Life-Changing Books Episode 9. Grant Cardone: Author of The 10X Rule

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to episode number 9 of our brand new podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, I interview some of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better. In this episode, I have the pleasure to interview author, entrepreneur, and speaker Grant Cardone. Grant is the CEO of Cardone Capital, which has almost $2 billion in its portfolio of multifamily properties. He's created over 20 best-selling business programs, and he was named the number one marketer to watch by Forbes magazine. Lastly, Grant is the founder of the 10X Movement and the 10X Growth Conference, which is the world's largest business and entrepreneur conference. Talk about a huge resume. Our conversation touches on a few things, including his book, The 10X Rule. We talk about his biggest regrets so far, and we discuss my favorite topic, how books can have a positive impact on you. Without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Grant Cardone.

Book Thinkers. Ooh, love that shirt, dog.

Thank you, Grant, and welcome to the show. And I don't say this very often, but no introduction necessary, huh? You have got your seeds everywhere these days.

Even a rock gets an introduction.

Well, I'll do a little formal intro for you, but for anybody that doesn't know who Grant Cardone is these days, you want to introduce yourself and tell everybody what you're all about?

You know, I'm a guy like everybody else, man. I've just been hustling and trying to figure out my way and, and, and, uh, trying to figure out how to, how to, Realize my own dreams. And it's been a long time. Like, it's taken me a long, long time to, to kind of assemble anything that, that at least I'm proud of.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and frankly, most of the time I've done it wrong. Still do it wrong today, but somehow I do it— as much as I do it wrong, sometimes I just figure out enough to seem to advance my life a little bit.

Well, you are just like everybody else. And in the book, you talk about your early beginnings, McDonald's, 15 years old. And so when you look back at that moment, I think what's really cool is you say, hey, I'm not satisfied yet. You say, I need to keep pushing the needle forward. And so can you talk a little bit about that powerful mindset about why it's a duty and obligation and a responsibility to be successful for yourself, your family, your business, all of it?

Yeah, so you know it's a super important question because I had a buddy of mine hit me last night. He's like he just finished watching the Jordan Netflix. I haven't seen it yet, but I heard it's fantastic. And he's like, you know, you are like he's like when I'm watching how relentless Jordan Michael Jordan was. He's like you remind me of that that constant. demand for, uh, the next level. And he's like, Grant, where do you think you got that from? And I said, you know, it's simple. Like every time in my life where I have been satisfied, every time I took my foot off the gas, uh, every time I thought I was in a good position, I get every single time in my life. I mean, I can literally go to 10 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old, 18 years old, 21 years old, like 23 years old, 25. Every time I thought, oh, I got it, I got slapped. I got whacked. Even, even, uh, in 2008, like 2008, I was doing great, uh, financially. I had 3 companies that was working and then this mortgage, uh, crisis happened. Now since then, uh, I wrote the 10X Rule after that and I have been preparing for, for, I guess, uh, 10 years for the, for a collapse. So when COVID came around, dude, I just, all I did was apply the 10X rule. I just said, I told you guys, everybody's wondering why I'm busting my ass working. I'm flying private, doing 19 countries in one year, got my own plane with my name on it. You know, I'm, uh, I got a billion dollars of, I don't know, $1.5 billion worth of real estate. COVID hits. Prior to this, everybody's like, dude, why don't you take it easy, man? Why don't you relax? I'm like, cause every time I do, I get whacked. And then COVID comes, knocks out 40 million people. Like, like, you know, this word privileged is being used a lot right now in our society. Hey man, I've been privileged, and every time I act like I am, I get whacked, and I'm tired of getting whacked.

And what you talk about, actually what I loved, it's so validating, the opening line in 10x says that anyone that suggests to me to do less is not a real friend or they're very confused. And so, I deal with that during COVID So many people are like, relax, watch Netflix, stay home and chill. I'm like, I need to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is my duty, obligation, and responsibility. And you preach that all the time.

Yeah.

I love it.

