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Success Story with Scott D. Clary

Welcome to the Success Story Podcast, hosted by entrepreneur, business executive, author, educator & speaker, Scott D. Clary (@scottdclary). On this podcast, you'll find interviews, Q&A, keynote presentations & conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups and entrepreneurship. Scott will discuss some of the lessons he's learned over his own career, as well as have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, notable figures and... Welcome to the Success Story Podcast, hosted by entrepreneur, business executive, author, educator & speaker, Scott D. Clary (@scottdclary). On this podcast, you'll find interviews, Q&A, keynote presentations & conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups and entrepreneurship. Scott will discuss some of the lessons he's learned over his own career, as well as have candid interviews with execs, celebrities, notable figures and politicians. All who have achieved success through both wins and losses, to learn more about their life, their ideas and insights. He sits down with leaders and mentors and unpacks their story to help pass those lessons onto others through both experiences and tactical strategy for business professionals, entrepreneurs and everyone in between. To get more of the Success Story podcast, go to www.successstorypodcast.com.

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➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Nick Perry is the founder and executive chairman of Want To Sell Now, one of the largest wholesale real estate operations in the... ➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Nick Perry is the founder and executive chairman of Want To Sell Now, one of the largest wholesale real estate operations in the country. Since 2014, he's closed over 1,500 deals nationwide by building a completely virtual system—his team analyzes and contracts properties across all 50 states without ever seeing them in person. He was early to leveraging pay-per-click advertising at scale in wholesale real estate, developing systems that consistently generate deal flow in even the most competitive markets. Beyond wholesaling single-family homes, he's expanded into multifamily properties, commercial real estate, a fleet of semi-trucks, and multiple e-commerce ventures. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/nickperryrei/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickperryatx/ ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Truth, Lies & Work Podcast - https://truthliesandwork.com ShipStation - https://www.shipstation.com/ (Code: SuccessStory) Square - https://square.com/go/success SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/scott Monarch Money - https://www.monarchmoney.com (Code: Success) Claude - https://claude.ai/success Incogni - https://incogni.com/success (Code: Success) Think Big, Buy Small Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/B2cH36AX?sid=SuccessStory NetSuite — https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:29 – What True Wealth Really Means 04:26 – Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Success 08:25 – Why Nick Took a Corporate Job at Indeed 11:31 – Lessons Learned from Corporate America 13:11 – Building a Business You Plan to Exit 15:23 – Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made? 16:47 – Most Entrepreneurs Get This Wrong 17:59 – Why Nick Chose Real Estate Wholesaling 19:33 – Sponsor Break 22:16 – How to Push Through 104 Rejections 26:37 – Heartbreak and Hard Lessons in Texas 33:54 – Designing Freedom Into Your Business 35:12 – The Secret to Winning at Wholesaling 39:49 – Sponsor Break 42:41 – Nick’s Bold New Marketing Strategy 46:04 – Be a Master of One, Not a Jack of All 49:48 – The Sales Skills Every Founder Needs 53:42 – The Biggest Sales Mistakes People Make 54:38 – How Nick Trains His Sales Team 55:55 – Keeping Energy High After Rejection 57:50 – Overcoming Imposter Syndrome 59:45 – The Silent Killers of Entrepreneurs 1:04:45 – Nick’s Most Painful Lessons in Business
and doug le and i always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual but now we want you to feel it queue the em music le save yourself but need to dare you will custom and save we see that may have been too much feeling only pay for what you need at liberty mutual dot com liberty liberty savings very by liberty mutual insurance company in affiliates excludes massachusetts being able to do what you want when you want with whoever you want for as long as you want is really what money buys you when i was young i didn't come from any money we had one grocery store trip every two weeks from the food ran out so i had to work growing up very early today's guest is a strategist for wealth not in theory but in practice nick perry is an investor coach who guides entrepreneurs and professionals to build scalable portfolios and un ent themselves from trading time for money when i moved to austin texas i started youtube how to do real started taking some action but i failed miserably in my first year real estate it took me like a hundred and four appointments before i got my first deal sales and marketing at the two highest skill sets that you can have that will get you paid more than anybody if you can get good at marketing and sales then you can start your own business the reason ninety percent wholesaler fail is they can't get consistent reliable high quality marketing going they're bouncing from one marketing channel to another and nothing is really working for them he teaches the rules of capital mindset and of income not just passive but purposeful wealth nick doesn't just talk about investing he builds pathways for financial freedom biggest reason that i see most people fail is shiny object syndrome they'll do something for three months six months maybe a year two and then they jump into the next thing you have to stay laser focused and i would rather be a master at one thing than a jack of ball turd nick tell me what this means to you true wealth isn't measured in dollars but in freedom to live anywhere work on anything and answer to no one yeah you know being able to do what you want when you want with whoever you want for as long as you want is really what money buys you nothing in a store is gonna give you any sort of fulfillment right this is a twenty dollar zara sure but i just got back from you know two hundred thousand dollar vacation in europe and that two hundred thousand dollar vacation was worth more to me than anything because i was able to stay out there as long as i won't give my family experiences that most people can't give them and that's what true wealth is is freedom that's what money really buys you how did you come to this realization that this is what you wanted to build because i think that a lot of people when they start entrepreneurship they're looking for more money they're looking for freedom but they end up not getting it they end up working more than they ever did in a corporate job so what allowed you to sort of escape the golden handcuffs that a lot of entrepreneurs find themselves in yeah it was a cycle when i when i was young i didn't come from any money like my parents were my dad he barely can make ends meet i mean we had you know one grocery store trip every two weeks when the food ran out it ran out and so i had to work growing up very early yeah and i would see all my friends you know getting new cars when they're sixteen being able to go out and take you know these fun trips and that wasn't in the cards for me and it used to really piss me off that money was a limiting factor in my life so from a young age i always said i do not want money to ever be a limiting factor in my life and i realized you know from then that money bought freedom it bought resources in order to do what you want with with whoever you want for as long as you want and when i got into business and i started making money that's when you know i went through the phase of buying all the designer clothes you know bought a ferrari you know did all the stuff that you know you do when you first get it and none of it brought me any fulfillment you know nothing that you can buy in a store will give you any sort of lasting thing happiness you get a short term dopamine net when you look back on your year and you say what was the best things to happen this year you're thinking about the vacations you took with your family the amazing experiences you have it's not man i went and i bought this new pair of you know designer shoes or you know i i bought this dang it's never about the thing it's always about the experiences and the impact that you make right so giving back to people and creating experiences where you're gonna have the the most lasting fulfillment so i just learned it through this yeah school or not it's funny how again like super ambitious people they all they all start something for the material like like i wanna have a nice car i wanna you know i wanna live in a bigger house i wanna buy a nicer watch i'm doing all this vanity shit basically i wrong with it if you make money go for it but then they do that and they work so hard and they don't have vacations and they don't spend time with their family and they don't do all the things that actually give joy in life and i feel like a lot of entrepreneurs they they just have it backwards it's like they feel like entrepreneurship is like you have to be working twenty four seven you if you aren't working you almost feel guilty you feel like you're you're like not being whatever like of productive you feel like you're like well if i'm taking time off like i'm not getting as much done as i could get done so like i'm not being the best possible entrepreneur this isn't what i signed up for and you almost like self i don't know what the word is self sabotage self sabotage a little bit right you like ruin all the other parts of your life in pursuit of just chasing money yeah and a lot of times when you are doing that you're actually delaying the process so being an entrepreneur is a lot like being a farmer you're going out and you're planting seeds in the ground you're watering their seeds you're being patient waiting for those seeds to you know grow but what most entrepreneurs a k farmers will do is they'll plant the seed the water it they'll sit there they'll look at it it's not growing they'll start kicking it yeah right and so you're kicking up your own seeds so when a lot of entrepreneurship is actually just patience and you got to let the seeds grow and just sit back and let let the gestation period happen and so i've realized that as long as you have the right people the right processes and things are in place you have to be patient and trust to process for things to grow and that doesn't mean working harder one of my one of my good friends i've told this story a few times i think it's so relevant so he runs a publicly traded company very busy guys he's had exist in the past and he said that having kids was the best thing that ever happened to him because it forced him to only work on certain things so i think a lot of people just focus on everything they could possibly do and they don't focus on the one the few things that actually move the needle whereas for him like having kids force him to only work on certain things because he needed time for the kids as well so it almost hyper prioritize and hyper focused him but i don't think a lot of people have that wisdom when they're just starting out like you said i had to go through it i mean i was the guy that was you know rising grind four thirty am we're putting in eighty hour weeks and it's go go go go go and i did that for fifteen years and i created amazing company and i actually kinda got forced out of my office so explain what happened you know i built a pretty successful real estate investment company and i had you know great team and it came time to promote one of my my coo to the ceo yeah and so i promoted him to the ceo of my company and when i did that it basically i fired myself yeah and so when i did that i kept going to the office every day and he's like dude you gotta let me run so i said okay you know what was like let me do my job yeah so i had to i had to get out of actually i austin texas which is where my office is from because i couldn't sit at home and knock go to the office that's so funny so i moved actually here to miami florida and i went through an identity crisis i felt useless every single day i was going to the gym twice a day going out to dinner and you know i was just kinda sitting around loss like because that was my identity and that's where i ended up learning a lot of those lessons that i think most people don't get to i think we do sabotage advertise our own success more often than not but i made more money that year when i left then when i was in my office grinding and out every day so doing very well in like corporate america nine to five so you started with indeed and you were making over two hundred grand a year with indeed so that to me is what a where a lot of people get stuck they make a ton of money in a corporate job they have a great nine to five they have like these golden handcuffs where they're making good money and i think that a lot of people just get stuck in this position for a lot of their career and they don't actually take the jump and they don't actually build something themselves why did why did you take that job and why did you why did you leave it well i took that job because i moved to austin texas and i wanted to start my own company i was a personal trainer and i saw that all my wealthy clients all own businesses and so in order to have financial freedom you couldn't work for the man your entire life that was very clear to me and when i moved to austin texas i started youtube how to do real estate started taking some action but i failed miserably in my first year real estate i think most do though yeah it was brutal took me like a hundred and four appointments before i got my first deal it was rough and so during that time i was like i got take a job in order to keep this you know dream alive yeah so i got a job at indeed i was down to eight hundred dollars in my bank account about to get a victim from my apartment indeed took a flyer on me and hired me on and i said before i showed up on my first day to myself i said i'm gonna go in here and do whatever they tell me to do absolutely crush this job so i get out of this job as quick as possible so i went from eight hundred dollars in the bank account to rookie the year top gun making you know quarter million dollars a a year very quickly at indeed but i took all that money and i put it into my business so i had my nine to five yeah then i had my five to two yeah right yeah and i worked every evening and every weekend till i was able to build myself out of that job but that was always their goal before even started that role do you think that's like the way people should sort of set themselves up because i see a lot of people that just jump into into entrepreneurship or they quit a job and have like a few month savings and then that's when they start building a company but i like the way you did it so you were making money good money mh relatively good money to grand is a good salary well i guess it's sales too so there's probably a base plus some so you're good at selling and then you just took all that money and just started like funding basically your own business do you think that's how people should start absolutely update that sales is the number one job for anybody that wants to start their own business sales and marketing are the two highest skill sets that you can have that will get you paid more than a doctor more than a lawyer more than anybody and that if you can get good at marketing and sales then you can start your own business but you need to have income coming in it's not unheard of that you can just start from cold but life's a lot easier when you have you know money was there anything else because you were an inside sales and indeed was there anything else that you learned from corporate america that was actually stuff that you learned from corporate america that is very useful for entrepreneurs that are starting sales or otherwise but also what did you learn in corporate america that is not helpful if you're trying to start a business yeah so what i learned that was helpful yeah is a ton i'm in indeed one of the top sales organizations in the entire country yeah so just corporate structure you know that accountability that you have in corporate america is the same culture that i have in my company now all of the metrics and what it takes to actually be successful in sales you know sixty calls a day a hundred and twenty minutes on the phone you know quotas all that stuff is now adopted into my own company now in terms of things that i don't think make a that that were a hindrance to entrepreneurship is i think in corporate america there's a lot of bureaucracy accuracy where you know there's channels of communication and your ideas are don't matter my company as an idea merit where i wanna know exactly what all of my guys even from you know the lowest paying role up to the highest paying role what best ideas that they have that's something that i brought in because i felt like in corporate america my ideas didn't matter yeah you know you had the corporate direction and they had their quarterly initiatives and what you say yeah it doesn't matter but the best ideas that i've got in my company have come from my team when you i think that it's smart that i think that it's very smart that you work you make money you let that fund your business but if you know there is an exit how do you commit yourself to doing this thing if you if you eventually wanna get out of it because like there's like mental gymnastics there great question this was a tough win for me but i figured out a formula so for anybody that's looking to get out of their nine to five job all you need is these numbers right here you've got you need at least three to six month of liquidity for your business and your personal so you spend ten thousand dollars a month on your personal expenses and ten thousand dollars a month on your business you need at least sixty thousand dollars at least three month runway ideally six month so ideally you would have a hundred and twenty thousand if you're spending ten k and ten k yeah and then that's just to it's just to set you up for success and it gives you that safety and that yeah and then put a date on the calendar and honor that date yeah when was the moment because you were going you were working at indeed you're making over two hundred obviously you know you wanna do something bigger or this is not where you're gonna end up but what was the moment when you knew that you wanted to quit indeed and move on like what was the thing that was outside of the money in the bank because you just said we need so much money in the bank but what's the thing that you were that you experienced that you were like i'm i can't do this anymore i need to move on i knew before i even took the job that i was gonna leave that job so you were just you were just waiting do did you wait for traction in the wholesale business first yeah okay and that's i took the job knowing that i was going in there with that plan and i executed that plan and i got out as soon as possible correct i understand but where did that start it started being told when i can go to the bathroom in school yeah like i there's no way that i can take orders from somebody my entire like i listen to god that's my only boss and that's you know the natural entrepreneur right there a hundred percent well i i think so do you think that entrepreneurship can be learned or do you think some people are just born entrepreneurs i think that i was developed into entrepreneur i think that through life circumstances happening to me yeah it it pushed me there i felt like you through getting in trouble getting all all the your know stuff you go through growing up that's what ends up you have a a decision are you going to stay beating down and just take orders your whole life or you're gonna take personal accountability and responsibility now one path is gonna be much harder the entrepreneurship path is not for the faint heart is not for the week you're gonna have to ever overcome extreme adversity a ton of odds and you're gonna have to bet on yourself over and over and over fall seven times get up eight but it is the most rewarding path for those that got the heart to do it it's not easy i'm wonder if entrepreneur entrepreneurship is right for everyone it's not i don't think like i love my family but they're you know like my sister's a phd yeah and you know she's happy she's she's a a college professor making eighty grand a year and she's got her life and her and that's it she has no desire to wanna be an entrepreneur and i'm perfectly fine with that i think that happiness and fulfillment is the true measure of success when you were doing personal training because you were exposed to so many very like high net worth an ultra high net worth successful people do you find that more people have it right or wrong like those people did they have those five ass or did you see that most people just chase the money i would say more often than not the people that i would see there was a lot of imbalances in their life yeah now i met some extremely amazing people though that had it all all figured out and those were my mentors you know my early mentors in the day were the guys that i personal training and my first mentors the ceo of quiz subs for real yeah yeah so he's like he's pulling in several million dollars a year like he's very successful yeah but he's working on stop no not really he was you know he had it figured out he was you know silver fox like fifty years old super charismatic happy amazing relationships you know just had had it all and i was like i wanna be like that and so i emulate you know those guys in those early days because i came from nothing and so i almost had impostor syndrome when i was around them and that was how i ended up learning you know the ways was from just that exposure when you first started so you're working at indeed you know that you're gonna build a wholesale business you're sort of funding your business with your with your salary but you know that's where you're gonna end up you finally start to have some traction in the wholesale business and i know it didn't come easy like you mentioned just briefly but it's an important point to touch on you went through a hundred and four i think face to face rejections when you were building out this wholesale business over eleven months that to me is just it just shows you what it takes right that's what it takes to get anything off the ground is never gonna be easy it's gonna be a lot of just you know hand to hand combat what starts to work and also just for people that are into real estate why wholesale in particular as opposed to all the other kinds of real estate you can get involved like why are you sitting at home thinking personal trainer killing it out indeed now real estate wholesale like it's such like a a wide variety of like interest so what was about wholesale that made you wanna go into it that was so compelling well the majority of my clients that were doing really well were we're also big in real estate you know even if they owned a company they had some form of real estate going on their life and our you know read enough books say you know eighty percent a million come from real estate so i wanted to get in a real estate but i didn't know how i didn't have money i didn't have credit i didn't have a real estate license and none of that and so with whole you don't need money you don't need credit you don't need a real estate license i was like well i'm qualified hubspot a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data all the most important details in call logs emails chat with their customers it's just left floating in digital space not being used hubspot it gives you the access to those insights to help you grow your business because when you know more you grow more visit hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what is a feature hold for business if you ask nine experts will get ten answers bull market bear market rates are up rates are down at the end of the day it'd just be easier somebody invented a crystal ball but until then over forty three thousand businesses a future proof themselves with nets sweet by oracle in number one ai cloud erp that brings accounting financial management inventory and hr into one unified platform here's what i love about it instead of juggling multiple systems you get one source of truth real time insights and forecasting that actually let you peer into the future with actionable data when you're closing your books in days instead of weeks you're spending less time looking backwards and more time focusing on what's next whether your companies earning millions or hundreds of millions nets tweet helps you tackle immediate challenges while seizing your biggest opportunities if i needed this product in my business this is what i'd use it's a game changer for business visibility and control if you wanna see how ai can transform your financial operations download the cfo guide to ai and machine learning for free that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now say you just realized your business needed to hire someone fast how can you find amazing candidate fast it's easy just use indeed when it comes to hiring indeed is all you need stop struggling to eat get your job posting seen on other job sites indeed sponsor jobs helps you stand out and hire faster and with sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need how did you keep going after failing failing i put that in air quotes but like getting a hundred and four face to face rejections like how do you push through that because that is what it takes to be successful so how do you push through that it was a lot i mean that summer when i was doing all those appointments i remember i had back surgery too so i had a big i had a big thing like going on with my back and i'm driving in a you know beat up mazda three with no ac all over the state of texas getting told no and about appointment seventy five that was like when i started to break and i get back to my apartment and i remember sitting there and i'm like you maybe this whole thing's a scam and all these people on youtube were just lying to me to try to sell me a course maybe it is real but i'm not cut out for this and they can do it but you i don't have the soft skills in order to be able to be successful in this you you i sort having all these limiting beliefs coming into my mind and i had sunk calls fallacy where i had already come so far so i was like i didn't come this far to only come this far i'm either going to get richer die ryan it was like i will be go homeless and yeah still be going on these appointments at this point had you quit indeed no this is when right right when i starting indeed oh okay so so indeed was like an insurance so to let you keep going did you have no more it yeah i had to take a job it's smart i mean some people would have too big an ego to take a job yeah you gotta let your ego go go and you have to say what do i gotta do to make this actually work so i had to swallow my pride and say i gotta take a job and i'm gonna not let this dream die and i'm gonna persist no matter whatever it takes until i figure it out and i will become the best at it and so that's that's what i did i just so seventy five a seventy five appointment you're starting to break i started to break and then i pulled it back together real quick i was like burn the ships yeah it's either this gonna kill me or i'm gonna figure it out figure it out what worked after under hundred and forty four rejections what did you learn or was it just literally just putting in you you know we're were talking before you're like oh the podcast is going well what's the secret it's like well thousand episodes forty fifty pieces of content a day you figure it out eventually like it's not it's not that hard it's not easy but you just figure it out you just fail forward and keep getting a little better every single time and you do that until it's almost it's unreasonable for you not to be successful the statistical probability it goes down so low that you end up becoming successful so one thing that really actually helped me was indeed because in that sales job i learned so much about sales and so the sales job was actually like the catalyst that ended up moving everything forward like i wasn't following up with these appointments and i learned that fortunes in the follow when i was in corporate america and so i went home and i was i gotta follow up with all these people and guess what ended up happening people started coming back around and next thing you know i got a deal and then it started the snowball from there and eventually you quit indeed you're all in on whole at that point and things are going you're making money off whole at this point when you actually quit and yeah was there a amount was there an amount of money that you would have liked to have hit before you left indeed like that was like the number like if i double my salary or something like i don't know what the number is but is there a number that people should shoot for that you shot for before you quit the the nine to five w two and go all in yeah i had six months of liquidity and so i knew that i was having a quarterly bonus hit on april fifteenth and when that quarterly bonus hit it would put me over that liquidity amount and that was the day that i quit so i waited until i refresh my bank app and the because you know in sales they kick you out the same day i know they do yeah i know i spent a lot of my career in sales i know in corporate well not corporate canada corporate america the same difference but yeah they don't they don't keep you around if you're done and also sometimes that is a pain in the ass to collect all those commission checks that are like doing in like six months if you leave so mh you just take whatever money you can get so as you're scaling the whole business i think that a lot of entrepreneurs when they first achieve success they may not think about how like that can impact other parts of their life so at what point did this whole sort of i don't even know how to describe it shit show with a woman that you were dating and you were common law married to in the state of texas at what point did this happened in your sort of entrepreneur journey because i don't think if somebody's making a lot of money and they're dating and they're not not married yet i think people are pretty aware of what happens if you get married but from what i understand you can tell me a little bit more you were common law and you lost a lot of your savings because you broke up but even though you weren't technically married in the state of texas you still owe her a lot of money if you're common law married i don't think many entrepreneurs would think about this when they're building they probably don't think about it at all no it is complete side yeah so you know give me a time frame for it too yep you know i'm working at indeed i'm doing really well there i'm you know also working in real estate in the evenings i'm making probably you know forty fifty thousand dollars a month in real estate i meet this girl we started dating she works at oracle she's in sales as well oracle did a massive round of layoffs she's actually good on the phone so while she was laid it off i said well hey just take some phone calls from me while i'm at indeed that'll actually be helpful you know i'll give you some commission on it till you find something else and relationship was was okay we dated for eleven months and around the eight month mark i was like just come stay over you know at my house it's fine you can work out you come all months then you think for months in yeah so long story short we go to cancun and i she's just a shit showdown down there i mean she's drinking taking xanax smoking weed and i was like i gotta cut this girl off so we get back to the united states and i was like alright well here's what i'm gonna do is i gotta a work trip coming up i'm gonna go ahead and break up with their teller just move out and you know be out by the time i'm gone i knew she would need some money in order to do it so i wayne got twelve thousand dollars from wells fargo cash went back home i say hey listen i gotta a roll for work i'm coming back on friday here's twelve thousand dollars just go you know get another apartment stay with your mom whatever you wanna do do it i had a bad a high rise apartment in downtown austin you know overlooking the water you know was making fifty grand a month you can afford some it was nice and she'd only been staying with me for maybe you know month and a half two months and i get back on friday i go straight to my office at indeed and about ten thirty in the morning the receptionist office managers like hey you've got a visitor up front it's some guy on a bike i was like i didn't order anything he's like nick perry i'm like yeah he's was like you've been served i'm like sir for what yeah and i go and i pull out these papers and i look at it and it's you call it's not even common it's like divorce papers i'm like divorce papers like this is bullshit like i don't know i am worried about it whatever long story short it was divorce papers and they had a restraining order which meant i couldn't go into my house i couldn't get my vehicles couldn't get a phone charger couldn't get a toothbrush couldn't get anything your own house yes she was very smart in the way that she is professional so she went and soon as i broke over there she retained an attorney who was her uncle i didn't know at the time that was working pro bon and this is what they did were like okay well we can get this guy for pretty much everything then here's exactly what we're gonna do we're gonna go ahead and file for a common law we're gonna go ahead and put it restraining anywhere the house is gonna be yours all his shit's gonna be yours and we'll get half of his money so i didn't think this was even a thing i'm like what do you mean so like i even tried to like go back there break get all my shit they called the cops i couldn't get my stuff and so ended up having to stay in my buddy's house and how is this a thing in texas there's no statute limitations for the amount of time that they stay there it's three consecutive nights they say there three consecutive nights if they get mail there your history they can say that your common law married are you serious yes that was my welcome to texas present i was like this is not yes i've never heard us in my life it's a old outdated law that just hasn't been changed and a judge doesn't call bullshit on this no so the evidence that they used was she lived in my house she got mail there because i had her working on the business she had access to the checking account yeah and said they're like well then what do you mean you guys are pretty much married you have joint finances that link she's on the business you know judge didn't wanna hear it and i didn't know that i was basically playing a losing game because she had a pro attorney i didn't know is her always he's she can you can fight forever yeah and i was like i'm just gonna fight this and you know i'm gonna outs spend and i'll be out of this in you know probably twenty is gonna be a twenty grand hang up no it was not a twenty grand hang but ended up costing me everything i lost the apartment all the brand new furniture the family of the apartment no it was just a lease but they they i i was on the hook for it i had to pay the entire lease even though you weren't living them yeah it was terrible so so long story short i ended up torch my checking account all the way down because i tried to fight it to the end yeah and but what would she have gotten if you didn't fight it well she got she would end up getting half of half of everything but that she wanted everything she wanna the business as well so i said that was the big contention she wanted to take my business that i started and i said no because that was the that was the value because i already had a bunch of contracts that were set up to close and so that's what they're coming after and i said no absolutely not so i fought for that i got that and she got and gave her all the possessions and i started over and then i just kept grinding and then bounced back like six months later and got that craziest story i've ever heard that's the chris i've never heard of that happening ever do you think this was do you think this was targeted do you think she was planning this ahead i think it was pre meditate i don't think that i think she always had in her back pocket that if i broke up whether her that's what she was gonna do she already had that plan so she thought you're super successful i'm gonna come out of this one way or another correct after this so now you're sort of starting from scratch you did you have to give the business to her or no no i kept the business i was like you can have all the cars all the least have it all but you're prime the business out of my cold dead hands then the judge let you keep the business yes so that was the compromise and so even though it's sucked going through it like i was still hustling like i'm still doing great at indeed i still got real estate deals that are coming through so like i wasn't like tripping too