Dan Peña: If You Want To Know How To Succeed, Try THESE Business Practices!

When you decide that you really want to invoke permanent change, you start playing to win all the time.

If you tell me you're going to do something, young lady, if you don't do it, I'll rip your head off and down your neck. If you don't love yourself, you can't be a good husband, a good father, a good anything.

Love you first.

Need motivation?

Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation.

He's Dan Peña, and here's my take on his Top 10 Rules of Success, Volume 5. Enjoy. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1: always play to win.

A number of you have started a business at one time in your life. The first €50,000 or €100,000 in revenue when you start is geometric growth. So everybody that has ever started a business that generated any income, that's geometric growth because it's starting from ground zero to the first €50,000, €100,000. Everybody with me?

Okay.

What happens?

You stop playing to win and you start playing not to lose.

If—

when, not if, but when you decide that you really want to invoke permanent change, you start playing to win all the time. And nobody preaches that. They say keep 6 months reserve in your bank account, right, in case you lose your job. That's a common bullshit. For the first 30 years of my life, I spent 125% of every penny that I made every year. I was always, as you would say, in depth instead of debt.

I don't know why I call it debt, but in depth. Why?

Because I didn't want any backup. I didn't want any plan B. I either succeeded or died financially.

Rule number 2: Have high standards.

QLA works for not just money. This kid came to me 2 years ago. He had never finished higher than 20th in university archery. He was on the archery team in Britain. Never finished higher than 20th at any meet he'd ever attended. This is him finishing first in Great Britain a year and a half later. First, the little skinny wimp, retard. He couldn't even pull the thing back. I didn't realize, you know, they've got 60-pound bows, so he goes and gets a 140-pound bow. Well, he doesn't weigh 140 pounds. Finished first. He was firing 50 to 100 arrows. I said, you fire 500 arrows a day for the next year and you'll win. His little arms would quiver, couldn't get the thing back. Blisters cut through his hands. He's the champ now. Your goal has got to be high standards. I talked to a couple of the kids and financial planning kids here, and I happen to know a lot about financial planning, being one of the forerunners 50 years ago. And most of the kids that go into that wealth management, as it's called now, don't set their standards high enough. You don't want to manage money for people that have $2 or $5 or $10 million. You want to manage money for people that have $100, $500, and a billion. But they don't teach you that during the training programs at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, etc., etc., because they realize that only 1 in 100 is going to attain that goal. And they want 100 of you with $5 million in your book, not 1 of you with a billion in your Rule number 3: Focus on the few, not the many.

Focus on the few, not the many. And I've been giving that advice for 25 years, and I was given that advice when I was with the Onassis people. And we think, we think about too many different things, and we try to do too many things. Virtually everybody, almost everybody in the group is trying to do too many things, and the And the most successful, not unlike you, Josh, you focused, once you pivoted on one thing until you got the ball across the goal line, until you got the deal financed. And until you get the actual money financed and exchange contracts, as it's called in this country, the deal's not over until the fat lady sings, until it's over. And I see you gave an example being on the one-inch line. 2 or 3 times, and I see a lot of kids falter at the 1-inch line, either because they're working on something else or they allow something else to obstruct their ultimate goal.

Rule number 4: Work hard.

Jack Welch, arguably the greatest CEO in the history of the world, who managed General Electric for 20, 25 years, he said there is no work-life balance. There are work life challenges, and we make decisions, and we live with them. Do you think Elon Musk has work-life balance?

No.

Do you think Steve Jobs, when he was alive, had work-life balance?

No.

Do you think Bill Gates?

No.

Henry Ford? No. Original Heineken?

No.

So if none of those people that created the wealth of the world had work-life balance, Why do you think you're going to have it? Why? Because you deserve it? I don't think so. You deserve what you get in life by working hard.

Also, if you want to learn how to have confidence, check out my 254 Confidence series. It's free. The link is in the description below.

But no one does know initially up front. You have to try. You have to swing at the plate. A kid like you, if you had to keep track of 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, what you do.

Rule number 5, be tough.

I drove by a college today and I yelled boo. 35 people went to the hospital, 734 needed crisis counseling, 429 needed a safe area or room, and, uh, classes were canceled for a week. There are universities that I've spoken at that have safe floors. The third floor in the physics building in Krakow University has a safe floor. If life gets too tough for them, they go to that floor to chill. The Air Force Academy has safe cards. When they're— yeah, we have a Naval Academy guy, so he said that they pull when they're being beat up too much. Enlisted men going through boot camp have safeguards that they pull. We're lucky we don't go to war with fucking Russia. They'll eat our lunch. They're going to eat us alive. We're lucky. There are no safeguards in life. I tell the kids all the time, if we were at war, we'd all be dead. See, you're used to making mistakes and nothing happens. For the few of you in the military in here, you know mistakes can cost lives. Our kids are millennials, but they're not, I mean, you'd think that they were Godzilla, Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan compared to the other millennials. Our daughter is me with a skirt. She's a rough bitch. She's a rough girl. Daddy, why do you want to go? If she were standing here, she'd say, my daddy treats everybody the same. Like shit. Whether you're the Pope, although I do cut the Pope some slack, that's not quite accurate. Whether you're, uh, you know, whoever. I mean, I treat everybody the same because I hold everybody accountable. If you tell me you're going to do something, young lady, if you don't do it, I'll rip your head off and shit down your neck. I'll be all over you like, like, like a cheap suit.