You know, like, I told the guys, I actually was in Colorado when this thing happened. I got on a flight, you know, I got— and I flew to Miami, got my team together, and I'm like, hey guys, the world's getting ready to come apart. I've been, I've been, I've been telling you guys for 6 or 7 years this was going to happen. I didn't know it was COVID. I didn't know it was going to be some made-up virus. I said, look, they're going to come try to take all the chips away from us. There's a redistribution. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I know this is happening. This has been happening for centuries on this planet. It's not a new game. It is go work your ass off, we're going to take it back from you. And so, um, I got on a flight. I, I called the plane. I said, pick me up. Plane comes, gets me, come in, tell my team. I'm like, every department that doesn't work, execute it right now. And they're like, huh? I said, uh, well, I know this one department. It was brand new. We just started like 60 days before. I said, look, it's too— we're gonna go remote. We're not going to be able to work in the office. Bam, kill it. And they're like, what about 10x? Kill the department. And they're like, well, that's not 10x. I'm like, well, you don't understand 10x. 10x for me to go take some, I'm not going to take something and not keep it. Okay? I can't, I can't go fight every battle. 10x means, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to take this heel this hill over here, this, this thing, this target. And I'm going to do, I'm going to 10x until I get it, but I want to keep it. I don't want to get it and lose it. Because I've done that before, man. I went and worked and then I lose everything. I'm like, 12 years of work down the drain. Sometimes you got to kill something over here that's a distraction so that I can pay attention to the things I want to keep and I can expand on the things that are worthy. So the 10X thing is it's a very tough mentality. It's very much about never be satisfied like you're talking about. And it's not about working because you can't relax. It's about working so that one day you can relax. And more importantly, so that the people that you bring into the world can one day not be prone or victims of some made-up crisis.

Yeah, and your mindset, your mindset definitely shifted because you talk about it in the book too. You know, when your daughter was born, now you have more of an obligation for success. You have a duty and responsibility to her now. It's another reason to work so hard and to 10x your thinking. And you do talk about in the book, I'd love to hear a little bit about this, your biggest regret in life was for an early period of time, or probably a couple times, you let that 10x mindset slip and you weren't thinking big enough. And so you've totally course corrected, especially since the book came out. Like, some of those goals that you list in the book, you've already achieved them.

Yeah.

And you've course corrected over the last couple years. You're everywhere. And so I love to see that. And, you know, one of the things that you talk about outside of regret now is that your goal is when anybody says sales, they think Grant Cardone. Whenever you say sales training, whether you're a business or a person or whatever, Whatever, you think Grant Cardone. So what's that like now? How are you doing that?

So I just learned a lot in 2008 and I just swore this is, the 10X Rule was really written as a way for me to blueprint not to have that happen again. Like what did I do wrong? And this is a question that I think a lot of people can relate to. What have you done wrong to work your whole life and have nothing? Because even if the deal— even if the, you know, the, the, the cards are stacked against you, even if it's not fair out there, which all that's probably true, I kept coming up short. And I just got tired of coming up short. My dad died when I was 10, and he did everything right. And then when he died, my mom had to start selling stuff. And he did everything right. So how right did he do everything? He did everything right based on a certain set of rules. You know, I can go to, I can go to, I can go to Vegas and play the hand perfectly and still lose. I don't want to lose. I need to get— I need to start getting ahead. I'm tired of taking the 2 steps forward and get— take 2 steps back. 2 steps forward and the tax man whacks me. 2 steps forward and somebody sues me. 2 steps forward and somebody comes out with a new piece of technology and they disrupt my business. I I started a business once and Apple killed the project because Bill Gates lent money to Apple. This is years, years ago. And part of lending the money to Apple was you had to bury the little, the Newton computer. I had a business that depended upon one piece of technology. I'm like, I'll never make that mistake again. See, the 10X Rule is like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna figure out, I'm not gonna stay in my lane. The 10X Rule is not about a lane. It's about getting good in a lane. But it's about owning the whole highway and being able to use the ditch if you need to, or being able to jump the, the, the center, the center line and go against traffic if you have to. But it's about being able to dominate space so that when people say your name, you know, when you walk in a room, people should know who you are.

Yeah.

If you connect enough and you walk in a room, people be like, oh, that's that guy. And, and, uh, if you don't get there, and I know not everybody's like, everybody's like, I don't want that much attention. Okay. Well, good. Then you're, you're going to be every day of your life having your attention on what happens if the next shoe drops. So what I would rather do is command the attention of other people so I don't have my attention on my finances, worried about, worried every day about what, what are food prices, what is inflation.

So. I love that. Hey, in the, in the nonfiction book space, which is my kind of small pond for now, I want everybody to know who Book Thinkers is. Hey, I'm Nick at Book Thinkers. If you need a book recommendation, if you want to discover your next book, like, I'm your guy, and this is the podcast to do it.

Yeah.

So that's why 10X resonates with me so much. And we went from Instagram, now we're on all socials. Now we've got a mobile app coming out, we've got a merch store. Now we're getting into podcasting. And people think all the time, like, Hey Nick, you put out a podcast, you got Grant, you're pretty lucky. I'm like, I put down thousands of hours of work to grow my community to impress somebody on Grant's team to say yes to me. That's what happened. It's behind the scenes. You talk about that in the book too. Like, success does not happen overnight. It happens because you put a lot of work in behind the scenes.