much i ended up getting an part another apartment and ended bouncing back like right away and just ended up you doing better than ever and it was it's just a lesson that cell there's was a lesson how did you create sort of like a virtual completely virtual workforce how did you sort of architect freedom into your business as you as you scale it so that you weren't just working non nonstop twenty four seven yeah so my business when i started it it was all in office it i replicated indeed essentially it was you know it was just like a wolf wall street boiler pit right yeah had a bunch of sales reps in there slay the phones and then i ended up building that up i put a ceo in charge and i i left and i traveled the world up into all seven continents and then when i moved to arizona i moved it from mexico back to the states to take my real estate business further than anybody's ever taken a real estate business before i was complacent in cancun and i said i'm gonna take this to the next level on only way thirty six so i came back i opened an office i have the office in scottsdale yeah and my executives are in my office in scottsdale but the rest of my team is all remote so we have around forty people yeah and they all work in different parts of where the majority of them are actually in south africa because south africans are phenomenal at sales they have british accent and and it like it it also like you get really great talent it reduces your costs as well you have all virtual yeah when you build so talk to me about sort like the nuance or like the specifics of wholesale like what makes somebody successful at wholesale like what makes you successful at whole because i know that a lot of people try and go into it and they're not successful and they burn out or even if they put a couple years into it like they're just they're not making a ton of money with it so what makes you different the reason ninety percent of wholesaler fail is they can't get consistent reliable high quality marketing going they're bouncing from one marketing channel to another and nothing is really working for them marketing is the biggest hang up so i've got ninety nine problems but a lead a one my my business has always been blessed with good marketing yeah i master google paper click pretty early yeah and that was one of the best things i did do you see that marketing has changed a lot since like now with chat like do you have to change your strategy significantly to to still get leads or no i mean google still crush even right now in two thousand and twenty five we're we're recording this but alphabet has completely cannibal their entire strategy so google for the history of the internet they have monetized through clicks right you google something and then you click on a a sponsored ad well they've gone completely away from that they're going to a model where if you google something now you see the ai summary i know yeah yeah that's cannibal their business model so how are they going to capture revenue for the first time in twenty two years google declined on cert searches because everything going to chat e and complexity and things like that so now they are putting the majority of their their stock into other campaign types so google owns youtube we advertise heavily on youtube google also owns like a million other sites as well so you can monetize across a ton of their other sites so performance max demand gen campaigns those are where we get the majority of our leads we still do phenomenal in search yeah but search is dying i don't think search will last another five years so that's like your website and like like seo on your website you don't think that's gonna stick around no i think degree no i don't see that being a long term thing and so that is going to shift into you know ai yeah you know and with all like ai snippets has it changed your ppc strategy at all or no no our ppc strategy has remained the same we still do search campaigns we advertise heavily on youtube we take advantage of google performance max and demand gen campaigns and that's still the majority of our leads that's the majority of your leads and then it's not like those are keywords that are too expensive to bid on even in twenty twenty five no because the way that i market is different than everybody else so the majority of wholesaler will pick a market like miami florida yeah atlanta georgia fill in the blank and they will go in bid on those expensive keywords we buy houses sell house fast etcetera and they're paying fifty hundred dollars a click which is insane you know they're paying three four five hundred dollars a lead and it's not sustainable so i made a contra bet about nine or ten years ago because i did something that i found completely changed everything was if you market in metropolitan areas in small cities and things like that your cost per click is through the roof if you just expand the geographical targeting to the national it drops your cost per click by like ninety five you know ninety eight percent wow but then where are you getting your you're getting your customers outside of major metropolitan areas correct the majority of all the money that i make are in towns that you'll never hear of and no one else does this strategy well they do now i've been able to capture some market with it yeah i've captured a lot of market i made my career in that so at this point you know everybody's you know followed what i've done i kinda pioneered that in our industry i've coached over nine hundred and fifty other real estate business i've created over a hundred million through you know what we do you know worried about coaching your own income competition i have an abundance mindset and so i feel that you know that is i've i'm always out a little bit further ahead too the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening the truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers workers tick it's worth checking out listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to the rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and when makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it 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sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup up ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the moscow center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today what's like the next thing that's working well because you obviously take contra bets you obviously sort of market a little bit different than everyone else so what are you trying now that seems to be working yeah right now i mean mixing up the geographical targeting so i used to just do where i would do blanket a nation than i did states now i do i go based on the data for real estate so i think a lot of people they get married to a certain state or a certain market that's the wrong way of looking at it if you are in real estate you market based on the data so i actually market to the counties that have the highest pending percentage that means there's a hundred houses is sitting on the market yeah i wanna see what what counties have the highest amount going pending quick that's your demand what does that mean going pending if you put a house on the you say you go to sell your house with the realtor yeah when a buyer signs you sign a contract with a buyer and it's getting ready to close it goes pending yeah yeah yeah that's that's a signal that there's demand for that house right understood okay so if there's a hundred houses on the market and only ten of them are pending that's not a good sign that means there's no demand on that market if there's sixty of them that have gone pending you know that that you know anything you put up is gonna fly so you can see that that's all public information too you can find that data yes and so most people are getting stuck in these areas i'm changing my marketing out every single month to what is the hottest essentially i'm just day trading houses i don't care where they are i just care about the statistics do you have a similar strategy for the other side because wholesale means you need buyers too or are you just selling the leads i've completely gone away from wholesale as we know it wholesale as most people know it is pretty much dead in two thousand and twenty five the traditional model of wholesale is you get an off market property from a seller and then you find an investor that wants to buy it for a markup that's that's a dead way of doing business the way that you're gonna make the most amount of money in the least amount of time with the least amount of headache is you do the same strategy get an off market property from a seller but rather than sell it to an investor for a slight markup you sell it on the retail market to an end user a family that wants to move into the house for a hundred percent of full value and through what's called a innovation a innovation basically means it's just a set of paperwork that allows you to do that so our entire business model has shifted to do that and is that also sort of sort of not what most people are doing most people still trying to sell to investors yeah i mean i've been able to i've bank swing the entire real estate investing yeah market to do that now and most people have followed what we've what we see it they see it's working it's correct working yeah correct it's just interesting how people get so married to the way it's always been and they never they never modernize their business and that's like the death of a business like when you never change when you when you say like this is the way it's always been done mh i mean i'm always looking for ways that we can reinvent ourselves how can we you know rapidly adopt artificial intelligence or systems and processes and stay ahead of marketing as an entrepreneur you gotta be looking out ahead and and and making this r and d bets and yeah with a lot of entrepreneurs i think also a lot of real estate people they seem to do a little bit of everything seem to diversify all their efforts and energy you are the opposite you're always like laser focused on one strategy one market one opportunity at a time you feel like that's the best way to really like be successful a hundred percent biggest reason that i see most people fail is shiny object syndrome yeah know they'll do something for three months six months maybe a year or two and then they jump into the next thing yeah and that is suicide i think it takes years in order to be a true master at anything especially in real estate even just real estate like is a very broad topic yeah we could talk about wholesale we could talk about subject to we could talk about airbnb commercial like they it just branches out yeah you have to stay laser focused and i would rather be you know a master at one thing than a jack of all trades and that's where you that's what that's what you do so you just focus on the one thing you do it you know ten thousand times and eventually you'll figure it out and i don't care how green the grass looks on the other side i'm staying my lane when you started you were looking for freedom fulfillment now you can travel anywhere have you ever thought of like how you take to the next level exit have you thought about that that's exactly what i'm working on now that's why i moved from mexico back to the united states was to be able to create a large enough real estate investment company to be able to sell off the private equity nobody has really been able to successfully sell a wholesale company really that's so surprising to me because private equity buys like everything once so guess a certain revenue the majority of wholesale and companies are too small they have key man risk their systems and processes are not streamlined they don't have high enough profit margins and it's just not appetizing to most pe companies you know for in order to get a decent multiple you need to be over like five million in eb yeah so once you're over five million in eb everything's system process then it starts to you be able to be sell are you doing that are you still doing that with a completely remote team yeah yeah all completely remote and one cool thing that i've also done is i'm doing it with my company but then i'm also partnering with a lot of my students as well so i have a coaching and mentorship program and the guys that are crushing it in my mentorship program will actually i'll bring them up and say listen don't pay me anymore for mentorship we're gonna do this together and i'll come into their business help them streamline everything and then we'll participate in the upside together so it's like you're almost like doing a little bit of your own roll up doing a roll up yeah you're building your own companies to roll up into something that private equity got it's very smart and that's the so are you gonna do roll up and then eventually exit out roll up and then exit out yep i think that a lot of entrepreneurs they don't think of the exit plan and they don't know where they wanna take it they just started it it's growing and then they're like okay do i pass it on to my kids do i like do i sell to private equity and i think that like having a good exit plan is probably one of the most important things just so like you have this direction that you're taking the business enough direction you don't know where you're gonna go with it no to me it's still a stepping stone yeah i still see that it's a small opportunity for you know if i could sell that this company right now for you know eighty to hundred million dollars like then that gives me some seed money to go play in a real capital now yeah so let's talk about sales for a second because sales is as we mentioned before one of the most important things in entrepreneur can learn how to do obviously it sort of major careers it's it's major business it's it's it's something that i think is one of the most important skills you learned it out indeed it helped build the whole business just give me sort of an idea of what you look for when you're training somebody on how to sell like what's the what's the skill set that an entrepreneur has to learn to be able to sell well who does be a good salesman i mean when i'm looking for guys that are on my team that can sell i wanna i wanna see body count i wanna see that they can pull girls if they can pull girls then they can usually sell that's that's one so i'll look at their facebook or their you know social media if they've got a hot girlfriend that's usually a plus is that true yes it's it's translates in high ticket sales it translates extremely well into how well somebody's gonna do number two i wanna see a successful track record i don't hire entry level salespeople people and i think that when i say successful track record it's not only in job but it's it's the other areas in life how do they treat you know themselves their their fitness their faith all the other areas and then can they hold a you know good conversation yeah that's extremely important when you close deals you contact the leads eighteen times in seventy two hours so this is a very very i don't know i would say aggressive to a degree approach but it works why does why do you need this amount of volume when you're contacting somebody and trying to close this is not just a real estate thing i'm assuming i'm assuming that there's parts of your sales strategy that you picked up from indeed you picked up from years of whole eighteen touch points for the average person would seem a lot who isn't in sales why does that work yeah it's like the first forty eight when somebody gets kidnapped you know after that it that goes cold right yeah it turns into a cold case so you've really got this first seventy two hours to get in touch with that lead or just forget it like it's gonna go into a long term follow ups sequence yeah so the mechanics that we do it's three calls a day three text today three emails a day for the first three days and that it's eighteen touch points eighteen touch points and what do you know the percentage of closing in the first seventy two hours when you do that versus when you don't it's it's through the roof i can give you an exact percentage but it's it's it's like night day night and day you have to have speed the lead especially with inbound online leads they're contacting your competitors and they're just waiting for the first person to call them so you've gotta be on it immediately and then steaks in stalker mode for those first three days how do you know how do you know when to like shut down the relationship like there's a point where persistence well to some people they would describe it as harassment but i wouldn't even say that i would say that there's actually it's just a waste of your time after a certain point if you're going on and you're commenting this so much like there has to be a point where you disqualify the lead as well correct yeah so we will hit them for this first eighteen times and seventy two hours and then they'll go on a longer term follow ups sequence where we'll have an automated follow ups sequence that goes out to them we're still calling like once a day but it doesn't get as aggressive like i said this first three days or the most when you have to hit them and this is a this is sales across the board with any product on with any product any service what do people screw up the most in sales what do they get wrong i think that right now in two thousand and twenty five when we're recording this people don't understand that iphones completely changed the game now yeah so if you've looked at your text message is it summarizes your text message on there and so you need to know what to saying a text message so you don't end up just getting tuned out and blocked by somebody number two most people have their phone on d and d and so you need to hit them three times just in order to get it to break through the d so most people know like in sales double dial somebody they'll get on but if their phone's on d d which most people's is mine is yeah always then the first ring it's gonna go straight to voice mail the second ring it might go through but the third time it'll actually punch through and you it'll it'll you ring it'll actually ring when you're just onboarding somebody you mentioned like sort of these are the prerequisites they have to be able to you know sell themselves be able to have a good conversation what's the training to get somebody up to speed on sales is it just dialing and just facing rejection after rejection no no so we've adopted artificial intelligence into our training process where we have a software that will actually role play with the new hire and we've created different personas for the ai and they can go back and forth and just get beat up by ai until they score a certain score on the ai and then we have multiple different personas they have to graduate through so it saves us a phenomenal amount of time and it doesn't burn leads doesn't burn leads it doesn't take resources and time for my internal leadership team yeah in order to do it so that's been a game changer is doing ai role play in addition to that we have a a a course that we put them through and then we have a you know sequence of of different trainings that we do in order to onboard them in that first week so if i hire hire somebody on a monday usually they're on the phones by thursday friday how do you when you're when you're onboarding a new salesperson and i say like onboarding a new salesperson some of the audience sell themselves and some of the audience they're founders and they're selling themselves so this question applies to somebody who is hiring a salesperson or somebody who's selling themselves how do you maintain the energy as a salesperson after tons of rejection now i know that you're not training them with real people but for the long time that's how you train sales reps you didn't have ai how do you get somebody to like be excited after a hundred rejections or after not closing the deal for the first two months because maybe you're gonna say they're not right for sales i don't know but there has to be something that keeps them going because there's gonna be a lot of rejection and i think that that rejection is what screws up more founders than anything that's what stops them from being able to sell yeah it's massive belief in the product or service that you are offering in order to be able to help your your client yeah and then massive belief in yourself as well so if you don't have those things you better go find it or you're gonna end up starting to fail yeah so if you start to see that your energy is waning you're dip in you're feeling like you're going downhill yeah audit okay do i really believe in what i'm offering if you don't you better go in and find that you have to find that belief yeah you can't you can't sell if you don't believe in what you're offering right and if you don't believe in yourself a lot of it's in between your ears so sales is you know a mental game but what is it's a mental game so like you mentioned if you don't have belief in the product that's one thing you can go learn about the product you can research it better you can understand how it actually adds value to the custom summer but belief in yourself this something that people struggle with and i've been asked us a lot and i have an answer but i know if it's the best answer people always ask like when you have impostor syndrome how do you overcome that because it's like a chicken and egg scenario for a lot of people they have impostor syndrome so they don't take action because they don't take action they don't have a proof point that they can be successful so they sort of hold on to the impostor or syndrome so this is a great question so i'm gonna i'm gonna play out a scenario for you okay so you've got you and me alright you're a stud you're confident you've got it all together me i'm a little shaky we go when we show up on the job day one we have the same script we do the same training the same role play you go in and you start crushing deals right out of the gate and i'm i'm sucking i'm bombing why is it we had the same training we had the same script but what was different between you and me the difference was that you had the internal fort two and where is that where's that confidence in fort two built from it's built from honoring the promises that you make to yourself it's because when you said you're gonna go work out in the morning you got yourself in there and you worked out and you gave it a hundred and ten percent when you said you're gonna make your bed you made that bed and it was tight right you do the things that you say you're gonna do every time you honor the promises that you say you're gonna make to yourself you get a little bit more confident anytime that you don't you end up becoming less confident you go out you say you're gonna follow a diet than you're out eating the cheeseburger become a little less confident so it's just from honoring the promise you make to here so i love that so it's not even about success at work it's about success everywhere else in your life yeah it it all comes together it all it's all one that's why i believe that working out being strict with your diet with your health with your wellness with all the other things in your life i think that that compounds the business success i couldn't agree more at all is the same what are the things that hurt a salesperson or an entrepreneur the most like the it could be limiting beliefs it could be self sabotage like what's the mindset that is actually detrimental to your success vice you know drugs alcohol junk food pornography like do you fill in the blank all those things will take you down at black hole social media yeah right so if you find somebody going down those past it's to slippery slope to poverty you know patrick bed david yes one of his favorite quotes i love is that if you don't have god in a traditional sense then something else will become your god so if you don't have god like and you don't sort of subscribe to something that's bigger than you then it could be work it could be drugs it could be women porn gambling there's gonna be some other vice that becomes your god that you really become like a slave to and i think that that's where i that's where a lot of people don't realize how damaging some of these habits are because it's not like they don't look at some of these habits as life running and nobody nobody watches porn and things is gonna ruin your life but because of the dopamine release that you get from a lot of these activities it's very easy to like start to let it take over your life and become the god quote unquote in your life and then distract you from what actually matters and i i think that that's probably listen i think that's probably where a lot of people let themselves go and they as a like because then it takes up time right it takes a time if you're addicted to drinking and gambling and porn like even if you are a hard worker even if you are focused when you're working like you have two three four five whatever amount of hours less per week to focus on the thing that could actually move the needle in your life or in new relationship was not even the time is the energy as well yes a hundred percent a hundred percent because it's it for sure there's that actual time but yeah the energy because if you like listen if you're like like if you're drinking three nights a week like i'm thirty five my hangover is last two days now so like that's forty eight hours of less than productive right if you are like if you are spending more time drinking or watching porn then you know going on a date night with your wife i mean compounded over a couple years is your relationship not gonna be so good hundred percent everybody that's watching this needs to go read the book napoleon hill out waiting the devil the devil placed these kinda of tricks on you and it's called drifting so what you see is like it's seemingly insignificant like you know what's you know vape gonna do or i'm just gonna go play blackjack jack you know on my phone then you know what happens is like you said that becomes your god and it's not so much about the time it's that your mental energy is looking over here when you should be focused here and you're constantly getting pulled by these devices into a direction that you don't wanna go and then a year later you don't even recognize yourself and you didn't accomplish your goals because your body so when you do these things there's like a dopamine there's some sort of like hormone release and your body crave that and it's like well i could be doing like this over here which is important but boring and no dopamine release or i i i know i i know that if i go play blackjack for like thirty minutes there is a dopamine release why social media so bad no constant dopamine it's worse than alcohol as they've done stuff percentages it is it's totally addictive so i mean i catch myself doing it now and i'm like aware of it i try and only use social media for business i try and post i try to not just scroll but i mean like like every human you get you get sucked into it and i'll be bored and boredom is good because boredom means you can think and boredom means you can sit with your thoughts and boredom means you can be creative like you don't always wanna be on a hundred percent working away right you wanna breathe a little bit it's important but i'll be bored and instead of taking a second and like breathing and taking a second right you're immediately boom exactly because my brain's like oh well i'm sure that brainstorming where my business is gonna go is useful but i also like to dopamine so let me just fuck around on tiktok and i does nothing for you right but again you do that every time you have a down you know a down thirty minutes there goes your life but you don't think about it like that i've never i've never heard of that napoleon hill book i everyone knows like thinking grow rich but i've never heard of this one out winning the devil is even better than thinking very rich what are some other we've sort of spoken about okay so biggest things that distract entrepreneurs biggest things that will make them successful what are the most important lessons that you've learned over your career that you would hope to somebody who's just starting out would learn or i would even say what is the most painful lesson that you've learned that you hope nobody else would ever have to learn but it was a useful lesson for you most important lesson that i learned growing up was do not take advice from people that are not early where you wanna be so my entire you know childhood adolescence you know i was controlled by you know parents teachers you know had to do what i was told and i realized none of these people really had it figured out and everything that they were doing was out of love yeah but it was leading me nowhere so the ones that are closest to you your friends your family that have good intentions for you does not mean that you should listen to them if they are not where you wanna be financially spiritually mentally fill it in the blank do not take advice from them you have to distance them so that was a very hard lesson that i learned in my adolescence i had to go and un wire all of that stuff in the way that i un uncovered it was i would literally brain myself with personal development youtube and i pushed away friends family everything and kinda isolated it for so you like did like a hard reset on your belief system i had to yeah that was my only way out or i would i would have been a you know been working at nine to five probably still in northern virginia claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under unprepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources but my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that 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68 Minutes listen 10/8/25
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➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Chris McChesney, author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, breaks down how leaders can execute with clarity when everything feels urgent. He reveals why most... ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Chris McChesney, author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution and #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller, breaks down how leaders can execute with clarity when everything feels urgent. He reveals why most teams struggle to act on strategic priorities amid constant pressure, and how the Four Disciplines—focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability—help bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Learn how to separate the truly important from the merely urgent, use lead measures to create momentum, and sustain high performance through simple, consistent execution habits that cut through chaos. ➡️ Show Links https://successstorypodcast.com YouTube: https://youtu.be/p1ww1QhUEn8 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chris-mcchesney-wsj-1-best-selling-author-franklin/id1484783544 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4kanx9mpprUlgBP4IbqTJr ➡️ Watch the Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/scottdclary
in this lessons episode discover how the four disciplines of execution help leaders turn strategy into action and focus on what truly drives results learn how to overcome uncertainty and urgency that block progress understand why clarity and leverage determine successful outcomes and explore how accountability and focus to sustain long term performance in any organization so let's let's let's queue up the the four disciplines and what they're actually so four disciplines are four disciplines that are focused on executing executing in a business context in a leadership context this is obviously what the you know this is the book that you just re released right today today is actually the today actually today we're recording it on today tuesday april twentieth yeah so congratulations that's exciting it's very exciting so actually so what's what's the what's the re release about like if people have already checked out this book what is the re release and then i actually wanna go into some of the more tactical stuff but i'm just curious what's the yeah yeah so the the if if you're familiar with four disciplines the the re release about thirty percent new content really a lot of focus on where to use this approach and wear not to use this approach okay this is not you know vitamin c this is not good for what ai you this is heavy medicine right and and where do leaders apply these disciplines and where not to how do leaders of leaders we go into much more detail on how organizational leaders apply this we do a lot with leaders that are finding themselves managing projects and they're not project managers how do you apply the disciplines to a project going instead of a of of a performance type goal and then finally sustainability a lot of organizations have been at this for almost a decade how do you keep it fresh how do you keep it alive so those are kind of i guess the headlines or the highlights of how of what's new in the second edition and there there's valid points because i can i can tell you from personal experience the the leaders of leader's point is something that nobody really nobody nobody learns in school it's the very difficult thing it's one of the most difficult things to figure out and then also just the project management piece when again another leader of leaders things when you're managing tasks that if you're in sales and you love selling and you move into sales manager and you move into director sales and you move into vp sales well now you have to manage projects and now and actually that's one of the reasons why some people don't like those executive roles because there's a lot of leaders of leadership type requirements and there's a lot of project management type requirements that is so far from the actual act right yep anyway anyways good good advice some i'm glad you said that about leaders of leaders i'm glad that note because the one of the c authors of the book jim hu and i are actually starting right now we had the same thought you did we're starting right now another work on leading leaders and we don't know if that's the name of the book it's a damn name here's on this and we we we we had to cut this chapter short we had so much on this topic and and we we had to say scott we said the same thing you did there's not a lot out there there's a lot on leadership in a general sense but in terms of the specific dynamics of when you're a leader and you have to lead another leader that is not at least at least we've not seen a great deal on those unique dynamics so that is something that we're looking at right now it's a good it's a good topic and i know that the the audience here some of them everybody here is career focused trying to build something themselves so i would just say if you aren't leading leaders right now regardless of whether or not you're starting a side hustle building something you're an entrepreneur and you wanna build something in an organization there will be a point where this will be applicable in your i mean i be today right but figure it out so you don't have to go through hell and trial by fire when you're actually living it and anyway so let's you're gonna to get this we'll need to reward of success exactly exactly we will be leading leaders that's right that's exactly yeah okay so we're trying to remove ambiguity we're trying to take on task to ambiguity so that everything clear everything is comforting we see the end result we see the vision so first of all how do we do that and then how do we apply savings for principles to executing when we have that clear vision so first how do we get rid of that ambiguity yeah so let's do this let's let's put up sort of two obstacles and then let's maybe walk through the disciplines so the one obstacle is it's not that people we think this but it's not that people necessarily resist change we think people resist change because it looks like they're resisting change a lot what they resist is uncertainty people initiate change quite a bit so it's it's really unfair to say that it's a human dynamic to resist change what people resist is the uncertainty that often comes with change k so if you said uncertainty is sort of one issue and then the the here's the second issue that gets in the way of execution and it's it's urgency it took us a long time to sort of see this this was hiding in plain sight that any goal that you're trying to achieve any strategic priority anything that's really important will always compete with the day job and we've given the day job a nickname called the whirlwind right so this day job this whirlwind always feels urgent media oh i've gotta get back to someone and so oh i promise might have that done oh i've gotta do this oh i've still got seven unanswered emails oh oh oh right and so we're working all day long and you can live in the whirlwind and not move on anything strategic and and here's the other problem in the moment when a human being is confronted with a choice between something that's happening right now or spending energy on something far more important but less urgent the human default does not go to importance the human default goes to urgency this is the great barrier to strategic execution we're not wired for it we are wired for i media so you think about those two factors this this resistance to uncertainty and this this whirlwind of urgency that we have to execute through so if you just thinking of those two things and