BIG vs. RICH: The REAL Financial Literacy Lesson Feat. Brian Tracy & Richard Branson

What is the road less stupid? How would you describe it?

If I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life, how much money would you have? And there's not a person in this room that if I gave them the ability to unwind, any one of three financial decisions, wouldn't have more money. It turns out that the key to making more money is to doing fewer stupid things. That's true. I don't need more good ideas. I need fewer ideas that I think are good, that I've executed on. And so I've had the experience over the last 47, 48 years of being in business of having done some smart things where actually it wasn't that smart. But in reality, I was lucky. I happened to catch a big wave, and I mistook catching a big wave with being a good swimmer. And it's what Warren Buffett is very famous for saying. Most of you have heard it. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And so the key is not can I make it? The key is can I make it and keep it? Those are two entirely different skill sets, and in fact, they are almost diametrically opposed. What it takes to make money is very different than what it takes to keep it. And most people are so obsessed with making it that as they become more successful, they do stupid things, which winds up sabotaging their overall success. And I know this story firsthand, because this is one of the reasons I appreciated you so much, Paul, and your presentation is because I've had the experience of losing a lot of money, $100 million of my money that I made. I didn't inherit it, I made it. You were better off than me because you cut the bleeding at plus 600,000. I didn't cut the bleeding until I was minus 50 million. So I went from plus 100 million to minus 50 million in a matter of 24 months. And when you do that, it takes your breath away. I mean, that's a major, major event. Not only because of the size of the money, but also because the loss is so devastating. And I had so much of my net worth. I have my self worth entwined with my net worth, which is a deadly combination.

How old were you during that time?

40. 40.

And that was during the. In real estate.

Real estate, yeah. And what led to the loss? Look at your losses. It's not necessarily pleasant to think back on, but everybody's had some kind of loss that they've sustained as a result of A bad decision or excessive optimism, unexamined assumptions, unexamined assumptions, faulty expectations, excessive optimism are killers. Arrogance is killers. Hubris is a killer for creating and sustaining wealth. So the goal to me is not to get it. The goal is to get it and keep it. You can get lucky and make it. And I know lots of people who got lucky, but the problem is they weren't able to keep it because they didn't have skills that would allow them to sustain. So the truth is, to me, sustainability of wealth is the holy grail. Making it, I can catch a big wave, I can get lucky. I can happen to hit a crease in the market at exactly the right point, and, you know, we can wind up being, you know, affiliate associated with you or Tony Robbins or any number of other people. And there's a degree of luck in all that, and there's a skill set in all of that. And so I'm very much about, let's make sure that if we're going to all this effort in order to create the success, and people do stupid things in the creation mode as well. People oftentimes think that if I just improve my product, that that would somehow allow me to create business or financial success. And yet the truth is, it doesn't require a great product in order to make a lot of money. If I ask you to think about your favorite restaurant, the place you would go to have a huge celebration, you're thinking about it, you know where it would be. There's not one person in this room that's thinking about McDonald's. Not one. And yet nobody has made more money in the history of mankind in the restaurant business than McDonald's. How did it happen? Is it because their cheeseburgers are so good? No, their cheeseburgers are horrible. Horrible, right? They are. Their French fries, on the other hand, are really good, but the cheeseburgers are horrible. What allowed McDonald's to make a lot of money was not an obsession with the product. It's never, write this down. This will be a takeaway. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. Southwest Airlines, their whole business model is put butts in seats and fly those butts from point A to point B safely. No mention of your luggage, Right? Your luggage is immaterial to the airlines. Whether it makes it or not, we don't care. Let's just make sure the person gets from point A to point B doesn't even have to be on Time. Southwest Airlines has made more money in the last 10 years in the airline business than the rest of the airline industry cumulatively since Orville and Wilbur Wright. Now you think about that One airline has made more money than everybody else since Orville and Wilbur. How'd that happen? Is it because their planes are so good? Is it because their first class section is so roomy? Is it because the food is so outstanding? Is it because the hostesses and stewards and stewardesses. Is it because they're so good looking? No. I can't tell which is older, the stewardesses or the airplanes. Right. It's never what you. Southwest Airlines success is not based on what they did, it's how they did it. You name me any product or service. I don't care what it is. Give me one week. You could say chewing gum, shoelaces, seminars, pins, socks. Name me any product or service. Give me one week, and in one week I'll come back and name you one person who's made millions and 100 people that have gone broke with the exact same idea. The problem is, as entrepreneurs, we become obsessed with the product. We become obsessed with either the quality. And I'm not opposed to great products. That's not the message. The message is, what is it? As a business person, what is it that we're focused on? The artist side of me wants to focus on the product and making it better and longer lasting and prettier and more robust. And I'm good with that. We need artists. The operator side of me wants to get busy and get a bunch of stuff done. I just, I got so much to do and holy cow, if it's going to get done, I'm going to have to do it myself because I don't know how to hire a team or keep a team or have a players or create a cult or I don't know any of that. I just got a lot to do. That's the operator side. The business person side says, wait a minute. The job is not to react to the problem du jour. What I need to do is leverage and structure. Write those two words down. That's the difference between a solopreneur and one person army. A solopreneur and a business owner. A business owner has mastered two things, structure and leverage. And without structure and leverage, there is not a way to create a sustainably successful business. I'm going to say the structure part a different way before I talk about leverage.

Yeah.

Opportunity without structure is chaos. The Achilles tendon of most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it that's why they started their own business, is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical to for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order to be able to do it. Otherwise I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff, and it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean, debt is a financial instrument, it's leverage. But the more powerful form of leverage is who's on your team. So I'm going to ask you a question. If I gave you an opportunity to build a world class team of A players, and the only people on your team were A players, I mean, seven footers, these are the Kevin Durant's, they can do it all. If you only had a team of A players, how many of your existing problems that you have right now would go away, disappear? It turns out the problems that most of us are dealing with are not even really the problem.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to Joe's free book and you can get a copy there.

