Roy explains why entrepreneurs need self-awareness to build strong teams. He contrasts maximizers, who chase perfection, with achievers, who focus on execution. Pair complementary co-founders, own your strengths, recruit for your gaps, and target a problem that serves others.
Grandma Mentor goes, "Roy, focus on what you love doing. Stop trying doing everything else." Mr. Tassar is here! Sup, man? You ready for today? Yeah! Let's hustle! The chemical society, that was a good meeting. Those students were brilliant. They're out to do something big, and I was so excited to be able to come in and give them some help. That's a challenge with me. It's hard for me to finish a project, not because I don't like finishing them, it's because my talent of being a maximizer, which means striving for perfection. That's why I love working with you, because you're more on the achiever side and you want to get things done. I'm on the other side, I want to make sure things are perfect. So I like initiating things, I like starting off things, but the challenge is keeping them perfect. It drives me crazy sometimes. If you're trying trying to go somewhere in life, you have to figure out how to get there, you know, the fastest way, the best way possible. And then what happens— I was having— I was at 22 years old, I just got to the States, and I was trying to figure out my life. And I had this conversation with my mentor, and my mentor goes, Roy, focus on what you love doing. Stop trying doing everything else and stop trying focusing on what other people ask you to do and focus what you love doing. And at that point, it hit me that, you know what, I have to recognize what I do really well. And then the challenge that happens is with you in life, because you grew up with something and do very well, you're not aware that you do it very well, because for you it comes easy. If it comes easy, it means you assume that it comes easy for anyone else. For instance, it's easy for me to sit down, to stand up in front of an audience and start talking about ideas and discussing subjects or interviewing them. I assume it's easy for anyone else. It turns out public speaking is like, it's one of the most feared things in the world. I had no idea because I grew up naturally good at it. I became an adult and I was never aware that I'm good at it. And because of that kind of thinking of like, look Go back in your life, the times when you're doing something so well without you having to work so hard on it, because that's your natural talent. That's your pattern recurring of behaviors. And with that, I started becoming more and more self-aware. Let's say right now you're an entrepreneur, right? Like, I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of startups, and they're all trying to start teams and all trying to start companies. The best advice I'll give you: look at your own strengths. Look what you're really good at. Look what you excel at. And by nature, what happens with us, we always look for people who look like us, act like us, and feel like us. That should not be the case in starting a company because what happens is both of you are going to have the same skill set and maybe you might have both the same vision, but if you have both of you the same skill set, some other things need to be done by, you know, stuff that you don't enjoy doing, neither of you. And the idea with this is once you know what you're really good at, you have to look for another co-founder, another team member who complements you in the things that you don't enjoy doing. So you could focus on what you enjoy doing and you could focus on what they enjoy doing and complement your skills. We're trying to do a project, I like maximizing in on it versus, you know, someone else who's likely to get it done. What about getting those two people together to get something done that is very effective, where it's near perfect at every level and it actually gets finished and published? We build teams where I look for partners who will basically maximize my talent, but they also like to keep things moving and get them done. The ultimate advice that I give for entrepreneurs and founders when starting companies is first start by recognizing yourself and your strengths. Once you recognize yourself and your strengths, I would look for people who can complement your strengths. 'cause once you bring them on board, you both can achieve high-performing team because you're able to tackle things from different angles and both of you would enjoy tackling those things and getting things done. And the third thing I would do is look where both of you complement each other in helping someone else get to where they're trying to go in their journey. That's the advice. Know yourself, bring other people who complement you, and look for a problem to solve out for someone.