then the what are the what are the four disciplines alright well the first one is called discipline one's called focus on the wildly important and it's a decision that a that a leader or an entrepreneur or a professional person makes when they say i am going to give something disproportionate energy i'm not gonna ignore doesn't it mean i gotta ignore everything else everything else can go into whirlwind but something's going to get disproportionate energy and i'm gonna and i'm and and not only am i gonna narrow the focus but i'm gonna it's a little bit like focusing a camera i'm gonna bring it into focus i'm gonna give it a starting line i'm gonna give it a finish line i'm gonna give it a deadline and there's a whole science around how you do that an organizational setting and how you do that between levels but that's what the first discipline is all about it the first discipline is all about targeting getting really clear on well let me let me give you a quote i really like this this this was something that was said to us twenty years ago by the gentleman who's now the president of chick f a he was vp of operations at the time his name is tim t sop and he said when i meet with a leader and so you got one of the you got one of the planets really good operators right he said when i meet with a leader the first thing i wanna know where is that leader putting disproportionate focus this where are they spending like i don't wanna know your seven priorities i i wanna know number one i wanna know what's your big bet what's you play right now otherwise i know if they don't have that they're on the defensive they're they're just they're just trying to putting on fires right they're put out fires they just wanna get through the week right and he says it really helps me know where a leader's head is and we and i think that little statement started to influence the way we use the discipline so i got discipline one is about what i'm going after discipline two is called act on the lead measures so if discipline one is about the principle of focus discipline two is the principle of leverage it basically says look i've just i've just identified something that by definition i can't move otherwise i wouldn't have identified i've i've just deliberately picked this really important thing that's really hard and so if you think about a rock that's too heavy to move yeah and then you picture a lever you can get a fu crumb you get a lever under there right and you know what are the characteristics of a lever well a lever unlike the rock you can move it the lever is influence and when the lever moves the rock moves so the levers predictive and so for twenty years we have been our had our heads into this idea of where the leverage k so the classic example that everybody gets his weight loss so people know okay if losing weight is the heavy rock i've just not been able to accomplish right diet and exercise really are the lever right i could act i don't always act on it but i can right and they're predictive if i stay with it it works right we we don't believe it works but it works right so so it's predictive and influence what we found is that in every field of human endeavor if you can get the targets low enough down to where the work is happening you can find leverage points you can find what we call lead measures now a so a lead measure predictive and influence not the same as a predictive indicator just one little distinction on this if i was trying to grow corn right and crop production was my wildly important goal that's what we call the targets and disciplined one we call them wig or wildly important goals my wiley important goal or my lag measure right was crop growth like similar to weight loss a predictive indicator of crop growth would be rainfall right we have we have a lot of rainfall we're gonna have a good crop growth okay well you can't control it can't get very good scott right it's predicting but at eight influence right lead measures are not predictive indicators lead measures are true leverage their influence and their predictive alright so so getting so you might have an organization with eight nine different teams each team we we really limit you to one wildly important goal per team per work group at a time this is what we found people get handled the day job plus one alright so they got one week that team has been very involved in creating the lead measures disciplined three now it's called keep a compelling score board and it's really about for me it's about throwing the game on switch like that's a that to me that's a that's a tangible it's a binary switch when someone goes alright it's live game on right and i engage and the hypothesis that you've created a discipline one in discipline too doesn't put it in motion but the minute you go game on and for us that's bit a score so we we have an app four x o s that we've got over a half a million people on right now utilizing and and in very simple terms it's not like it's not like a business score board it's not like a spreadsheet it's not like like a coach we we think of it this way it's not a coach score board you you need those you have those this is a players score board okay so if you think about the score board at any athletic event it's much more like that than it is the spreadsheet they hand the coach at halftime time so that's discipline three does the can we take what we did in disciplines one and two and can we make it go game on and the discipline for is create a cadence of accountability and that is every week right every team that owns a score board each individual making commitments and then reporting the next week like in addition to the hundred things i gotta do this week what's the one or two things that are gonna ensure we do the lead measures like if my lead measures are diet and exercise right what would a commitment be we'll do diet and exercise no we know that my commitment might be it's gonna rain next week i'm gonna get that gym membership because i hate running in the rain or i'm gonna go to whole foods because i've got these recipes but i don't have the ingredients right and i've gotta rick i've got right i wanna make sure that i'm not eating junk and then i'm hitting that calorie lead measure so discipline one get the focus discipline put two get the leverage discipline three game on and then discipline four if you've ever heard the adage force against leverage that's right that's applying that force so what we found is by doing that we're able to drive activities into an otherwise schedule of urgency and do it in a way that it doesn't feel overwhelming to people where they're like i don't even know where to start thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success
15 Minutes listen 10/6/25
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➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, David Priemer, founder of Cerebral Selling and bestselling author, breaks down the science of selling through a deeply human lens. He explains why authentic communication and emotional intelligen... ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, David Priemer, founder of Cerebral Selling and bestselling author, breaks down the science of selling through a deeply human lens. He explains why authentic communication and emotional intelligence outperform rigid scripts and formulaic sales strategies. Learn how credibility-driven language builds trust, how to use empathy and tone to elevate every conversation, and why the most powerful sales tactics are rooted in understanding—not persuasion. Priemer also reveals how discovery, objection handling, and negotiation can become authentic exchanges when approached with curiosity, conviction, and connection. ➡️ Show Links https://successstorypodcast.com YouTube: https://youtu.be/9lexv5PtFkY Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-priemer-ceo-of-cerebral-selling-how-to-sell/id1484783544 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6QxwD7CL7lxCK5At8DK638 ➡️ Watch the Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/scottdclary
indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode uncover why authentic communication is the core of effective sales learn how to replace scripted pitches with credibility driven language that builds trust explore science backed tactics for discovery objections and negotiation that engage both emotion and logic and understand how empathy and tone can turn any interaction into genuine connect and lasting conversion good it's a good thing to know a good point that regardless of the sales strategy or or whatever you subscribe to if it's spin or challenger or i don't there's a there's a million and one different things that different organizations use miller h like a whole bunch of different types right this underlies all of them this this this could or can be added onto to because if it's how to use tone and how to i would say be more human and more authentic in your approach and be more i don't know more confident in your approach and and i'm sure that i'm using very general words and you can probably go a little bit deeper on how this actually manifests and when a rep uses it this can be implemented in line with any sales strategy because it's it's not it's not a different strategy it's it's something that you have to add on correct correct it's it's very foundational it's very human feeling now there are a lot of tactics we talk about messaging tactics discovery tactics you know objection handling negotiation and so on but like for example people are familiar with like bands or mimic you know people have these discovery methodologies where they say hey look scott when you go into the call with the customer like here's the list of of things that you need to come out with and then what happens is we get too t to like those lists and we say so scott like what's your budget you're you say oh i don't know we haven't said it and they're like okay awesome so who's gonna sign this thing and you're like i don't know maybe my boss i'm like okay great and when do you need this buy and and your customers can feel that you're it's like a polite interrogation that you're just working down a checklist it does not feel human and so when you mean we talk about tactics it's about using tactics that you can execute with passion conviction they're not all easy to execute by any stretch right but that's the whole idea behind sales and thinking person profession you really have to unpack it some of them are easy but yes manifesting the emotion the conviction using words like you know even just like a very simple thing when you have a lot of let's say young sales reps and they go and talk to customer and they say well you know scott like what i think and what i've what i've seen and scott's they're thinking like who the hell is this kid what i mean yeah it's you've seen nothing anything k like you're not o'brien like you're not bill gates like you've seen nothing so you know one of the the tactics i talk about and this just a small little thing i i i call the eye freezing trap where we start saying well i've seen and i found and like no one cares what you think so i i say well who has credit if you don't have credibility who does your customers have credibility third party you know articles and studies and reputable journals have credibility the collective experience of your company has credibility so i say shift your eye phrasing to we phrasing and invoke the credibility of the entities that have it so i you know what what we found like we've been in business for ten years and what we found working with tons of customers like you is and you can use that on day one of your job right you just have to execute it with passion and conviction and there's lots of ways to do that but just like these little tweaks to your rep repertoire can make you feel completely different but how you execute that sales motion and when you feel completely different your customers can feel too and it's very powerful from a conversion perspective indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at of four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that uses ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need company using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform i choose if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next tech hiring in cognate is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's wherein cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data broker on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself and cog handles all the pay work follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee so you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today so let's break down what the current modern day iteration of cerebral selling is because now you have a book out you have a course that's been broken down into so i'm pretty sure six different components what is what is the the full complete cerebral selling when you train it when you when you teach somebody how to sell this way well you know it's funny like when you start a business like like mine when you're focused on training it's not just about the content because there's lots of great content out there i i all often times we'll we'll focus just as much on the delivery mechanism and the retention right because people forget and and actually as a consumer of sales training over the years where the sales trainer comes in and does it the the thing for two days you you forget most of it this has been been proven out so what i do is i focus on a particular topic like messaging you know and and we we focus on that and then you know i leave you to execute those tactics in the field for two three weeks before i come back and i i teach you something else so we focus on the fundamentals messaging discovery objection handling negotiation leadership focus and and in each case we focus on like science based tactics executed with the right empathy and tone and you know it's especially relevant now when you think about like the current buying climate you know whatever it is you say you do there's a million people that will say the same thing at least in the you know now you think you're this delicate snowflake and you're unique from everyone else and maybe you are but to your customers you just all all sound the same so no one really cares what it is you do and a lot of times when i say so scott what do you do and you're like oh we're a platform to like no one cares about your stupid platform and i'm saying that the best possibly no one cares about your platform k like people walk around caring about their problems and their lives and not even like features and benefits right so speaking the language of like pain and like for example if you say like so david like what do you do with cerebral selling yeah i can oh i'm it's a sales training and you know thought practice and i have a book and like then no one cares right so i said alec look i work with sales teams who realize that like people have to buy stuff but they hate talking to sales right and now you've had like a little mini epiphany of like oh yeah you know it's true i also hate talking to sales alright tell me more right so when you think about from a messaging perspective and it's not just having empathy for your customers but like really thinking like how does my customer's brain process this information when i give it to them so that i maximize my chances of creating interest and conversion later on down the road and and none of this is like this is all completely above board it's it's easy stuff it's stuff that you can execute with passion and conviction but that's that's how it breaks down in in every step messaging discovery objection handling there's all these like little tips and tricks that you can manifest you know i can give you more example i no i i think that so what i wanted to do so i saw there's messaging discovery objection handling negotiating leading for growth which i'm not sure what that actually means and then i don't know what that option mean but it sounds interesting and then it sounds great i like i like the copy it's great copy for for these for these little for these breakdowns and then mindful execution so so five and six let's we can we can sell those for a quick second so messaging discovery objection handling negotiating these are things that if you sold anything to anybody and put an ounce of effort into researching how to sell something these will come up again and again and again so let's break down the cerebral approach approach excuse me to the other three so discovery objection and negotiation and how do you do that with this cerebral nuance for sure we'll look with with discovery i kinda think about two things and you're going you go into a discovery call with the customer what is it that you wanna know like what do what do wanna talk about with that customer because there's like a million things you could talk about not all the things will be equally important and not all things will have an equally emotional impact on the customer so we talk about that the other thing we talk about is the science of self disclosure how do you get people to tell you things but they don't wanna tell you like when i come to you and i say scott like what's your budget for this project like even if you walk into a car dealership and the car salesperson like so scott like what's your budget all of a sudden you're the the hamster wheels cranking your brain your day i don't i i don't want shield up why they asking what are they gonna do with this information when i give into them what what should i should i low ball right and so we get into like the science of self disclosure and like how to kind of recognize the the kind of pictures that are going on inside people's heads and how to kind of approach those discussions with objection handling it's all about understanding before we even handle the objection it's understanding what what with the intent so for example the most common objection in sales of any kind is is too expensive right everything's too expensive everything was free life would be good but everything's not free unfortunately so when someone says though it's too expensive it's like if i if i ask you on a date scott and you don't wanna go with me and i say so scott hey let's what we we mad like saturday night i'm free you wanna go saturday night and you don't wanna go with me and you say oh david i'm sorry i'm i'm busy on saturday night right that's the that's the equivalent if it's too expensive thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one
11 Minutes listen 10/6/25
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➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, where he has led one of the most successful turnarounds in American media—achievin... ➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, where he has led one of the most successful turnarounds in American media—achieving profitability, record subscriptions, and three Pulitzer Prizes since 2021. Previously editor-in-chief of Wired (where he boosted digital subscriptions nearly 300%) and editor of NewYorker.com, Thompson co-founded two tech ventures sold to WordPress and Amplica Labs, edited stories that became the Oscar-winning film Argo, and authored The Hawk and the Dove, hailed as "brilliant" by The Washington Post. An American record holder in the 50K run with 2 million social media followers, he embodies the intersection of editorial excellence, entrepreneurial vision, and athletic discipline—bringing the same relentless drive to building media companies as he does to distance running. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/nxthompson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasxthompson/ https://www.nickthompson.com ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Truth, Lies & Work Podcast - https://truthliesandwork.com ShipStation - https://www.shipstation.com/ (Code: SuccessStory) Square - https://square.com/go/success SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/scott Monarch Money - https://www.monarchmoney.com (Code: Success) Claude - https://claude.ai/success Incogni - https://incogni.com/success (Code: Success) Think Big, Buy Small Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/B2cH36AX?sid=SuccessStory NetSuite — https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:31 – Why Running Is the Purest Sport 02:28 – The Challenge of Being Alone with Your Thoughts 04:44 – Discovering the Need for Solitude 11:52 – Running with Awareness, Not Just Discipline 14:42 – Living with Conflicting Personalities 16:42 – Sponsor Break 19:27 – The Double-Edged Sword of Obsession 21:14 – How Cancer Changed His Perspective 31:50 – Sponsor Break 43:29 – When Simplicity Becomes Profound 48:40 – Running as a High-Performer’s Edge 49:30 – Nicholas’ Wildest Running Story 53:22 – Running as a Multifaceted Tool 54:43 – The One Takeaway for Readers 55:11 – Advice to His 20-Year-Old Self
why is running the simplest sport it's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself your successes are your own and your failures are your own i start running very seriously when i'm about fifteen and initially i do it for a love of comp petition and i do it because i'm good at it and it gives me status at high school it makes me cool he's a storyteller who turned media into mission nicholas thompson is the ceo of the atlantic and under his leadership the magazine returned to profitability earned multiple pulitzer prizes and grew its digital subscription base exponentially when you're running pain doesn't work the way we're talking most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about homeostasis if you can reach that level of awareness of yourself you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits he also c founded the ata a multimedia publishing company acquired by wordpress and wrote the hawk and the dove he runs a daily video series dissect technology culture and power reaching millions and reshaping how we think about the future when your life is hard there's something about going to the track and just running to the point where you fall over that feels amazing we're all on instagram all the time we're all twitter all the time we're all constantly distracted and we fill all those empty moments with screens social interactions notifications but what's interesting is at the same time that that has happened the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathons to activities so nick why is running the simplest sport hey scott it's the sport that you can do almost at any time at any moment just by yourself you don't need a rack it you don't need a ball you don't need someone else you just go out you don't even necessarily need shoes though they're useful particularly if you're on rocky terrain but you have the ability to just go out there and do it whenever you want and then because it's just you you're able to observe things about yourself and understand things about yourself as you do it your successes are your own and your failures are your own you understand aging and it creates mental space that other sports don't do so my the hypothesis of my book is that if you look closely at running and you look at what it does to people's lives and you look at what it did to my life you can actually understand really deep and really meaningful things do you think that people in general have a hard time being alone with their own thoughts some people do some people don't but we all have to spend a certain amount of time alone so we all should be comfortable and you know there's this interesting phenomenon in modern life where you know we're all on instagram all the time we're all twitter all the time we're all constantly distracted and we fill all those empty moments with screens social interactions notifications but what's interesting is that at the same time that that has happened the number of people who run marathons and the number of people who run ultra marathons to skyrocketed and so there's almost an inverse relationship between how distracted we are by our phones and how much we seek sort of long distance long endurance competition that's very interesting yeah yeah i i i feel like as you describe running in such an el way and i haven't heard many people describe it that way but it's i've experienced it with a variety of different fitness things but none are as how do i describe it like when you run you get into a statement i guess it's flow state or something where you there is no distraction it is really just you and your thoughts which can be a good thing or a scary thing but it's really interesting that you notice that correlation between our thoughts being overwhelmed by social media being constantly stimulated be a constantly about bombarded with messaging and images and ideas and our need to find an outlet that gives us back our mental peace almost it gives us back our mental piece it can connects us to you know we were right we hunted ante envelopes on the you know savannah when we're you know many many you know centuries and generations ago i do think there's something very pure about running even when you it like i do it in an industrial city you know most of my running is from brooklyn manhattan over a bridge with a train so it's not like i'm off running in the fields of wild flowers so i do think that even if you do it that way there's a way it connects you to our ancestors in a way it connects you to the sky i do think they're really beautiful things that happen through it where does this sort of i don't wanna say love for running but need for being okay with your own thoughts and per through difficult times where does this inflection point or this major theme come into your life when does it first present itself i mean i start running very seriously when i'm about fifteen and initially i do it for a love of competition and i do it because i'm good at it and it gives me status at high school it makes me cool but i also very quickly also learned that it's a way to be outside be in the woods think get a deeper level process complicated things and so it's probably pretty early in my relationship with running where i realized like i didn't just want to go out and try to beat people on the track i wanted to see if i could run to the top of kin mountain right i wanted to see if i could you know get to the next ridge line and you don't do that because you want to prove anything you know now you might do it for a str segment but back then you didn't and so it was really about finding some kind of spiritual peace so i think that my my need the mental benefits that come from running started to make themselves present then but i think it was later in life when i mean the the the inspiration for the book came in a pretty important moment which was you know when i was twenty nine when at when i was thirty i ran a a fast marathon i had this long struggle to run a fast marathon i just couldn't break three hours and i finally break it and i run two forty three and i feel amazing right and then shortly thereafter after i'm diagnosed with cancer i recover let me talk more about that that process that whole thing then for the next like thirteen years i keep running and i just run two forty threes over and over again just nonstop right and two forty three is fast is cool it's great like two hundred years a great time it's objectively like it makes you the fastest person in your company right usually if you run two forty three you know fastest person on your block whatever then in my mid forties i get way faster right i run two twenty nine and now suddenly i'm like one of the best in the world in my age group you start setting records and the inspiration for the book the moment i decided to write the book came when i was trying to think through like what the heck happened like how did i get so much faster and and more importantly clearly i have this late ability why didn't i realize it while i was training my butt off in my thirties like why and i gotten faster than like makes no sense and then i had this realization oh wait it's because i had only cared about at some deep psychological level being as fast as i had been before i got sick like that was the only thing that mattered to me and so it was that realization oh wait like the things that make you fast the things that slow you down the things that determine how well you can do at the sport are buried deep inside they're not just like your cardiovascular system your legs they're deep in your mind and it was that realization that led me to start writing this book that's very interesting so you discovered that the reason why the reason why you weren't getting better is really because of i mean to put it very very simply sort of a a limiting belief or not even like a like a a baseline or a benchmark that that you thought that was what you wanted to achieve i mean this is like obviously we're talking about running and and and and sport but this is something that transcend ends almost everything you do in life totally it it like it i don't like it's there's so many multi factors and there's lots of elements but yes it was essentially like i was not i just wouldn't let myself get faster because i didn't care because all i was trying to do was prove that i was still alive and that i was like similar to the person before he had gotten sick and that seems to have them what was going on inside my head what does that what does that teach you about sort of you know aging into your prime because i think that that's something that yeah well i mean like i don't think a lot of people at at you know forty five are trying to break records i don't think that a lot and i and i always tie listen i i i am a business guy in a sports guy i i do tie a lot of sports performance and sports lessons back to business because i think that some of the mindset hurdles that you overcome to succeed in sports and teamwork working and all these different ideas they really do translate into into into business as well and just life success but i think that you're talking somebody who's forty five i don't think they're looking to you know create incredibly new milestones in their career incredibly new milestones in their in their athletic life incredibly new milestones in their relationship even though i think they should be but i think that around that ages when people are thinking okay you know i've done it i figured it out i'm good let me coast into retirement or whatever that looks like yeah a couple of things so one i had a very good model my maternal grandfather he doesn't really play a role in the book he's mentioned a couple sentences you know worked until he was eighty three years old at the highest level of us government right like and he just got fired all the time you know get fired by almost seven out of eleven us presidents and then just would work his way back right so i had a pretty good role model that said you don't stop you don't give up you don't go like you don't say okay at fifty five i'm gonna retire or like forty i'm gonna stop running you just keep going until until the end you know he was playing tennis with me when he was ninety years old put a little like chair out on the court and you would like sit down between points so that's you know that's one element of it another element is i think the lesson that i learned there are forces that slow you down as you age right it is inevitable and you know my i don't know less lean muscle mass than i had when i was twenty eight years old i have a you know lower maximal heart rate right i have they're all kinds of like i have a lower v two max there all kinds of like physiological things that un make me floor that said i also have wisdom right i've learned things about training that i didn't know before i have learned actually forms of endurance through my professional life that are useful for running so you have a bunch of forces pushing you backwards you have a few forces pushing you forward and so i'm never gonna even if i devoted my whole life to run and i'm not gonna run two twenty or two nineteen but i can you know keep i can keep pushing back against the decline declining to be better i had scrubs to my mother she was like oh my god my reflex are just getting worse and worse you know it's like every day and my reflex are worse and i was like mom you're that doesn't have to be the case like let's go out on the porch and i'm gonna throw you tennis i'm like sort toss them to the right toss them to the left i'm gonna bounce them and you're gonna catch them and throw them back to me and like we went and did she's like my reflex are getting better and you're like yeah you know you can like there are forces that push us in one you know towards decay and you can push back you know not at everything but at what you want you know we're not gonna live forever you know i'm probably gonna die at roughly the same manager is gonna die out if i didn't do all this running but i'm glad that i haven't like given in to the forces of the decline at least not yet survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions 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matters so get your ops in order get your business running smoothly so you can scale and you can really build something meaningful stop letting all this chaos steal all of your energy and listen to the op authority wherever you get your podcasts you right about running with awareness not just discipline explain what that means what's the difference yeah so when you're running this is important it gets into like a little bit of it's almost spiritual stuff but you have to the trick one of the tricks in running fast one of the most important things and so the lesson than i think applies across life pain doesn't work the way we're taught or the way we think that it when we're young and when i started running i thought that the reason i hurt when i ran was because my muscles were inflamed or you know something was going wrong with my nervous system or like i i used to think there's like there's lactic acid buildup right and the lactic acid buildup is what makes you hurt boom no it's not there is lactic acid buildup but that's not what makes you hurt most of your pain is actually just the brain sending signals because it's worried about home and so your brain is you know sending signals through the rest of your body to try to get you to slow down because it i think doesn't think it can maintain the pace you're running for the distance you wanna run so when i run a marathon or anyone runs a marathon when you get all these weird pains right and you're like three miles in your shoulder will start to hurt right and on a regular day your shoulder not gonna hurt three miles in a run because there's nothing going on with your shoulder right like it's it's just there right it barely moves but your brain is like it's worried about running twenty six point two miles on this particular day and it's worried you've taken it out too fast so it's trying to get you slow down and so it's looking for weak points and there all kinds of studies that show this and so your brain is running all these calculations how hot is it like how long is this gonna take how heal is the course how hard i work what is my part rate and it's measuring all these factors and it's like a thermostat and then if those factors kind of exceeded level it like sends a pain signal out and so when you're running you're trying to understand this and you're trying to understand these different pain signals and you're trying to understand like isn't this just something i can ignore this is like this thing in my shoulder or is it an actual pain signal is it like i've actually injured my achilles right so i was running this past saturday and let me start to go wrong on my ham right now i like okay this like a real thing or is it just worried that i'm trying to run a twenty mile run and that is like a really profound and deep body awareness that if you can reach and not that i've reached perfection but if i've read i am at a much deeper understanding in my body than i was twenty years ago ten years ago thirty years ago if you can reach that level of awareness of of yourself you can actually go quite a bit faster because you can push your limits in part by sort of it's like using your brain it i call it plain hide and seek with your brain right but the only thing i have to use your brain to play hide ahead and see with your brain but you can kind of convince yourself to go faster they're obviously physical limits like it's not like the perfect buddhist can run a one minute mile but you know you can still do better if you have a deeper understanding you actually set records for men forty five and up in a fifty k race like this is not just a casual i go for a run on a sunday morning was that done purposefully did you say i never want to be a hundred percent my work is that benefited your work is what's the relationship between this sort of the two conflicting identities well it could be a it could be a strength it could be a weakness i mean i think that like my whole life and if you look at different moments and you look at people who have evaluated me you know the people who like me and the people who are impressed by me and we i think i'm doing a good job are always like you know nick does so many things right and the people who kinda think i'm a sc are like nick's distracted right and it's a theme that goes through like my academic life my twenties my thirties my forties and you know they're there are there are trade offs when you have a life where you have a bunch of things you do there are moments where your goals end up tension