Dean Jackson argues entrepreneurs should invest in access to expertise and networks rather than learning everything themselves. He contrasts the slow path of figuring out the 'how' with the faster path of finding the right 'who'. A $25,000 annual network membership becomes a $250,000 investment over ten years that compounds through others' skills and real-world knowledge.
Questions this video answers
$25,000 for one year
A 10-year investment of $250,000
Chapters
Now we were having a great conversation about this concept of return on genius that everybody in this room, we're all entrepreneurs, we're all here by definition to turn things into a return on those investments. That's what we're doing here. And so the reason that we're here is to multiply the money and the time that we've spent to be here. And when we started talking, I've been thinking for a long time and I think when I was with Dan last year, we mentioned this idea of the choice between focusing on how to do something or focusing on who can do something for you. And that how is a question that leads to just more time that you have to invest in learning how to do something and then you have to spend time actually doing it, probably poorly, because you're doing it for the first time, something that you've just learned. Whereas if you're focused on finding a who somebody who can do what it is that you're looking to get done, the result that you're looking for, you instantly get to the done. And that allows you to move on and continue on. Now, yesterday or a couple of days ago, I've been, I think this thought a lot and I always look at how are we measuring our return on genius? And you look at the, rather than thinking about this type of an event as part of an educational budget or an expense that you're allocating to develop yourself, we look at it as more of a capital investment. And over time, if you look at this instead of a $25,000 investment to be part of Genius Network for one year as part of your educational budget and then move to something else, all the real return on genius comes from the cumulative effect, just like a compound interest table. If you think about this, and the way I think about it is as a 10 year investment of $250,000 over that 10 years and looking for what's going to drive that investment for a multiple of that money now. Now, the distinction that I had yesterday or Tuesday when I was talking with Joe is that as we're moving now into this more, we're moving away from linear thinking and into exponential thinking. It dawned on me that how and doing are linear thoughts. They're linear processes. You can only learn how to do something by investing real linear time in doing it. And then you have to spend real linear time in actually doing what it is that you've learned. So our personal development is into learning new skills. That's kind of the old linear model. As we move into now, this Exponential world. What and who are exponential things that you don't have to spend a fraction of the time when your focus is on what to do and who can do it. I loved when this whole premise of thinking about what needs solved is the reason, the why that you're in the room and what we're all going to be exposed to. We've all got our own different what needs solved and the opportunity we have is to focus on what can we do that would solve that problem. So we look for and identify. Well, that would be a good idea. I want to get more leads for my business or I want to whatever the. Whatever it is that needs to be solved. You're going to be exposed to what people have done. These are like field reports from geniuses that have spent their whole lives investing in their personal development to get to the result that we've got. Everybody in here has run or developed at least a million dollar business and has gotten to that point by being focused on their personal development, applying it to a very specific thing. Now linear is personal development. And it struck me that exponential is tapping into a genius network where you're instantly when you're tapped into a network and you have a relationship with other people who have spent just as much or more time in their personal development than you have and you have instant access to the cumulative effect of all of that time that they've spent in there when you're focused on what they've done, that gives you a clue as to what you could do to solve the same problem and look for the who's that can actually execute those things for you. There's such an exponential outcome from that.
