Give Me 27 Minutes and I'll Show Your EXACTLY How To Achieve Any Goal
In this 27‑minute motivational talk, Ryan Deiss shares a personal narrative that moves from a quirky blue‑spandex photo to building a multi‑million‑dollar business, using the story to illustrate three "unpopular" principles for achieving any goal. He argues that talking about dreams makes them fragile and that success comes from silently becoming the type of person who can fulfill those dreams. He recounts how, as a college student in 1999, he launched dozens of niche e‑book sites, scaled them to six‑figures, and used that momentum to fund his marriage, a ring, and later larger business milestones. Throughout, he stresses the importance of paying oneself well as evidence of a well‑run business, differentiates the "first mountain" (foundational sales, marketing, hiring) from the "second mountain" (leadership, finance, M&A), and warns against applying first‑mountain tactics to later stages. He introduces the "ask for the fish" metaphor, encouraging entrepreneurs to request concrete help rather than endlessly figuring things out themselves. The talk also outlines a practical framework used in the Founders Board community: value‑driver check‑ins, brain‑dump of highlights and lowlights, clarifying one’s deeper why, and committing to three concrete actions in the next 90 days. Finally, he balances the pursuit of wealth with the need for time freedom, emphasizing that money is a tool, not an end, and that true success is measured by the ability to enjoy life with family and friends.
Chapters
How can you achieve your goal? And there's a lot out there being said about it, and a lot of things that frankly I just disagree with. What's the point of having some bangin' mansion and rolling up in your bling-bling car if it's after midnight and nobody's there to welcome you? I have people with very fancy toys, incredibly expensive cars and boats and houses and country club memberships that they never ever get to enjoy because they have to work so much to afford them. So if you want to achieve your goals, become someone who's dream-worthy, not someone who merely talks about all of the things that you're going to do. I've never seen water flow from an empty cup, and I've never seen a broke person hire a rich person. I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is objectively better. It just is. I'm sorry. Don't tell me about your dreams and don't tell me about your goals. Tell me what you're going to do. I've done a lot of, of like research, and I've done a lot of studying on, you know, personal development and goal achievement, and there's a lot out there being said about it, and a lot of things that frankly, I just disagree with. And so what I want to give you are 3 unpopular tips for achieving any goal that you set for yourself that you might not like and you might not agree with, but that are still true even if you don't like them. 'Cause at this point, if you're still here, I like to think we've earned the right to tell you what you need to hear instead of simply what you want to hear. So let's kick this pig, shall we? This is a picture of me in full-body blue spandex, and I show you this picture for a couple of reasons. Reason number 1: this documents the absolute pinnacle of coolness in my life. Like, I have never been cooler than I was at this particular moment. I'm young, I'm thin, I'm surrounded by beautiful women. Futuristic-themed costume party. I remember going to this thrift store and seeing full-body blue spandex on the, you know, on the thing, and I was like, "I got to buy that. I'm going to duct tape an M to my chest, and I'm going to go as Millennium Man," because it was 1999. It also documents the moment just before I met my now wife. Because you see, right after this picture was taken, I turned to my left to this girl, and I said, "Hi, my name is Ryan." She said, "Hi, my name is Emily." And this, shortly after this, was when I asked her out on a date. One date became two, became three, and as I said, within a couple of weeks of dating her, I decided that this was the woman that I was going to marry. Now, importantly, as I've said a number of times, I didn't tell her that because I knew that that would be creepy. I also didn't tell her that or anyone else that because I knew that if I said, "This is the woman I'm going to marry," that people would think I was crazy. And I knew if I told people what my goal was and what my dream was, that they would tell me I was a fool, and I knew that I would probably believe them. And so, instead of talking about how I was going to marry this girl, I simply set about trying to become the person that a girl like her would want to marry. So, you fast forward, we start— we're dating more seriously, and then I remember one day she gives me a mixtape. Y'all remember those? Anybody remember the mixtapes? And one of the songs on there, this is a couple years later, was "Going to the Chapel." And I was like, "Alright, I got the hint." So my dream was almost realized. Unfortunately, as I talked about before, I was broke. And so I said, "Well, I should figure out a way to make some more money." I had a plan. I said, "I bet I can sell eBooks on this new thing called the internet." And so right there from my dorm room in the year of our Lord 1999, I set about building and launching websites that sold eBooks. Ebooks on weird little niche topics, things like how to make your own baby food, how to get a job in pharmaceutical sales, things I knew nothing about, but things that I could research, get the information about, and that people were actively searching for on the internet. And I will never forget the first day when I woke up and I saw sitting in my PayPal account $14. My first book that I ever sold for $14, and I remember thinking, This is it, I'm rich. $14 big cash dollars, that