Eunice is where I need a little whiteboard, if I can get one right here. Joe just handed you a piece of paper a second ago and said thank you and said write down one of your biggest problems. So I'm going to ask you right now to write down on your piece of paper one of your three biggest problems. Maybe you just did that. Maybe you can refer back to that piece of paper. Maybe you're not going to have to share this, we're not going to talk about it. It's not going to be anything. So you may want to write really, really small so that nobody else can see. Write it really small and just write down or revisit one of your three biggest problems that you think you have with your business. Let me give you a thought. The exercise is over. You don't have to complete writing it down. The exercise is over. Every person here has an is line. This is reality. This is the way it looks. This is point A. Point A. And the problem that most people have, in my experience, I know I have this problem, is that I'm not particularly honest with myself about the reality of my situation. I sugarcoat it. When I was at the University of Texas, every day I'd walk past a little message etched in granite over the. The doors of a building. And the message was, you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. So you know this, right? And every day for four or five years, I walked past this saying, and I went, I don't know what this means. What does that mean? You should know the truth, and the truth will set you free. Well, the reality, it dawned on me later, is that as long as I'm lying to myself or not telling the truth, I have no opportunity to make a change. So it's why addicts don't stop using is because they say, well, I don't really have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Yeah, I know it's a little. I know it's a little bit. But, you know, the reality is it's. I'm functioning right. It's why alcoholics or poor people pick a topic. People don't tend to tell themselves the truth. This is point A. We also have point B. Point B is ought. This is the way I'd like for it to look. This is point B. And it turns out that most of us are experts on point B. We have massive clarity on the way we would like for it to look because we've done all this visualization, we've done all this goal setting where you make a goal and then you make it vibrant, and then you turn it into black and white. Then you bring it closer and farther away, and then you put music around it. And so we're really good at visualizing what ought. We tend to suck at what is. And when asked what our problem is, we describe the gap. The gap between where you are and what you want is what you typically describe as the problem, when in reality, this gap is not the problem. This gap is the symptom. I just ask you, Joe just asked you the last exercise you did, write down one of your three biggest problems, and everybody got busy real quick. We knew what the problem was because we were visualizing the gap between where we are and what we want. When in reality. That's not the problem, that's the symptom. The gap sits right here. This is. Sorry, the problem sits right Here. This is the problem. This is the obstacle that I need to overcome in order to move the needle on my is line. In order to move the needle on my is line, I need to get clarity on what it is that's truly blocking my forward progress. What's blocking my forward progress has nothing to do with where I am versus what I want. What's blocking my forward progress is the obstacle that sits right here. And it turns out, Joe, that the hardest part of thinking time is getting clarity on the problem. That is, if you don't have clarity on the problem, that is, you'll be tactical instead of strategic. So I say 10 pounds overweight. What do I want to do about it? Well, as long as I view the problem as being 10 pounds overweight, which is not the problem, that's the symptom.

Hello.

Hello. Are you with me that? Being 10 pounds overweight is not the problem, that's the symptom. But as long as I identify being 10 pounds overweight as being the problem, then what I will lurch to is, okay, should I buy a jump rope or should I join a gym? Should I buy Oprah's latest diet book, or should I get a personal training? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll get a piece of home exercise equipment. That's what I'll do. If I just had a peloton bike in my house, then I would get in shape, which is why most home exercise equipment and most diet books don't work. Because it's a tactical response to a tactical question. As long as I'm dealing with the symptom, I'm going to be dealing in tactical. And once I say it's not a tactical issue, I need to be strategic and think strategic and identify the problem that is. So here it is. And then I'll stop, Joe. If I don't have clarity on the problem that is, I'll build a machine for the problem that isn't, which is what we do 99% of the time. We identify the gap, call it the problem, when in reality it's a symptom. And we're highly tactical in our response because we have a tactical question that we've asked which winds up sabotaging our results. If you tell me your sales aren't high enough, I'm going to say that's a symptom, not a problem. If you tell me you don't have enough profits, if you tell me you have a crummy culture, if you tell me you have weak employees, if you Tell me your balance sheet is screwed up. I'm going to look at you and say, all those are symptoms. What's the problem? So if I gave you an opportunity to rethink the problem that you identified a minute ago, is that really the problem? Really? Is that the problem? Is that the core root underlying problem that's blocking your forward progress? Or is there something below that, something buried where you got to get busy and figure out what in the world is going on? So business, to me is an intellectual sport. It's chess. Money and business does not respond well to emotions. Warren Buffett said it. Optimism is the enemy of the rational investor. It turns out in business, optimism is your enemy, which is why one of the pieces of advice that you gave is so good, Paul, which was, we all need a board, we need advisors, we need people that we will listen to. The higher you go or the higher you want to go, the greater the requirement to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth. Because I can't smell my own breath. I can smell your breath, but I can't smell mine. I can't see my own swing. I can see the shot, I can't see the swing. I need people around me watching me swing who will give me advice. And then I gotta be willing to hear that advice. As long as I'm arrogant, right? Unwilling to listen, it does no good to ask. So business is an intellectual sport, and the people that win the game sustainably have got skills and tools, which is why I wrote the book the Road Less Stupid.

Yeah.

So I love how you refer to businesses and what you build as the machine. How would you, if you, as simplistic as it may sound, what do you mean by that? A machine. Everyone here is building a machine. And your comment about building a machine for the problem that isn't it seems to me that the vast majority of entrepreneurs, because of the failure rate and the stress level and just the really not getting ahead in any way financially, that they spend an enormous amount of activity accomplishing not much of anything except getting tired and worn out and frustrated. So if that's the case, you've developed a process which is thinking time, which we'll get into, which is why I believe your book is so good. And it's so beyond just a book. It's a map. It's a plan and a path. What is this machine, though? If we think of we're all building a business, it's a machine. It's an intellectual sport. It's a chess game. How should everyone here Think about this machine. That is their business.