with each other what i've tried to do is to make the life work and to make it so nobody the atlantic everything i'm slack on the job because of my running right i run to and from the office takes about them at the same amount of time as going on the subway i'm often listening to podcast i'm gonna work out obviously i'm knox i'm trying to cultivate awareness right i'm using running as a way that can help my job they're things i learn running that really helped my job or things from my job that helped my running so i've been able to build it into my life so they don't think any i don't think anybody at the atlantic whatever say i shi on responsibilities you know i think they mostly like and nick has this like hobby that he's able to keep contained and you know one of the things about running is that you can do it at an elite level without putting that much time in right you you know you spend i spend what eight hours a week running like it's a lot but like you could spend eight hours week we watching netflix hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and imagine you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most 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your life and i feel like a portion of you not a hundred percent but a portion of you is obsessed and that's what allowed that's what's allowed you to get to where you are what is your thoughts on obsession with running with performance with work with everything you've done i'm like that's a good question because obsession is you know i'm it's hard to be obsessive about it's hard to be like a obsessive p right and so my whole life i've never really focused in on one thing to the exclusion of others but i am very driven and very focused and i care a ton about doing well in my job i care a ton about running fast and i care a ton about being a good father in my three boys and a good husband to my wife i think obsession i think sort of like a modulate obsession where you like really care passionately and you like you it's just whatever the goal is right so the most important goal in my life right besides being a good father good husband the most important goal is figuring out a business model so this amazing publication founded by ralph walter emerson and harriet s can thrive for generations to come and play a role in helping american democracy in helping america like existence a nation right that's my objective right i don't write the stories i don't edit the stories my job is to find the business model and i am obsessed by that i think about it all the time right and it's in the back of my head looks should we are we doing are we doing this well or enough can we hit this metric right so in a way i am like profoundly obsessed about that but not to the extent that it prevents me from spend a bunch of time running no i think i i like that it's strategically obsessed yeah strategically obsessed there you go that that's that there you go i'm strategically obsessed when you get cancer at a young age you i mean to a degree you're facing mortality how does that change your relationship with running your hobbies your past times your family work like what does this do what what is the thoughts that go through your head when you do get cancer at a young age well so one of the thoughts so i got it when i was thirty you do suddenly you just you question who you are and what you are because you're like wait if i die what have i have i done anything have i left anything have i you know the world would be identical without me or at least if you're thirty and you're like i was at thirty right i mean if you're some super accomplished twenty nine year olds maybe different but it it makes you wonder your place in the world it makes you think more about the people who truly love you you go through this moment and you also you get to see how people react and you get a better sense of who truly loves you and who truly matters in your life and then if you're lucky and you get through it as i did you take life more seriously and you you have you have post traumatic growth you know you have this thing you can hold on to right you've been to the pre but you've survived and you you care more about certain things and you care less about other things and so right you may care more about trying to figure out your place in the world to journalism i mean you can maybe care less about whether the red sox when the a east right and so you just sort of like your your shift of priorities and your your way you spend your time i think changes there have been studies that have shown that people who get cancer and survive it end up with big they they end up becoming more religious they end up become becoming closer to their family members they end becoming closer to their deep friends they end up probably having fewer weak social connections and they end up more focused right like there's a kind of they do a whole bunch of things that are very solitary for the mental health and they i think they also spend more time you know outside like thinking about important things like you kind of like remove trivia and add important stuff into your mind and you know there been lots of states that show that it's not true for everybody and you do have to obviously survive it and come out the other side completely intact right and you can come out with all kinds of different outcomes but you know when i look at my life there a lot of things that didn't go right in my twenties it went right in my thirties of you know running it's a very obvious one but they're are all kinds of them and part of it was having had this really dark and scary experience with you know the thyroid cancer which is you know if you're gonna get cancer it's the the cancer you wanna get a very high survival rate i was very young there wasn't you know i was terrified and thought i was gonna die but there was no moment where like a rational doctor thought i was gonna die but you come to the other side and you're a you're a different more serious more focused person there was one line in your book it it was along the lines of when were teenagers were pulled by instinct now my emotions were those of an older man a steady rain that formed a river pushing relentlessly forward so this sort of it's just very well very well written and beautifully worded sort of evolution of a person and was that cancer that brought you through that evolution it was a couple things i mean that line in the book i was comparing two different races and they're both like very emotional races so the first was when i was eighteen years old we're seventeen years old and it was the new england championships and it was the three thousand meter race and it was for the new england title and it was both for the individual and for the team title and my race the three thousand was the last race and so it's me against my arch arrival if i win we have a good shot i win in the title if i lose we have no shot so i have to win and i go out like fall behind i get depressed he gets ahead and then i catch him right and then it's just this manic sprint and so you know what i love about those memories is that you can just like when you're running a sprint on a track you can just let your emotions out you can you can channel every element of energy you have into like forward propulsion and i don't think i've ever felt quite like i felt you know those last two hundred meters were neck and neck we're just you know we're going back and forth you know like i really like i hated the guy he he insulted me on the track like three weeks before the only person beating me all season it was like unfair he was a graduate you know like just i was like i wanted to beat the guy and so we're going at it i passed and i catch which is amazing and then i lose and he wins and so i was describing the emotions of that race and what it feels like to give it all into like be a young man and be like screaming inside yourself and moving on in the lane two which amazingly in track is called the lane of high hopes which is so cool so that was the first race and then the second race is the fifty k in oregon where i set the american record where you know in that first race i crossed the finish line and i'm blackout like i don't even know i've lost when i crossed the finish line it's so close i think i might have lost but who knows and then it's like then in the fifty k it's like i remember the end where i can see the finish line and i know i'm gonna break and record and they've pulled out the tape and i run through and the video is kind of amazing right and you watch and i go through and i break the tape and i look i look good and then and i remember feeling good and then i like topple over you know if like i've clearly like completely maxed myself to the exact you know it's like you know i don't know if you prone to the gas station and there's like one drop of gas in the tank and that was like what i had done in that race but i had done it like in sort of a steady smooth way as opposed to that first race where i'd lost by the way i will say that the the guy who beat me in that race when i was at seventeen he read an article i wrote about running and sent me an email and said it he loved it was so great to read about it and like it had inspire him to get out and play more squash and i now i'm i'm now friends with him that's so far the arch nemesis no but i think that so yes you're right it wasn't just cancer but it was like this it was just life just turning i mean a it's a lot of things right there's a lot of changes happen so i think i really like you there there's sort of four things that happen at that time period there's you know one i overcome my cancer too i start having children right so have three boys and there they appear in the years after i get healthy third i write a book and i write a book about my maternal grandfather who i mentioned who is this just you know phenomenal diplomat but also just a force of nature and a model i write a book it's the history of the cold war based on his rivalry reading in george ken and then the fourth is that i have this very intense relationship with my father and i watch is very driven man you know kind of fall off into alcoholism then despair and bankruptcy and i i like have a counter example right like if you let things slip this is what happens right and that sort of you i start to really process that so all of those things are happening at the same time in my life that's a lot that's a lot a lot one last thought on this because i think it's a useful idea and i think can help people that are going through difficult things god forbid hopefully nobody although probability dictates people who are listening this are going through cancer some sort of cancer care but just negative negative moments in people's lives in general you found a lot of relief in running to really take your mind away from the cancer or but the the the point is running physical activity it gave you something that would take your mind away from anything negative like i'm i'm assuming you've used it to escape a lot of you know really mentally exhausting and stressful situations over your life talk to me about what people should what people should know about running just when they're going through something hopefully not cancer but if it's cancer or anything else like what's the what's the thing that running gives you that nothing else really does you know i don't know i mean for i don't know if for other people it gives you something that nothing else can give you but there there are a couple of things that can happen with running so one it allows you you know sometimes when you're running what you're doing is you're actually seeking the pain right you're like you're going out there and because things are hard in your life you're just like you want the opportunity to kinda get into ultra runners called the pain cave but you wanna get into like just a point of there's something when your life is hard there's something about going to the track and just run into the point where you fall over that feels amazing right so that's one use right i don't use it that much that's more kinda like the young person's thing you know but that that that was kind of like what you know if i had like broke up with the a girl when i was young i would like just go run hard right and like you know sometimes like bringing pain on can process the other pain what i use running for now is kind of the opposite it's almost like spiritual escape like okay i'm gonna go and i'm gonna run and i'm gonna feel this different thing and i'm gonna be out in the universe and it's gonna be closer to meditation right and i'm gonna go make something hard happens in my life now i just go out and i go run in the woods right and i don't run hard i don't necessarily run long but i go and it's a way of like releasing my mind and freeing myself and so i think people can reach that mental state you know that kind of dis association you can reach it through multiple ways now you can go for a walk right you can you know go bird watching right like there are different ways of kind of escaping and going maybe you can meditate it maybe you can sit quietly in a chair but for me it's running that gets me to that state that's you know really helpful the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick cast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the house hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have to hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over an over and over again it made me realize that i probably lost a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen the truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to their rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade 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da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup up ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop from networking with all these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it is it inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today talk to me about your relationship with your father because obviously he's in the title of your book so that was something that was very important it shaped a part of your life a big portion of your life what was your relationship like with him he's a very complicated guy but my relationship with him was always we had a very strong relationship we emailed you know more or less every day throughout his life he passed away seven years ago but he's a very complicated guy where he grows up and he grows up in kind of a tough family where he's afraid of his father he grows up in oklahoma and his father they're on a native american reservation his father's president of the university there and my dad just doesn't fit in doesn't have any self confidence and so he kind of escapes he like learns about the school called andover applies gets a scholarship and then it's this just like rocket ship trajectory for the next ten years right where he goes to andover is an out cast figures it out goes to stanford wins a rhodes scholarship you know dean students you know i find these recommendation letters where they're like scott thompson the best student we've had since herbert hoover right john f kennedy says this guy is gonna be president runs every political organization he's just a d goes to oxford you know with his rhodes scholarship comes back with his fill mar my mother who is the you know glamour daughter of this important political figure and so my dad's like just you know the guy's gonna be certainly is gonna be senator right but then he doesn't really like it never gets on track professionally and you know from the time he mar my mother where he would have been me to twenty old little twenty seven years old until he's forty he's in kind of a rut he starts to drink too much becomes alcoholic he then you know if he can't really get himself going professionally can't really write an important book so it's stuck in all these sort of political battles inside the faculty where he's wears a professor he then finally like starts to make it in the late seventies and he becomes kind of a well known public intellectual ronald reagan gets elected and he's a top choice to run the policy planning staff which is a great job he doesn't get it but it's right then that he realizes realizes he's gay and you know it's something he'd thought about maybe we you know he as it's unclear exactly when he realized that he had tendencies he's clearly bisexual to some degree but that were he was his male tendencies were stronger and so then he leaves my mother he you know moved to dc and then he just unravel and he you know he starts to he would he would there would be hundreds of men we would you know would come to our house and he would you know i said he didn't spend a that alone for twenty years and he is you know there many of them are completely inappropriate right some of them are like violence some of them are thieves some of them are you know yeah i don't know just kind of like em souls right like they're not the people that scott thompson should be with there's some some like but mostly like they're not really the right people for him to be with and so then he like the next thirty years of his life he's a loving father he's fully supportive of me fully devoted to me he's an amazing man to talk to right the guy is always so smart interesting and well read and he's like he's a great person to have a parties but it's just chaos right and he like falls behind on his taxes he makes a these bad real estate deals he ends something like thousands of court cases and so maybe hundreds of court cases he eventually leads to asia he can't handle it america anymore and then by the end he's you just running this hotel in bali that is it really a hotel or is it just like people come and sleep with the male gardeners and you know it's a pretty it's a pretty dramatic story of rise and fall from like this little kid in oklahoma the you know halls of washington to the rice patties you know and then eventually dies in bat tonga philippines so it's a it's a it's a the other reason i wrote this book is because my dad's life story whether there's a lesson in and or not a lesson and it's interesting right like if i tell people that like they're like what is your dad do and they sort of assume your my dad has a kind of a different story than way he does so you know it's is it interesting guy but what's important what's most important is that he was completely devoted to me he loved me and even though he like threatened to kill himself to like get a couple hundred bucks from me or you know all kinds of like blackmail and craziness you know order prostitutes to like into my apartment there's like there's and there's even worse things that i don't put in the book despite all that like we maintain our relationship and you know we stay in touch and we have a loving father on relationships till the very end is there is there a lesson is there a lesson to me one of the lessons was don't get knocked off track and if you do get knocked off thought track and you do start to like lose yourself confidence and you do find yourself you know sort of letting slip the things you care about get it back like it seemed like what happened with my father was the way he cope with his drinking problem was to drink more and the way he cope with having drunk more was to drink more and you what you wanna do is the opposite you wanna like sort of cultivate a little bit of self awareness he was a very interesting man and that he had you know such incredible ability to view the strengths and weaknesses of other people and could see through you and could you know he wrote me a letter when i was twenty one that you know fore saw a huge portion of my life it's one the most inc letters that i've ever received and how well did he know me like i spent two weeks a year with him sometime time with him on weekends i read it that just recently i was like oh my god this man he was but he his own self awareness yeah i mean he you know what he would say is you know that like his sexuality that he came of age a wrong time that it was really hard to be had been born gay in nineteen forty two right if you're born gay in nineteen eighty two you can come out of the closet if you're born gay in nineteen twenty two you to stay in it and so he was born gay in nineteen forty two and then came out you know in during the middle of the age crisis he was as he mentioned he was diagnosed as hiv positive that turned out to be an incorrect diagnosis he would say that he you know just life life gave him life gave him a a dna a dna imposed limit and because of his sexuality he couldn't have succeeded professionally the way he wanted to like washington would not have allowed an openly gay man to succeed and once he realized he was gay he could not you know control it and because he hadn't been able to like be a young man exploring his sexuality when he's a teenager he had to compensate by you know dating this endless parade of you know nineteen year old guys he met on man jam like that's what he would say which is not i think you know fully persuasive but that was his argument no i i think that there's a lot of turmoil there for obviously but i wonder if and and you probably know you you probably thought of this at least once or twice before if even though it was a it was a good relationship and there was a certain degree of chaos in the relationship but even though it was a good relationship you're saying it was a good relationship did it you you you kind of ended up being complete one eighty like a complete opposite like you when when things don't go right you make sure that you don't lean into the wrong you find a way to correct it like i see you was actually a very disciplined person as somebody who like leans into the hard things as opposed to sort of giving way to the easier things i i think that i don't know if that's part of what shaped who you are i think for sure that there's something that comes from our parents at definitely at least imprint on us to a degree but you seem to be a complete opposite of that well it to the extent i am it's deliberate right it's like you my sister i have two sisters oldest sister a younger sister we've all talked about like our fear of becoming like him and the what we do to try to not become like him but on the other hand like i am quite similar to him in other ways you know i you know he was this like bundle of energy who was always doing lots of stuff you know people like people his old friends always say i remind i remind them with him square is a success story partner now there's his coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as his tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee i'm picking up lunch everything just works smoothly be ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why i keep going back every business has different goals and square the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story monarch money is a success story partner now know what it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment 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that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success what what makes something so simple and we did touch on this but go go a level deeper please makes something so simple becomes so profound and and such a benefit to your life yeah i think it just it opens up levels of thought and it opens up levels of experience that you know are pretty hard to open up one of the things i did in the book is i you know both tell my story and what running is done for me but i was tell the stories of five other people who have struggled with really hard things in life and use running to cope with them and you know the first maybe just tell her story maybe they'll tell to of them the first is this woman named bobby gibbs and they're all people who've have intersect with my life you she's the mother of a friend of mine and she you know grows up and she's just she's wired differently and she really doesn't she just can't stand the role that women are supposed to play in you know nineteen fifties nineteen sixties america like can't have a credit you can't have a job you just gotta be a wife she just can't stand it and the way she cope with it is she's like you know what i'm gonna do my own thing and so she goes off and she runs across the country you know not directly across her she is in a van but she like gets in the van and she'll drive starts in boston and drives to the you know berkshire shares and goes go every night she'll go and run like i don't know for four or five hours you know and then sleep in the ground and like look at the stars and look at the sky and she goes across the entire country and goes to you know it goes to san francisco and then she's like you know i kinda love this running thing and then she goes answers this hundred mile race and vermont and she you was able to run with the horses here in sixty six miles in two days and she's just like running gives her this way of being a spiritual being out in the world then nothing else does and helps her like escape these feelings so then she's was like you know what i'm gonna run the boston marathon and so her she grew up so she sends a letter and the working organizers are like sorry women are incapable of running the boston marathon it was this like belief right i the women weren't able to run i camera a second i don't nineteen sixty six really yeah it's crazy women like women didn't run distance races at the olympics until i the seventies eighties like it's it's absurd wow i i didn't know that that's insane yeah it's wild and so bobby gets this letter back and it's like women are incapable sorry you can't run boston marathon she's like we well i just ran sixty six miles with horses and so she runs it she like puts on her brother's sweatshirt and like sneaks in the bushes and then just goes out and runs a box of marathon and she runs it in like three hours and twenty minutes or something and it's this she's the first woman to run it and so it's a wonderful story about running helping this person you know find her role and civil rights find her role and you know bringing freedom bringing a equality and it's just a beautiful story there you know the other five characters i mentioned one of those guy michael west and so he lives on this tiny island thirty people out in off the coast of maine and there's nothing to do because it's a tiny island you know eating your powdered milk and you staying inside and so everybody on the island becomes a runner right and there's one two mile road and he'll run like a hundred miles a week back and forth in two mile road and they end up having like population of thirty seven of them runs sub three hour marathons at one point and so he becomes this great runner and the one he runs this road race in northeast harbor which is a town on the mainland and he wins it your one year my father runs it so nineteen eighty one i think then thirty years later my son runs the race so i'm running the race my son runs the race and i'm watching my son and he's coming you know my left and i've i've finished i've gone back to go find my kid and there's this guy right with who's like arms are fl all over the track and i'm running with his buddy mine as a cop i'm like he's like okay it's like hey it's michael west and so what happened what had happened to west is he'd got parkinson's and so he had gotten parkinson's in his like forties this like runner carpenter strong guy built up all the houses on the island and he'd had to learn how to run with it like he loved running it was the thing he did and at first he was embarrassed and then he learns how to like tie his hands behind his back so that they don't fl too much when he runs and he runs he's like qualifies boston marathon times with parkinson's he sets a world record for fast marathon park he's incredible and and so i spent a lot of time interviewing him about how he cope with like using running as a way to deal with you know i had to deal with the decline i had to do with cancer i had to do a fear he he gets a disease from which there's no return you know and he gets it at forty nine and he knows that the rest of his life it's just gonna get you know harder and harder but he wants to keep running because he loves it and it's a story about what he learned about competition what he learned about running so i tell those two stories there's others in the books that are like it but the point is there's something about this sport and the fact that you can do it like you can't play tennis if few have parkinson's right you can't like you can just go out and train and do it you know you can sneak through the bushes and get into the boston marathon course right because it's just you and it's just your shoes there's something about the freedom and the self determination that come from the sport that allow you to really reach deep places and do important things for somebody who is like a high performing individual what from work helps them with the running what from what what from running excuse me helps them with their work yeah i think that concentration is really it's something that really trends i mean you mentioned earlier that there a bunch of habits right like you eat well you sleep well you know you learn how to like modulate your energy levels like there's a bunch of like you develop this kinda stoic right i'm gonna go run today i'm gonna work today i'm gonna run i'm gonna work today right like you develop this confidence in like building up your skill step by step rick by brick run by run right you learn like the power of consistent effort you learn that through both but i also think that concentration really does come you know i've learned through running how to focus and i've learned through work how to focus and i think the two feed each other one last question about running you've run through times square at midnight you've been chased by cows and le you've dissipate like a thousand no trespassing signs just what was the most insane running story that you have not somebody else but something that you've dealt with you mean like the weirdest run or like the most oh that's a good quote you take it at however you want it give me the weirdest and give me the best whatever this one one of the points i'm making in that chapter is like just fine time to run night and you just run wherever you are actually i'll say that i say like this is actually an important one and this is this is something didn't even know this it happened until i was writing the book there was a time where i went to my my then girlfriend's house and she know she become my wife but it's the first time like meeting her parents and i go there and we have a big dinner i think they're out they living in berkeley and i don't maybe i drink some wine we have a good time maybe we all watch a movie together who knows and then it's like eleven o'clock and i'm like okay i'm going running and because i hadn't gone running that day and i leave and my future mother law's says to my future wife like wait what's wrong with that guy and my wife is like what you don't get is that he enjoys it and so there been a lot of situations like that where i just go and run in places have you know i run i like what's coming to mind as i remember once for some reason like i came out all these world i remember running like a ten mile run a a small parking lot in las vegas i can't remember why i had to do it but it was like the only place i could run that particular day you know and you just there's was actually action i remember i was i ran out during there is a time when i was up in the cats skills and i couldn't leave my kids but i had to do it run so i just like ran around the house which is like pretty small by i ran like ten miles like in a little of like tiny loops around the house you just figure out what to do i had another time running in vegas i know why i always was happens in vegas where i was like giving a speech and it was one of those things where i like show up and actually i guess i i have a whole bunch of vegas stories once i met a friend's bachelor party like he's going up the elevator with a bunch of people he's met at the you know at the club i'm coming down to go running and it's like the rest of the bachelor of the party's going up and i'm going out then there's another time where i'm in vegas and i've like forgotten to bring a t shirt and but i'm only there for like three hours and i have like fifteen minutes when i can run between meetings and so i had like a winter coat because i've been in new york and so it's like eighty degrees and i'm in shorts and a winter coat running in las vegas anyway so the the point being like i just love to run and we'll do it wherever i can what do you want what do you want if you're gonna pass on a lesson about running to your to your three boys what would that lesson be the lesson that i hope i've passed and i don't know is that they see they can't really understand my work right and they can't i mean now they can they're seventeen fifteen and eleven but like when they were little they couldn't and they didn't like quite know what i did they get some sense of it they don't really know what it means but they can see the effort right and they can see the discipline and they can see the consistency and they can see that it's like they can learn some of the lessons from running about resilience perseverance dedication building things up steadily and that's what i hope they get and i you know the in a way i like my eldest son doesn't run but he works so hard right he works so hard at to school working and he works so hard as debate tournaments right and he you know i he's clearly whether he's learned it from watching me run or watching me work or watching my wife who knows but like he's pick it up the other two boys like they both run and they do it really well you know i this one last thought i think it's like a lesson that i'm picking up from you like running you i mean like you you say running connected you to your father but you also use it as an escape when things are difficult you can use it to focus on something or you can use it for meditation to get your head out of work like it's just it's like this tool really that's that's how i see it it's this tool that you can apply it in different ways just to improve your life and it's such like a multifaceted diverse tool yeah yeah it's definitely that that's a very good way to put it because you can do you know there's no one thing i do when i run i seek different things when i run i seek meditation i seek so an intense focus i sent sometimes seek association sometimes i'm running into like away from things sometimes we're running toward things there's a lot you can do with it and i think it's beautiful because i think that we keep trying to add more complexity into our lives with routines and all these different things and all these different fitness things and health things and and they're all good to a degree but i think that sometimes simple just wins and that's that's really what it is so the book the running ground of father a son in the simplest of sports that is available october twenty eighth so we'll make sure this podcast goes up around the exact same time when this is live and you can get that book anywhere you get your podcasts if people were going to just take it home if somebody wanted to pick up this book what do you hope they would get from it what's the one lesson or the one idea that you really wanna drive home i mean the best thing that happens is when people who don't run read it and then say they went running and i happened a couple times just as i would send out drafts to friends i really love that and they're like you know i like i now can think more deeply about the sport and i wanna go do it and i love that response i love that i think it's just like a leading indicator to a picking it running like a leading indicator to a better happier healthier life last question i ask everybody you kind of already you're you already told me what lesson you wanna pass over to your kids through running but just a lesson that after going through everything in your life you would like to tell your younger self your twenty year old self what's that one lesson that was really important to you that you think would help that younger version keep at it you know i think i spent too much time i didn't understand then this thing i'm i really believe that if you do your best every day good things happen right and like you don't see it right you don't see yourself getting better you don't see it improving nothing's linear in life but if you keep at it you'll get there and one of the problems i had psychologically in my twenties is that i sort of wanted of the world in a minute you know and i like i just sort of assumed that things would happen really quickly and like whatever success i saw or whatever accomplishments or whatever like i thought i'd be able to like write really great stories as a journalist and you can't like it's you have to learn so much and it takes a long time and i didn't quite appreciate the benefits of like compound interest the compound interest of daily work and it took me a while to realize that and because of that i sort of would stop and start and i made like a bunch of sort of dumb professional mistakes in my twenties and pretty off track and i think it's because i didn't understand that i didn't have the confidence i understand that if you keep at it and if you do your best and if you treat people well and you know your kind and generous and thoughtful and work hard like it will stuff will like not always and there's all kinds of biases and injustices in the world but you know things will work out better claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under unprepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my 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➡️ Start Here: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Subscribe Here: https://youtube.com/c/scottdclary ➡️ If you like more content like this, you'll love my podcast, 10 Minute Mindset https://10minmindset.org/ In this "Lessons" episode, we're exposing why AI terrifies you: It just ... ➡️ Start Here: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Subscribe Here: https://youtube.com/c/scottdclary ➡️ If you like more content like this, you'll love my podcast, 10 Minute Mindset https://10minmindset.org/ In this "Lessons" episode, we're exposing why AI terrifies you: It just proved what you do isn't as special as you thought. If you're watching machines do your job in seconds and feeling your entire identity crack apart, this one's for you. I'll reveal what separates people AI will replace from people it can't touch—and how to make sure you're in the right category before it's too late. ➡️ Connect With Me https://instagram.com/scottdclary / https://twitter.com/scottdclary