was a lot of money for young college-aged Ryan, and I thought instantly, you know, what if I had 100 of these little websites? Right, if I have, I've got one of them, it's doing about $14 a day, if I had 100 of them, again, I'm not really good at math, but that seems like it might be, I don't know, at least like $40 or $50 a day, again, you can do the math. So that's exactly what I decided to do. I decided, I set about at that moment, I'm going to launch not one of these little websites, I'm going to launch 100 of them. But again, I didn't tell anyone what I was doing because I knew they would say I was crazy and that I couldn't do it, and I knew I might believe them. And so instead, I just started doing it. And one of these turned into two, into 10, into 20, My friends are going out and partying and I'm just sitting here building. What are you working on? Just stuff and things. Fast forward, after about a month I had covered my rent, which was important 'cause I was on full grants and I had some grants and I had like a sliver of a scholarship, but I was mostly paying my way through college. After month 3, I had my tuition covered. After a year, diamond ring secured. And after 2 years, I had made my first $100,000 a year. Which to me at that point I was like, "This is as much money as I will ever need to make." But it was finally enough, and when I talk about my enough number, what I really thought was, "This is enough money that I can go to this girl's dad and I can get his permission to give her that ring that I bought." He said yes and so did she. We get engaged, and I'll never forget, I was at an engagement party, our engagement party, And a friend of her dad's came to me, you know, wanting to know the new, you know, boyfriend/fiancé that, you know, his buddy's daughter is about to marry, and, you know, he's asking me, "Hey, what are you going to do after you graduate? What are you going to do? How are you going to support this girl?" And I remember telling him about my stupid little websites, I remember telling him about my websites, my ebooks, and this little side business that I had started. And I'll never forget, he kind of chuckled, And he went, "Huh, that'll never work. No one's ever gonna pay real money for a digital book." And I remember smiling at the time and thinking I had a couple hundred thousand reasons in a bank that he was probably wrong. But I'm glad I didn't tell anybody else about my plans because in that moment, I remember thinking, "Oh, what if he's right? What if it doesn't work?" It'll never work. If I had not already achieved that level of success that I had achieved, the first time somebody told me it'll never work, I probably would've believed them. I probably would've believed it when they said it'll never work. Since then, I've had a number of other dreams and goals. I wanted to build a 7-figure business. I wanted to build an 8-figure business. I wanted to build a 9-figure portfolio, check. Check and check. I wanted to make the Inc. 500 list, multiple companies the same year, check. I wanted to pull $1 million in distributions in 1 year. I wanted to write myself a $1 million check. Check. I wanted to realize an 8-figure cash exit, check. I wanted to play a round at Augusta National, the home of the Masters, not check. Yet. But importantly, with the exception of the last one, I achieved every single one of those goals, and I didn't tell anyone about it. I didn't tell anyone what I was setting out to achieve. I simply just set about doing the work and becoming the person to achieve that. Because simply, y'all, I believe that dreams are fragile things. I believe they are incredibly fragile things. Your dreams and your goals are highly fragile. And there are people that will tell you, "Oh, you just need to speak your dreams into existence." Right? Just speak it. Just make it true. And you need to tell everybody that what you're doing, and just, you know, you can like kind of manifest it and speak it into existence. Horse hockey. The more people you tell about the things that you're going to do, the more people are going to come to you and say, "You're not going to be able to do that." And some of them are going to be genuinely nice, kind people who love you, who are just trying to protect you. Some of them are going to be bitter poopfaces who are just upset at the fact that you could possibly dream of wanting something that they know that they can never have themselves. See, this is most people's like launch plan, right? When most people think about starting a business or doing anything of any significance, right, they get an idea. Like, "I got an idea and it's a frickin' great idea. It's an amazing idea." And so what do you do after you got an amazing business idea? What's the very next step? Well, obviously you buy the domain name. I know people with hundreds of domain names and zeros businesses. Then what's the next step? It's really important you start manifesting exotic cars that you're gonna buy. That's step 3. Somewhere along the way, you need to actually launch the product, but what's the fun in that? Never mind, I'll just come up with a different idea. Dreams and goals tell us who we need to become, the actions that we need to take today to be worthy of those dreams tomorrow. This is the purpose of dreams and goals. Like Roland said, they give us directionality, they tell us where we're going, and they inform the actions we need to take today to become the kind of people who are worthy of the dreams and the goals that we've set for ourselves. So y'all, don't tell me about your dreams, and don't tell me about your goals. Tell me what you're going to do. Better yet, tell me what you're doing. And when you do it, and when you achieve it, just know that we're here to root for you. So if you want to achieve your goals, become someone who's dreamworthy, not