There are two types of business models. There's the Michael Jordan model and the Michael Dell model. Both of them will work, and both of them, you can get filthy stinking rich. One is not right, one is not wrong, one is not good, one is not bad. They're just different models. Michael Jordan, Tiger woods have a personal services model. It's all on them. There's very little leverage because Michael can't delegate the jump shot to win the game. Tiger can't delegate the two foot putt on 18. He Tiger has to make the putt. You can make a lot of money in that kind of model. But there's nothing as much leverage as there is the Michael Dell model. The Michael Dell model is Michael hadn't put together a computer in 38 years. He put together a couple of them and then realized very quickly, unless he had some people on his team that he could leverage, that he wasn't going to get to the success that he was capable of or that was available to him. Depending upon which model you're talking about, the machine could look one of a couple ways. The Michael Dell model, where it's not a personal services type of model. Michael Dell model relies on three things. It relies on a strategy, a plan, not an idea. Not an idea. One of the fundamental mistakes we make as business owners is we wind up executing on ideas instead of plans. We have an idea of what we want, but there's no yellow brick road. This is oz. We're in love with oz. I've heard so many business owners tell me over the years, this is my dream, this is my vision. I go, I'm good. You're telling me about oz. Build me the yellow brick road. Show me how to get from where you are to Oz, and then I'm on board. But just because you become very adept at describing OZ doesn't give me the clarity that I need to be an investor or to support you if I don't have clarity on the plan. So the plan, the strategy is number one. What does strategy mean? Southwest Airlines, here's how they made all their money. Here's how they made more money. It's one sentence. This is one sentence. So it's going to tell you how Southwest Airlines made more money in the last 10 years than the restaurant rest of the airline industry. Cumulative. Southwest Airlines at the very beginning said this. A plane on the ground makes no money. How hard is that? What a brilliant insight. And so they built the entire organization around keeping planes in the air and it turns out the key to keeping planes in the air is to become an expert at baggage handling. The core problem that Southwest Airlines had to figure out is how do you get the passengers and the baggage on and off the plane as quickly as possible? Because the faster we get them off the plane, faster we get the new ones on, faster the plane takes off, more money we make. One sentence that's extraordinary. So plan and a strategy is number one on machine. Number two. You got to have people. A, players. You take a great strategy and you have B, players, C, players. If anybody in here have an employee, anybody in here ever been disappointed with the performance of an employee? I'm going to give you a hint, and we may talk about this more. You get what you tolerate. You get what you tolerate. In fact, I'll say this. I'll say this even louder. This could be the most important thing I say. Nothing can change until the unspoken is said. Nothing can change until the unspoken is said. And the truth. Here's the truth. For us as leaders, the greatest failure of leadership is a lack of courage. A lack of courage to say what needs to be said. I tell my employees we own businesses, and I tell my employees all the time, I'm. I refuse to lower my standards in order to accommodate your need for mediocrity. I will not do it. This is the standard that we have. And what we're going to do is we're going to help you build a yellow brick road so that you can be successful. Every. Every employee you have, Every employee you have, has, for all of us, has the exact same outcome. They're all optimizing for the same thing. Every one of our employees wakes up the morning and they want to be successful. There's not one person who wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to try to do the worst job that I possibly can. My job as the. As the owner, as the leader is to support my team in being successful. That's my number one job. And so I'm going to coach, I'm going to build a yellow brick road. I'm going to have performance standards, but I got to have eight people if I. So I've got a lot of tabs open right now in my brain, so I'll come make sure I come back to machine. What's the definition of an a player? There's three or four things. Number one, they have a high internal emotional need to succeed. High internal emotional need to succeed. I'll say this a different way. Pros don't have to be motivated amateurs do people ask me all the time, how do you motivate your employees? I say I hire them. I'm giving you an opportunity and I've built you a yellow brick road that if you stay on the yellow brick road and hit my standards, you and I are going to do well. If you can't hit my standards, I understand this is not a good fit. You're not gonna be able to stay here and be successful, which I know you don't wanna come to work for the next five years and be unsuccessful. So let me help you go find someplace else where you can be successful. Because it's not here. Because here, this is what we produce. If I don't have standards, which is all part of the people, if I don't have the standards, then I'm going to be promoting people or giving raises based on loyalty or longevity or likability. Oh, my God. This person has been here since day one. You know, in fact, the first month they were here, you know they were here. We didn't even pay them. They've made it. And so I wind up creating this story that becomes a substitute for performance. At the end of the day, I don't want the story to get in the way of the facts. I tell you what sabotaged you. It sabotaged me. I substituted a story for the facts. I'm really good at spinning those stories. So are you. That's where those unexamined assumptions come from. So that's number two. Number one is I gotta have the plan in the process. Number two, I gotta have the people. Number three, I got to have the structure and part of the structure. Probably the most important part of the structure is going to be the culture. Culture is not perks. Those are two different things. Perks are how many jelly beans are in the kitchen and whether you do or don't get to bring your dog to work. Those are perks. Joe has heard this story. I was given a speech in Oslo and there were some very well known famous entrepreneurs who had done very well. And one woman came on stage who's very well known and started talking about how important culture was in her organization and the example that she used to is. And we just built our employees two nap rooms. I hadn't gone on stage yet. I'm sitting on the front row. And when she said this, I looked up and I said out loud, I didn't mean to, but I'm sure she heard it. You must be kidding me. Nap rooms have nothing to do with culture. Nap rooms are a perk. Besides that, I'm not paying my people to come to work and sleep. That doesn't even make any sense to me, but apparently it did to her. And so I look at culture as, how do we treat each. Treat each other? How do we talk to each other? Culture is accountability. The Navy Seals has got one hell of a culture because they're accountable. They get stuff done. They do what they say they're going to do. They're on time. That's a cultural issue. And so I would ask you, as you're thinking about a machine, what's your plan? What's your leverage? Tiger has leverage. He's got a plan, but he also has leverage. It's just not the same kind of leverage that Michael Dell has, but he has leverage. And they both have structure. Michael Dell and Michael Jordan, Tiger woods, they all have structure. There's a culture. There's a way we do things. The whole idea of the machine is that I pour gasoline in and it runs, which is not the kind of business that most of us have. Most of us have a business where we're this, we're crankers, we're hand cranking. And then I hear people talk about, I want to scale my business. And if you scale a crank business, you wind up with more crankers because there is no machine. It turns out scaling a crank is a bad idea. But we're addicted to this idea of growth and getting big and scaling as if big was the same as rich. Big is not the same as rich. Those are two different words. And when I look into the cockpit of most businesses, there's one lever that the pilot has at his or her disposal. Who's running the business? The pilot. And that lever is the accelerator. Anything that goes wrong, okay, first thing let's do, let's mash down. Let's get big, let's amp, let's scale, let's add more of this. Let's do this. Let's get a social media web. And pretty soon I got all these tactics storming at me, and I'm going, what is the real problem here? What is the real problem I've got? You know, J.C. penney thought the idea was to get big. And you see where they ended up. And the list, Kodak, the list is long of businesses who somehow mistakenly believe that the most important thing is how do we grow it When a react, I'll say it this way. Sometimes gains are a result of losses avoided. If you could rewind the clock and avoid 0, 8, 09 and 10 had we just been able to dodge that bullet. Now we can't always. And so one of my jobs as a business owner is to think in terms of risk. So the machine is three things. I gotta have a process, I gotta have a strategy and a plan. I got to have the people to execute and I got to have some structure so that I pour in gas and this thing goes. It doesn't require me in order to double the size for me to spend two times faster. That's a crank business. And that's a business that if you try to scale it, you wind up tired. So that's a machine.

Great.

Love it. There have been very few empirical studies into what actually makes a successful business. That most of what is taught in the entrepreneurship faculties of the universities is nonsense. In fact, he said that there's something 1,687 professors of entrepreneurship and their primary focus is drinking their own bath water and telling that entrepreneurs have to have a business plan and if you have a business plan, you'll be successful. And they spent two years in their faculties teaching people how to set business plans. And 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful businesses in the world today. So we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses. And what Joe is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work, hundreds, even thousands of hours hard work to understand how to do it much, much faster to shortcut. We say there's always a learning curve in anything. And what we want to do is we want to jump the learning curve. We don't want to spend years and years learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income. And so I have majored now in the last few years on doing seminars and talking and books and articles and programs for owners and would be owners of small and medium sized businesses. Now I've got 45 minutes, so I'm going to have to condense what Sometimes I share in seminars for days, but I understand you're some of the smartest people in the world so that you can take a lot of information in a short period of time. Is that true? Did anybody not understand the question? So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts was, which I thought was interesting, was a little story that was in the papers recently. Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest men in the world, and Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates Sr Were at a dinner party and the three of them are good friends. And they were talking and a gentleman came up to him and said, you know, I was looking at you, and you gentlemen are very successful. What would you say is the most important quality of success? And all three, according to a bystander, all three broke off their conversation and turned and simultaneously said, focus. Focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast moving world today. If you can focus, you can succeed, and if you cannot, you cannot. It's almost a black and white thing. Well, I thought that was interesting because the way Joe and I met is I put together a program some years ago called the Focal Point Program, which basically brought in business owners like yourselves and taught them to focus. And we spent three years going through every single aspect of Life. We had 82 exercises that dealt with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning. And it was focus, focus, focus. And my offer, which is not as good as Joe's, but my offer was that you will double your income and double your time off within 12 months or there'd be no charge for this program. And I never had to give a refund. In fact, many people doubled or tripled their income within 30 days just by learning to focus and just by thinking in terms of focus. So it's really, really important. I read an article about myself. It was a very successful entrepreneur in New Zealand. And the article was sent to me last week. I'm reading this article, and he said the turning point in his life was when he went to a Brian Tracy seminar and learned how to focus. He was broken, he was unemployed, he had no money, and he walked out of the seminar a completely different person. And he had written goals. He then looked around, and as it happens, he saw an article on coffee shops and Starbucks success in the United States. And it said, coffee shops are a good business to be in because more and more people like the idea of a specialty coffee shop. And if it has a WI fi, then they go there, it becomes a social center and so on. He knew nothing about coffee, and before the dust had settled, he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. And then he says he got into a divorce and had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. But he didn't share. He did not sell off the worldwide rights to it. So he's rebuilding. Anyway, his point was, at the end of the article, they said, well, what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful? And he said, just Two things he said, focus and fail fast. Focus and fail fast. Learn quickly, try something new. And I thought I would just pass that on because it's sort of what I have discovered over the years is the faster you fail and learn, the faster you succeed. You actually learn to succeed by failing. You know Thomas J. Watson's famous line, if you want to increase your rate of success, you must double your rate of failure. Because success lies on the far side of failure.

