How To Become The Best Version Of You With Start With Yourself By Emma Grede

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Are you reaching your full potential? Are you doing your best with everything you got? I often ask myself that question, and that's what led me to read today's must-read book, Start With Yourself by Emma Greed. Now I'm gonna talk a little bit more about who Emma Greed is, why this book is so important. But today I wanna share with you the 5 biggest takeaways that I got from reading this book, Start with Yourself by Emma Greed. I read this book on the beach between games when I was playing at the FIBA Masters basketball tournament over in Greece. And the reason why I really wanted to go deep in this episode about this book is because really at its core, this book is about how to change the scripts that in your head. The old thoughts that often dictate your behavior. If you want to change what's happening in your life, you got to change what you do, and you only change what you do when you change what's in your head, what you think about. So how do you do that? Well, I'm going to share with you exactly how and other big takeaways, some real gems I got from this book. Now I got to say that Emma's style and her whole way of speaking is not everybody's cup of tea. This book will challenge you. So let's jump into why and how you can get the most out of what she has delivered in this book. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, it would be amazing if you dropped us a quick review on whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. It helps me and my team bring you new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover the podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. So who is Emma Grede? Emma Grede is one of the most successful self-made entrepreneurs. She's the co-founder and CEO of Good American. She is the founding partner of Skims. She's really like a serial brand hustler and builder. And what really resonated with me when it came to Emma's story is that she didn't come from very much. She grew up in a working-class neighborhood, raised by a single mom. She grew up in East London in a very rough neighborhood, and she's a high school dropout. So nothing was handed to her. And her book is a New York Times bestseller, and she's become one of the most successful modern-day entrepreneurs. Now, she rubs people the wrong way. Her style is quite aggressive, and a lot of people feel like she is not really helping with, you know, hustle culture, and she's all about like, you gotta work hard. I can understand why she says this, and I know this is kind of her mantra because that's what she had to do to get of her situation. She had to work hard. She had to defy the odds. She had to do extraordinary things to make sure that she can get out of the ghetto and move into a better life. So I have a lot of empathy for her because, you know, I didn't grow up with a lot of money and I understand the merits of hard work. And it's hard to ignore that, especially when you have to do everything in your disposal to be successful, to get out of a situation. In the book, she shares how she did this. And part of it is her psychology. And this is what leads me to lesson number 1 I want to share with you from this book, and it's all about killing your old thoughts. This is really the spine of the book. If you just get this lesson, you're going to be winning. Emma talks about what she calls old thoughts, old scripts, old thinking, outdated ideas. And she says that, hey, these rules that I think that set my life, what's possible, it's not possible, can really change what's possible in my own life, what I can actually do, how much money I can make, how much I can move up in my career, What kind of personal life I can have, what kind of relationships could I have? You know, it's all dictated on what I think is possible. So you need to change that way of thinking in order for you to start doing this. So how do you kind of kill those old thoughts wherever they came from, whether your upbringing, your neighborhood, you know, your family, whatever it might be? How do you change that when it's so cemented from day one since you were born? And here is really the key insight she shares. And I think this is a really good way to look at it. She says that these thoughts that are stopping you from succeeding, that are putting a ceiling on your success, They're just system errors. They're just bugs in the system, and you can rewrite your code and clean those bugs. It's not permanent. When I thought about that, I was like, wow, that is true. Like there are things that I didn't believe before in my life, and now I do believe in them, or I think it's possible. So it's just a matter of rewriting the code. And as you start growing in business, in life, start achieving some of your goals, you start realizing that even the, the life that you are wishing for, you're gonna have to rewrite that code because you're gonna start raising the bar and moving into another territory and you have to like improve the code to do better things. So it's a good way to look at it. It's like, hey, how do I constantly check for bugs in my system and first remove the bugs but improve the code? And the reason why this really hit home for me is, like I mentioned, you know, I grew up in an immigrant family. We didn't grow up with money. I inherited so many of old thoughts that my parents had and they tried their best, but this is what they gave me, you know, and I have to figure out if it's serving me or not. And a lot of us don't understand when you don't grow up with money, you have conflicting thoughts when it comes to money. Like, I want more money