someone who merely talks about all of the things that you're going to do. Become someone who does the things and becomes the person who is worthy of the dreams and goals that you've set for yourself. Let your dreams inspire the actions that will make you worthy of your dreams. I think we should admit that we want to get rich and be wealthy. I do. Somewhere along the way, it became kind of uncool and unpopular to admit that, yeah, I just kind of want— it's why I make a point of saying, people like, why do you do this? It's like, I do it for the money. Now, I know how shallow that sounds, but part of the reason that I want to say it is because I just want it to be okay again to admit that we do want to be wealthy, to admit that we want stuff. I'll tell you, I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is objectively better. I'm sorry. I'm sure there's no significant nobility in, like, poverty and all this stuff. It just sucks. I don't want to do it anymore. I've done it before. I've done it enough times. It's no fun. So to admit that, yeah, I want success, I want financial stability, and you want the life that wealth can provide. These are okay things, these are good things. Payroll requires money, office space requires money, servicing your customers and clients requires money, roofs require money, food requires money. It is a tool to achieve and to do the things that you set out to do. It is not in and of itself a bad thing. And last I checked, I've never seen water flow from an empty cup and I've never seen a broke person hire a rich person. It's the other way around. So saying money doesn't matter doesn't mean you're noble. It doesn't mean you're the next Mother Teresa. It likely means you're naive or you're a bitter, bitter person. And I'll ask you the same question that Roland asked me when I was complaining about the fact that I didn't have enough money and then we didn't— weren't doing enough. And he's like, you need to give yourself a pay rise. And I'm like, I'm not allowed to do that. He's like, yeah, trust me, you can. You can just go in the back end and like just start paying yourself more money. It's weird. It's like it's your business and everything. He said, "Can you honestly say your mission of your business, the purpose of your company, can you honestly say it's your number one priority if you're worried about paying your own bills?" I couldn't. But I do believe in what we're doing here. I believe in the work that we're doing. I believe in the value that we provide. And it's because of that that I like to keep me very, very, very motivated. And so I believe in paying me very, very well. And I think you should too, because we believe that paying yourself well is not a selfish act. It is evidence of a well-run business and a well-run life. When you're making a lot of money, that is evidence that you are creating surplus value. It means you're putting out more into the world than you are taking, and that is why some of it is returning to you. It's not greed, it's math. It's just how it works. When you create surplus value, when your cup floweth over, there is more to share. That being said, money still isn't everything. It still isn't. And we talked about this yesterday. There's money wealth, which is amazing, but there's nothing like freedom and time wealth. And I talked about how, what's the point of having some bangin' mansion and rollin' up in your bling-bling car if it's after midnight and nobody's there to welcome you? I can tell you there is no point. I've lived it. It's not worth it. I have people, friends, with very fancy toys, incredibly expensive cars, and boats, and houses, and country club memberships that they never ever get to enjoy because they have to work so much to afford them. What's the point? And what's the point of martyring yourself so that you can provide this amazing life for your family? I wanna make sure that I can afford to put them in the best private schools. I did this. We gotta work hard 'cause I gotta make sure they can get in the best private schools. What's the point if you never see them and they barely know who you are? It's not worth it. Ask me how I know. You can keep doing what you're doing, but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore. Words that changed my life forever. What are you doing right now? What are you engaged in that you've convinced yourself you have to do, and in reality, you're simply doing it in service of the very thing that is taking you away from the things that you actually want? I'm happy that where I am today is different from where I was back in 2016. It's the reason that I enjoy getting up here and sharing this message. It's 'cause it's something that I want you all to hear. I'm happy that today I do make it home well before midnight, that I am, unless I'm hanging out with you all, making it to soccer games and things like that. And I'm happy that I get to take a month off every single summer just to spend time with these kids that keep getting older every year, and it's pissing me off. But if you want to achieve your goals, you need to become someone who is dreamworthy, You also need to pay yourself well. You need to pay yourself well along the way. You need to reward yourself along the way, but you need to make sure that you're not sacrificing those you care about for the sake of success. And one of the ways that you can make sure that you don't sacrifice others is to make sure that you don't sacrifice yourself. The first step to martyring those around you is to martyr yourself. Funny enough, when I started paying myself really, really well, you know what else I started doing? Making it home for dinner. When I started paying myself really, really well, you know what we started doing? Going on family vacations. Paying yourself well is not a selfish act, it is evidence of a well-run