I just get on. People say, what's the key to success? You just had it and there's no shortcuts. And it doesn't take any genius. Well, no offense. It just takes starting and completing your most important task. And if you'll just do that, get my book. Eat that frog. And I'm not trying to sell books because you don't get very much with a book. But the thing is, the book is now 50 languages. Can you imagine that? 50 language, two and a half million copies. And by the way, it's probably closer to 10 million because there are several countries like Iran that don't pay royalties and other have published the book without telling anybody. So it's published all over the world, but they cheat you on the royalties. So it's probably 10 million copies of it have been sold. And so that's my starting point and everything else. Here's another thing, by the way, and I love what the lady was saying about values. I had a good friend, maybe you know him, his name is Mark Walden. And Mark came to my office when we were doing our coaching program some years ago and just, he just dropped it. He lives in Northern California, San Francisco. And he said, I said, so what's happening in your life? Is it a break? He said, well, I've come up with a new question. And he said, I'm just walking around teaching everybody and the question is, what is my most important value in life right now? What is my most important value in life right now? And I thought, gee, that's a great question, because all of us think about values and our impressed by value. So I asked everybody in the, in the room, what is your most important value in life right now? And he said, you have to ask this question every day, all day long for a week, every day. Just keep asking the question. Your first answer will be, you know, love and truth and God and things like that. Just keep asking the question and keep drilling down deeper, keep drilling and drilling until you finally most important value pops out. And that can change your life. And so what I did is, I did the Same thing. I asked the question for a week, what is my most important value? And the way you can tell your values are because of your behaviors. What you do is you look at your behaviors and especially your behaviors under stress, when your behavior is in difficulty, you always demonstrate who you really are inside by what you do on the outside when you have difficulties or challenges. So I finally concluded my most important value is what the lady said is freedom. Freedom is my most important value. And you know something? America was established by people for whom freedom was their most important value. And it changed the entire world. There is still no country in the world for which freedom is the organizing principle. Freedom is a concern for everybody but Americans more than any other nationality. Thank you. Of freedom. And so therefore your job is to have freedom. How do you have freedom? Well, one of the things is you have to have enough money so that you can buy the things that you want, that you can take care of your family, that you can provide for your spouse and for your children. And when you achieve freedom, more freedom, you feel happier, you have more energy, you have higher self esteem, you feel more in control. And everything that you do moves you toward having more or less freedom. So that was a turning point for me is that freedom is the key. And then I look at my family, everything I've ever done with my four children and my wife has been to increase their freedom, give them more freedom, open doors for them, open up opportunities for them. So freedom is mine. So what is yours? That's a great question. And the way you tell is you simply look at what do you do under pressure? What do you care about more than anything else? What is really your value? And it's great question, great organizing principle for your life.

Yeah, Brian.

And as you know, most genius network members have teams, many have running multimillion dollar businesses. What is the dark side of success? In the midst of building and growing, what have you noticed where things become out of control, out of hand, where people start losing it? Because as you know, a lot of entrepreneurs, because of the success they have, comes responsibility, obligations, messes, navigating things. And here we are in the middle of a pandemic. What have you found to be success traps that people have gotten themselves into that you would have any advice, suggestions or insights on either how to avoid or how to navigate if you're in the middle of it?

Well, Joe, that's a really tough question, but you and I have talked about this subject is that what is our ultimate goal in life? Remember, the whole thing is write your own Obituary. You wrote your own obituary. What do you want people to say about you when you pass on? And I went for a long walk on a beach near Brisbane in Australia some years ago, and it was about an hour, two hours of walking. And I asked myself that question. And the answer that came up for me and never changed again is that after I pass on, I want. When my children meet someone who knew me, they say, oh, yeah, I knew your father. He was a really good person. That to me was my ultimate goal in life. I knew your father, he was a good person. And I have never deviated from that. I never have done anything or said anything to anybody under any circumstances that would cause anybody to say other than he was a good person. And so you have to keep that in mind. See, this is the purpose in life. And one of the things that I learned is that success does not change you. It just makes you more of what you already are. It just makes you more of what you already are. If you're a good person, you become a better person. If you're a jerk, you become a worse jerk. If you're honest, you'll be more honest. If you're dishonest, you'll be more dishonest. So you always have to think in terms of long term. One of the things that I found, and I've written about it extensively, I wrote a book, by the way, a couple of years ago called Get Smart. And it has 10 ways of thinking that have been developed over the ages. And basically it says that successful people think this way and in the same way of thinking, unsuccessful people think that way. The most important, which I learned from Drucker, from many others, is long term versus short term thinking is really successful people think long term. Unsuccessful people think short term. In other words, they go for advantage, opportunity, making money. They're short term thinkers. Whereas the very best people think long term. They think, where do I want to be in five years or ten years from now? What do I want people to say about me when I'm gone? And so long term thinkers, surprisingly enough, when you think and act long term, you accomplish vastly more than if you're a short term thinker.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd to like, like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

And there's. And the book get smart has basically 10 different ways of thinking. One of them is, it comes from Daniel Kahneman, who got a Nobel Prize for it. He's an economist and a philosopher. And it was, you know, it was, what is it? Two ways of thinking.

Think fast.

Slow, yes. Thinking fast and slow. And what he says is basically successful. People think slowly about important things in their life. One of the things that Kahneman sort of touches on, but which I hammer, is the word consequences. And consequences, as you always ask, what are the likely consequences if I do or don't do this? And everything in life has consequences. And the true measure of how really smart you are is your ability to predict the consequences of doing something or not doing it. Milton Friedman said this, exactly this. The Nobel Prize winning economist, he said, the quality of your thinking can be measured by how accurately you predict what will happen as a result. One of the greatest thinkers of history, a man named Frederick Bastiat, said he said the same thing back 200 years ago. He said that the primary consequences of everything you do are good. You eat this, drink this, do this because the primary consequences are good, or why would you do it at all? He said, but it's the secondary consequences that are more important than anything else. And your ability to accurately predict the secondary consequences of a behavior determines your whole life. And so, for example, the people who belong to the genius network, one of the reasons that they belong, one of the things that they get is they get ideas that can affect their lives and work long term. Truly superior people are long term thinkers. And they make the sacrifice and they travel and they invest the time and the money in. It's all aimed at long term results, consequences, what happens as a result of what you do and then what happens and then what happens? And so that's what you and I learned right at the very beginning. As we started exchanging ideas, we read Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich and how the mastermind was the starting point of success for so many people. And then we started doing it, and then it was sort of like a baton in a race. We handed off the baton and you took it and ran with it. And here you are.