You know, it does. Unfortunately, it does for the— for people that are trying to figure out why they don't have it. Yeah, that's your answer to why you don't have it. Oh, what happened to Grant overnight? It happened to LeBron overnight. It happened to— yeah, okay, whatever, dude. That's the little lie you tell yourself because it doesn't happen to anybody overnight. Uh, Jeff Bezos has been playing his game for 25 years before anybody knew his name. Um, Elon, same thing. I mean, these guys are like— these guys were playing, you know, Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook. Everybody thinks that Facebook was his first deal. It wasn't his first deal. Warren Buffett, I mean He was in his 50s before he ever made any real money. So I've been playing this game 35 years. I don't know how many speaking engagements, thousands and thousands of unpaid. Um, how many, uh, podcasts I've been on? I don't know, thousands of them. Some of them with 2 viewers. How many posts I've made that nobody watched, nobody saw? Probably have We probably have, I don't know, 6,000 videos on YouTube. A lot of effort, man. And too many people are viewing, you know, my 7th inning to their 1st inning.

Yeah.

I've been putting, I've been putting, I've been struck out a lot. I've been hit with balls, thrown out of games, sat on the bench. You didn't see all those games, you know, to finally get to this part of the cycle where I'm like— and I took too long, bro. Look, if I would have known what you know right now, if I'd have known this 20 years ago, like, like, if you put Book Thinkers on 10X, you'll be— you could be— you could be the biggest thing that ever hit books. You might be the revival for books.

I will be, and I am putting it on 10x. And there's a lot happening, man. I mean, the last couple months are a blur, and I love it. I love it. And now I have people like you on video saying book thinkers, man. A few years ago, you would have told me that, I would have said you are lying. And now here we are, and it's only going up. And so that's what I love about the work behind the scenes, the compound effect, small steps in the right direction. Let them all pile on top. Delayed gratification. It's about tomorrow and today, but it's also about tomorrow. And that's what you are so good at. I mean, 30 years, you built it. Talking about regret, you wish that you built it a little faster, a little bigger, more ambitious?

You know what I wish is I wouldn't have wasted the first 22 years thinking small, man. I should have been like, I should have been thinking about the big expansion, um, the whole time. But unfortunately, I had a lot of people around me like you do, like you have Tell— telling you, be 1x. They don't say that. What they say is, man, why don't you relax? You only live once. By the way, they don't even know if that's true. Uh, why don't you relax? Why don't you take it easy, man? What you worried about? Money isn't everything. Can't you just be happy? When's enough enough? Blah, blah, and blah. But, and they're not telling you that. They're talking to themselves. I know they think they're talking to you, but they're really talking to themselves.

My business partner and I are having that problem now where everybody wants to give their opinion and everybody has a ton of fantastic input, and it's just like you gotta filter. He painted me this picture the other day of a funnel. He's like, here's everybody trying to give me feedback, and then there's kind of like the middle part of the funnel where it drops down into his brain, and he's like, I'm only letting a couple people through. Because it's way too much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don't want an open mind, man.

Neither do I. And but what's so crazy about 10X, and you just mentioned it earlier, is that you have your fingers in everything. Like, you've got the live events, you've got the books and the e-commerce and the media, you've got the real estate. Real estate's exciting. I heard you say recently you're going to have a billion under management in the next 10 years or something like that.

No, $10 billion. We have $1.8 billion under management right now.

Oh wow. I didn't know that. I'm watching outdated videos.

I'm here for the first time. I'm going to raise $3 billion in cash without going to the banks.

Book thinkers.

I'm going to do it without paying a middleman. It's never been done before. I'll put together a $10 or $12 billion real estate portfolio. We'll do that in the next 3 to 5 years.

What I love about you and watching this live— that was an original, The Book Thinkers— is that you make claims like this. It doesn't even shake or waver you. And so I'm doing that too now. I am the biggest nonfiction book, uh, Instagram community and podcast, but I want to do so much more. And so I really have to start making claims like that. Do you feel externally accountable or do you not even care when you say things like that?

The more times I say it, man, the more it starts to set something in motion for me, right?

Yeah.