in this lessons episode we're talking about why ai terri you it just proved what you do isn't as special as what you thought because now you're watching a machine do your job in seconds and you're feeling your entire professional identity crack apart gonna talk about what separates people ai will replace from people it can't touch and how to make sure you're in the right category before it's too late every single creative person that i know right now is having the exact same crisis they feel like ai is taking their creativity they open check gb they type in a prompt thirty seconds later it spits out something that took them three hours last week but the worst part isn't that ai can do your job it's that they can't explain why their version is better than ai version so artists are panicking writers are protesting designers are furious this narrative is everywhere right ai is stealing our creativity it's destroying our craft it's making us obsolete but here's what's actually happening ai isn't stealing anything it's holding up a mirror and most people don't like what they see because if a machine can replicate what you do in thirty seconds maybe what you're doing wasn't as creative as you thought maybe you were following a process that you absorbed from everyone else you just didn't realize it until something could do it faster now this isn't an attack because i spent many years of my creative life in the exact same position before i figure this out but if you're feeling defensive if you're feeling angry right never saying scott that's wrong maybe examine that reaction but let me explain what i mean let me describe your creative process tell me if i'm wrong you sit down to right you scroll twitter for inspiration you read three articles in your niche you notice what's trending you absorb the patterns jim and you start to rearrange those ideas and it's something that sounds like you and then you hit publish and if ai can replicate that in thirty seconds it's not because ai stole your creativity it's because what you were doing was pattern matching it wasn't creativity so this is what's actually happening right you see a hundred examples of good content in your space and your brain learns that structure the hooks that work the frameworks that everyone uses the talking points that get engagement and then you reproduce those patterns you add your unique voice which really just means you use slightly different words to say the same thing that everyone else is saying and that's not really creativity that's curation and i know this because i've done this for years before i realized what i was actually doing see the reason ai feels so threatening isn't because it's taking your job it's because that you just realized your entire creative identity is built on doing something that a machine can replicate which means that it was never that special to begin with me tell you a story about my friend sarah she's a graphic designer ten years of experience built a very solid freelance career and then mid journey came out so her first reaction was great right this is stealing from real artists this is not real creativity it's destroying the industry so i asked her to walk me through how she creates a brand identity for a client she said well i start by looking at competitors in their space i see what's working i create a mood board on pinterest i pull color palettes from brands that i look up to i'd admire i iterate on those patterns until something clicks and i didn't have to say anything she heard it she was doing exactly what ai does analyzing patterns holding from existing work rec combining it in slightly new ways the only difference is that ai does it faster oh here's where it gets interesting sarah didn't quit design she changed how she designs so she stopped starting with pinterest she started with conversations deep ones but the founder life story their actual vision what they care about beyond just looking professional and building a business right then she'd create three completely different directions not variations of the same approach three genuinely different ways to express that specific person's worldview view and her clients started paying her triple and it's not because she got better at design because she finally started doing something that ai can't do translating a human unique perspective individual form that's the shift and most people won't make that shift because they're too busy defending a process it was never theirs in the first place see the panic around ai isn't really about losing jobs or losing income that's a lagging indicator it's about identity collapse you spent years building a skill you got good at it people paid you for it your entire sense of self is tied up in this identity of being the designer or the writer or the creative and then ai shows up and does in thirty seconds what took you three hours and that hurts because you're losing money because you realize your entire identity was built on something a machine can replicate which unfortunately means it was never that special to begin with see if ai can do what you do you were never creating you were executing and execution is exactly what machines are built for and this is the mirror that ai holds up and most people don't like what they see now here's how you know if you want if you're saying scott no i have a real creative process trust me okay fine let's test that idea out sit down right now create something in your field piece of writing a design concept a video outline whatever you do but here's the rule no research no looking at what's trending no checking what others are doing no ai just you and a blank page is that a timer for thirty minutes and just start creating and if you finish with something worth sharing you have a real creative process you can generate ideas from your own synthesis of knowledge and experience and thinking if you stare at the page for thirty minutes and you produce nothing you don't have a creative process you have a copying process with enough steps that you didn't realize that it was copying and look this is not an insult most people are in this category including me when i first started creating content but the question is not am i upset about it it's what are you gonna do about it because ai isn't going away so let's talk about what a real creative process actually looks like and before i show you the specific methods that i use you need to understand what separates a real creative process from pattern matching gust is a success story partner now look i talked to business owners every single day you know what i hear constantly scott i love running my business but i hate dealing with payroll and i get it nobody starts a company because they're excited about calculating tax withholding and benefits administration that's exactly why use gust myself and the smartest business owners use it as well gust is online payroll and benefits software built for small business it's all in one remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay higher onboard and support your team from anywhere now here's what's sold me unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price no surprises no hidden fees when you need to run that extra payroll and when you hit a tough hr situation and trust me you will you get direct access to actual certified hr experts not a chat real people who know what they're talking about plus they're the number one payroll software according to g two for fall twenty twenty five and over four hundred thousand small businesses already trust them pride gust today at gust dot com slash success story and get three months free when you run your first payroll that's three months free payroll at gust dot com slash success story survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try it today at survey monkey dot com slash scott square is a success story partner now there's this coffee shop in my neighborhood that just started as this tiny little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to i'm grabbing my morning coffee you're aren't picking up lunch everything just works smoothly the ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why keep going back every business has different goals and square the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story so a real creative process isn't about following a formula it's about having a system for generating ideas that nobody else would generate because they don't have your exact combination of experience knowledge and obsessions here's what that system includes there's the real process of idea generation or you don't wait for inspiration or scroll for trending topics you have a method for surfacing ideas maybe you go on walks and you just voice note observations maybe you keep a running document of questions that bother you maybe you deliberately consume content outside your niche to create these unexpected connections whatever it is it's yours it's specific it's repeatable and it produces ideas that only you would have next you need a real process for connection so you don't just take idea a and pair it with idea b because they're obviously related you have a method for finding non obvious connections between concepts you maintain a knowledge system that allows you to pull from multiple domains simultaneously this is why reading widely matters not so you can reference books in your content but so you have more raw material to create connections than nobody else sees after connection you have a real process for synthesis so you don't just explain what others have said you have a framework for transforming input into output you have questions you ask yourself you have standards for what makes an idea worth sharing you have a filter that everything passes through before it becomes part of your work this is what makes your work yours about your style not your voice your filtering system and lastly you have a real process for iteration so you don't just publish and move on you have a method for improving you track what works you analyze why you experiment you evolve most people never get here because you're too busy trying to go viral with templates that copied from someone else now let me show you exactly how to build this system this is exactly what i do it's not theory it's the actual system that i use generate ideas and create work that can't be automated the first way i do this is something called the collision system so every sunday i spend about thirty minutes choosing three topics that i want to explore that week and they have to be from completely different domains so last week it was cognitive load theory ancient stoic philosophies and practices and how video game designers create addictive loops and throughout the week i consume content on these three ideas i'll read books i'll watch videos i'll listen to podcast but the key is that i'm not taking notes on what they say i'm writing down the questions that pop into my head so for example this is what i wrote down for this week and the questions and the assumptions don't have to be right or wrong you just write so one question i wrote down is why is reducing options make people more decisive in video games but not in real life i wrote down how did stoic handle information overload but all these modern systems and i also wrote what if cognitive load isn't about memory capacity but attention direction right so by friday i have fifteen to twenty questions from colliding these three topics and then i sit down to right i don't start with what should i write about i start with which of these questions is worth exploring this is how you generate ideas that ai can't generate and replicate it's not because you're smarter because you're connecting specific things that exist in your knowledge base in ways that require your questions the second method is a reverse engineering framework so most people study content in their niche that's the wrong move that just teaches you to copy what already exists instead find creators outside your space have qualities that you want to develop so if i wanna get better at explaining complex ideas i didn't study other writers i studied youtubers who teach technical skills so i pulled up ten videos from a creator who was explaining programming the beginners i didn't watch for content i watched for structure how do they introduce complexity when do they use examples versus definitions how do they handle objections how do they create these aha moments and then i started to document a specific pattern so start with the problem solves show one concrete example explain the principle behind it show two more examples with increasing complexity address the common confusion give a practice exercise that's a framework now i can apply that framework to any topic not because i copied their content but because i extracted their thought process again this is what ai can't do it can't execute a framework it can't reverse engineer one from a different domain and translate it to yours the third method the deliberate input so i keep four running documents just on my phone surprise facts that made me rethink something concepts i don't fully understand yet questions nobody seems to be asking and contradiction i've noticed between different thinkers and every piece of content i consume gets filtered through these four categories so if nothing from what i just read or watched fits into one of these four categories it wasn't worth consuming and this does two things first it forces me to actively process instead of passively consume i can't just binge content and call it research second it builds a database of raw materials that's already filtered for originality so when i sit down to create i'm not starting from zero i'm pulling from ideas that i've already identified as non obvious and interesting so here's what it looks like in practice so i just read an article how japanese companies approach failure different than western companies and from that one article i got three things surprising fact something i don't understand in the question so the surprising fact was that they document failures as thoroughly as successes which is a contradiction to move fast and break things the thing i didn't understand is how does this scale in fast moving industries than the question that i asked or that i thought should be asked was why do americans treat failure as a learning experience but then immediately move on without documenting the lesson so that is three potential angles for future content from one article because i'm not just consuming i'm deliberately extracting what's useful now what does this mean for you it means that building a real creative process is not a weekend project it's a complete restructuring of how you approach your craft and how you consume content and how you form ideas do you have to care more about developing genuine ideas than just performing well you have to read widely instead of staying in your lane you have to sit with concepts that you don't understand until you do you have to question your own thinking instead of defending and you have to document your process so you can improve it now most people won't do this not because it's hard because it's very uncomfortable requires admitting that what you've been calling your creative process was actually just pattern recognition and that's fine but ai will handle the pattern recognition it'll execute templates it'll optimize for what works workflow but it can't do what you can do if you actually develop the skill of thinking see the people panicking about ai right now are the ones who've never built that skill they learn to execute not create an execution is exactly what machines are built for see the people thriving with ai are the ones who generate ideas worth executing and now they have a tool that handles that execution while they focus on thinking remember ai didn't create this divide it just made it visible because there was always two types of creators two types of thinkers two types of knowledge workers there was people who generate ideas and there's is people who execute patterns people who think and people who copy people who create frameworks and people who follow them ai just revealed which category you're actually in and for most people that revelation is uncomfortable to say the least but here's the thing you can move categories you're not just stuck you just have to be willing to rebuild your entire approach from the ground up but it will make you a stronger person a stronger individual a stronger creator a stronger entrepreneur a stronger employee start with curiosity real curiosity about something specific not what's trending curiosity but what question would you explore even if nobody cared and build a system for capturing those questions connecting ideas and not just organizing them but connecting them creating new insights from this collision and develop standards for your work beyond performance what makes something worth creating even if it gets zero engagement now ironically when you create work worth creating is a very low chance it'll get zero engagement but i digress this is the work not using better prompts not learning new tools developing the capacity to think in ways that produce ideas worth sharing because ai is only gonna get better at execution the question is whether you'll get better at thinking either way mirror isn't going away claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for cloud today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success
15 Minutes listen 10/1/25
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➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory JC White is a two-time Men's Fitness cover athlete, former professional bodybuilder who became the youngest WBFF competitor at a... ➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory JC White is a two-time Men's Fitness cover athlete, former professional bodybuilder who became the youngest WBFF competitor at age 22, Santa Monica Trainer of the Year, and founder of T3 Body—a science-backed coaching empire that has transformed hundreds of entrepreneurs using 79-biomarker DNA testing, real-time expert coaching, and a holistic approach that proves true success isn't just built in the gym, but through the disciplined fusion of optimal physical performance, mental resilience, and sustainable longevity. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/coachjcwhite/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCx1YrkjZhUcjxOaFfEZKp3w https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-white-4500a1191/ ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Truth, Lies & Work Podcast - https://truthliesandwork.com ShipStation - https://www.shipstation.com/ (Code: SuccessStory) Square - https://square.com/go/success SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/scott Monarch Money - https://www.monarchmoney.com (Code: Success) Claude - https://claude.ai/success Incogni - https://incogni.com/success (Code: Success) Think Big, Buy Small Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/B2cH36AX?sid=SuccessStory NetSuite — https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:27 – How Success Wrecks Your Hormones 05:12 – Why JC Never Quit Bodybuilding 08:14 – From Depression to Discipline 10:28 – The Nutrition Truths Bodybuilding Taught JC 11:17 – Bro Science vs Real Science for Beginners 16:24 – Hidden Dangers of Bodybuilding 18:19 – TRT: Hype, Risks & Reality 22:34 – Sponsor Break 23:16 – Biomarkers That Reveal Everything 25:54 – Why Diets Fail Different People 30:00 – How Ignoring Health Destroys Business 31:10 – Testosterone Secrets You Need to Know 37:34 – Sponsor Break 40:26 – Red Flags in Your Body’s Feedback 41:31 – Why High Performers Battle Gut Issues 42:39 – Finding True Purpose 54:38 – JC’s North Star Moment 57:48 – Resources You Can Actually Trust 58:49 – Redefining Success from the Start 59:54 – The Fitness–Mental Health Link 1:06:56 – The One Lesson JC Will Pass to His Kids
sports injuries test you your mind your body and spirit others transform you elevating you to a stronger bolder version of yourself at summit orthopedic our experts are prepared for both for every challenge for every comeback because you deserve nothing less than the best live life at your summit with summit orthopedic summit ortho dot com hustle hustle hustle when you consistently do that you increase your cortisol levels you decrease testosterone and also other performance indicators so we have to find this fine balance between success and also longevity on today's episode i'm joined by jc c white an entrepreneur innovator who knows what it means to build from the ground up from the early days of hustling to now creating ventures that challenge convention jc has proven that resilience and bold thinking can change entire industries body building is the greatest thing not just about like building muscles or the superficial stuff it is literally the mental and spiritual side that comes out of it because when you take those lessons and you apply it to business or you apply to other of your life you cannot lose he's not afraid to push boundaries test limits and bring ideas to life that most people wouldn't even attempt his story is about grit vision and the courage to on yourself when the odds are stacked against you the number one killer men america's heart disease million deaths happen every single year from heart disease the good thing is a lot of those things can be easily fixed which is nutrition and lifestyle and it's not like craziest people think some people can just have higher levels cholesterol just nap naturally and if that's the case then the ketogenic diet can actually be very dangerous for them so an attempt to get healthy sometimes that can actually cause you to get unhealthy and raise their risk of heart disease the fastest way to make better choices in the life is to make take more accountability over your previous choices have enough faith to begin the process and job will take care of the rest okay so jc what is modern success doing to our hormones absolutely tanking them because modern success is go go go hustle hustle hustle grind grind grind and when you consistently do that you increase your cortisol levels you decrease testosterone and also and also other performance indicators so we have to find this fine balance between success and also longevity i think that a lot of people that sort of identify as high performers listen to this podcast or looking at you or even looking at me and saying i wanna achieve success i wanna learn from scott's guess and i wanna achieve like even a little bit of fraction of what they've done i i do believe that they think that they have to sacrifice their health to get it i've heard this repeatedly like i cannot build anything significant and be in shape and go to the gym i think it's shorts sighted for sure what happens when you live your life like that because you see the guys and the world then everybody who lives their life like that what happens well typically what ends up happening is when they get into their forties and fifties their body catches up to all the years that they neglected it so that's when they'll see levels of high cholesterol they're gonna be more insulin resistant and then that's where their hormones is gonna have huge issues so cortisol issues testosterone issues and other things that come alongside it so when we start to have that type of image of success was compartment yeah you know in order to be successful in business you have to give up your health in order to be successful with your family you know you have to put work on the back burner that's when we start to be very short sighted in you know everything ends up catching itself in the end is it because people are are not good at balancing life is it because people's priorities are screwed up like why do people believe it's in the first place here fear of not making it a if fear of not being good enough fear of like well you know i don't feel like i can achieve x amount of income or x amount of business success without sacrificing something like it doesn't make sense to me doesn't make sense that i could have good body good health good relationships with my family good relationships spiritually mental health plus make money like it almost like doesn't compute yeah it's fear in its lack of patience if we set clear injectable goals and we give ourselves enough time in the yeah in the time period isn't something that is too shorten you know it's saying instead of a year we give ourselves five or ten years to actually achieve those goals in each area of life then it it almost loosen the reins a little bit so if you wanna be healthy but you also wanna build a very successful maybe multi a figure business you wanna be married and have kids and have good mental health well as opposed to just saying okay i wanna accomplish that the next year we'll just extrapolate time or and it takes the pressure off yeah but when we just started just i need to get rich tomorrow i need to get fit tomorrow yeah that's when people get into this you know they they don't get there to their goal and quicker time and they they quit you know that's what you always see in fitness right people start january one i wanna get fit this year the first time to go to the gym for people like going to the gym and worse time to go you know i actually i appreciate seeing them because i was once the person that started in that cycle too as well i just happen to stick to it but you know they get get into that cycle and then they you quitting you know a month or two later because they they they didn't see the results fast enough because it was as unrealistic i'm like bro you've been in that body for forty years do you expect to get out of it in three months that it doesn't work while when you frame it like that yeah that's the way it is it's like if you were broke for forty years you expect to be a multi millionaire in three months know working for we we gotta be more patient with the process what made you stick with it what made you stick with it that a lot of people lack because i think that something that all body builders and not just body bill they're think body builders is tough because it's like you against you there's no coach especially when you start out sort of pushing you on like if you're playing for a team you have teammates your peers your coach body building it's like such a solo sport so like the mental fort it takes to just continue on it's not easy so what made you successful at body building i think there's actually a lot of things that translate from body building and just being okay in inflict a certain amount of pain on yourself to business success but what made it like what made you successful at it have you ever like what that psychological thing was it allowed you to be successful when many people weren't i believe that i just had an innate desire to wanna be great and i felt like that was like the key in order to do that because like you just mentioned it's u verse virtue yeah there's no more excuses it's a massive amount of accountability and so with those two things in mind you can't point the finger at somebody else if you're not getting the results and as a young man that's the lesson that i needed to learn because the reason why i you know didn't do as well and other things in my life at the time times is because i lacked accountability is because i didn't look myself in the mirror and say okay this where really need to improve upon this is where your stream are this where your weaknesses are and then go to war with myself body building is is the greatest thing it's not just about like building muscles or the superficial stuff it is literally the mental and spiritual side that comes out of it and because when you take those lessons you apply it to business or you apply to the other of your life you cannot lose yeah that's the beauty in the game i mean you mean you take that mindset in the business you're not gonna win you'll crush yeah because you're not looking at your competition you're looking at you you say everything that my results that i'm producing is solely on me nobody else but a lot of people have a hard time with that a lot of people have a hard time with accountability and sort of looking inside and saying like the life that i'm living is a result of really just my choices mh whether or not whether or not you you like that or or you don't it doesn't matter it's like most people's lives is the sum of their choices and yeah there's bad luck for people for sure but still it's all on you to figure it out at day well i would just ask them and what kind of life do you wanna live at the end of the day yeah because at the end of your life it's gonna be dictated by the choices that you make and if the the the fastest way to make better choices in the life is to make better like take take more accountability over your previous choices so we are direct equation of the choices we've previously made in life you're at where you're at in life because you made good choices hopefully i didn't one you it seems like you've made pretty good choices i dude you know i'm at where i'm in life because i made good choices too as well you know i hadn't always made great choices in life but you know it's because you can take the moment to self reflect and say okay this is where i fall in short where i need to do in order to move life forward so i i just believe like that's that's one of the beauties in in body building and in fitness and you know and it's just a byproduct that you look better you feel better like that's just that's just the icing on the cake wherever were you at mentally when you were missing college basketball try you were depressed you weren't doing great how did you pull yourself out of that what like what happened yeah i was i was crushed i mean i was i was a decent high school athlete i had some d one looks you know had some recognition from you know local papers in in in statewide papers and then my college coach had set up a a try out with a like a one of the the college i went at the time which was western michigan before i transferred and i slept through it like like was it because of depression or was it you were just tired or what just irresponsible and i think a little bit of self sabotage a little bit a little bit and i woke up and i remember i just called up my max girlfriend at the time and she was like what's wrong i was had just slept to the trial it was the whole reason why i went to the school in the first place and she's was like you're gonna call your coach figure off if he can arrange another i was like nope so what are you gonna do other i don't know figure it out and that was like a very defining moment because i didn't really have a path at that point yeah i didn't know what i was gonna do i was kinda interested in law at the time but i was like i know if i really wanna go down there right i was just gonna go down there for the money but and then i just found my way into the gym later that week and i used to hate the gym dude it out was so fucking week i remember at one time i went in high school and we were bench pressing everybody was like throwing around two twenty five i only had thirty five pound place on there was like only like one fifteen barely hitting it i was like dude i hate this shit that's so fine but i went into the gym and then you know it it wasn't that i was strong when i went in there but it started to help me to feel a sense of accomplishment and relief because just doing one workout if you just knock out one you won yeah and then you do it again and you one again and so that start to stick with me and the results don't come fast yeah but as long as you stick with that and you start to learn the other skills that come with it about you know nutrition and lifestyle and sleep which we'll get into more about that then the win start to come compound and then that's where you start to see the transformation but you know to kinda to wrap that up you know it it it it it taught me like a lot of life skills doing that and enabled started to transform me from the inside out so talk to me about body building and sort of what you learned from body building that sort of shaped your view of nutrition health and wellness yeah nutrition is the most underutilized mechanism in order to transform the body people do not look at it as as how powerful it actually is when you dial it in to the degree of what your body needs not only based upon your blood chemistry but how you're training how you will you recover and then make adjustments based upon your bowel feedback that is a huge mover that's what help me don't me i was also very young too so like you're gonna have optimal hormones during that time period so i'm gonna take advantage of that but people need to really understand the power of nutrition and power of actually supplementing like intelligently not just randomly taking supplements because some a guy on the internet said take something right which a lot of people end up doing but when you take it based upon what your body actually truly needs i think when a lot of people start working out the obvious thing or the thing that feels right is to go to the best looking person on instagram and just listen to what they say yeah and a lot of the time some people are honest more than when i started working out people are more honest about if they if they take steroids or they take something but a lot of people aren't honest so a lot of people are listening to the advice of people that aren't natural and are on a whole bunch of shit and they're like why isn't you know my gym routine working compared to x influencer on social media so as somebody who's like truly natural and competed natural and sort of i would say you know figure out how to optimize yourself naturally where does somebody start like what is what is grow science versus optical science right yeah i i love this i love this so do one more quick thing for me to define be healthier what what does that mean because i can be so let's define it how do you define be healthier yeah so my definition of that would be high levels of energy optimal blood work and then you know you have you know if we were to track your sleep you have good hr and things like that is that the definition we wanna do for like okay kill and jim and be helpful what would other definitions be some people it may just be like okay i wanna have better cardiovascular endurance but i think that i think that all of that if i look at what are the the markers of of living a long life it that's different so looks like a spear right because like if you wanna go yeah you wanna kill it in gym and go muscle mass that is not optimal for longevity like if we're gonna go interesting yeah that's because that's a different path you gotta go down the macron nutrients are gonna be so like your protein carbohydrate fast for both of those yeah your recovery cycle is gonna be different like the whole game plan is gonna be different i would not be doing the same thing from now like ten years from now bro that do right now this is not good yeah this is gonna take me to eighty five ninety eighty five people wanna live to a hundred and twenty bro like yeah well yeah you know i mean right yeah like this is to just to look great you know do magazine stuff that that's it you know you know look good for women you know that's what it's most we wanna look good for women if you're if you're if you're trying to like go to the gym but i don't think many people think they wanna end up on the cover of like a a fitness magazine so there has to be a balance between both i wanna look good and then i also wanna live long okay alright so that clearly the defines what you mean by healthy so that's probably gonna put you around like thirteen percent to fifteen percent body had a true thirteen percent to fifteen percent body fat with that type of protocol then you wanna focus mainly on your cardiovascular like the most recent research shows that cardiovascular is more important in stream training i would i would say doing that three or five times per week for about thirty minutes to fifty minute sessions is gonna be most important in a zone two and then stream training is just gonna be to for bone density and that's also gonna help with some natural growth hormone release and keeping testosterone levels optimal