Yeah.

What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received and how did it change your business path and your direction?

I think it was. Well, I received a couple of them. The first one was somebody said, don't spend all your money, kid, because it's really, really hard to make money. And it's 10 times harder to keep it. I think that was one of them. And I think the other one was it's all about the numbers. There's only two ways to do business. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And don't do anything because it's an ego play. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And those things probably have been been the ones and everybody else knows all the other ones. Of course, do what you love. Of course, do your research and everything else. But the room knows that already.

So Fubu has. It's had 6 billion in global sales. What are the key elements, secrets and requirements of building like a $6 billion brand that people here can utilize well.

In the days that we built it? I think that there are a couple of things. First of all, you know, in business, it's purely about distribution. I think that you can have the greatest idea in company or whatever the case is, but you don't have a way to distribute it. It's a pipeline. It's a challenge. I think that to understand and don't fall in love with your product where you think that you're creating something new. Because we will never create anything new. It will only be a new position or a new angle on it, a new price. You know, I would say Twitter was a. As I shared with you before, it was a. It was a note on a pigeon's leg a million years ago. And I didn't put three sleeves on a T shirt. I just created a movement around it. So it's always a different positioning. And I think those are the ways. And then after you get to a certain level where you have brand equity, I think it's creating a large amount of really amazing strategic partners. You know, licensing, whether it's a territory or licensing a different angle of your product is important. I'm not going to understand what they necessarily want in Japan, even though they want Fubu in Japan. It's a different culture as well as I can do my men's business, but you and I were two guys. If you wear a 32 and I wear 32, there's two size 32, there's 32 long, 32 short. If I sell a pair of seven or a pair of eight jeans to a female, there's 17 sizes because the thighs are too big, the butts too. This gaps over here. So I would license that business to an expert in that area because I don't have a lifetime to learn the ladies business as well. So I think that strategic partners are very valuable.

Okay, so Your friend Kevin Harrington was here earlier and he was talking about Shark Tank, and he said that Kevin O', Leary, Mr. Wonderful, was a far better, more intelligent negotiator than you.

I don't know your thoughts on that.

He didn't say that. I'm totally kidding.

I would say I should have just.

Like, let that go.

No, no, no.

I knew.

I knew that. Kevin's a great guy, and I'm actually representing him in the speaking, and I would absolutely make sure he doesn't get any more gigs after that.

Yeah.

If you were to get in a fight, a physical fist fight with Kevin o', Leary, you think you could take.

Him with Kevin o' Leary or Kevin Harrington?

Kevin o'.

Leary?

Well, both, actually. It'd be interesting to know a celebrity death match.

Well, so Kevin o' Leary I could take. Kevin Harrington will crack my head to the white meat one day. I don't. You know, I think he's like 100 years old, but one day we all did push ups on the set and I think I was on my 19th and he was on his, like 107th.

No, he's. He's a mania.

He is. There's something. There's a problem.

He came. He came to Necker island and he was like in one of those sumo suits and everything, and I swear to God, he was like knocking everyone down. It was bizarre.

You know, if you've ever been in his office, he does not have chairs in his office.

He's too neurotic.

He just has a table right there and a bunch of crap all around.

Yeah.

Can I get a timer up here too, so I know where we're at? What are the little talked about factors that most successful people wouldn't want to publicly share that drive growth and success?

Well, anybody that's really successful, such as yourself, such as Jay Abraham, and the people in this room that I respect have always shared every single aspect of success. That's probably one of the things that you end up beginning to share is that the opportunity to give somebody this knowledge only comes back to you. But I think other things that people don't share in success is. I really wouldn't know. Honestly, I don't come from that model. Any and everything that I can share in success, I will. So I don't want to take up time trying to think of something.

Okay, well, you have to be all hurtful about it. Just kidding.

Hey, I love the whole 10 minute thing.

You know what?

Because I was thinking over here, all of us as public speakers, if you gave me, 10 minutes. I, I would be uncomfortable.

Right.

And I'd ramble through it. But you know what? I would have been uncomfortable and it would have tested me. So I want to stay on the. Even though I got 30. I like that idea.

Yeah.

Okay. In 2009, you joined Shark Tank. How have your investments worked out on the show? And you know, if a business owner. These are the questions I have. Doing over a million a year was going to investor wealth, what would you recommend they look at, analyze and try to do so.

All right, so in the investments on the show that I want to make, make this quick. So the first three, three years I think I lost 750 the first year, 500 the second, and I think I made it all. I lost about 200 the third, and I made it all back in the fourth year off of one deal called Jamba Juice. Talba Teas we sold to Jamba Juice. Here's the reasoning. You know, people really didn't know what Shark Tank was at first, so the deal flow was poor. Second of all, the producers are really producers. So in the first season of vetting people, whatever people said was whatever people said. And the producers didn't know any better. After sitting on sets for three years watching, you know, 150 people per year pitch and two hour pitches, the producers became more savvy towards this. So the deal flow became much better. And the closing ratio went from only closing 30% to now we close approximately 95%.

Also.

The sharks themselves have become very astute. We've all put the right resources around us after making those mistakes. So I didn't make anything up until that point. And then only one deal itself paid for everything. And now we have found ways to convert sales and I've had a license and division everything else. Taking that and going into the model of having a million dollars, you want to know where should somebody invest that?

Yeah.

Like if they were going to invest the wealth, what would you recommend they look at? Analyze deals and try to do so.

We'Re not talking about going to public markets or anything. We're talking about looking at venture that's out there in the market and angel things of that nature.

Correct.

Yeah.

Tell you, if it was, if it was me, first of all, I would invest in what I'm seeing is a large shift in business where many people in this room are doing this already in regards to online curriculums and things of that nature. But I'm seeing that there are kids at home and people at home that are going into these networks and into these forums and they're speaking the voice of other people. And people are prepaying for goods or whatever it is, and they're doing 2, 5, 7, $10 million worth of business. The entire business model is shifting now, you know, so they always say retail is messed up or bad or let's say my business model, 20 billion. It's not a 20. It's not that. It's not a $20 billion business no more. It's just that these big guys like us aren't doing it. It's 10,000 kids doing a million dollars out of their home. So that is how business is shifting. And it's about social media and it's about continuity and transparency.

You read a lot.

I read a lot, but I don't get to read a large amount because I'm the same dyslexic. So reading a lot means three pages to me. But it may take two years. And usually the three pages of one of J. Abraham's emails.

That is actually funny with every adjective every now.