Because then I start thinking about it and then I, I write my goals down every morning. That's been something really helpful for me. So I write them down in the morning and at night. And when I start writing it down, like I can just sit down with a pen right now if I wouldn't have thrown my pen away. And I'm like, $3 billion, $3 billion raised in cash. $3 billion buys me $10 billion worth of real estate, maybe, maybe $12 billion. Okay. $3 billion would pay me, like I could literally make $3 billion. I could probably, I could become a billionaire off that race. I mean, a legitimate billion dollars real.

Yeah.

I like that. That's a fun game for me. Okay. Because I'm playing a game no matter what, I'm playing a game every day. Everybody's playing a game. You're playing some kind of game. Get to work on time. Save a little money, go on a vacation. It's all games, dude. Have an argument with your wife. They're just games, right? So hey, why don't I play a big game? Where's the big score? Again, I just— how old are you?

I'm 26.

Yeah, dude. Goddamn, man. 26. I was coming out of a treatment center for drug addiction. I was thinking about how to stay clean for 24 hours. That was the big achievement of my life. And if I'd just— if I wouldn't have wasted 9 years screwing up with drugs, and I don't know, maybe that's what it took for me to get to, you know, to do this. But I just wish I was starting at 26 again. Like, that is a major regret for me that I wasted so much time. So good on you.

Well, and I— so I never read a book until I was 21, but I started to read some of these books and I thought, wow, I'm living under my potential. And that's when it hit me. And I didn't have the, the drug addiction and the rehab and everything or trying to stay clean, but But what I have is work until your idols become your rivals. But I want my idols to become, you know, I want them to idolize me. Like I've got that 10x mentality right now and it's moving so fast and I'm loving it. And now it's just like where to take advice from, where to put it in place. And so a big question I had, a personal question is when you're transitioning from a really nice job where you make a lot of money and you live a nice lifestyle to going out on your own, I know you, you took a couple of steps back. Like it took you 3 years when you first started your business to get back to that same level of income. And so, what's your advice for somebody like me or in the audience that's like, whoo, I know I'm taking a step back to do this myself, but I know that the future is so much brighter if I have more control of my time.

Yeah. So, you can't always go forward in your income, right? I mean, I'm talking about net income after expenses. So, a lot of companies lose money for years before they, they go backwards before they go forward. Um, I see people leave my company and they're like, I'm gonna go start my own gig. Okay, are you, are you ready to go backwards? Can you go, can you go backwards? Do you even know how to go backwards? Most people are not ready to go backwards. You know, they, they want just the advancements. For me to go into a new space, I go backwards every time I do it. What that means is like, it's, it's the big fish in the little pond thing, right? For me to move out into the ocean, uh, it's a new environment. I'm going backwards to some degree because I don't know the settings, the surroundings, the geography, the players. Uh, who's the sharks? Who's the whales? By the way, the whales are what you want, not the sharks. The sharks are distractions.

Right?

Um, so, so it's, it's like sometimes you got to take a step backwards. Like me having to get rid of a department in, in March. I had to kill something in order to move forward. When I was 25, I had to go to a treatment center. I had to go backwards. That was not a step forward, by the way. Okay? That was a step away, a big, huge, giant step backwards to confront my problems and, and spend the money, invest $28,000. Hoping, hey, this is going to clean me up. And the money was just half of the commitment. So, uh, you know, yeah, you got to be willing to go backwards in business. Sometimes you go backwards. That means I'm gonna lose a little money as we go through the COVID thing. My entire, my entire office thinks, oh, we're gonna go backwards because of COVID No, we could, we could, or we could We could go from 8 hours a day to 16 hours a day and not go backwards. See, that's a form of going backwards too. I'm not going to go backwards financially. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go backwards because I'm not, what's it called, privileged. You know what COVID did? It says, hey dude, all you privileged people, okay, you lost your jobs. And you other privileged people, they're still leaving work at 6 o'clock at night. I'm like, why are you guys leaving work at 6 o'clock at night? Because you're fucking privileged. That's why you leave. You think you deserve a job here. COVID happened. Everybody should have said, I will go to 16 hours a day without overtime. That's what they should have said. But most people didn't. Most people think they're entitled to their job. I'm doing 16-hour days right now so I can keep myself where I was.

I'm in the same boat. And I love that mentality. Like I, and you say it in the book too, there's enough success for everybody. Everybody can make progress and become successful. And we look at everybody else, like so many jobs lost, so many people not raising their hand and saying, hey, I'm ready to do 16 hours a day. And it's just sad. I, I love that. Uh, I love that you're helping people adopt this mindset. That's what's important to me.