too as well that you wanna need about three times per a week for about thirty to forty five minutes you wanna focus on like heavier compound lifts yeah and then far as nutrition now this is where it's gonna actually gonna be different we'll get more we'll get more on the weeds too i just want somebody like just starting out so yeah so go forward i i know that they're like it's so funny when you talk to somebody who's such a specialist there's like a a trillion different auctions in your head about okay well we have to measure this and your reaction to this and if you're you know genetically predisposed to this and my brain goes not where your brain goes but i i don't want people to start there because i think that they have to start somewhere and then the then once and we can talk about habit forming too i think that it's important to start at a spot where you can maintain the habit and once you maintain the habit then you can go a level deeper and a level deeper but i also believe that too many people online throw too much shit at people out of the gate and then they're like well fuck this i can't as way too much stuff right and then they just drop off and then there's they're the typical january jim go who signs up in january and then you pay the gym for the rest of the year and you never go okay yeah so the i would say just a a mix of of cardio and stream training primarily focusing on cardio then when it comes to the nutrition just to keep it like high level focus more on you know whole foods and like being the primary focus of your plate with the side of protein yeah lean more towards like lighter proteins not like you know steaks and stuff like that so like fishes and chickens and then get really good sleep that's gonna be the that is important yeah that goes against the hospital culture yeah yeah i got some stuff to say about that but yeah yeah yeah get getting really get really good sleep it's not just the the the quantity of the quality of the sleep there's tons of different ways you could track that with or ring we'll be use one in particular absolutely but i lost it in greece so going now so like trip yeah is okay so i've also heard this tell me if it's right or wrong the biggest indicators of longevity are strength training in v two max does that make sense yeah yeah there's there's also some other things too as well but yeah those are those are great indicators you said like the way that you eat and lift and live right now it's not for longevity no so is there a point in your life when you are gonna switch it up yeah absolutely and if you do switch it up you said like the way that body builders live which i agree it's not to live to ninety or a hundred or even eighty eighty five can you reverse a lifestyle at a certain point so for example if you switch your lifestyle in ten years can you live to a hundred it depends of how much damage to be brutally honest you know you know i i checked my boat probably about three to four times per year and it's usually very good but you know if i were to push in certain ways and do certain things you know you you always it's it's a fine tune i love body building i love screen training i love power that's why i've done all those things but it does come with the cost you know so you know it's just how far can i push it out how far do i wanna push it if somebody is actually really into body building and they've been body building say until like they're like you know mid to late thirties is there things that this is gonna be a smaller sample of the audience but are there things that you look for in your blood work that could indicate like oh shit i have to change my lifestyle sort of sooner than later yeah for sure i i would tell anybody who's into body to get more advanced cardiovascular panels done so like a l fourteen a like look at all those so look at particle size too as well that's very very important especially if they're using ana antibiotics because that typically drives up those inflammatory markers i'll look at c reactive protein too as well that's just a overall inflammatory marker of the body and then also don't just look at your glucose so go like your a a1c and your you know your insulin resistance or sensitivity that's really important and then also depending on upon how much testosterone when you're using if you are doing that type of game look at your red blood cell count because a lot of times i thicken your blood is there issues that you see with so many people jumping on t i think it's becoming more popular and people are i think men in general feel like they and i understand why they want to have sex drive they wanna feel like they have energy and they wanna feel like they did when they were twenty so i feel like everybody's jumping on t team now because it's not taboo okay fine but i don't think there's anybody that's really speaking about the potential negatives to sort of cruising on testosterone on your entire life yeah great question so t is the most well marketed supplement put the most highly over utilized for optimal performance we get guys that come to us every single day where we look at their blow work and it is still absolute trash yeah and they're not being monitored or supervised correctly by whoever put it on them and they'll t will drive up your ldl cholesterol which is typically thought like the bad one drive your hdl which is thought the go one thickens up the blood and it's crazy because like a lot of guys what they'll see they'll see an initial blu up at first when you get on t get a little energy back get a little beetle back they'll start to feel but then it goes right back the baseline you can't put a band aid over a bullet wound like you gotta go back down to the root cause it's just an amplifier like i started using t once i got into my thirties it a little bit more sometimes right but it it it it it only it only amplifies and helps if you're doing everything else correctly you don't have to be you know like a a crazy man with it and and track every single macro and eat out of tu where but you do need to have the like the fundamentals now i almost say like it's like it's like if you wanted to build a business and you get funding but you don't even have a business game plan yeah yeah it's like he's gonna run he's not gonna go anywhere anyway so it's like the same thing you have to have a smart strategy behind it and it's it's i don't want it to to run its course and then people just go on to the next fad because we just didn't utilize it correctly so there needs to be more education in the space like okay yes it's it's good to use if if your body is no longer producing and or producing it you know lower than especially with free test software lower than what your body actually needs but we do need to focus on the main things you need to get make sure you get good sleep and make sure you're eating correctly hubspot is a success story partner now think about listening to this podcast right now you're probably multitasking you're probably catching seventy to eighty percent of what we're talking about but let's flip that and amount and you're only catching twenty percent that'd be crazy right it's really not a good use of your time if you only remember twenty percent of what we're talking about but most businesses most entrepreneurs are only using twenty percent of their data 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reach the people you want faster and it makes a huge difference according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs plus with indeed sponsor jobs there's no monthly subscription no long term contracts you only pay for results there's no need to wait any longer speed up your hiring right now with indeed and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility just go to indeed dot com slash cla right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash cla terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need first of all i don't even think people know what a biomarker is so what is a biomarker you test seventy nine of them this is sort of like the basic rudimentary i'm gonna start working with jc this is what what i have to do right okay so talk to me about biomarkers why are they important what are they what do they tell you yeah so bob to simply put is just individual blood tests right so and then each one had like a panel will have like either twenty or thirty three or seven or five just depends on what you're actually looking at so we start off with at least seventy nine it could be way more just depends upon once we intake a new client if we need to do more but we look at advanced cardiovascular we look at like blood sugar we look at all hormones to like testosterone free testosterone sex hormone binding gl cortisol est other things too as well just to really get a full identification of what's going on on in the person inside because that determines the road map that determines the strategy because you know you we and i are the same age but we took our blood test to probably come up very different so therefore we need different supplements different training programs different arrest recovery protocol all those things that would be different so that's what we do in order to help get people to the from a to z as fast as possible and what do you see in like somebody who's like a high performer stressed out working hard what do you see typically i mean it's gonna to be the nuances but what do he typically in their blood yeah typically it's usually high cortisol also stress a lot of stress yeah stress is usually high than because of that testosterone is lower yeah and then estrogen rises to compensate for that normally so that's like estrogen is kinda like the female hormone for our viewers who don't understand it so that usually starts to compensate that's when the body starts to get soft in doughy you know all the water watery all that kind of stuff and then there's some usually some immune system disorders to as well that's just because of the elevated stress chronically so that's usually like the things that that we'll see but the good thing is a lot of that's o n cholesterol too as well the number i'm one killer men america's heart disease about a million deaths happen every single year from heart disease so so those things the good thing is a lot of those things can be easily fixed which is nutrition nutrition and lifestyle and and it's not like craziest as people think in order to like help with cholesterol it's just increasing fiber lowering saturated fats that's pretty much it for the most part and it's just making more conscious smarter choices when you go out to so instead of having like the rib eye for dinner have the fillet yeah and it have a little bit of oatmeal for breakfast like it's just conscious choices like that and then we custom formulate supplements too as well that can help people to are there any is there any genetic predisposition to certain diets to work well for some versus others do some just work well generally versus others is there any truth to that what's true what's not yeah so we do a genetic test and then you'll look at just anything things that you're genetically predisposed exposed to so hyper cholesterol anemia as one of them so some people can just have higher levels cholesterol just naturally and if that's the case then the ketogenic diet can actually be very dangerous for them because you good ketogenic diet is high in fats high and saturated fats which will drive your cholesterol even more so it would attempt to get healthy sometimes that can actually cost people to get unhealthy and then raise their risk of heart disease so we'll look at like your particle size as well to really see if a a good look at that and you know we've been able to save some flies by doing that i have no doubt because because i i've see i see people one of my friends has exactly what you're describing and like he's a very small person like he's not not fat he's not fat at he's like he's like tiny he's very skinny but like his cholesterol is just horrible like genetically horrible and his kid's cholesterol is horrible and his kid is like very young but it's like a highly elevated cholesterol on the kid is just a kid doesn't eat like shit they feed him healthy stuff so these so this genetic predisposition he tracks his blood work now but yeah it's very scary because you wouldn't look at him you you'd look at him and like the healthiest is dude exactly healthiest is silent killer yeah yeah and but i think that like when i think i think when people think silent kill it just think like well it's gonna sneak up on me i'm not gonna feel sort of any i'm not gonna feel anything wrong with me before it happens but i don't think that people that are really skinny think that they even have a chance of of for how is misconception but but tell me when you when you if you were gonna go into the mind of somebody who's like a man you know six feet a hundred ninety pounds two hundred pounds maybe is hundred and ninety sort of a small two hundred pounds whatever they're not thinking i should worry about my cholesterol i i really doubt they are because they're like well look at i'm skinny i you know i fit into like a you know thirty two thirty four or pant like i'm like i'm like a pretty slim guy i go for runs so i don't think people even think about the fact that you could be genetically predisposed to like heart disease not directly but through high cholesterol yeah the the data says otherwise just based upon the amount of americans that have high cholesterol and the amount of americans that are either pre diabetic or diabetic which eventually usually leads to higher levels cholesterol people so one in three americans are they're pre diabetic or diabetic because thirty three percent one and three one and three yeah and they don't all look at is what we're saying like they typically don't that's why that's just so important to look at these different biomarkers in your body to understand what's going on with you yeah because when you do then you can actually make intelligent choices with your food and with your supplementation as opposed to just taking like random things so for instance if you found out like you had high levels of cholesterol are you high levels of blood sugar be is a great effective supplement you can get over the counter take a gram per day and that has really good research showing that it can lower cholesterol and also lower blood sugar but if you don't know you don't yeah you don't know you just caused you know pop men's one day which yeah yeah i'm not a great what you hear you'll fuck that and i'll be good to go it's like you gotta look at you once you look at your blood work it really just tells like a like a full story like i didn't understand because i i have high levels cholesterol naturally and i remember i got done one time getting ready for a magazine shoot and i was in great shape i looked amazing and my cholesterol was at one zero three which is about three points above the top end of the meadow range optimal about seventy to eighty so have a little bit of work i was like i'm a heck is my cholesterol no five still five yeah was like i'm eating this really like clean eye and everything like that then i gotta genetic that i was like oh i have cholesterol on email makes sense okay so i have to play with that my whole life if i get out of out of pocket for a little bit for a four month time period i don't even wanna see the blower it goes to shit dude it it's awful i'm like my cholesterol will be through the roof i gotta to get back together again like gotta have really tighten up the diet what happens what happens to somebody's actual performance when like their hormones are out of whack their cortisol too high like what do you see sort of when people come to you as the before image what what is it like their decision making abilities comp from my like what is the thing that not paying attention to your health does with your business so belly fat was the person thing that came into my mind that's one the first thing that i can see the the the decision fatigue they're gonna gonna be able to make decisions as sharply also just the amount of decisions they can making today is gonna go down tremendously brain fog mh lack of clarity usually midday crashes is something that they experience and in confidence confidence is the biggest one they don't feel like the man that they used to be and that is directly correlated to their internal health so once that gets dialed back in those things reverse and they get that that that that brain going again there's no midday crashes and they had the confidence back but that that has to be to be fixed but yeah that's usually the things that they experienced and then also i guess the last thing everybody starts talking about testosterone and and like testosterone levels and that's why again i think executives before even jumping and you know before even getting their their blood test on they jump on t i think that's probably for men that's probably like i feel like shit that's where i go it talked to me about testosterone and like what levels are normal what range should they be in where t has a place where it doesn't i'm assuming it's after you figure out your blood work in your diet but just talk to me about testosterone because i that's something that a lot of people again just assume is the one thing that's wrong with them and there's like a million other things that are wrong with them yeah so the testosterone range is quite large it's about two fifty to eleven hundred okay and most physicians once you get down to around like the two fifty is when they'll start to look at t yeah but they don't always consider look at your free testosterone which is actually what your body is utilizing so i like in total testosterone to revenue and free testosterone to profit i like that that's good it's a good analogy so you know if you if you have high revenue but low profit you should still probably look into t so say if you had like a eight hundred total tests but your free tea was low and you that that's something that you want to look at or if you look at what's called sex inviting gl which is your expenses yeah you wanna make sure that that set off to arrange you as well so it's a fine balance between all those things to actually see if that's something that you to to get on what is the difference between bio feedback and biomarkers yeah so biomarkers is gonna be your blood work so it's that's gonna be your genetics bio feedback is gonna be both a qualitative measurement that you would actually rate yourself and then also some things that we would get from data to to to quantify that okay so some good bio bio feedback so five of them that that we look at that we want you to rate so you can get more in tune with your body would be sex drive energy mood appetite digestion okay and those things are actually directly correlate it with a lot of hormones in the body so it gives us an instant feedback loop understood and then we quantify that with like hr your sleep your stress throughout the day because that can actually be measured with a lot of different tracking now so those those sort of five main bio things that you look for how should actually well actually this is probably gonna be a really good test for somebody to go through to figure out if i mean they should always get blood work we're done but they should sort of go through a test to see how these five things are how how do i say it how these five things like impact them right now to see if they're healthy right so what what were the five things again and how do you measure them yeah sex drive energy mood appetite digestion so for example sex drive what would what would that be like waking up like with an interaction is it just like being like into somebody or like is that how you measure sex drive or is there other markers you should look for yeah so think about it like this so if we had to say zero being absolute dog shirt yeah yeah no lo yeah if the most beautiful person whatever you're in into walk by you would just not be interested okay that's a zero and the best time you're life being a five where you just you know felt like you could it could be the most ugliest person in your life you sell into it that's how you would just rate that skill yeah okay now where do you fall on that right now like you for instance i'd say a four okay say it yeah i'd say a four i'd say like i think that i think that i remember like when i was like fifteen sixteen like like any girl was like i oh my god yes now i'm like yeah i'm like like three and a half four i think i'm like pretty healthy but like i'm not like only thinking about sex all day so i think that's also useful did not be distracted by sex not stop but i do notice that there's times when when i like i work too much mh and i i i pay attention to it but i also pay potentially it because i used to be really into body building so i was always very aware of how my body felt and how my body responded to food training to everything i think more aware than like the average person just like walking down the street but yeah i there's sometimes when i'm traveling a lot or when i'm stressed about work where it's like you know i could not be bothered with sex like it's just like so far away from like what i care about because it's probably because like high cortisol and other things around my mind but i can tell like when i don't know if this is like a marker like when i wake up and i have like direction in the morning like that to me like okay i'm not stressed out or if i'm like you know with the with gina like we're like okay we want each other like now like yes that's great after a day of work that's good if i work too hard then after i'm done work i have like no interest in sex at all and that is like a signal to me that something's off see what you just said there yeah is the whole reason why it needs to be tracked yes true hundred percent a honestly see so that's what i want people to by giving your example that's the importance of why the the audience should track with inside of themselves because you mentioned cortisol yeah stress you also mentioned times when maybe life's is going a little bit too fast so you need to settle down a little bit more and those are all things directly rated back to your blood biomarkers yeah so that's the importance of keeping just in tune with your body and it's not just because like alright if you find out and and there's something else i wanna say about that too as well because if if you say if you like fall down to a too right and it's life's normal not too stressed out but you still don't like wanna hook up with anybody or sleep with your wife or sleep with your husband and here's like why yeah why like i'm i'm on vacation and i should be relaxed and we should be having sex but i just don't feel it mh now there's now there's potential supplementation we can look into to actually help to boost that back up so we could look into you know zinc if you take a good amount of like thirty milligrams of zinc per day make sure your vitamin d levels are okay there's also some naturally things like diet acid three point two grams of that day shown up to increase testosterone about forty two percent using untrained man but there can be some benefits in train too as well so that's the whole reason why you you want to measure that so that you can be more in tune with your body what's going on the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now a quick podcast recommendation i've been listening to truth lies and work they're in the hubspot podcast network just like success story it's this husband and wife team a and lia elliott they break down why people actually do what they do at work so if you have a business if you manage people if you have the hire people at any point you have to listen to their show i just listened to an episode on why good employees suddenly quit that's an issue that we all have and it totally clicked for me one of the reasons i explained is why it's not usually about the money it's about all these little promises that we as founders entrepreneurs managers leaders we break without realizing it like when you tell someone you just hired that they're gonna learn all these new skills but you just keep giving them the same tasks over and over and over again it made me realize that i probably a lot of good people for dumb reasons that i never noticed and hiring is one of the most important things you can figure out so if you manage people or if you just wanna understand what makes your coworkers tick it's worth checking out listen to truth lies and work wherever you get your podcast chip station is a success story partner you know what separates successful online businesses from literally everyone else it's not just having great products it's delivering an amazing shipping experience that keeps customers coming back all of my friends that run the biggest e commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they save thousands on shipping costs thanks to their rate chopper tool that finds the best discounts and what makes ships station brilliant you never need to upgrade because it grows with your business no matter how big you get and they offer discounts up to eighty eight percent off ups d express and usps rates and up to ninety percent off fedex it integrates seamlessly with every selling channel you're already using and your customers get branded tracking updates to keep them happy and informed when shoppers choose your products you turn them into loyal customers with cheaper faster and better shipping no credit card required cancel anytime that's ships station dot com code success story hubspot is a success story partner now the future of business is happening right now and you don't wanna miss it that's why you have to be at inbound twenty twenty five they are bringing together the brightest minds in marketing sales business entrepreneurship ai three incredible days in san francisco the global epi epicenter of innovation and technological disruption picture this you are learning directly from amy poe about creative leadership you're getting ai insights from da modi who's literally shaping the future of artificial intelligence here's what makes inbound special not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediately implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with aldi these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today what are so outside of so energy mood sex drive what are some other things that you can sort of pay attention to as you go through your day with these bio bio feedback markers that are sort of if this happens to me it's sort of a red flag that i should go get checked out or i should go do my blood work or i should fix something yeah midday energy crashes okay yeah if if you are not able to start your day go through it and crush it and then walk out and still have time with your family and do all those things that in and feel accomplished at the end there's something wrong you you your your body is engineered of millions of years to you know to be able to do these things so you know usually when people they you know they they wake up they're having multiple cups of coffee they still feel tired and so sluggish around noon and then they're dragging and everything like that and they're stressed out and their mood starts to tank there's something going on internally that needs to be looked at and it usually comes down at that point is that their body is more insulin resistant and they're not processing their food correctly so you've found a lot of gut issues hundred percent yeah and entrepreneurs executive ceo's high performing why is that that i would have thought like cortisol was like the obvious thing with the with somebody who's always on always working how do how does gut issues tie into that yeah because when you're when your body is stressed out one of the first places that it goes to is your gut there's more nerve innings endings inside of your gut there anywhere else in your body and that is where a lot of your mood comes from your energy your hormone regulation all these things are to come from your gut and a healthy microbiome yeah so when we put ourselves through chronic stress terrible sleep optimal hormones that is gonna massively disrupt your gut and that's what's gonna cause a lot of brain fog fatigue all those things that they're experiencing is usually trigger from the gut so that's why cleansers usually can be a good like short term cleanse not like the you know the the the market cleanse you know that those but things is to kinda help your gut to reset and to help it to kinda find its balance again along with some proper supplementation doing that we'll set them up for the right path to start to rebuild it properly because we're eating all this food or in america that is you know terrible it it it's such a a terrible i think a lot of people especially in like our circle people listen to the show they do folk so they focus on making money for sure and they just run towards that and then if they're lucky if they're lucky and they're fortunate then they realize that money's is not everything so then they don't sacrifice the relationships in pursuit but i i i i don't speak about it at lot but i i definitely don't think that people care about their spiritual health as much as they should at all i think there's that's i think that i think there's a whole bunch of issues with how secular a society has become whether or not it doesn't matter it to me which which god you pray to and believe in but just the way that i look at it is what god allows you what god really forces you to do it's probably a better word for it but you'll understand where i'm coming from it forces you to remove yourself from the center of the picture there's something bigger than you something more important than you and i think that when people don't have any version of god in their life they believe they're like the main character and i think that that doesn't always lead to the best decisions and i like i don't know if like people that work with you if you sort of help them re center themselves and sort of remove themselves is like the the main character and focus on things that are bigger than them and focus on maybe a north star that's bigger than money or career success maybe maybe that's like the psychological component they're like the mental component that people have to understand so that they actually you know focus on the relationships focus on their health focus on all these other things that are so important that are not just career money hundred percent and also comes down to while we're here in the first place i believe that we're here for contribution to each other yeah and when you're playing it from that lens then life becomes more meaningful it's almost like when you just you know air quotes just to make money it's almost like the most selfish thing you can do not because money's is bad but because you're it's if you sacrifice yourself in the pursuit of money like you're also like how how can you serve people with that money if you gotta know how exactly yeah exactly yep yeah i mean what what who cares if you're a billionaire but you're cro fifty five what what's gonna happen you should have another at least thirty forty years man yeah and then imagine what you can do and how that money can come compound and that how many more people that you can help and the impact that you can make it's it's a life changes to that point not just for you but for generations of people to come it's true how do you get people out of the like when somebody like running so fast like when i when i was twenty five and like running so fast how do you get somebody of that heads space like what do you tell somebody who's me ten years ago fifteen years ago mh one simple question what motivates you do people have an answer for that mh it's usually a long twenty minute answer and i just dissect what i need out of that and then reflects back to you what you said and then we just start putting the pieces together so if i was just like young super ambitious twenty twenty five year old and i said money motivates me which i think fair amount of people listening to this podcast will say yeah that makes sense to me what do you say to me to because you know what motivates me but you know that's also not the healthiest reason to wake up in the morning well i wouldn't judge so healthiest that's you don't seem very judge but i appreciate i wouldn't put judgment on that i would i would just ask okay well what about money motivates you particularly so let me go back to me at the time i would say i would say success freedom status sort of probably some probably some chip on the shoulder shit you should talk with therapist about because like you wanna achieve whatever the the house that you think is like the house you should have the the life that you feel like you should have like you're aiming for all these sort of material aspirations and i think you can make i think you can try and probably do some psychological work as to where those material aspirations actually come from but i think it's i think everything that you know your friends your instagram whatever it is it's showing you what your life should be and that's what you're running towards so it's yeah it's like status happiness whatever that is whatever that means to that twenty five year old version of scott do you think that that makes scott more valuable having those at the time i would've said yes for sure i would've said yes so scott only acquire half those things is he not still the same value i don't know i don't know valuable in different ways but i feel like i wouldn't be living to my full potential so you believe that you acquire those things the status the wealth the income is you maximizing your potential yes i would yes how would you want your life to look like once you acquire those things and who would you want around you so i don't think i ever did that exercise in my head because i don't even think i don't think i had an answer because i was i was sacrificing a relationship for work so i can't say like i can't say that i would have wanted that relationship mean there's a lot of things that are wrong with that relationship by the time that's whole different conversation but it like i i would i would say i want a family i would say i want a wife if i want kids i would say all these things but then the actions don't align with what i'm saying which is interesting and i don't really have an answer as to why because growing up i definitely wanted like family wife and kids and then at some point i was like fuck i gotta make a lot of money let me work hard and i don't really know when that point was but it's like my goal is growing up and the goals i saw have i still want like wife kids family those are like always been really important to me and i think that like money has actually mattered less to me now not that i don't think it's important to make it but i don't i don't i'm not the same person now is is when i was like early twenties so at some point something flipped in my head and i just thought i just have to work nonstop and make as much money as possible even though even though it didn't really help me achieve the goals that i had which were like my most important goals per family kids sort of that was my most important goal segment four it said were you either chasing pleasure or running away from pain which one do you think you were doing back then i think chasing pleasure because i don't think i was running away from pain because i didn't come from like a a tough childhood i didn't come from like poverty i didn't come from like some people are had very tough i didn't come from any of that so i like a pretty comfortable childhood like so i think it was probably chasing pleasure what do you believe the driver for status what that's where i think that i think that money in my mind was the driver for status it's interesting what you said it was it's kinda like the pee and the elephant if you ever heard that no i haven't so it's a reference to our brains our conscious brain where we make like our decisions is like the the this that's excuse me the flea the elephant is our subconscious yeah and you could just imagine the the difference in size or well the elephant is actually what drives a lot of our behavior and you seem like at one point you have friction between what you were saying and what you're actually doing so consciously you were saying you wanted some things so subconsciously it really wasn't i i agree but that's probably why it was so burnt out because now your brain's almost arguing with itself all the time and the stuff that you're living every single day is not in by the i don't think this is like bad abnormal i mean you you speak to a lot more people that are going through some shit than the average person because you're unpacking okay why are you even coming to me why are you coming to me like you you say you want health and wellness and you wanna feel better but like what are you doing in a day what does your day look like right and there's this this this lack of alignment between the two mh yeah alignment is the most important thing so i'll ask you this then who's the scott two point o somebody that likes the work that i do but doesn't sacrifice my life for my work i also do believe that being obsessed with what you do is important but obsessed doesn't always equate to hours i think that i understand leverage i understand delegation i understand focusing on my strengths much better than when i was twenty five where i just figured i could just