So I'm reading that, then I gotta go to the dictionary. Then I gotta read that. Go back to the dictionary. What the hell did he say?

What?

No, I mean, he has the most expensive vocabulary of any human being I've ever met.

He's like the Muslim guys that come out of jail with kids and they just start saying everything because they studied the dictionary.

No, I always let Jay's like talk about engineer reciprocity and stuff like that.

Amazing. But that's why he's my mentor.

Yeah, yeah.

So what are the key things to look for and do when growing and developing talent and stars in an organization?

Good idea. I mean, you know, when I, when I speak, I can only speak off of my experiences and what's worked best for me. So. No, so, so people can't object. What I've learned for about in talent is first of all, I don't pay a high price for talent coming aboard. I want people who are willing to bust their butt and prove themselves. And I think we both then are a little uncomfortable. And this is how that I structure with anybody in my company. Number one, you have an obligation to the team that you must do. And this is in your silo. Number two is if you are able to, to contribute to part of the team, there is some form of compensation, a percentage or whatever the case is. And number three, if you do well enough, we will start this business together and we will be partners. Now why do I do that? Number one, you have to have a Dedication to something. Number two, you have to show that you're a team player but you compensated. And number three is great. People are very hard to keep and sooner or later they will either leave or and be your competition or they will just leave or they will be such a large cost. So if you make them a partner here, you basically take them off the market, you increase your margin and your revenue, they start teaching everybody else down the line and it becomes a pyramid and domino effect. And that's the way that I've always run my business.

Okay, cool, cool.

Briefly set up three ways that your business can make more money. And there's only three ways. I learned this from Jay Abraham. Does anybody know the answer to to this? Okay, so more sales could be more customers. So new customers, more purchases, bigger purchases. Right? Only three ways you can grow a business. You get new customers, you get them to spend more often and you get them to spend more money. And if you can do that exponentially by doing all three of these, we call this the gold mine. Now, of these three ways, if there was only one way that you could focus on to grow a business and you had to ignore the other two, which way for most of you is going to make you the most money?

New, higher price.

Okay, this is the worst way. A new customer is the most expensive thing to get. They're the one you have to spend the longest with. And they're the ones that are often the most skeptical of any and all claims because they have no previous relationship with you. Here's the biggest challenge of the product that we sell. It's very rarely an advantage before somebody spends money with us. How can somebody know your product is good? Typically they have to buy it first. So they take a leap of faith. It's all perceptive. And so this is a challenge with selling higher prices. Generally speaking, the path is these two, which you need existing customers for. And of these two, this is the big one. Selling at the highest price as possible. Joe was a pioneer in this field. If there's anybody to study on high ticket selling or high price selling, it's Joe. He was the first one ever to sell a high price continuity program. And he sold it to billionaires who owned yachts. No, he sold it to carpet cleaners. You know, the people you pay to do the work you don't want to do are willing to pay more for education than a majority of the population. Now, not all of them. Okay, so here is the rules. 20% of a customer base will spend 80% of its money. Okay? So four out of five customers, potentially that could be yours, you should flat out ignore if you want to make the most amount of money. You follow me? Okay. Now we are taught as children to treat each and everybody equally. And that works in a communistic society maybe, right? But in a capitalistic society, I am telling you, four out of five customers, you want your competition to have them because they're not worth the headache that they endure. You want profitable customers. Now here's the biggest challenge. How do we find the 20% that spend 80% of the dollars? Right? How do we find the iPhone users and not the Samsung Galaxy users? Right, Listen, mathematically speaking, an iPhone user is 16% of the smartphone market, yet they spend 74% of its money. If I'm selling smartphones, I want you iPhone status symbol wearing, I don't care if it's 10 times as expensive, I look cool when I pull it out type of customers, right? How do we find the high ticket customers? The ones that are willing to spend the most with the least amount of effort. Anybody know? Okay, here's the best way I know. We allow them to self select. I say, hey, here's a very expensive thing. How many of you want it? Most of you say, not me. A few of you say, I'll take that. Half of you that buy high ticket stuff do it simply because you can prove to other people that you can spend more money than they can. And that's one of the best benefits of selling at high prices. So why am I to deprive you of that experience? So we give it to everybody and we allow those to raise their hand and step forward and say, yes, I would like this. And those who don't, we say, oh, you're one of those people, okay, whatever.

Right?

I don't try to figure out who. I just put it in front of everybody and allow them to tell me who is the 20% of the market that makes 80% of the purchase. Does that make sense? Okay, now it's easy to miss them if they don't consume your stuff. How many books do you buy per year? Jim, how many books do you buy? 30. 30. How many of those do you actually read?

10.

Okay, so you're better than most, right?

That's not true.

That is true. That is more than true. That is beyond true.

Right?

Okay. He buys stuff, 30 books. And each year he learns unlearns a book that he read the previous year. Right? So you're at negative one. Okay, I buy probably 60 to 70 books a year. I read maybe 20 of them. I pay Joe 100,000 a year, and I maybe attend one of his hundred thousand a year meetings recently as my track record. I'm good at paying. I'm not necessarily good at consuming. And all of you are simply the same. So we need consumption. Because if a valuable product is only obvious after somebody buys it, it's still only obvious if they buy it and they consume it. Does that make sense? Okay, so how do we get users to consume it? That's the trick. That's the challenge. So this is what we've shifted to lately, and I would love for you to adopt something similar. What's the greatest way to get somebody to do something? What are some of the factors that will get somebody to compel themselves to do things that they otherwise wouldn't normally do?

Take it away. Take it away.

Take it away. That's a good one. That's one of my favorite ones.

Right. Okay.

Joe says, hey, Jason, how much does it cost to hire you? I say, oh, you can't. Right. Immediately makes me more desirable to want to be hired. Was that calculated or did it just happen that way? You'll never know. Right. So you take it away. You say, I don't think. Think you can do this new smoothie challenge? I don't know, really. If you're a P90X type of individual. Right. Do you have what it takes? Now, usually marketing is more subtle than that, but that's the implication. What's another way you can motivate somebody? Think of some time in your life where you did something far beyond what you thought you were capable of doing. Michael. Fear of losing it. Okay. Fear of losing it. Okay. That's an interesting one. Right. So we call that scarcity. One of my favorite things in the world, fear of missing out. Pain of disconnect is another one. Right. Now, again, let's talk about. Think about Taylor's story earlier. What motivated you to want to do something? Pain is the greatest motivator of all. So it's not even just necessarily pain of disconnect. It's pain of disconnect. All right? But think about a time when you made a massive upgrade in your health, your wealth, or another aspect. What really moved the needle for you when you said, this time it's going to be different and I'm going to see it through. And you kept going even when it got hard and you wanted to stop. Yeah. Okay. It's hard. See, this is what the thing about marketing. Everybody's a marketing expert because they see a lot of Advertising. That's like everybody saying they're a hot heart doctor because everybody has a heart, right? All of you are missing the most important, important ingredients. The easiest way you can motivate anybody is to turn it into a competition. How many of you have looked back on something and you said, oh, my God, I shouldn't even have done that. Why? Just because you wanted to win even the silliest, stupidest things, right? You went above and beyond, you worked harder, you stayed up late at night, you did all that extra stuff because you wanted the gold medal. Joe, what's that saying that? I think Napoleon Hill said it.