because a lack of money causes a lot of pain. It causes a lot of fights in your family, causes a lot of issues, heartache, disappointment. You break promises to people that you love. And the flip side is that, well, is that greedy if I want more money? So there's some stuff I have to reconcile in order for me to make more money, right? There's something that's stopping me from going past certain limits because of that code. It's also helpful to know that people have their own code, they have their own old thoughts, right? For example, when I left teaching to start a business, almost everyone treated it like I lost my mind. Like, you have a stable job, you're moving up in your career, you're a young chair of department. Why would you leave this opportunity to start a business? And you know nothing about business. Those reactions that people had, those were their old thoughts. That was their bugs in the system. I have to recognize the fact that, hey, they love me, they care about me, and they're just doing this because that's the code that they are running on. And throughout the last 20 years of my adult life, I had to consciously delete beliefs and never just accept what is in my head. Just because I'm thinking it doesn't mean it's true. Just because I believe it doesn't mean it's true. I have to Constantly question things to say, hey, why not? Why not build this business? Why not get a million dollars of revenue in my business? Why not ten million? Why not a hundred million? Why can't I do that? And by doing this, you start to open up possibilities. You start asking yourself the right questions like, what do I need to do to get to ten million dollars in revenue? What are the things I need to change about myself? What do I need to change about what I do every day? You need to start doing this, even if it's just a few minutes a day. Especially when you're struggling in your business or struggling in your life where you're like, hey, I'm hitting a wall. Well, ask yourself why you're hitting a wall. What are you doing that's actually contributing to you hitting a wall? A good question I like to ask is, what are the rules in my head? What are the scripts in my head that have led me to this point in my life? Something I believe led me to the decisions that led me to my circumstances right now. Okay. If I want to change the state of my life, I need to change what I believe so I can change my actions. So therefore I can change My reality. That's just how it works. 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Phew.

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Say you want to be able to discuss your business in Italian. This actually happened to me. Nicole and I were in Italy. We were having some drinks with her cousin Manuela, and I was trying to describe to her in Italian what we do— podcasting, blogging, business education— and I got to say, it was pretty challenging. I'm for sure going to use Sapphire Studio to create vocabulary cards so I can know how to discuss business with Manuela the next time we meet. I also like to shop for clothes when I go to Italy, and I want to learn a little bit more about how to say specific words when it comes to fashion, like shoe size and can I try this on? What I love about Rosetta Stone is that you're not just sitting there memorizing vocabulary. You're learning entirely in your new language through visuals, through audio, which helps you pick it up naturally. You're learning your new language the same way you learned your first language as a kid. If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. The $100 MBA Show listeners can get 20% off their Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. Visit rosettastone.com/mba to redeem your 20% off. That's rosettastone.com/mba. Lesson number 2, master your 5 emotions. Yes, emotions. I know if I read this book 5 years ago, I'd probably stop reading it after chapter 1 because I was kind of the person who was like, hey, you know, I'm in control of my emotions. I don't let emotions bother me or affect me or change my path in business or in life. That's a bunch of BS. We can't help it. We're human beings. Emotions are part of who we are. So you need to be aware of the 5 big emotions that really motivate and change your behavior. So what are those 5 emotions? Here they are: anger, fear, guilt, sadness, and joy. One of the things I really thought was very refreshing in this book is that she says, with these 5 emotions, don't treat them as a bad thing, as something that are problems that you need to suppress. Treat them as signals for growth. When you start to feel one of these things, anger or fear or guilt or sadness or joy, ask yourself, why am I feeling this? What do I need to do to learn from this, this kind of emotion that I'm feeling right now? So for example, if I got an opportunity to speak on stage in front of 10,000 people and I feel the emotion of fear, why do I feel fear? Well, maybe I feel fear because I've never done it before. Oh, okay. That makes sense. But how can I help that feeling kind of motivate me to do better in life? Well, maybe if I prepare. and rehearse and get a coach, that fear will wane because I'll feel prepared. So like, you have to use that emotion to help you through life. Too many people believe that emotions are the enemy, like they're something that you shouldn't actually experience. You should just treat them like data. Emotions are data that you should take, signals that you take on and say, okay, what does this mean for me? Anger is information. Fear is information. Guilt, sadness, joy, All this stuff is telling you something. The skill though is not to just ignore them. You need to read the signal and respond