business, and it is evidence of a well-run life. After 20+ years of business research and experience, I can tell you that virtually every single business follows this pattern. It's hard, we figure it out, it gets easy, and then it gets hard again. That part of the middle is that no man's land, that messy middle that we talked about. It's been written about before. I thought I discovered something new, and then somebody was like, oh, the S-curve. Yeah, this guy Richard Foster talked about this in his book Innovation back in the 1980s. But this has been observed again and again and again. And the reason that I believe this happens is because progress is not one mountain that you climb. Progress is a series of different mountains. We conquer one mountain, and then we need to move to the next mountain, and sometimes what it looks like to go from one mountain to the other is to dip down into another valley for a moment. This is the second mountain phenomenon. A recognition that the first mountain that you conquered, zero to a million, getting good at marketing, and sales, and fulfillment, and hiring, these are all important things, but these are also all first mountain thinking. And this is why I so appreciated what Richard said when he was answering one of your questions yesterday, when it hit me that what we do when we get scared is we revert back, we digress, and we typically go back to first mountain thinking. What the second mountain looks like is not just marketing and sales, but— or not just hiring, but leadership and management. Not just marketing and sales, but marketing and sales systems, tax, legal, Finance, entity structuring, M&A, these are fundamentally different skills with fundamentally different playbooks, 'cause it's a fundamentally different mountain. And that's why this S-curve happens, because we had to shift mountains. We had to go from one mountain to another. What we perceive as a flatline is actually the transition to our second, third, or even fourth mountain. The analogy that I love to use is the difference between ascending Everest base camp and actually the peak of Everest. We call it one mountain, but they're very different things. Everest base camp sits at around 17,500 feet. It's high. It's up there, don't get me wrong. But it turns out that pretty much anybody can get to Everest base camp. I was looking at a site, they said that the difficulty level of the Everest base camp is moderate. The trekking time, not climbing, but trekking time, often requires 2 weeks' notice. No prior trekking experience is required, but it's suggested that the trekker be determined and physically fit. If ever there was a description of, you know, entrepreneurship and business, that is it. No prior experience required, recommended that you be pretty determined and physically fit. You need about 2 weeks' notice. I was like, that's perfect. I'm giving this clown 2 weeks' notice, I'm gonna go do my own thing, I'm determined, I'm physically fit, we'll figure this thing out. That's Everest Base Camp. So you make it to Everest Base Camp, and you decide, well, I made it to base camp, let's just keep going. Let's keep going right to the top. Let's get all the way up there to, I don't know, you know, almost 30,000 feet. Do you realize that if you take the same tools, the same equipment, the same gear, the same mentality, the same guide that got you from sea level to Everest Base Camp, and you say, "This should be able to get me up to the summit," you will die. You will die. It requires a fundamentally different plan, completely different tools and gear, and an experienced Sherpa to get to the top, because it is effectively a fundamentally different mountain, the difference between 17,500 feet and 29,032 feet. That's the difference when we ascend from mountain one, uh, to mountain two. And thinking the skills that got you up mountain one are going to be the same skills that get you up mountain two is the surest path to failure and death. Because at some point, you don't even know the questions you should be asking. This is one of the biggest problems that we solve for in Founders Board. We spend a lot of time, we call it sharpening the axe, of helping our members, helping our clients just figure out the right question to ask. Once you know the right question to ask, the answers are actually somewhat easy to get. You can ask around, you can figure it out, but at scale, the right answer is non-Googlable. And it's even harder when you don't know what to Google, when you don't even know the question that you should be asking. And this is why entrepreneurship feels so lonely. When I hear the cliché, right? If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Sounds smart, sounds wise. I say, "Hooey." I say, "Just give me the dang fish. Give me the dang fish because I'm starving to death. Give me the dang fish because I'm really, really, really hungry. Give me the fish because I care less about how you caught it than I care about having it." "Now, once you've given me the fish and I'm no longer starving to death, I'll buy you a beer and you can tell me how you caught the fish. Deal?" So we believe in asking for the fish. We believe in asking for the fish. We believe in asking for the fish and then after the fact, you can learn to fish if you want to. But the name of the game is not in constantly learning how to fish the next stream. You don't have the time at scale. That is first mountain thinking. I'm gonna figure it out myself. First mountain thinking because, and it worked in the beginning, it got you where you are, but it was also your only option. If the first mountain is about figuring it out, the second mountain's about just asking for the fish. So I give you all permission to ask for the fish. In fact, Founders Board members, you'll know this, when somebody has a real issue or challenge, they'll