out work everyone and do everything and that did not work for me like it just didn't work so now i i'm forcing myself to to be more strategic about my obsession i still am i'm obsessed with my work i absolutely love it i live and breathe it but not at the expense of like my life and i've made more money living that way and i've had you know i were talking about like what level am i at in terms of like my sexual health and my mood and my energy like so when i'm obsessed with something but obsessed with it to the point where i can do it without sacrificing my life because i have a longer time horizon that i wanna be successful with than all those other markers increase and i'm like okay this is like i like this yeah i enjoy this now i could be better i could still everyone could always be better right like there's still times when i should probably like you know take some time and go travel or you know make sure that i don't skip like a date night that week because i i'm working but it's still not as bad so i like moving in listen life is like you just have i have to always move in the right direction right so that's i guess that's got two point o here we go here we go beautiful man yeah i try i try i because i don't like listen it's been like a journey for sure i feel like you're interviewing me now it's been like a journey for sure but i don't want to i don't want to i don't wanna just work and i don't wanna just to make money and i think that also being on this podcast and interview people that have just again like just made money like made a lot a lot of money where their families are broken or their health is shit i'm like when you get a front row seat to these people it's not so attractive when somebody is worth like over a hundred million dollars and their wife hates them the kids hate them like they look like they're literally like one sandwich away from dying yeah because they are so morbid but obese and it's just that's not attractive like you can keep your money i'll just take you know happiness balance however you wanna describe it a family who loves me and my health and ability to live to hopefully older than eighty i'll take that every day right i think that that's something that i wish more people could experience when they're on these like sort of self destructive paths so what you just described there was also the beginning of creating your own masterpiece of a life it's just start write these things down sometimes i'd be sometimes it's it's like guiding north star have you figured out have you have you gone through like a similar journey yeah in your life yeah like like to yours where i was like the like i mean have you had moments of imbalance or have you had moments where that radically woke you up and rely and and you had to take a step back and say the path that i'm on is really not the path that i should be on and if i continue down this path like i'm not gonna live long i'm not gonna have the life that i want i have you gone out through this as well yeah yeah i one time i push my i was working so hard i push myself in the hospital got robbed yeah i was seriously yeah it was a the process of me starting t three i was also transitioning out of personal training at the time and i was training for a body living conversation so was in the gym about two hours per day so i was literally working from five am to about nine or ten o'clock every single night like just go go plus push my body really hard and i'm ross in the gym and i was training and my left it was warm set i was doing a hammer shrink press you know and my left side just started going out and i was like that's weird i was like maybe i'm not warmed up enough what was happening like my left side was going out yeah and then i did like another set and it literally just lost it i stand up and i go talk to my friend with a trainer i was like hey can you just stand by me for a little bit i was like i just feel kinda funny today yeah and then lily my whole left side started to go numb but i thought i was having a stroke i was so scared i was alright i'm not i'm not gonna train it today i'm gonna go home you know drink some water rest like the the intensity i was going at for that that many weeks was like insane like how hard i was pushing my body in the gym how hard i was working how hard i was like trying to put together everything that i needed to to start this company i was going insanely hard and so i go home i started drinks some water and everything like that i call my girlfriend the time she say what's wrong she was like you was just it's a gym my left sorry so i going on i think i'm fine i'm we get some rest literally i i'm drinking water i lose feeling in my hand dropped the water cut i i gotta go to hospital right now they do they do like some blood test my cr levels like the top end of that range is eight hundred yeah my was at eight thousand so my my basically my body cannot not keep up in recover what was going on between lack of sleep training hard pushing mentally all these things and that's what i really learned like okay like success is very rhythm progression is very rhythm you cannot like swim up the current you have to flow with the current yeah and so like at that point i trying to like brute force everything everybody i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna jacked his heck i'm a start this company i'm doing what i was yeah like different but not so different yeah and and i learned like okay no now you gotta ask me more strategic you have to think bigger think longer yeah and like pace yourself and be smart with it so understanding that that rhythm now it allows me to understand and i also help help to coach other people like don't try to get it all done in one month two months three months even a year sometimes like just expand it because you'll be very satisfied and probably even overwhelmed with the amount of success you'll having in five or ten years if you just give yourself more time it's interesting when people like slow down they really do speed up mh yes if somebody is going on this health journey i don't want them to be susceptible to like clickbait social content you mentioned a lot about where they should start and what they should look at but like what are the resources actually that you trust great question i think examine dot com is really good for like learning and yeah yeah it's it's boring because this is gonna give you the literature but what it does do is it really consolidate it down and it erase the actual the effectiveness of the study and it makes it super easy for you to to understand it and you can actually go to actually reference it and and take a look at like the full document if you like but that's a that's a great tool to look at i love that and then that sort of like cuts through all the social media bullshit yeah run everything through there like everything that people's with supplements diets like can run everything through there because you'll see like ninety nine percent of these influences are full of shit yeah you'll see it like right away they don't know what they're like they just they're just doing stuff to just collect dollars to the average person who has that definition of success that i had say ten years ago i know that they have to go on their own journey but what's the first step that they should take towards re evaluating what their definition of success looks like yeah the first thing i would say is ask himself like truly figure out what motivates them like really think deeply about that and it has to be an answer that you feel pulled towards not pushed towards and make sure it's not coming from fear but coming from inspiration what happens if you feel pushed towards it by your family your friends what instagram says sis like success looks like your your wife your husband is that where men midlife crisis comes from sometimes yeah you're doing it for other people you're not doing it for yourself so you're gonna have a a feeling of emptiness and you're not gonna be fulfilled by that process yeah and then when no one's looking you're not gonna wanna do the work like the true inspiration comes when nobody's looking that you're still willing to do whatever it takes to get the outcome what about what about mental health we didn't really touch on that too much but health wellness working out i think you believe a lot of the same things as i believe when it comes to like treating depression and anxiety with like lifting and busting your ass in the gym which i don't even think i don't know if that's a controversial opinion i think i'm sure it is to some people but talk to me about sort of mental health working out and how that how does that tie together yeah every good therapist i know always has that part of their protocol is getting people into the gym because it it it naturally releases hormones that help with happiness with help with mood and then once you start to take care of yourself it just raises yourself esteem so you feel better about yourself what you're gonna help with depression and all those different things but yeah i i believe the picture of health is is way more holistic like if we just look at blood biomarkers and and and all that kind of stuff and we just go directly there but we're not fixing the actual computer that's supposed to put in the solutions and follow the protocols it's all gonna be missed so we have to really like tie this stuff altogether the mind the body of the spirit because like that is what true optimal health is it you can't just look at one or the other that's it's true optimal health it's true optimal success it's it's true optimal happiness it's like not one thing right it's like mental health physical health spiritual health physical health all of it all of it and find a way like whatever that you know you mentioned like the motivation that like you're not being pushed towards but pulls you i i believe that that motivation should include sort of all these different boxes that you should check yes it will if it's correct for you you know what i'm saying if you really figure out what you're motivated towards yeah it'll it'll check every box it's not gonna be hard to find gotta just listen and that that usually takes people having to be still which is hard in today's society because there's so much noise but you when we're still then we connect with god and that's what we can get really clear on where we're supposed to be so i think that to close this out first of all where can people connect with you like what are your socials and website so drop them and i'll put them in the show on us but what are they yeah instagram it's coach jc c white and then the website is t three body training dot com why do you call t three body training it actually stands for tele soma which means become your highest self it's just a greek translation and a couple things that we turn around and make it i love that that's beautiful when people connect with you spoken a little bit about the protocols that you put people through but just so they can understand exactly what they're sort of signing up for so to speak they contact you what is the journey that they're gonna go on mh yeah it's a twelve month transformation process so it's not a ninety day just you know get beach body in out we're really in it to help you win for the long haul so first we saw off get blow work and dna test done and we do that every three to four months but we surround you with a team of experts so medical doctor functional nutrition and health coaches in a mindset coach you as well because that's a huge important part of this whole journey we gotta get this right in order to get the body to move and then we provide you with custom formula supplements based upon your labs in your dna so it's literally a one of one formula nothing stock nothing's inventory is based upon what your individual body needs and then potentially peptides and other things like that if that's what your protocols and we need to help you elevate to the next level and then yeah that's that's the whole entire journey within three to three to six months usually we we see the huge body composition change yeah so you lose the body fat that you want to lose you you gain the muscle mass you're looking for in the last six months is about putting you back into i have more of a maintenance getting your body to really just acc there and then and then setting you up for long term success so that's like what's call like reverse dieting and walking the calories back up and i think that that's something that two points on that first of all i love that you do the mindset piece of it because i think that that's what i think that that's probably the one thing that's gonna let somebody achieve success if they get in the right mindset and like we've we've spoken about this and we've been like gone through some exercises and stuff about how to focus on what actually matters in your life but that's that is the precursor right because if not they're gonna fall off and drop off but also i think a lot of people have a really hard time reverse dieting i only know that term because of body building but i don't think a lot of people understand how hard it is to make a radical life change and to achieve whatever body you wanna achieve and then actually keep it for the long term i think that this is what people are gonna have a hard time with with those epic and all and all these peptides and tries appetite and all these other ones like or even just go forget forget forget peptides and like oz epic just like even a very strict diet people rebound so hard because they don't know how to come back so i think that that's probably mindset plus reverse dieting so that this can be like just part of like a lifestyle that will indicate success better than anything i think that everybody can like stop eating for like a couple months very easy but that why don't they lose weight right why don't they keep it off yeah why do they always rebound yeah oh yeah about ninety percent of people rebound from their diet and they gain the weight back yeah it's staggering statistics so people don't actually keep the weight off when you reverse diet properly you can your body to a healthier caloric intake while maintaining the same about body fat percentage is that you have is this what set point means yeah that is yeah where you where you adjust your set point now it's it's gonna be it's it's challenging because like a lot of people wanna go full re restart once they get to yeah so you have to kind of pace yourself a little bit and just slowly walk your calories back up so usually like not to get too much of the weeds of it but you wanna put yourself back up to maintenance so you could feel you know great again is it depends how lean you get to as well and then just slowly walk up the calories over time but it's usually not a stressful process at all i've seen guys eat like more calories than they were when they were fat but now they're thirty forty fifty pounds leaner yeah and that's just such yeah it's like an amazing thing because now you can go out and live life and you look amazing and you eat way more food than what you used to that's a secret and like diet success being able to just like go back to your like quote unquote regular life and this is why this is why i actually appreciate your approach so much like not just the diet not just to working out not just the peptides not just supplements not just my like it's all of it like it is truly all of it that's why i can't stand like thirty second reels on how this particular doesn't change your life because there's so much more it than that but listen like to your point you know you spent thirty years twenty years getting yourself into this shit you're not gonna take twenty years to get out of it but like you gotta change some stuff you gotta change habits last question i like to ask about everything that you've learned in your life it could be die advice could just be life advice you have to pick the most important thing that say you could only pass this one lesson onto your kids because it is the most important okay the most important it could be the thing that you know just radically change your life it could be the best piece of advice you ever got from a mentor or whatever it is but you can only take this one thing and pass it on to your kids what would that thing be and why have enough faith to begin the process and god would take care of the rest claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link claude dot ai slash success oh the car from car von here well well you'll look at that it's exactly what i ordered like precisely it would be crazy if there were any catches but there aren't right right because that's how car buying should be with car you get the car you want choose delivery or pickup and a week to love it or return it buy your car today with car deliver your pickup these may apply limitations and exclusions may apply cr r seven day return policy at curve dot com
69 Minutes listen 9/30/25
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➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Rajiv Nathan — also known as Startup Hypeman, who has helped over 100 companies perfect their pitch — breaks down how to transform lifeless sales demos into captivating stories that close deals. ... ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Rajiv Nathan — also known as Startup Hypeman, who has helped over 100 companies perfect their pitch — breaks down how to transform lifeless sales demos into captivating stories that close deals. He explains why great communicators think like entertainers, not executives, and how focusing on emotion and audience engagement creates lasting impact. Rajiv introduces the “Que Pasa” Framework — Problem, Approach, Solution, Action — to help entrepreneurs lead with empathy and clarity rather than information overload. Learn how tailoring your pitch like an artist’s setlist can turn every presentation into a memorable experience that connects and converts. ➡️ Show Links https://successstorypodcast.com YouTube: https://youtu.be/ZJ3ocXk_7EE Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rajiv-rajnation-nathan-founder-of-the-startup/id1484783544 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lM4QCRHCxI4Yne8KLjRX5 ➡️ Watch the Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/scottdclary
indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode discover why effective communication starts with thinking like an entertainer not an executive explore how a emotion driven messaging builds stronger audience connection understand how the k boss framework turns bland pitches into story driven experiences and uncover why leading with problems before solutions builds credibility and engagement you gave me some good points to run with that i i wanna bring up so one of your points was don't think like an entrepreneur or executive think like an entertainer explain what that means for people that that don't understand the value of storytelling or or even just just break that down yeah of course that's and that's really like the startup up hype man like guiding mantra is think like an entertainer the idea behind that is the entertainer is solely concerned with their audience right they they have one goal in mind elicit an emotional reaction from the crowd get them to feel something get them to leave the arena buzzing about something and it's that that's actually why when you know so so scott who who's like your favorite music artist favorite music artist oof move that's a good one which which genre oh i'll go with i'll go with i'll go with somebody who who can't be controversial anymore i like a vic if vic is a great artist sure rest and peace right rest and peace exactly yeah i'm not gonna name any people that are still around because i might i might i might stir some feelings whatever but vic everybody loved the vic okay so levels of vic right so when avi hits the stage or when he he did hit the stage here's what would happen right he'd come out and be like how is everyone doing tonight and everyone's like yeah we're doing great and it's like alright let's do this k what did not happen with a vic or any artist for that matter they do not hit the stage and go how's everyone doing tonight yeah we're great okay great so check it out here's what's gonna happen i'm gonna play every song in my catalog that i've ever come out with it's like you know nine albums deep but i'm not just gonna play those songs you've heard i'm also gonna go through the b sides and the draft versions and some things that i've been working on in the garage recently because and i i don't really care that you you don't care about all those but i they really mean a lot to me and it's important me and it's gonna take about like twelve hours to get through it all who's with me you know even like the biggest of vic fan is gonna be like alright we gotta get home at some point right they you're they they think about like what's their set list and they say we're gonna compose this set list based on a take home feeling that we want them to have and and we want them buzzing with something and that set list is constructed very carefully now it doesn't mean you don't get the guitar solo or the wrapper doesn't go into like that you know that off script freestyle but the the idea is that they're working within a construct within a set list which allows them the ability to go off script momentarily but then come back to something they they you know they didn't just like go in blind and be like well a you it's a it's a three hour long free i don't know what i'm doing today yeah right so they have that set list and and again you know the actor will go off script if the scene demands it but it's because the scene demands it not because the actor demands it that's a that's a really great analogy that's a really really good analogy it really it really frames up what's wrong with demos but when you put it like that it's almost ridiculous why would you just like vomit verbally vomit on somebody everything you know if they don't need it or they don't care about it right how how like first of all there's different you know of course the ideal is to walk away from a demo with a positive impression of the person is pitching but you know maybe maybe you're looking at other vendors you have a neutral impression because they you know hit all the nails on the head and you just wanna shop around but if you're going to start pitching things then i've seen this before they open up like the feature brochure now virtually feature brochure and it's like like like just like threw everything and the person's like man i need like like a tenth of what you just showed me like chill out like let's let's let's like like in sell that for later but if you do that like and you're taking up somebody's hour hour and a half that's a negative it's a they walk away with a negative impression so not only could you not sell but could like jeopardize like your reputation as a sales rep as a company and and really really her chances of even you know selling in the future to that person of that organization so that's that's very important so entertain tailor the pitch tailor the stuff that you're giving over and and like hyper personalized so that it's like specific for them and that's it but you know well and even within that i think what's important they're the operative word you use there is tailor it right i think yeah there are like there's almost the other extreme that people fall into where they're like well every person is different so i'm gonna have nothing baseline to work off of and and and i'm just gonna you know go with the flow but that's not like tailoring means you had a suit that you adjusted for the situate situation like for the event you're going to or because you gained a couple pounds you know you brought sides a little bit or or vice versa it doesn't mean you don't even have a suit or or address to begin with yeah it means you had some base face clothing that you adjusted in the situation and that's i think the other extremist people fall into is they don't even know what the starter clothing is the starter material is yeah and then they're just doing everything on the fly yeah very smart okay so let's talk about elevator pitching what is yeah what is this is is that you pronounce it the key pas is that it key pass pass all you you clearly don't know any spanish i don't know any spanish i don't know any spanish and that's a oh that's a that's a anyways so that's embarrassing the k pass the elevator pitch framework yeah so let me let me just give some context to that so in my process we always start with what's your elevator pitch and the reason for that is everyone at the company know mean not even just sales and marketing everyone at the company should know what to say to the to the answer the question what does your company do right most companies everyone everyone's says something different that should be a pretty unified front there like that top line message about your company should be pretty unified yes you know one rep may have a slight personality tweak to it versus another but generally the message should be the same and it's not just that the elevator pitch represents what do you answer or for what do you do but it's actually like the foundation for all of your brand communication right like that is the movie trailer where and and the movie is the deeper interaction with your company with your product with your brand so while it may just be well while it is the answer to what does your company do it's also the elevator pitch is also what you deliver when you're on your demo call and you need to give that introduction to your company mh your elevator pitch is also what you build your pitch deck around right like it is the core and the deck is an extension on the value delivered in the elevator pitch the elevator pitch is also what you what your marketing team leverages for the materials they create and that's why i'm very intentional that formula i created the k pass pitch method it's like all of these things funnel back to k pos and i'll get into what that means in a second mh and and the idea is that you you you become a better storyteller by consistently speed not only like having that hard line message in that formula but then also knowing throughout a sales process throughout a demo call speaking in like sub versions of k pos specific to the you know the nuance situation so what k pas means in spanish which i think we've just identified i need to get sent some closets on ba or something yeah yeah so k pas in spanish just me it's like a cl way of saying like what's up or what's happening okay k boss go it's what you'd say if someone like comes to hang out with you right oh what's up man and and this is something that i came up with several years ago when i was looking at like where is there a gap and how people are talking about their companies how they're pitching and and presenting what they do and so what k pas represents is an acronym the second half of the psa pas which stands for problem approach solution action problem approach solution action okay that mode of communicating is inherently buyer focused it is inherently audience driven because what you're doing when you lead with the problem first you're creating context and frame of reference for why you should be why you should exist why you're talking about this in the first place but most importantly you generate and you lead with empathy mh and because you're leading with empathy then it makes sense why you have a solution for this thing what i see most companies do and honestly it's it's oftentimes driven by the ceo accidentally they will talk they'll jump immediately to solution we have a you know we we have a saas ai platform that gives you the you know the the roi on on on all of your digital spend right they lead with solution first we have a you know dashboard that does x y and z and that cuts empathy out of the equation altogether but with k pas again problem approach solution action you start with empathy so you you you make it about them out of the game again customer focus customer centric that's exactly the framework for everything that you're teaching over so i love that yeah and and while again while it's your heart elevator pitch that idea of communicating k pas right it's also how you can demo every aspect of your product when you do get to that component or when you do when you get to that part of your process right so what you'll see on a lot of demos which are just like horrible is the person will say what we'll just be like okay here's this feature here's what it does you know this widget down here does this thing yeah and and it it creates this like overwhelming amount of information in a snooze first versus if within the product level itself if you are like okay so let's start here usually when you're working you encounter this type of a challenge right okay yeah that you that's what we hear often great well our way of addressing that is this and here is what this widget does for you to address that what are your thoughts there could that work for you right so so it be become you're just kinda like weaving this tapestry mh by talking continue to communicate in that way thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful full tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problem sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success earn up to two hundred thousand bonus points with the i g one rewards premier business card limited time offer ten twenty two visit i g dot com slash business card cards issued by jpmorgan chase bank n a member fdic offers subject to change terms apply wix it's where website creation meets ai and where your bold ideas become real it just takes one platform to build a site that looks great and does everything you need it to and it just takes one person you to start taking care of business like a ten person team with ai tools for creating an entire website from scratch or testing new ways to make money wix is there with you from day one try it out now at wix dot com when too much work bog you down asana helps you handle it ai makes it easy to hand off routine tasks and stay focused on important work that's how work gets handled visit us at asana dot com
14 Minutes listen 9/28/25
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➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Jay Jay, founder of Ace of Spades Agency, breaks down the art of building a personal brand from the ground up. He explains why people invest in personalities before businesses and how credibility... ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Jay Jay, founder of Ace of Spades Agency, breaks down the art of building a personal brand from the ground up. He explains why people invest in personalities before businesses and how credibility, visibility, and emotion drive success more than just skill or product quality. Learn how to craft a memorable hook that sets you apart, create authentic emotional connections with your audience, and turn your story into a magnet for opportunities and influence. ➡️ Show Links https://successstorypodcast.com YouTube: https://youtu.be/PYM4usecc8o Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jay-jay-ceo-of-ace-of-spades-pr-agency-how-to/id1484783544 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Fzs1J5siAGgD9D2r8fhCJ ➡️ Watch the Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/scottdclary
indeed is a success story partner now here's your tech hiring tip of the week from indeed seventy three percent of tech workers say flexibility is one of their top priorities so if your job posting doesn't mention flexible hours or remote options you're basically invisible to three at a four candidates keep that in mind look hiring tech talent right now it's tough you are competing for people with super specific skills everyone wants hybrid work and the salary expectations are through the roof it's a lot that's why indeed actually makes sense they're the number one place where tech people go to apply for jobs we're talking three million tech professionals in the us and eighty six percent of them have applied through indeed it's not just some job board where you post and pray they've got tools like smart searching and their tech network that use ai to connect you with people who actually have the skills that you need companies using the tech network saw over four times more relevant applications that's huge more qualified people way less time wasted whenever i've needed tech talent in the past indeed is the only platform choosing if i needed to hire top tier tech talent today i'd still go with indeed post your first job and get seventy five dollars off at indeed dot com slash tech talent that's indeed dot com slash tech talent to claim this offer indeed build for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode uncover why building a strong personal brand can elevate an entrepreneur beyond the quality of their product explore how credibility visibility and emotional connection create trust and loyalty learn how to craft a distinct story and hook that stand out in crowded markets and understand why people invest in personalities before businesses people pay a lot if they if you can deliver excellence if you can deliver the best possible product people will pay but now they have that option and you mentioned something else you're selective about who you work with right and i wanna dive into why you work with personal brands because that's a whole other con concept that people really haven't bought into yet the personal brand this celebrity ceo that so let's talk about that let's talk about personal brand why is it important why should an entrepreneur starting a company care about p for themselves versus their business and and walk me through that and what you've okay cool let me ask you your a question nate what do you think of why does gordon ramsay in jamie oliver makes so much money as a chef but the guy at the local house awesome guy is making eighty grand a year when gordon and j making eighty million a year why mh it's certainly good them it's it's them the celebrity brand factor it's dave input a lot of marketing a lot of promotion into and they're built up now are they the best chefs no are they a great chef absolutely are they the best looking guys no gordon ramsay has definitely got a face for the the kitchen you know even says that are they are they the best spoken no it's because they've figured out and or a team is figured out hey how do we market this person how do we take gordon how do we take jamie oliver right and and amplify their message amplify them as the celebrity or the leading expert in their space and guess what they get all the choices gordon ramsay has restaurants around the world right because he's that fate he's he's the guy he's got influence and he think if people can understand it's okay to get some celebrity aspects to your brain without having to be the jj or the gordon ramsey you don't have to go to that level right but you can do it in your own space think to at least be seen with more star power so that you get chosen over the next coach over the next podcast broadcaster over the next guy selling real estate dude i'm in miami there's you know how many real is in everyone's a real unlimited unlimited realtors everybody it the population miami is is doing the amount of real estate deal yeah yeah but but the point of why these people getting chosen or not and and i think everybody listening one because one thing i had to do was be okay with you go to take your ego out of it and realize it's not the best it's not the best website the product man it's sometimes it's the person constantly be seen the about who's promoting you know yeah and and it's a it's a human component it right absolutely yeah they cannot connect yeah well you know the the only thing that i do with the people i work with is listen we can get their attention right but how do we make them how do we keep their attention and how do we make them keep coming back it's like we don't wanna give you the new plastic surgery look on your face with no personality because you ain't picking up anyone at the bar right you look good yeah but where's the solve where's your personality so back to your question yeah it's really important that personal branding as people are really like g towards people who can they can connect with and they wanna know more than you're a great good looking person with a great product what is he on his personal life is he marriage he kids how can i connect with this guy oh he has a heart now i wanna invest with you no i like him and and here's and i know i can go on about this way just scott but and anyone listening ask yourself this when you make a decision on something you bought in the past maybe an online course or the person you work with ask him what ask of why didn't you make the decision and bet you didn't go well it was a really cool product you're probably like oh i like the post that he said wow he's a family man i'm a family man you know or he went to you know he went to the maldives this and i i you know it could be something small because but it personal brand has a really great way to connect with people and that's what we wanna be a part we wanna be we wanna be connected and and just to take it a step further if you are class quickly sales train you will know the people buy with the emotion and justify with logic right and how do you buy with that how do you buy how do you build that emotion it's with trust mh and that's where the the face and the person and the founder and we're talking about real estate we're talking about people that sell a variety of services online but even anything you know you look at elon musk you look at you know richard branson you look at gary vaynerchuk you look at the people at a that are enormous business names but they're you know you look at their following even you know you can say well tesla's recognizable but elon musk is is the person people listen to if elon musk didn't exist you think people would care you think you think tesla's stock price would be so volatile well if they just followed the tesla twitter account and elon never said anything no because it's it's a it's a person that you're now aligned with yeah yeah but but i think scott as well to to bring it back though for people to understand is and and it this comes up a lot with new clients they go well i'm not i don't wanna be richard i don't wanna be elon i don't wanna change it and i get it i i listen i totally understand but what you need to do is be okay of understanding how you make decisions so make it relatable to the person go oh i made that because of this greg how do we choose use that same technique same principles and incorporate that into you as a coach you as a real so smaller level smaller level so bring go up a go with a couple of notches man get into the press get get some authority about you get some more testimonials social like third party validation maybe get a forbes right like if you had to make a decision for a house scott and there were two realtors on the table one guy was forbes and one guy was it those looked the same both pool both well put together you're probably choosing the you're more likely to choose to listen to the guy in forbes because our forbes is well forbes he must be someone yeah the credibility yeah here's credibility that yeah yeah bull so what's this so let's let's talk about the strategy to get that story told right when you're when you're build so i guess it would start from your story as an individual cool because that's what's gonna drive everything right that's gonna drive the socials is gonna drive the the b what's what is that story i call what's your hook we play this game i play games with my clients all the time when they come if you have come to my office scott i'll and we do this game we print out a big photo of your face when you come in the office because i used to be an entertainer right i'm very immersive i coat when i coach and teach so if anyone if you ever worked with me anyone wanna take a big photo of your face like print it and put it on the wall you come in you're gonna see it like okay great who is this guy first thing we need to do is break down like who you are what you do but what's your hook right so why if i was the owner if i was oprah you played i'll ask you this scott if i was oprah from ellen and i'm like no actually let me change it up for you if i was richard branson and i said listen scott no i have thirty seconds you i've got i checkbook ready to write but you go to woo me you gotta to pitch me you gotta to what's your what's yourself that's gonna be your whole what what's the that's a good one what's your what's your personal elevator pitch yeah exactly but a lot of people don't understand that they're not just a a business coach they're not just a realtor like what is the point of difference that makes you differ print for the media amounts to choose you over everybody else and and this is where you know my expertise comes in but like that's one thing that's really important you have to think of like well okay you know that you're amazing print your clients know that you're amazing but the world doesn't and they just think you're another coach they just think you're another guy another girl so the first thing we try and do is like really quickly how do we find that fault for you right like how we like what why why would forbes choose you what are they gonna what what's your move here you know and take some time so the first thing would be like figuring out that unique point of difference just something so that if there are ten business coaches in front for forbes to choose they're merely going like that without without even knowing you your credentials like that that pitch oh that's interesting so for me when i was a magician i'm not a i thought i was cool enough being no yeah now the man from down under steals watches from around the world that's like one little week right well the fifty seven million viewed man steals you know when i was doing stuff more for women like steals your heart and steals watch oh okay i'll click on that so yeah yeah coming up with the hook is is is a good start move for for people just like okay what do how can i be a bit different here that thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research 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11 Minutes listen 9/28/25