instead of reacting. You know, a lot of us, we just get angry and we start shouting and we start pounding on desks or whatever it might be. That's a reaction. But if you think about why am I angry? What's happening right now? You're going to get a chance to kind of process that information and respond properly. And you see, you can't do this. You can't do this if you are not Recognizing the fact that these emotions exist and that they're valid, and you have the self-awareness to stop and say, okay, I'm feeling something right now. Why am I feeling this? Let me just recognize the fact that this is going to affect what I'm about to do in the next step. As a founder of a business, as honestly a competitor, I'm very competitive as a person. If anybody knows me, I'm very competitive. I love any kind of competitive game or sport, whether it's poker or on the basketball court. My emotions can fuel me, or they can also sabotage me, and I have to be very aware of that when I'm competing, whether in life or in games for fun. And I often like to channel my emotions to help me rather than hurt me. For example, if I'm not playing well on offense in basketball, I'm missing shots, and that anger is natural. Like you're upset at yourself; you usually hit those shots. So instead of like hanging my head. Low and feeling upset, what I do is try to take that energy and put it into defense and try to make something happen, be an impact person, grab a rebound, do something where I'm using that energy in a positive way. Now I can't do that if I'm not recognizing the fact that I am angry, right? And I am upset. If I just like sit there and be like, oh, I'm upset, that stinks, hopefully the next shot goes in. No, that's not a good use of that energy. Like they always say, don't let a good disaster go to waste. You know, like this is a chance for me to Use that type of anger in a positive way. Fear. Fear can stop you from making the right decision or bold decisions that can impact your business and impact your life. I always say that if the reason why you're making a decision is out of fear, it's usually the wrong decision.

Right.

When you have to choose between 2 options and you choose the one that's more comfortable because the other one seems a little bit too scary, it's usually the one that is going to not pay off in the long term. Angry, right? I get very passionate when I'm discussing a topic or I'm debating something or making a decision with my co-founder Nicole. And I have to be very careful that that can come off as, you know, being confrontational. And I found that the difference between a good day and a bad day is how well I'm aware of my emotions, of those 5 emotions that we talked about earlier. Having that self-awareness is the whole game so that you can be like, okay, I am recognizing something here. I have the choice to react. In the way I'm going to feel proud of. Hey, I hope you're getting value from today's episode. I want to tell you about an episode I'm working on, and it's coming out very soon. It's an episode called Multiple Revenue Streams Will Kill Your Business. This is very not popular, this opinion, right? It's an unpopular opinion. A lot of people think that, oh, you got to have like diversify your income. I'm a big believer that that is not a great idea, especially if you're making less than $1 million in revenue. Multiple trying to like spin a million plates to make as much money as possible. is actually hurting you more than you believe. And I'm going to prove it to you in this episode. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Lesson number 3, the rule of thirds. This is an amazing rule you should keep in your head always. And honestly, it's worth the price of the book alone. This, this one takeaway. Okay. Emma in the book talks about living by the rule of thirds. What is it? Well, if you're going to do something difficult in life, if you're going to challenge yourself, you're going to try to build a business, you're trying to chase a dream, you're trying to publish an album, whatever it might be, you're chasing your dream with real effort, with real energy. You're pushing yourself to the limits. You're gonna expect to be happy 1/3 of the time. You're gonna expect another 1/3 of the time to just feel all right, kind of even keel. And then 1/3 of the time you're gonna feel real rough, right? It's gonna be really bad. It's gonna be a crappy time in your life, and that's just how it is. Just accept the fact that your life If you're pushing yourself, you know, in your comfort zone, one-third of it, you're going to feel amazing and feel unstoppable. One-third is going to be like, kind of okay, I'm all right. I'm not happy. I'm not sad. And a third is going to be really tough and almost to the point where you're like, why am I doing this? I'm so glad that she wrote those words in that book because that's exactly my experience in my life. And it's very important for people to know what they're in for. If you are chasing a dream, you will be challenged. It's not going to be easy. Otherwise, everybody would do it, right? Everybody would be successful and everybody would go and do hard things, but it's hard for a reason. And knowing that in advance that, hey, I just got to accept the fact that not every day I'm going to be super happy. Not every day am I going to like feel like this day is ecstatic and everything's wonderful. You're going to have things that you don't expect to happen, especially in business. People are going to poach your employees. You're going to have financial problems. People are not going to be loyal. Your best friends are going to maybe get jealous and start to act nasty to you. All that kind of stuff.

Okay.