Rule number 6: Be willing to make sacrifices.

There's 7.5 billion people on the planet, and, uh, my, my guesstimate is we're— there's only about 700,000 or 800,000 of us on the planet that are willing to make the sacrifices vis-à-vis focus, commitment, and it's just like premier athletes. There's a lot of people that run the 100-yard dash, but there's very few of them that make it to the Olympics, and there's even fewer that medal.

Rule #7: Love yourself first.

I love myself.

Nobody—

my wife, God bless her— would say, "I worship the ground—" Don't get mad at me, Sally. "I worship the ground Dan walks on." but my love for him is transitory for the love he has for himself. Self-esteem.

If you don't love yourself, you can't be a good husband, a good father, a good anything.

Love you first. And I have no problem, and I've been that way even when I was doing bad things.

Rule number 8: Have a dream.

Now, this is me in my best attempt to be a cholo in East LA. That was taken 25 years ago in front of where my house used to be. And if you can tell, my house was from the chain-link from the fence to the brick wall. Wasn't a very big house, was it? It was 800 square feet. When we were taking that picture in 1993, there was 2 drive-by shootings within the neighborhood. And my camera guys jumped under the car. That's where I come from. This is where I lived in 1972 on Wall Street. 14 years later, I think it was 12 years later, I lived there. I lived in a little— they used to call them when they had no— I forget what they call it. But anyway, a little apartment I had. I lived in a place called the Bedford, but we called it the bedbug because cockroaches were that big. We used to sit there and watch our little TV and we'd see the cockroaches racing back and forth the floor. 6 of us in a 2-bedroom apartment. And in 12 years, not dissimilar to President Obama, I had a dream that I was going to live in a castle on an island. And 12 years later, I moved in.

Rule number 9: Dress well. Dress like the president or the prime minister of your country. You only have one time to make a first impression, kids. You come in looking like some of you, I wouldn't give you toilet paper. Most of you, I'd be embarrassed the way you're dressed.

And rule number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is just do you. The $50 billion man. That guy? Yes. He doesn't give a shit, though. That's what he's almost dead. I don't think we could play his stuff without getting sued.

Jamie. Hello, Joe. My name is Dan Pena. I'm still a formidable force. At 6'1", 225. And if you think that I'm almost dead and I'm not going to be alive anymore, ask this bear that I killed with a fucking knife not too long ago. I'm still a very tough fucking guy. At 71, I take no bullshit in person or on the fucking YouTube. I'm not dead and I'm plenty alive and I don't give a fuck what anybody says about me. I rip people's head off and shit down their neck. And from one tough guy to another tough guy, don't be afraid. Don't be scared to use my stuff on your podcast. It's all fucking free. You ask me, why do you give it away free, Dan? I give it away free to take the last fucking excuse away from the sorry cunts why they can't fulfill their dreams. I'm calling you out, Joe. You think you're a tough guy. You haven't met me. I'm the $50 billion man, and this is my lair.

Now I've got a special bonus clip from Dan on how you can be all you can be that I think you're going to enjoy. But before that, it's time for the 3-point landing questions. Let's go from just watching a video to taking action. Here we go. Question number 1, where do you need to raise your standards? Number 2, where do you need to toughen up? And number 3, where should you focus on the few, not the many?

I believe we are put on the earth to be all we can be, not a fraction thereof. All. There's nobody in this room that puts their hand on their heart and says, all my life I've been all that I can be. This is all I can be. If that's the case, then you ought to blow your brains out, metaphorically speaking. Steve Jobs only wore black, remember? Zuckerberg now is kind of copying that. But I— and Sally picks all my clothes. She dresses me. This suit is a $50 billion man suit. The pinstripes say $50 billion man. I mean, the— I don't do anything except think about how to make you retards better. You know why I have a sore back? 25 years of carrying you fat asses across the goal line. 25 years. And not everybody deserves to be alive. So let's get that fucking thing straight right now. And if you think that, you're retarded. Some of you should have rolled down the inside of your fat mama's leg. And that's God's truth.

If you want 10 more rules from Dan Peña, check out the video right there next to me. I think you'll enjoy it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

It's never gonna get any better than this, kids. This is the— as I said on YouTube, the eye of the perfect fucking storm. So I'm saying no matter what your age is,