put in the community #needafish. And everybody understands, let's just get them what they need. No backstory, no, well, let me tell you how I figured that out. Screw all that, just give me the fish. Give me the fish. I give you permission to ask for the fish. I absolve you of the need to figure it all out. That is first mountain thinking that will hold you back. If you want to achieve your goals, you got to become worthy of your dreams, you got to pay yourself well, and you have to start asking for the fish. And fortunately, you're all in the right place to do that. And I hope that while you're here, you form some relationships and you made some friends with some people that you can ask for fish from. That's the main thing that we give. People ask, when they were asking me about Founders Board, they're like, so, I'm already in the Scale and Exit Accelerator, do I get, what are some of the other things I get? Do I get more stuff? It's like, no, you don't get more stuff. You don't need more stuff. I don't wanna give you more stuff, I don't wanna give you more homework, you got enough of that. What you have is access. What you have the ability to do is to ask any question and to be virtually guaranteed that you're gonna get an answer. You get the fish. So if you recall, we started off by looking at doing a value driver check-in. By having you go through each of the 12 value drivers that all map back to leverage sales, make more profit, and transferable value. And we wanted you just to figure out, where are you in each of these? Score yourself, measure yourself, because we need to— the first, before you can figure out where you're going, you have to know where you are. And when you finished, yours likely looked something like this, with a little more red and yellow than green, and that's okay. Then I gave you an opportunity to kind of clear your mind a little bit, to do a brain dump, to do business with the past by writing down your highlights and your lowlights. The nice thing about highlights is they keep us motivated, but it's the lowlights that deliver the most valuable lessons. It's the lowlights that bring the lesson. So we gotta have both. We gotta acknowledge both. We can't wash over the lowlights and spin 'em or anything like that, 'cause then we're not gonna learn. So that's why I wanted you to do this. Then we talked about the issues, the challenges, the bottlenecks, typically the ones that are informed by those lowlights that are preventing you from achieving those desired goals, as well as maybe some of the opportunities that you'd love to tap into, but you just can't yet. And then I asked you to connect with your why. Brainstorm your why. What do you want specifically for you? What do you want for the ussens in your life, that inner circle, your family, your close friends, even the stakeholders at your business? Roland and Richard are in my us. And then there's the them, the people outside, the world at large. How do you want to impact them? I asked you to figure out what your why was and to kind of get in touch with that a little bit, and I shared mine with you. My first why, I wanted to buy a ring for a girl. I hope you completed this. I really hope you did. And if you didn't, that's still your homework. And then when we got to the big 3, I said, "Don't do this yet." If you leave here and all you leave with is a bunch of notes that you're gonna get back and it's gonna sit on your desk for a little bit and then some things are gonna pile on top of it and then eventually it's just gonna find its way into a drawer, and you're not gonna do anything, then you didn't leave here with much. And so what I simply want you to leave here with are 3 things. What are 3 things that you're gonna commit to getting done in the next 90 days that will allow you to get closer to the goals that you've set? And we choose the next 90 days 'cause we like to work in sprints. So if it's one big thing and you're like, "Oh, there's no way that I could get it, this one thing done in the next 90 days," fine, break it into something smaller so that you know you got a lot of progress. But what are 3 things that you're gonna commit to getting done in the next 90 days? I'll tell you, if you don't have an operating system yet, I would love it if building my operating system was one of the 3. It should be, because that's gonna enable almost anything else that you want to do. Once you're clear on your big 3, I'm gonna ask you all the same question that we ask all of our Founders Board members at every meeting. Do you have everything that you need to execute on your right next thing? You got 3 things, but what is that right next thing? See, that's all I ever need to know for me. Some of you asked about like, how do you deal with all the chaos? How do you deal with all the things that you want to do? You got a billion different growth ideas. Let me tell you something, what makes you unique is that you always see opportunity where other people don't. You look at anything going on and you see opportunities, which is another way of saying you see problems. You will always, when you look at your business, see problems because you'll always see opportunities for improvement. And if you try to attack all of them simultaneously, you'll never get anything done. So the only question I'm ever asking myself is, what is my right next thing, and am I working on that? And do you have everything that you need to execute on it? If yes, amazing. If not, ask for the freaking fish. This is gonna wrap things up for this event, but I sincerely hope that the journey doesn't end here. Don't let this be the last time that you look at this. Don't let this be the last time that you take action on any of these things. Thank you so much. I appreciate you all, and I will see you again next time. Hopefully we'll see you in February. Thank you.