Yeah.

Well, the real quote is like, well, one way to say it is my life changed the day I realized a man would die for a big ribbon.

Right?

It was like the die, but the real thing was like a thread of ribbon. Is how Napoleon said it, that what a man, a man would give his life for a thread of ribbon.

Yep. So you turn it into a competition. Now, there are two types of competitions. There's internal competition, competition to better yourself. So a really smart marketer that I know had a contest model that he said, better, your best, really good smart marketer. I wish he was here right now. Brilliant guy, right? His name is Joe Polish, by the way. So you create an internal competition or an external competition. So what we do when we market to customers now, primarily to get new customers and to service existing customers and then to sell them higher ticket stuff, we challenge them. We don't say, I'm going to help you, blah, blah, blah, I challenge you to do blah, blah, blah, right? So every year at the beginning of the year, there's like a healthy challenge or some sort of healthy habit challenge. We just did it in yoga. It's like if you can go five days a week, then for six weeks you get two entries into a contest for a month free yoga. Now I need a month free yoga. Like I need another hole in my head, right? It's like 70 bucks, 80 bucks, I don't care. But I won't. Just to say I did the most for males. Some woman beat me. I was pissed off, but I got the male number one. And I don't even know why. Just because I wanted to win, I wanted to compete. So instead of teaching people and saying, you should do this, you should do that. If I challenged you to scream time elimination, that would be more effective than if I educated you on how to reduce or eliminate your screen time. If I said, the winner is going to get this trophy, all of you, most of you would be way more served in order to reduce your screen time by a challenge, not by education.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait until the end of this video or you can Simply go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

You follow? So anything you sell which is great, also sell a challenge with it. So sell the product and when most of your customers have trouble implementing it, which they will then sell a challenge on the back of that, right? Very quickly our challenges look like this. This is the tactics which matter the least, but it's the stuff all of you really want to know. Right now we run six day challenges. 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6. We break everything down into four critical elements of what somebody needs to do to succeed. There are 20 to 30 minute long trainings. We do them live, cast style. You can also record videos each day across the board. Except for day five. This one is the 90 minute training and this is when we sell them the thing that we know now that they're challenged and excited and ready to go, we'll get them to the next level. So we can take somebody because we typically sell these challenges for between 5 and $25 on the front end. And by the time they get to day five, they are so committed. There's a concept in marketing called identity and it's the single greatest concept I've ever used to make my fortune. If I can create somebody as an identity who feels empowered and successful, guess what they do. They step into that identity and they become successful and they become empowered. And then they invest in the higher ticket solutions which go anywhere from this to this. And we don't change any of the content. Content's the same, the framework is different. So I would suggest to you to take your best customers and instead of teaching them more or providing the normal solutions, physical, digital or anything in between, create a challenge. Whatever you sell, you can create a challenge around. The challenge is built on the solution. You want them to achieve that. If you knew they achieved, not only would they be better customers, they'd be worth more money to you as well, and they'd be more successful. That is a challenge model. We're partnering with companies in all sorts of fields to take their content, repurpose it into a challenge format, and customers that have been with them for Years are like, God, finally you're doing something that is totally worthwhile. Here's my money. And that's how we're crushing in the market right now.

You've had the experience of meeting, I'm.

Sure, just thousands of entrepreneurs over time.

And also helping to create them.

Is there any consistent mistake that you see entrepreneurs make in business that they could possibly avoid?

I think, I think that if you don't protect the downside and you sort of treat your business, business a bit like going into a gambling, gambling, gambling casino and, you know, so keeping on doubling up to, you know, hoping that you're going to get out of a problem, you know, then, then you're asking for trouble. And eight out of 10 businesses do go bust. And quite often it's because people haven't thought of the, you know, the downside consequences of what they're doing. So without being too conservative, it is important, I think, to always think, you know, if I do this, what's the worst that can happen? Can I afford the worst? You know, for instance, right now, you know, some of our airlines have protected against oil. Oil going up now. A lot of, A lot of people within our airlines said, well, it can't possibly go any higher. We've got a recession on, you know, certain. So do we really have to protect the wiser people at Virgin said, yes, you know, we should protect against the worst happening, you know, so it was, it was good and sensible that they protected against the downside.

I see that too, Richard. I mean, just as a great example is like Virgin Mobile, as we'd say in the uk, but Virgin Mobile and.

Like, just instead of buying, like building.

All the communication, all the, all the.

Infrastructure it would take, you literally leased.

I think, Sprints lines.

And so there's very little downside and very big upside. If it worked for you, we have.

A strong brand and therefore we're able to avoid the enormous infrastructure costs of, sometimes of building new businesses. We can piggyback on other people's infrastructure using our brand and, you know, we'll put in the brand, we get 50% of the company, we use our marketing skills and other people put in the infrastructure. And that in itself also, as you say, protects the downside.

Yeah, you know, with all the decisions that you have coming across your desk, wherever you're at your beach, I guess it could be.

Yeah, exactly.

How do you make really tough decisions on a daily basis? Because you're just, you've got to be. You've got so many requests and demands of your time and people that want your attention in the world. And, like, what's the Richard Branson methodology of, I guess, time management, priority management, really thinking it through. I mean, how do you do all of this?

Well, you know, we spoke about delegation, and I think the first thing is to make sure that everything is running without you. So, you know, if, you know, when I'm swimming around the island every day, you know, if a shark comes and decides that I look tasty and I disappear, that, you know, everything will. Will continue to run. And, you know, it may not run in exactly the same way, but it will continue to run and Virgin will continue to grow. The fact that everything is running, we've got a fantastic team of people on a global basis. It means that literally, I can work out how I want to spend my day.

I want to talk in the second part now about a bold and abundant mindset, and I want to start that with a video. My goal here is for you to up your game. My goal here is for you to think at a level that's uncomfortable. My goal is to have you think at, as Dan and Joe would say, a 10x level or 100x level. How are you going to touch a billion people on this planet? How are you going to take on the world's biggest problems and solve them? So let's watch this video and then come back.

The actual moonshot is wonderful, inspirational, poetic, beautiful, involved, great technical challenges, genuine heroism. It brought the world together. But think about the Polynesian islander on the dugout canoe deciding one day they were going to go that way. No one had ever been that way before. No one even knew if there was anything that way before. It was amazing and it changed the world. People can set their minds to magical, seemingly impossible ideas and then through science and technology, bring them to reality.

And that then sets other people on.

Fire, that other things that look impossible might be accomplishable.

Galileo is such a hero, you know, in thinking big. And what he represents to me is both curiosity and wonder that humanity had that he had that pushed him and drove himself to invent and work on the first telescopes that allowed us to see the moon. And here we are.

These aviation pioneers were figuring it out as they went. No one really knew how to build an airplane, right? Knowing how to fly an airplane, it was amazing and crazy and wonderful, and they wanted to explore.

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he.

Want to climb it.

He said, because it is there. There's so many challenges in the world. And you can feel daunted by that, you know, and sort of oppressed by that. Or you kind of say, how might we think differently about this?

