Top Life Lessons from the Successful Entrepreneurs

I've spoken to over 400 founders, billionaires, authors, millionaires, whatever you want to call them. And here is what I have learned. Number 1, on the topic of the billionaires, the first thing is they are really fast communicators. And when I say really fast, I mean exceptionally fast. For example, I had met a billionaire at a conference and it was 3 AM his time. He was traveling. He said, give me your number, call me in the next minute. That is the level of their communication style. It's very fast and they'll just pick up the phone. That's what I've learned about every single billionaire. It's about picking up the phone. It's not about scheduling a Zoom call. It's not about, hey, send me your calendar link. It's just straight up, what is your number? I'm gonna call you right now. I don't care if it's Monday through Friday or even on the weekends, I'm just gonna straight up call you. And it doesn't matter because billionaires are gonna get their way. They're gonna find a way to break through. And they've gotten to the level that they've gotten to because they have taken relentless action. And that's something that you can learn from all the billionaires that are out there. Now, I only know a handful of them, but I can tell you all of them have that trait, whether some of them are really nice people, some of them are a little meaner than others, that part doesn't matter. What matters is they all take relentless action when it comes to communicating and communicating quickly. The second one is, as I've done these 400 interviews, the number one book that's recommended is The Hard Thing About Hard Things that's written by Ben Horowitz. And this is a book that talks about the struggles of entrepreneurship. It talks about how it's not always sunshine and rainbows, and it talks about sometimes how you have to eat poo poo in order to move forward, and how sometimes things are just going to be numb. And it's about how you react to that situation. It's about how you power through that situation. And the quote that always comes back to me is the Winston Churchill quote: "If you're going through hell, keep going." It's really the struggles that ultimately define who you are, and how you deal with adversity defines your character. Now, before we continue, check out my newsletter. It's a weekly marketing and business newsletter. You can just check it out in the links below. There's over 30,000 people. that are on that newsletter and it's completely free if you wanna learn more, if you want to get better. Now the other thing I learned is that nobody knows what they're doing. We're all just kind of figuring it out as we go. We're building the plane as we're flying it. That's something that not a lot of people are willing to accept. Maybe the non-entrepreneurial types are not willing to accept that. But if you're trying to become an entrepreneur, if you're trying to create something for yourself, you have to be willing to deal with uncertainty and you have to be willing to wade into the swamp where it's really foggy and you have to be very careful about the next step that you choose because the next step could be falling into A swamp of the water full of piranhas, or the next step could be finding good footing for the next rock so you can continue to move forward into this trail where— this trail of uncertainty. The other piece is your habits ultimately define who you are. So I remember interviewing James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and it's about stacking the right habits and it's about compounding your habits over time because it takes a long time to build the right habits. And you can choose. Everyone has habits. Every single person has habits. It's about cultivating the more positive habits. I wrote a book called Leveling Up, and the way I look at life is a game, and I look at habits as power-ups. And so you can choose to be like Mario, eat a mushroom, or eat a fire flower, or get the cape and fly around. Or you can choose to eat negative mushrooms. You can eat the mushrooms that actually make you smaller. So there are negative power-ups in real life. There are positive power-ups too. So positive power-ups could be getting good sleep, training in the morning, could be having a very healthy diet. It could be getting sunlight. Negative power-ups could be drinking A ton of alcohol and getting wasted every night and waking up late the next morning. Nothing wrong with that, but you just choose if you want to sacrifice your next half day. There are seasons for that. You decide if it's for something that you want to be cultivating right now. And there's not one entrepreneur or founder-oriented person out there that I know that doesn't have good habits that have gotten them to where they are. By the way, nobody I know has a perfect habit stack. They are going to have some negative power-ups and negative habits in there. Myself included. And that's totally fine. We can all have guilty pleasures or our vices, you know, that's fine. The other piece to add here is that it's really important to keep an open mind. And that's one of the core values we have here at my ad agency, Single Grain. If you don't have an open mind, how are you supposed to get better? How are you supposed to receive feedback? How are you going to be open to discovering the things that you don't know that you don't know? And it's only through this open-mindedness that other people can help you uncover your blind spots, and so you can figure out how to move forward. There are a lot of people out there, they ultimately remain stubborn, and because they're stubborn, it's hard for them to get to the next level because they cannot grow. They can't beat the current level that they're at. And so if you are always thinking about constant improvement or being improvement obsessed, that's going to help you break through any barriers around that. So open-mindedness is a really important piece. I highly suggest taking a look at the Principles You personality test. And it'll show you just how open-minded you are. And that personality test is just a snapshot of who you are in that moment. The other piece is curiosity. Curiosity is really important because if you aren't curious about the future, you aren't curious about your analytics, what the data is telling you, how you can improve your business, how you can improve the traffic on your website, how are you supposed to get better? So you have to be curious about the future. You have to be curious about other people. You have to just be curious in general because it's the curious ones That will eventually find certain situations and become unsatisfied in those situations, and then they're able to propel forward. You think about Richard Branson, he started an airline only because he couldn't get an airline ticket that very day, and so he decided to start his own airline. That's a hell of a way to go about going about your life. The other thing I wanted to touch upon too is how your life experiences will ultimately come together, they'll intersect to define what you are unique at. And so for me, I played a lot of games growing up, that's one piece of it. And it just so happens to be that my game is now business. And so that's intersected. And so I look at business as a game and I love learning. I love teaching. I love playing games, or I used to love playing games, but now business is my game. So business has become my game. And so I just keep playing the game of business. I keep learning. I keep teaching. That also helps me build my community. That helps me build my audience over time. And ultimately your life experiences intersect to form who you are. Then you can create whatever you want around that. You are you. You're unique. And it doesn't mean you have to go around trying to copy other people or follow other people. You can surely draw inspiration from other people, but you should just focus on being the best version of yourself. And so when I look at a lot of these people that I've interviewed, I remember there's one person, his business almost bankrupted 10 times before it became a success. I remember some other people who I've interviewed and their business has since failed, but they've adapted and they built something else around it. They've created a parachute before everything completely fell apart. And I talked to one of the co-founders of Square. For them, it was about just finding the right idea and hiring the best people, figuring it out, doing a lot of hand-to-hand combat in the beginning, and then eventually they grew Square into what it is. And there's another One author I know, he read the encyclopedia cover to cover. He invented the magnetic credit card stripe. He's just invented so many different things due to his curiosity. And so there's a lot of these examples out here coming from the Leveling Up podcast. And again, we're all figuring it out as we go. It's important to be curious. It's important to execute quickly. It's important to have an open mind. It's important to understand that life is about struggle. Business is about struggle, and it's about how you react to it. So, I hope you enjoyed this one. If you need help with marketing, by the way, you can check out my ad agency, Single Grain, and we'll see you later. Bye.