Bro, it's sad. And then you see these police officers, man, they're working 20-hour days and they're the ones being hated on. Like it's And that's not a political statement. I'm just saying, like, you know, like, I got some great people that work here. I don't see anybody doing 15, 16-hour days. A couple people, I do see a couple people doing it, but I don't see— I know I'll do it. And, and, and I know your viewer right now, yeah, but Grant, you're rich and you own the company. Okay, good. And that's, that's who you should be studying. People that own companies, people that are— have made it, people that have kept themselves up there. Look at Elon. Elon's working freaking 16 and 20-hour days.

Yeah, I heard Elon in an interview talk about the math behind working 16 hours a day or whatever and weekends compared to his competitors. He's like, I'm working whatever, 60 extra days a year compared to my competitors.

You, you get, you get in the space like that. Yeah.

No, and I love it. And just like you said, you're doing what others won't today so you can do what others can't for the rest of your life. Yeah, that's important. And so, well, I know we have to wrap up soon, uh, so there's one or two more things I wanted to touch on. Something you said in the book that I've definitely started to realize is that massive action creates new problems. And so, that's how you can tell you've elevated your action. Can you talk a little bit about that for a minute or two?

So, you look, you know immediately when you hit 10x levels because you're going to create new problems for yourself. 10x is really not about I'm gonna go from a million to $10 million. It's to think with $10 million so you can start scaling and getting out of your old problems. Most people, most people want to move out of their old problem and they're like, okay, I'm gonna go from here to here. Yeah, but the problem is that step will not get you out of your old problems. You're still going to be calculating with everything that kept you right here. The people that you work with, your ad budget, everything, your, your where you office. 10x. 10x is like, okay, I'm going to move from the— this set of issues, okay, to these. My goals are not down here at a million, they're at $10 million. Now you're like, okay, I don't care about my lease. I don't care about it. It's nothing. But you see, right now you've got this little lease you signed, you got 12 months left, and that's your big problem in life. Dude, your problem should be you should be wasting leases every 12 months. Because if you make enough money over here, if that were the target, okay, uh, the target would be way up here. You'll drop these old problems and enhance inherit some new ones, which is, how do I get the money for that? Um, uh, I got to move across country. Like most people are literally just dealing with the same little repetitive, boring, mundane, dramatic problems that they're used to rather than saying, hey, if I'm gonna have some problems, let's get some big ones.

Preach it. I love all of that. Now I know you've read a ton of books, and you've talked about you've read terrible books, but they still help you. And so when you think of books, does anything come to mind as far as the biggest books that have impacted your life?

Uh, God, not right at this moment. I mean, I've read so many books, man. Like, they, they've all— they're— I read a book called Dianetics, man, by L. Ron Hubbard, the controversial L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Church of Scientology. Phenomenal book. Read that book 7 times. Uh, it's been on the bestsellers list for, I don't know, decades at a time. Um, like all those books inspire me, dude. Like, yeah, there's books I haven't read, read. I just got the title. I saw the title of the book. I'm like, oh my God, that book changed my life. That happens to me too. Uh, The Millionaire Next Door, absolutely hated it and it helped me. Because I'm like, I don't want to be the millionaire next door. There's not a book that I have read that I did not get something from. And there's a difference of reading a book and listening to one. For me, the words— when I hear Bill Gates talk about reading 50 and 60 books a year, the guy's so smart. And look, I don't really like to read, but when I hear Warren Buffett spending 3 hours a day reading Bill Gates reading 60, 70 books a year. I gotta tell you, I'm gonna take the advice of guys that are the, the 2 of the richest 10 people on the planet. Maybe I should listen to these guys.

Yeah, it's good advice. And I, I look at it the same way. Yeah, yeah, you have to be, you got to be a 10x learner too.

That's right.

Yeah, it is. Cool. Well, appreciate having you on the podcast today. And I know that the Book Thinkers family, my audience, is going to get a kick out of hearing that you're on the podcast. So thank you very much.

Appreciate you, brother. Keep up the great work. And I look forward to seeing you be the number one podcast in the world, man.

That's a wrap. Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Grant. I really do believe that because we are the average of the 5 people that we spend the most time with, It will benefit you and your network to share this episode with somebody that needs to be elevated. It only takes 60 seconds to share, and it could change their life and your life. Now, before I go, I want to remind everyone that Book Thinkers is both an online community, but we're also an educational technology company that enables readers to achieve more and live better. And so for more information on our mobile application, our shop, our social pages, or our mission, please check out www.bookthinkers.com. As always, remember that real learning requires education, like reading The 10X Rule, but it also requires behavior change. And with that, I'm signing off, and I can't wait for you to listen to another episode of Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.