And you just need to accept it and that's okay. And personally, I feel like if a year went by and less than a third of that year, I was not feeling so good about what's going on, then I'm winning. Wow. I kind of cheated that year. That year I had mostly, you know, happy days. Why is this important to know, especially when you're starting out? Well, I talk about this a lot on the show, this concept of you're going to eat glass for years. It's going to be tough. It's a long haul. Well, having this mentality in the beginning makes you understand that I'm going to not really have a fun time in the beginning until I see some reward. Reward is a little bit delayed. Okay. It's like that marshmallow test where you're like, you're going to have to wait a little bit and kind of suffer a little bit. In order for you to do that, listen, I'm going to give you a perfect example. And I left my job in teaching. I was doing well. I had a pretty good paycheck. I was respected. I was moving up in my career. People looked up to me. My parents thought I was successful. All that kind of stuff. Leaving that and starting from zero in a career I really wasn't great at, and having to build a business and having to try to be an entrepreneur, being like the worst entrepreneur amongst everybody I know, right? That is not fun. You're going to suffer for a few years. Your confidence is going to take a hit. Your ego is going to take a hit. You know, I had to lower all my personal expenses so that I have as much runway in my savings to be able to last me because I didn't know when my paychecks would come in because I didn't have a paycheck. Right. I was freelancing and trying to make money on the side and try to hustle for clients. I spent a good 2, 3 years like really behind in life. Right. Like I was like at a certain level in life and then I was just like, Dropped to the floor. And I was like, okay, I have to be okay with roughing it a little bit if I want to achieve something big. And I just told myself, that's just the cost of following your dream. Lesson number 4, every job is a school. Emma Greed had many different kinds of jobs that she shares in the book. She interned for a bit. She was in the fashion industry. She really didn't have a lot of qualifications. She's a high school dropout. So she did anything she could to earn some money. But she tells you in the book that nothing should be beneath you. You should be able to learn from every experience. Experience is a chance for you to learn for free, right? When you work at a job, yes, you're getting paid, but you're also learning a ton. You're getting experience. If you work for a startup, for example, and you want to build a startup one day, you're going to learn what it takes to run a startup, right? What are the moving parts? You can literally go to every department and talk to accounting and talk to marketing, talk to sales and talk to creative and be like, Hey, what do you actually do? And get basic real research from how a company is built. I look at the jobs I had growing up. My first job at 13 was washing cars at a car dealership, my dad's car dealership where he worked. And I used to do that after school, on the weekends. And it taught me about the value of hard work, but also taught me about the attention to detail. My job was to make sure that those used cars that got traded in looked new. When they got on the used car lot. When I was in university, I had a telemarketing job, part-time telemarketing job, learning how to sell long-distance phone service. MCI, I worked for MCI and I was on the phone every day trying to sell people on a phone service plan. And I was horrible at the beginning, but I learned how to sell. And that skill really helped me when I started a business. As a school teacher, I taught 5 times a day, 5 days a week. For over a decade, that taught me how to take ideas, distill them, and make sure that people could understand them, how to actually teach and how to make sure comprehension is taking place. That was my job for over a decade. Now I use that in today's show, in the podcast, in any kind of workshop I run. So every job you have, whether it's in your business or before your business, you have skills that you could take and utilize and leverage them. And make sure that you monetize them through your business. They're also skills that you could teach other people in your business, your other teammates, how they can leverage those skills and, and they could do a better job in what they do. Every job is a school. Lesson number 5 is something that I say all the time. You can have it all, just not all at once. Emma Greed, the author of this book, she's a bestselling author. She is a CEO of 2 businesses. She is a wife. She's a mother of 4 kids. But she believes the anecdote to burnout and feeling guilty is believing that I just can't have it all at once. I need to have chapters in my life. I need to be able to say in this chapter, in this sprint, in this next year or 2, I'm going to focus on this. And this is what I'm going to try to achieve. I can't have it all at once. You have to choose your sacrifices in life. You have to choose what are the things you're going to neglect. Because in order for you to focus and achieve something great, you're going to need to do that. You need to say, hey, this year I'm going to just not be the best friend in the world, right? Like, I'm not going to be able to go to parties. I'm not going to be able to check up on my friends, have drinks on Thursdays. I'm just not going to be that kind of person for this year. Why? Because I'm really trying to get in the best shape of my life and this is going to take priority. In order for me to do that, I'm going to have