't have a chance. But we were too stupid to know that. We hadn't gone to business school. We didn't read the Wall Street Journal. We didn't even know what the Wall Street Journal was. I'd never seen a Wall Street Journal. And that served us well. And so I wasted a lot of money, but what I got for that were a lot of successful ideas. Because it's like research in progress, you know, try this, try that, try that. And what it implies is that you have an open mind and you're optimistic that things are going to work out. And a funny thing about an open mind on money, things usually work out because you're headed that. Your whole spirit is about, come on, I can do this, I can do this. And it kind of works out. I think money's meant to be spent, which I know doesn't sound like prudent advice, but if you are not afraid to spend money when it involves betting on yourself— that's the key thing, not the next guy, betting on yourself— chances are pretty good that money is going to make you more money. I'm in meetings a lot. My calendar gets very full with those, and then at night after the kids have gone to bed, I'm on email a great deal. I get I get messages during the day, that's my chance to give long responses, and then over the weekend I send a lot of mail as well. I take 2 weeks a year to just go off and read and think, where I'm not interrupted by work or anything else. I'm just solidly trying to think about the future, and people get to send me things to read as part of that so-called think week. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learnt to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared. The majority of people wait for the masses to do something. When the masses do something, they join in and they join on board. But they forget that the masses are made up of individuals. Those individuals, each on his own, is extremely powerful. If they realize how powerful they are, If you realize how powerful you are and what you could do to make a huge difference that affects everybody around you. Every time you do something for somebody else and ask absolutely nothing in return, you get the greatest high of your life. Nothing exceeds it. And I know about highs. I was a child of the '60s. But doing something for somebody else, asking nothing in return, Nothing could possibly surpass that. We have direct access to our customer because I'm into social media and I want to hear feedback from parents, how they like our products and what they would like to change and how they would like to innovate on these products. To have like a brand that's for parents that, you know, is made by parents and then we're listening to parents on how to One of the things that companies do or startups do, they come up with an idea, they'll Google it, and if they don't see it in the first 2 pages, they think it's original. You've got to go back, right? Because over the past 15 years, there's so many different businesses that have tried and failed. You have to go back and find those and learn from those. So you've got to understand all the implications and you have to learn from history. And so that's what The we do. So you're saying that you're constantly looking best at the competition? advice I can give you on a video before talking to you or emailing with you is that you've got to find out the history of people who have tried your idea. Because there's a 99.99999% chance that your idea has been tried before. That's not a good reason not to start it because you might be able to outperform them, but you better learn from the history of your idea. Because you know what they say about people who don't learn from history. So I come from a centered place. I come from a focused place. I come from compassion. It's just, it's just my nature. I come from a willingness to understand and to be understood. Right. And I come from wanting to, to, to connect. I mean, the secret of that show for 25 years is that people could see themselves in me all over the world. They could see themselves in me. I always understood that there really was no difference between me and the audience. At times I might have had better shoes, but at the core, the core of, of what really matters, that we are the same. And you know how I know that? Because all of us are seeking the same thing. Everybody wants to fulfill the highest, truest expression of yourself as a human being. In capitalism, when you have a wonderful business, it's like having an economic castle. And the nature of capitalism is that people want to come in and take your castle. Perfectly understandable. I mean, if I'm selling television sets or something, there's going to be 10 other people that can try and sell a better television set. If I have a restaurant here in Omaha, people are going to try and copy my menu and give more parking and take my chef and so on. So capitalism's all about Somebody coming and trying to take the castle. Now what you need is you need a castle that has some durable competitive advantage, some castle that has a moat around it. And that moat— that's one of the best moats in many respects— is to be a low-cost producer. But sometimes the moat is just having more talent. I mean, if you're the heavyweight champion of the world and you keep knocking out people, you've got a competitive advantage as long as you can keep doing it. And it's very profitable if you're the one that happens to be able to do it. I tell you, I'm lucky to know A lot of famous people— Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg. I know all of them. I would like to share with you that those people— the difference between those people and other people— they are always optimistic for the future. They never complain. They always try to solve the problems of the others. And I think Where is the opportunity? The opportunity always lies in the place where people complain. Some people sit there complaining, you think, hmm, if I can solve that complaint, that's the opportunity. Don't complain. Let the other people complain. Those people complain, those people who fail. All right, so I hope you enjoyed this. Let us know in the comments who you think is the best entrepreneur ever. So it doesn't have to be in the 10, but ever. Right? We just gave you our top 10, and these can change from time to time, but let us know in the comments who you like the most, and maybe we'll do a video on them in the future. So again, don't forget to leave a comment, subscribe, tell your friends about it, and we'll see you in the next video.