Episode 305: From Homeless to Self-Made Millionaire in a Year with Entrepreneur Jay Samit

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and Again, go to wydellonwinning.comwebinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. This afternoon we're talking with Jay Sametown. Jay has an incredible track record of achievement and he's done it for a long time. He has written books, he's run major corporations and been on board of director. I'm going to let rather than get into this and right now written two bestselling books. He's founder and VP of Greenfield Robotics and I'll let him tell you all about that. But Jay, you've got an exciting, action packed life that you've lived and are living.

How did this all come about?

Well, I didn't expect to be an entrepreneur or start things like LinkedIn and eBay and all the various things over the years. I bought into society's promise that you go to college and you get a job and live happily ever after. And I graduated into a recession. There were no jobs. And it dawned on me that any job you ever apply for exists because somebody else already does it, which means there's somebody better qualified. That didn't sound like a system that makes sense. So I learned real early on, either be the best of what you do or the only one doing it, because if you're the only one doing it, by definition you're the best.

Right? And what were you aiming towards when you got started? What were the things that fascinated you growing up and informed your life, you know, your influences, your interests, your curiosities?

So the main motivation for wanting to be successful is I had two sons when I was young and I wanted them to have a better life. And so that gave me the motivation to go with the ups and downs. And then you notice a pattern. When dozens of your friends become household names and self made billionaires. You realize that they weren't the smartest people in the world. And it can be taught. So I started teaching it at the university level. I had students that did $100 million in a semester. And that was why I wrote Disrupt yout to Pay It Forward. And I'm spending whatever time I've left. You can't hire me. There's no upsell. I don't coach. You can't buy a T shirt with my name on it. This is about especially post Pandemic, when The middle class got wiped out. If you want to have democracy, you need job creators. And the only people that create jobs are entrepreneurs. And yet we teach people how to be employees and we never teach them how to be founders and creators.

Yeah. And let's talk about book number one. Disrupt yourself was in 2015. That's when I wrote my book. You've got a follow up one. But why did you write what was behind Disrupt Yourself?

So the main genesis is I was teaching this at a university level and I realized how far off the information was that most people had. You had a whole bunch of books written by journalists that never actually founded a company. And then you have the Jack Welch type that did one thing their entire career. And if you happen to get out of World War II the same time as him, you can follow that path. But there's very few people that have started many billion dollar companies and then gone on to run companies like Sony and EMI and the vice chairman of Deloitte Companies with hundreds of thousands of employees. So I could see it from all sides and I broke it down. And everybody thinks of changing the world, yet very few people think of changing themselves. And that's where it starts. And so the proof was I got thousands of emails from around the world to books in Lithuanian, it's in Chinese, it's in Korean, it's Vietnamese, and people are changing their lives and becoming successful. But I got an email from a millennial that said this book is all motivational, but I could never do that. And that aided me. Why was I missing on how to communicate with this new generation? So I tried an audacious thing. I took a homeless immigrant, mentored him one day a week for a year. And spoiler alert, if you're going to read future proofing, you, I took him from. He went from homeless to self made millionaire in 11 months. I gave him no capital, I gave him no business introductions, he had to start a business that took no money. And so I synthesized down our mentoring sessions down to 12 truths. You follow the 12 truths and you'll have the same results.

And repeat that, please. From homeless.

He was a homeless immigrant. To self made millionaire in 11 months. Wow.

And how did you. And so from that came the book, right?

Correct.

And let's talk about your job, career, work experience that gave you your foundational knowledge about what works and what doesn't work because you've had some incredible experiences.

Sure. So I'll synthesize it down. You only need two things for success. Insight and perseverance. Insight. I can teach people. I have a system to teach people. And again, there's no upsell here. You just get the book of how to find the next new thing. And for example, when I got out of school, there was this new movie called Star Wars. It was amazing, you know, loved it. I said, wow, it would be fun to do Hollywood special effects. I knew no one in Hollywood knew nothing about special effects, but that didn't stop me. I created a business with $1 called Jasmine Productions. J. Allen Salmon was mine, but I knew nobody would hire or trust their post production of their movie with a 21 year old kid. So I made myself head of sales of this make believe company. I went out and hustled, got some work and then I hired people that knew how to do the work. And that's a pattern that you can do anytime, anywhere.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Now what do you mean you hustled? You had this made up company and you hustled business?