to be in the gym 5 days a week. I'm going to have to watch what I eat. It's going to be hard if I go out to eat and drink and all that kind of stuff. You get the point. There's trade-offs in life, and if you wanna achieve something, you gotta focus and you gotta go all in and you gotta say no to something. If you are not saying no to anything, I guarantee you, you're not gonna be great at anything. So one of the best ways to do this is to treat your life in seasons, right? This might be the season of family for you. It might be the season of health for you. Maybe next season's going to be a season where you're gonna achieve some personal goals or go deep on some of your hobbies. Maybe another season's gonna be where you're gonna try to get as rich as possible. This is really the formula I found that makes me feel like you can actually make progress. I'll share with my own experience. You know, my first 10 years from 20 to 30, I was really focusing on being great as a teacher. You know, I was trying to be great as an educator, move up in my career, learn what it takes to be really good in the university. And I really just dedicated myself to that. When I left that career, I really focused on getting rich. I'm not ashamed to say that, you know, I was not doing well financially for most of my life, and I was sick of it. And I thought to myself, OK, I'm going to solve this problem once and for all. It took about 7 years to get to the point where I'm financially free and I was not worrying about money anymore. But it took full focus. I basically did not have a life. OK? Didn't spend any money on myself. I didn't have nice clothes. I didn't go on vacation. I just believe that it's very hard for you to achieve something in a reasonable amount of time if you don't do that. And what I told myself during that time, that trough of sorrow where I'm really like struggling to like find joy in life because I'm working so hard. I always told myself that, hey, this is temporary. There's going to be a time where I can go on nice vacations. I can spend time on my hobbies. I can focus on other things in life once I solve this money problem. Okay. And luckily I did. And I was able to move past that. And now I have time for hobbies. I do have nice holidays. I have nice clothes. All that kind of stuff. The point is, is that it's very hard for you to do it all at once. Solve one problem, graduate, move on to the next thing you want to do in life. I say very hard, but in reality, it's impossible. Like, I don't know anybody who's done it all, all at the same time and done it at a very high level. So to wrap up today's episode, the 5 lessons that I wanted to make sure that you drill into your head From this book, right? I recommend you read the book regardless, but here it is. Kill your old thoughts, examine the script, see the bugs that are in your code, clean them up, and do this constantly. You don't have to— it's not a once-and-done thing. You're gonna do it so you can keep on leveling up in your life. Number 2, master your 5 emotions. Be aware of the fact that you will get angry, you will have fear, you'll feel guilt, you'll feel sadness, you'll feel joy. These are signals, they're not enemies. Number 3, live by the rule of thirds. One-third of your life is going to be Amazing. One-third of your time in your life is going to be kind of mediocre, kind of not wonderful, not horrible. Okay. And one-third, it's going to be horrible, right? It's going to be tough. It's going to be dark and just expect it. So when it happens, you don't feel like it's not par for the course. You're like, okay, I knew this was going to happen because, you know, and I'm telling you, if you just have that kind of expectation, you'll find out and you look back and say, actually, it wasn't one-third. It wasn't that bad. Number 4, every job is a school. Make sure you extract what you've learned from any job you've had in your life, or if you're in your job right now, treat it as free training. Number 5, you can have it all, just not all at once. Live in seasons. Focus, achieve a goal, move on to the next. Listen, I'll be totally honest. Like, when I read this book, most of it was really just great reminders, things I knew but I needed to be reminded of. But there are some things in there that I kind of needed to go deeper in, especially when it came to examining my emotions and what does it doing in my life and how I'm making decisions. So I highly recommend you pick up this book, Start With Yourself by Emma Greed. If today's episode really resonated with you, I highly recommend you check out another episode we published recently called Not So Obvious Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s. It's actually about 6 weeks old, so make sure you go up and scroll back on whatever app you're on. It's one of my favorite episodes because I share some of the hard lessons I learned. You can avoid a lot of mistakes. I made and avoid some mistakes you're about to make by listening to that episode. So go ahead and check it out. It's called 20 Not So Obvious Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks so much for joining us here on our Must Read episodes. If you have a book you recommend I should read and cover on the podcast, make sure you pop it in the comments. Or of course, you can join our newsletter over at our website, 100mba.net. You can reply to any of my emails. And chat with me and let me know what you recommend in terms of my next book. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start, grow, and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you got to do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode.

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