Everyone else in the world is working on the next 10%. If you can be the one that delivers that 10 times improvement, you have a chance to really change things. If you want cars to run at 50 miles per gallon, fine, you can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas.

For 500 miles, you have to start over. You need a lot of courage in this work, and you need a lot of precision. One of the things that's really critical is not only having the courage to keep drawing every day or thinking big, even if you don't really 100% believe it's possible. Like, you might think this might be possible.

Have the courage to try.

That's how the greatest things have happened.

You don't spend your time being bothered that you can't teleport from here to.

Japan because there's a part of you that thinks it's impossible.

Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by that.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Humanity's progress has been a series of amazing, audacious things, from the very small and personal up to the great big and grand. And we are a species of moonshots. And to me, that's like the really amazing, poetic and inspirational thing. I think our ambitions are a glass ceiling on what we can accomplish.

When you find your passion, you're unstoppable. You can make amazing things happen. It's been true through all of history.

I believe in the human spirit, and I. I believe that there are always going to be crazy people who will get out of bed one morning and.

Say, you know what?

I think I can build a space elevator, and I'll just go do it.

But I think that if we become.

Afraid to take these great big risks, we stop inspiring people, we stop achieving things. And the biggest nightmare scenario is that we won't have what it takes to solve the really big challenges. When Kennedy said that we would put a man on the moon, it's a picture about the fact that he said, we don't know how to do this yet, and we're going to do it anyway. And that sends chills up everybody's spine, because if that happens, what couldn't we do?

Yeah, it's great, huh? So the guy speaking in that video is a good friend, Astro Teller. He's the head of Google X and I interviewed him at length for my next book, Bold and talk about the fact that we're living in a world where you can take moonshots. And his ethos is so true that when you're trying to go 10% bigger, you're competing with everybody else trying to go 10% bigger. When you go 10x bigger, when you have the audacity to say that and try that, it inspires an amazing group of people to come by your side and no one's competing with you there. And the question is, is it really a hundredfold harder? And the chances are that it's not. So I also in Bold, really drill down into what the eight innovation principles are that Google uses. And then with Stephen, look at how Lockheed Skunk works maps onto that. So one of the most extraordinary companies in mindsets and how do they work? Let me share with you these eight principles. The first is focus on the user. Google's issue, and you'll see this again and again is focus on the user. What does the user need? Pretty obvious, pretty direct. The second is Open will win. You know, I bet ON Android over iOS for that one reason. Open will win the ability for having billions of people to contribute to you. Instead of thinking that oh my 10,000 employees are the best and brightest in the world, you know, there's no competition there. The second is ideas can come from everywhere or anywhere. And the whole notion of crowdsourcing, we talk about that at Abundance 360. We talk about that at Xprize. At HeroX, it's the fact that you can crowdsource solutions from around the world to solve your problems. Think big, start small. So at Singularity University I constantly teach the students start with a product that has the ability to earn a dollar on day one but can impact a billion people in a decade. That's the think big, start small, never fail to fail. This is where big companies screw up, where they don't take risks. And you guys know that as entrepreneurs, never fail to fail. The rapid experimentation, launch early and iterate. My friend who's the CEO, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've launched too late. And I believe that when you look for striving for perfection, you miss the whole benefit of this hyper connected world today. Be a platform, float all boats and then finally, make it matter. Make it matter. Oh my God. Make it matter. So in bold, I talk about a concept that my good Friend Salim Ismael coined which is having a massively transformative purpose. An mtp do you have for yourself and for your company a massively transformative purpose that matters. That's going to attract people to work for you at xprize. It's making the impossible possible or solving the world's grand challenges. So here's the eight. We'll talk about these a little bit more. My question for you is what is the area of your business where you should be going 10 times bigger rather than going 10% bigger? I want you to reflect on that and think about that. Don't have time to do a session now, but ask yourself that question, please. Here's one of the first Moonshot organizations. One of the first bold thinkers out there is Kelly Johnson, who in 1943 is called by the Defense Department and says, we're losing the war against Nazi Germany and we need a jet plane. Never had a jet plane before. In 143 days, these guys did not design a jet plane. They delivered working hardware. You can't negotiate a contract in 143 days. Today they also delivered the U2, the SR71s. The question is, how did they do this? And so in bold actually looked at how Lockheed Skunk work did this, compared this against Google X and came up with some shared elements. And here they are. The first is having a compelling purpose or mission, an MTP that is uniquely yours. Google's is to categorize the world's information, right? And if someone else came up with that mtp, they say, no, that's Google's. So something uniquely that's yours that attracts the world's top people to come and work for you. The second that Kelly Johnson and Google X share is small teams, a passion around small teams. And this is the words from Kelly Johnson, the number of people connected to any project should be restricted in almost vicious manner. This is Jeff Bezos two pizza rule, right? Teams under 10, ideally five or six, extreme isolation, access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled. Because if you're trying to innovate inside your organization, even 100 people, let alone 5,000 people, and you're trying to do something that's disrupting your company and the entire immune organization is going to come out to you and say, that's a crazy idea, it can't be done. If you do it, you can put us out of business. What are you doing? Come on, stop it. And so actually taking that skunk works inside your group and isolating it, it's Steve Jobs taking his Mac team to a different building with a pirate flag above. So how do you isolate your team authority and autonomy? The manager must have control of his program, create mutual trust and very close cooperation in a day to day basis. It's the notion that my team at PhD Ventures Abundance360. It's five group, it's a team of five. It's like they're a self managed company. They have the authority and the autonomy to go and run on their own. I learned that from Strategic Coach. Of course. It's all good things. Flexibility must provide a very flexible drawing. So when they designed the fighter jets and the U2 and the SR71, there was a drawing in the middle of the room where anybody could go and change the drawing. There was no sort of organizational hierarchy. I need to get this person's permission. You could go and change the drawing of that airplane. And so it provided immense flexibility but also responsibility. Lives were at stake if you screwed up. But it allowed rapid iteration like never before. And then finally testing and experimentation. You know, fail often fail early. Test, test, test the next part of the book. I actually had a chance to sit down at length with a number of amazing people. Larry Page, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson studied their work and came up with a series of eight. I'll share six. Thinking at scale, strategies, passion and purpose. Elon said, I didn't go and build a car company and a rocket company to make money. I'm not crazy. It was driven by my passion, thinking at scale and experimentation. Jeff Bezos saying, you need to have thick skin. If you're not failing often, if you're not experimenting on a monthly or daily basis basis, you're not going to innovate. Larry Page saying, we need to be customer centric. We need to be doing stuff and touching stuff that people use every day. Richard Branson saying, we need to have risk mitigation. And again, you guys will get copies of my book. But specifically entrepreneurs are ones who take risk but set it off to someone else. Long term thinking. Jeff Bezos with Amazon is a perfect example of long term thinking. And then finally optimistic thinking. And Larry gives me credit on abundance often. But we have a reason to be tremendously optimistic in the world today. And having that mindset inside your organization and your company and your family and your life changes how you think about the future.

Future.

Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome. Click here.

Go ahead.

You're over here.

Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.