I went out with my business cards. Not everybody could afford Lucas at ILM to do their movies. So you go out there and you get some projects and then you go out and you hire the people that know how to do the work.

And how do you go out? How did you go out with no track record, no credentials and grind up some prospects and some business?

Well, the easiest way to do it nowadays and what I did with Ben, the young man that I mentored, Ben wanted to do social media. I'm like, there's 40 million people doing social media. Coca Cola isn't going to call you and suddenly give you their account. So I said, your first account you may have to do for free, you may have to do for very cheaply. But once you do that and show the results, now you have what they call in business school, a case study. So I told Vin, instead of being social media, why don't you find something new that's in the zeitgeist that everybody's talking about and make yourself the social Media expert for that one thing. And at the time that I was mentoring cryptocurrency was the new buzz. Bitcoin was going through the roof, and there were tons of other coins that wanted to come out. So he marketed himself as the cryptocurrency social media expert. First client, I think, paid him like a few hundred dollars for a month's work. But when he killed it for that client, the second one's paying you 10,000amonth, and the third one's paying you 30,000amonth.

So.

You'Re starting out your career. You get the. Why did you get the idea of publishing? How did the idea of publishing jump into your head?

Well, software. So I started doing software for different things. And I realized when you make a piece of software, when you're working, you make money. When you not, you don't. But if you publish it out and you make video games, then people can buy them when you're sleeping. So that's how I got into that side of it. But one of the first things that I did to break into the industry was back when people read newspapers, I took out a blind ad in the Hollywood Reporter describing the type of job that I want. People assumed it was from a major studio or whatever. I got a bunch of resumes in, and those resumes gave me two key points of data. One, what experience would I need to succeed in this industry? And two, here's a whole bunch of companies where there's somebody with one foot out the door, so they'll probably be hiring or looking to solve something. The modern version of that, which I wrote about and disrupt you, is a young man, got a job out of college at a major ad agency, one of the big ones, and he was all excited. He wanted to be like Mad Men, do something creative. And he's down in the basement moving numbers around, wants to shoot himself. It's a horrible job. But he noticed of the big five creative directors, none of them bought their names as keywords. So for $9, the price of a Frappuccino, he bought their names. And so when those famous creative directors Googled themselves, as people do, the first result came up. Hey, I want to work for you. Click here to see my portfolio. All five called them in for interviews. Three of them offered him a job, and he quintupled his salary and accelerated his career by 20 years. And.

You obviously learned to be proactive early on. You had that instinct, go find the answer. Somebody knows the answer, otherwise you starve.

I mean, the world doesn't owe you Anything. The first truth and future proofing you. The most important thing is to have a growth mindset. Everything else follows that. Instead of saying, I'm a failure, I've tried something and I've learned this doesn't work. And that's the big change. So with this mentee that I had then, if he grew up on welfare, he had a mindset that I had to switch instantly. And he didn't get to find this out until he actually read the book. But in our first meeting, I lied to him. There's a psychological principle called the Pygmalion effect. The professor goes to a school, tests all the kids, and tells the teachers, these three students will be super learners, super achievers. They will excel this year. And at the end of the year, those kids actually beat out all the other kids. But the professor lied. He just picked three names out of a hat. But if you tell people they're special and you treat them special, they become special. So everybody's capable of success. Most just don't believe it. If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

What do you where did you get your growth mindset from?

I didn't have a choice. As I said, I was a young parent. There's no jobs. I got to find a way to pay the bills, and I failed my way forward. You learn from failing. No one becomes successful without failure. Failure is not a shameful thing. Failure failing is part of the process because you don't end up where you started with. You either earn or you learn. The beginning of my career, two guys that I worked with had a brilliant idea. What if they hook up computers to traffic lights to synchronize traffic and reduce traffic? It was called Trafo Data. Nobody got it. No city planner got it. So Bill Gates and Paul Allen's first company went belly up. Their second one was Microsoft. Henry Ford's first company, bankrupt. Walt Disney's first company, bankrupt. I can go on and on. I've raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, and I'd rather back a CEO who has failed than one who was his first time out.

Absolutely.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years. Put them into something for you to watch. Go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.