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➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Gilad Uziely is the Co-founder and CEO of Sequence, a fintech startup backed by $7.5M in venture funding and building the world’... ➡️ Join 321,000 people who read my free weekly newsletter: https://newsletter.scottdclary.com ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory Gilad Uziely is the Co-founder and CEO of Sequence, a fintech startup backed by $7.5M in venture funding and building the world’s first financial “router” to tackle the $25 trillion global consumer banking market. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co-founded the neo-bank Lance, launched the guided-tour marketplace Mekomy, and led major innovation initiatives for Tel Aviv Global. Born in Jerusalem and raised in Tel Aviv, Gilad served in the IDF, earned a degree in International Business from the University of Technology Sydney, and now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and two daughters. ➡️ Show Links https://www.instagram.com/gilad_uziely/ https://x.com/uzielygilad/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/giladuziely/ ➡️ Podcast Sponsors Hubspot - https://hubspot.com/ Truth, Lies & Work Podcast - https://truthliesandwork.com ShipStation - https://www.shipstation.com/ (Code: SuccessStory) Square - https://square.com/go/success SurveyMonkey - https://www.surveymonkey.com/scott Monarch Money - https://www.monarchmoney.com (Code: Success) Claude - https://claude.ai/success Incogni - https://incogni.com/success (Code: Success) Think Big, Buy Small Podcast - https://link.chtbl.com/B2cH36AX?sid=SuccessStory NetSuite — https://netsuite.com/scottclary/ Indeed - https://indeed.com/clary ➡️ Talking Points 00:00 – Intro 01:33 – The Highs and Lows of Entrepreneurship 03:09 – Why Gilad Chose Entrepreneurship 04:34 – Lessons from a Failed First Company 06:42 – How Even Pros Get Core Assumptions Wrong 08:29 – Detaching Emotion to Make Better Decisions 16:04 – The Big Mindset Shift Behind Sequence’s Success 17:41 – Handling Investors in Tough Times 25:14 – Sponsor Break 27:25 – Founders’ Guide to Surviving Desperate Times 30:58 – Smart Strategies for Raising Capital 39:27 – What Makes Sequence Different from Competitors 44:38 – Sponsor Break 46:33 – How Sequence Changes Users’ Lives 50:06 – Financial Safeguards You Can Trust 53:44 – Will AI Make Bookkeepers Obsolete? 57:40 – The Future of Banking 1:00:18 – How to Extract Value from Failure 1:01:17 – Keeping Morale High in a Brutally Honest World 1:03:49 – The Best Advice Gilad Ever Received 1:04:09 – The #1 Lesson for His Children
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cowboy culture you you never wanna pay more than you have to because there are so many expenses that go farming and ranch to have any efficiency on the floor you need extreme connection and and reception i bet we save about a hundred and eighty dollars a month of spectrum and that's twenty one hundred dollars for the whole year real customers real savings visit spectrum dot com slash save real customer testimonial compensated not scripted they i just don't have the motivation working for someone i can't find the life to do it and to do it well and if i don't do it well i prefer not to do it when you have an idea when you start building you slowly slowly or sometimes quickly fall in love with what you're building instead of falling love with the of you're moving away from the tooth which is the only important thing that you need to chase as a found them and this is the most dangerous thing that can happen u he left jerusalem with a suitcase full of ideas built a travel start up in italy lee ran the innovation lab for one of the world's fastest growing tech hubs and then he went broke burned through years of savings all to chase one problem why does solo entrepreneurs struggled to control their own money that obsession led to sequence a finance virtual operating system for creators freelancers and anyone with more than one bank account it sounds simple but what they're building it could rewrite the rules of money management and what he shares in this episode might just change how you manage your money forever if you're focused on the right metrics opinions doesn't play part anymore you need to know what you're are tracking you need to know our success looks like you don't have to net from day zero sometimes it takes time i have all my life try to build communities and my take is that community product fit is much harder and product market fit and if you have a community and you see like your early signs of community being created you have to do whatever you can in order to cultivate and that's what we've done very successful the most important resource that we have is our time you have an limited at the time here make sure that you're putting your effort and your energy in a place that makes sense glad i'm very excited to chat this is gonna be a really honest and brutal startup story and i just wanna frame it for the listeners so we're gonna be mostly speaking about sequence today but your last company lance so you raised eight million you grew to thirty thousand users you realized you were essentially lighting money on fire with every customer due to fraud and instead of sugar coding it you spoke to your investors and there's a story there a really important story for entrepreneurs so explain to me the good and the bad of entrepreneurship because i think we speak about the good too often but you've experienced some not so great experiences yeah i mean everybody celebrates you know the huge successes the massive exit the ipo and and somebody look like you know just watching from the sidelines it seems like everything is smooth and but the truth is that it's a mess for all people that i know and i assume most entrepreneurs does there's a lot of pain involved in the all along the journey sometimes as founders we start we sometimes founders are very lonely and and she hits the fan you know and when the sheet hits the fan you know you are left many times alone i'm just trying to figure stuff out you have employees you have partners and c cofounder you have investors you have clients people that are actually using something that maybe you've built so it's a very hard a place to be i think that we over entrepreneurship and we make it seem like it's all fun and all good and it's hard work but i don't think we really dive into what happens if it goes wrong and also to your point it's very lonely so if it does go wrong which everybody who i know who's built something significant there's been a point where it's gone very wrong how do you deal with it because a lot of people don't understand what you're going through so let's even back up because i wanna understand why you chose to be an entrepreneur what kind of delusion made you want to go build something because that's also interesting and i don't believe that ninety nine percent of people on this planet should be entrepreneurs because it does take a certain way of thinking and it takes somebody who maybe is a little bit delusional but back me way up was lance your first company ever no no no i've i'm almost forty five now and i have like a w two for maybe two years of my life i've always built stuff and not necessarily startups ups i've started actually in my first steps as a as an entrepreneur pan as an as an adult we're in the we've built a two operator we've done mister ways we've done a feel like cool stuff there but i just i to be honest i don't have the amortization working for someone else and i can't i can't find the drive to to do to do it and to do it well and if i don't do it well i prefer not to do it so this startup story with with lance so why was this store so lance wasn't your first company it wasn't your land your last excuse me i mean like now you're building sequence but with lance what was what was the thing that went wrong i think this is like a great lesson for people well a few things went wrong but i think that the core problem with lance for the fact that we we've made a few core assumptions that were just wrong so so the basis of the business were not built for success and in our specific case what we've done we've we've tried to build a a finance company or a financial company using embedded finance tools and what happens is when i say you're gonna say embedded finance tool so banking as a service site so you're not actually the bank but you're acting as a bank and so if you are like if if you if you started really the early or have a lot of resources so companies like china right they did obviously very well but for somebody you came in the second cell or even fore found of new banking the economics never read it up because you you can't you open operate like a bank you can't land against your balance sheet and you can't really make money like banks and on the other side yeah you get all the downside of fraud charge banks disputes and by far the biggest problem for us was fraud right so at a certain point in time we've just looked to the numbers and we've understood that with every customer that you bring on your best basically shortening the life of your company because what happened is that you you would get like a cohort like a passcode and you thought that you your customer acquisition cost was like hundred dollars or whatever and then as time goes by you start you start to understand that you know plan to thirty forty percent of those customers are the accounts that you actually have to close so the cap is not one hundred anymore and you know it goes up and sometimes for certain cost even doubled itself so you're sitting here ka is going up the the payment period or the t keeps getting like longer and longer and and you basically understand that the trajectory the you know that you're that you're you're driving to you off a cliff basically so this is something that makes sense to me but for somebody who's first starting out this a little bit scary because i think the lesson here is that it doesn't matter how many times you do this it's not like the next time is guaranteed success and i think that sometimes i think that sometimes investors even think that we can talk about that as well of the other side of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship they always bet on people that have had past successes or serial entrepreneurs as opposed to the first time entrepreneurs because they think we'll have done it before then they can do it again but explain to me how does a serial entrepreneur who's done this many times how do you get some of these core business assumptions wrong like what was the blind that stopped you from seeing this when you started at lance well i think that you know when you when you have an ideal and you start building you slowly slowly or sometimes quickly fall in love with what you're are building instead of falling in love with the problem right you've build something you and you start telling yourself stories you start you start basically lying to yourself right you say if only we've build this and this is the only thing that is missing and something maybe one parent looks really good because we go fast we've opened a lot of accounts like we are like tens of thousands of accounts and so you say this is working and then you you start to ignore the the the bad stuff and you start lying yourself and i mean like it's like your baby right and everyone thinks that his baby they're the most beautiful perfect thing in the world but there are babies that are not perfect right and then you start lying yourself you're moving away from the tooth which is the only important thing that you need to chase as as a as a found them and it's something very natural alright it's like it's a diff difference mechanism that we all have and this is the most dangerous thing that can happen it can happen to anyone we'll talk about how you navigated because this i mean this is something that you have to deal with you brought you raise investors but how do you how do you remove yourself and remove your emotion and ego and attachment to the company so that you can make objectively good decisions and it's what's what's difficult about lance is because you had like unit economics and and economic issues and fraud it's not about like a pivot sometimes i think it's the kevin o'leary line right where you have to take it out behind the barn and shoot it and i think that that's a very difficult thing for entrepreneurs to do especially when they've raised the money so how do you how did it do lance sort of say okay this is really not working i need to find a way to have really hard conversations and kill this business what was the thing that woke you up just the numbers just the numbers if if you're focused on the right metrics it doesn't it doesn't opinions doesn't play play part anymore alright you need to know what you are tracking you need to know what you are measuring you need to know how success looks like sometimes you will take a little bit longer and and sometimes you and and you just need to see that you are you don't have to you don't have to minutes it from day zero right sometimes it takes time usually it takes time but you need to see that you are tracking towards what the important things and we've we've lance the problem that we should we should have killed it a before we before we have that's that's the truth was there i mean just curious i mean like hindsight twenty twenty but technically do you think that if you had found a way to mitigate the fraud and explain to me like what fraud is in like the banking sense for people that are listening what fraud is not fraud is not like somebody on your team committing fraud fraud is like the customers are committing fraud but was there if you hadn't found a way to mitigate that would it would it have been a successful business model or is that just a hypothetical there's no point in even figuring that piece so so so so that that's first of all fear figuring that out would have been huge and could have created a huge company that has nothing to do with with the neo bank because for this problem us across the board so to your first question the the the the ford came from customers not from employees at all and and it was anything that you can can imagine anything from money laundering to people you know topping up their account it went k going to vegas for crazy weekend and calling on man saying that that their car was stolen and my wallet was stolen it wasn't me so even if you can prove that it that it was them you still have to pay like heavy heavy fees to visa design and the other providers people that are just using your platform to get like you know like like you know like federal fees and stuff like that which is not actually fault but that's not why we you've build the product and they are just the customers out you can't make money of those kind of customers so it was accountable we were call to the sheriff office in new york okay like or anything from like crazy money laundering chains to just like people trying to to you know to steal five scale or something okay so it's not working you raised money for this company so you raised did you raise eight million or how much would you raise for this the stand the right meeting yeah you raise a million okay so then what happens when you realize that the company is not working so it's to be honest it's very stressful like we remember me my c founder was going into a room and saying like we don't we don't know we don't know how to save this we have obviously fiduciary responsibility to our to our investors and we understood that with with every new client we are basically you know like it's it's you know it's like you it we we had to stop and it wasn't it wasn't responsible of our on our side to continue and we said okay first let's stop bringing on new customers we still had thousands of people using the product so it's like you know it's a banking app you can't you can't just disclose it one day right so we continued supporting them we off boarded them and installed the custom that we you know that that that other companies were interested in and went back and and then we said okay what are we doing now like we either give money back to other investors or we think of a pivot and at this point i'm not i'm still not talking to my to my investors it was like you know was it was a few days later you're just having a conversation with your c cofounder for thinking like what the hell are we doing yes yes we we we understood that we had to stop to so to not to not to to stop onboarding new customers and and we did that and then we we went into a room and said okay what can we do you we either closed or pivot and we decided to try and pivot to save the company that was that that that's what we wanted to do when we started you know like slowing ideas around but then after like a few days we said okay guys we've just proved that our ideas are not that great that's was you it was just proven and so instead instead of thinking about about ideas let's let's think about cope and support that we'll guide our pivot and it came down to two things really one we were all all over forty and we want to make sure that we have investing the next ten fifteen even twenty years of our life is something meaningful with chances of succeeding and for that we wanted to get to conviction so the first important thing was get to to high high high conviction that was the first thing and the second thing was that after trying to build the bank and and and competing with bank of america chase you know all like huge players we said normal more red oceans we are looking for a replace for a blue ocean low low competition because for like and and that's and that's very very important and that's when we started working with a fare that i actually really lie because it's very simple and it's like and like you need to look for stuff that are non consensus and right and and basically it's very simple like consensus non consensus right and wrong if you're are wrong you're are wrong nothing you can do about it if you are right and consensus that lance right everyone that i talked to told me yes of course freelancers and the self employed needs a better banking experience but that you need the banks of america right there are also daryl on a bank right and when and when you find something that is non consensus side that's when you have like like a vision into the future right that's where you can build something that is truly unique and it's very hard because then when you go to talk to people mary will tell you do i don't understand what you're even talking about why would the anyone use it it's you you you are stupid basically explain to me because you spoke about sort of first principles thinking but you also spoke about non consensus but correct so how can you figure out which first principles apply to a non consensus but correct idea because this is what you've really done with sequence so so we've used that framework to to hit what was important for us and that's a blue ocean understood that that's that's that's how we looked at it and then to find the non consensus and right idea my my best suggestion is be lucky that's that's you know that's that's the most important thing gust is a success story partner now look i talked to business owners every single day and you know what i hear constantly scott i love running my business but i hate dealing with payroll and i get it nobody starts a company because they're excited about calculating tax 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talking to customers but also listening to them we maybe have built sequence i don't know four years ago because before lance we've built a bunch of like just tools for for the for for freelancers and self employed to just see all the money under the tax you know status and everything and they told us well this is great i love this dashboard and that was like a kind of like a mint experience or mono money experience and they said i really like it i i wanna touch the screen and move money around and and then if we were sm back then or we will just actually like digging in and understanding what those people want maybe it would have built sequence again and not lance but then we said okay they want to move the money we need to be a bank and and the value saying by being gates who said the world doesn't need more banks it needs better banking you know so listen to be guys that's another you know knows what he's talking about so dealing with investors is not easy i know that you had how many investors total because you raised eight million but it wasn't from just a a small group there was eighty three total investors yeah what we had to collect eighty three signatures from anyone who employees accelerate those programs we went through and and then everyone who have a lot a check into sequence and we've raised a bunch of money for my offerings friends and families or small checks and those guys those guys will never the problem so it's not like it it kinda sounds like to be honest like start up health like going through because this is so now okay so just to frame it for people if if lance isn't working you have hard conversation with your cofounder okay we gotta go in a different direction you gotta get eighty three signatures it took you eight months to get eighty three signatures i know that there was some people that were problems or at least they gave you a hard time so during that time i mean you're stressed out i don't think that you're really you're not making a ton of money yourself personally and life still goes on as well so you have to figure out what you're gonna do in terms of like you know i don't know your whole financial situation but when this is happening you're not drawing massive salaries while you're telling your investors that there's a chance that they've lost their money and you have to renegotiate exactly what you're gonna build so talk to me about this restructure because dealing with investors i even sometimes recommend that if founders there's reasons for raising money and there's reasons for not raising money obviously if you want to grow fast you can raise equity you can also raise debt doesn't have to be equity to different ways to raise money but what you went through is probably one of the most difficult things that somebody would ever have to go through if they are raising money outside of literally just telling your investors i'm sorry we've you know we've lit your money on fire you're not getting it back so you have this episode tell the story you had this conversation with your cofounder what's the next step we we we went into it if i i didn't know what i was working into i didn't know how painful it's gonna be and what we did was we we were we were in the room and said okay let's save the company like we we still think that we have something that we can do let's let's try and with the two the core principles of pivoting we went and started talking to lance good users and and we asked them guys what are you doing here and it was very like i don't wanna say unanimous but it was very common for them to tell us i really love this mini zapier experience for my money i wish i could connect my and then everybody like my my my husband account my wife account my business partner my four zero one k my student loan my my credit cards my mortgage so they wanted like a bunch of stuff and then oh and my c founder and the cto came back and said like a i think that what these guys are actually looking for is actually a router for their money they need a better way to out the money between all those different accounts and then we start with the okay that's interesting but again we just took a massive beating so we wanted to to optimize for conviction and so then we went and start talking to people who never help about plans not necessarily freelancers anyone who was willing to talk to us and we came them and said hey we're gonna build this out of for money it's exactly for money and then out of every ten people that we talk to six seven would go like you guys idiots i don't understand what you're even talking about and three four i would go where have you been on my life look at what i've built check out my excel sheet you know so it was this is this this is non consensus right wrong we don't know yet but it was definitely non consensus and very confusing right you don't know what to think and then we said okay optimizing for conviction let's be brave let's build a landing page and let's charge and let's charge a relatively high amount for just for the concept and we've built a bunch of landing pages and we've built actually one landing page and a bunch of ads and just describing the product we call it money out or out money which like a shitty name and and we told people if you want to get a lifetime access for this product take two hundred dollars today and i told my c founders you guys are crazy nobody gonna give you that that amount of money and so so but but we launched it and and i was extremely happy to be wrong because in five days hundred people pay the two hundred dollars for the lifetime access for for you we didn't have the product obviously and started talking about it all over the internet so they opened the discord server for us they started talking about it on reddit and people came knocking on the door and then you already said okay like the the two hundred dollars is off the table this offer is off the table but if i still remember exactly the wording we told them if you want you can lock in a discounted subscription for life and we actually had people paying subscription for a product that not only wasn't ready we haven't even started building and that's conviction right and then with that we've and we've started things like amazingly so it like it we we had like a very very initial and we've actually like already like you know got like an around twenty k or even more before even writing one line of code and this is very rare many people can say that that's what they want to do but they actually do it's much harder and you know it's like start it's like lean startup one zero one and but it's much easier said than done and and at this stage i went back to to to lance investors we had the kia think two million dollars in the in the bank and i told them there's something here there's something here let's give us some more money at this stage we've done one by round and two saves one on top of the other which is also a huge mistake and we can we can you know talk about it if you want and and it was just it was like twenty twenty two and nobody was doing anything just after covid it was the shit market and all my investors told me yeah we are not investing and so i went and started pitching to everyone was willing to talk to me anyone from this is to angels to work who like anyone i've pitched i counted i think it's one hundred and sixty investors which is crazy it's not it's not a smart to do but i was like you know i had nothing nothing else to do most of them told me know some of them took be the time to explain to me why what i'm building doesn't make sense and a few looked at it seriously but then through the cap table and like we're like i'm not touching this it's too too much and i got two term sheets and and when you're building sandwiches is non consensus side or non consensus stressed it's it's how to find vessels because all of them like most investors with like we are we are investing in the outliers we are looking for something different but actually very few do that and and i was lucky to get term sheets from lf which is one of the top is israeli vcs and email which is another like awesome great vc and and they they eventually all fled around and emerged participated and they did around but before the round happened there was seven to eight months of restructuring because the term sheet the term sheet which was you know at the end the good thing but again i was i i had no idea what i was walking into and they require us to collect ninety five percent of the signatures in order to start a new company that to buy assets on the old company for equity in the new company nets sweet is a success story partner now what does a future hold for business if you ask nine experts you're gonna get ten answers bull market bear market rates are rising rates are falling honestly sometimes you just need a crystal ball but until we get one over forty two thousand businesses have future proof 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conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you unique what would be the advice that you'd tell a founder or who's going through something similar right now like how did you okay so this is obviously on the on the on the very opposite end of the spectrum but like i know founders that go through really bad business situations and something like i mean there's been stories that founders like committing suicide and like just it very very depressed or you know getting sick or destroying their relationships or like a variety of different things because of business stress so what's the advice on how to navigate something like this and keep your head and keep your relationships and keep your help so now gonna you know like do as i say not as i do because i i i did a pretty like lousy job in managing my own mental health at at that point when i think that if i had someone that i could talk to and either professional or maybe like sometimes the people don't understand you the most of founders that are you know like two of these steps ahead of you in the journey and so i have this net and so and now now i'm and now i'm even like building it even further and deeper and but my personal feeling some i'm not sure how how really it was i but that was my feeling i felt alone and and you know i i having an like an amazing wife and and a lot of friends and i have great team and c cofounder and but i think that they put myself in a situation in with i i could've have done a better job i didn't take care of myself and and and i'm still i'm still i'm still paying the price even though it it finished like i know eighteen months ago and and by the way i i i if if somebody is going through this kind like paid to player restructuring i'm happy to talk to i i always have time to talk to people who are going through that and this is the kind of difficulty that i felt so i'm happy to share my experience and so somebody like like people can feel free to like you know to we can leave my email yeah yeah nice try appreciate because i think that these are so tough conversations you know it's so cliche but it's very true like everything you want is on the other side of a tough conversation and these are all these are all pretty standard motivational ideas and if you listen to enough podcast or read enough books you're gonna hear these but when you're actually going through it it doesn't matter what you know or what you've read or what you've heard or even what you've been advised to do by your friend or your peer or your mentor it's just very difficult like sometimes it's it's just and you have to you have to build the courage to have difficult conversations now you were somewhat forced to but i think that you know even to your point you probably could have had these conversations earlier and it probably would have made things a little bit easier you probably could have had a tough conversation with your c cofounder founder and i'm just making assumptions but you probably could have a tough conversation with the c cofounder founder which would led a tough conversations with your investors even earlier which would have ironically made it a little bit easier but the longer you dried out the more difficult it's gonna get yeah i think i think this is this is a good advice almost anything don't don't sit on things and for for me that the the conversation with my c cofounder wasn't tough the situation was tough for us and the and and i mean our our first reaction was like let's save the company so the the lance investors were are like not willing to continue to do their own in venture building i which is to invest yeah so that lead to a lot of friction and a lot of pain and for everybody i i also understand how they felt going through this experience what would be the advice that you give when it comes to how how to raise money that maybe you would have done differently knowing that say this is a potential not ideal but potential outcome so this is a this is a again a place where you know like it's much easier said than none and people tell you find the right investor for you it's like finding like your wife or husband or whatever like you know you need you need to you need to see the world in the same way but when when things aren't amazing and and you're still believe in what you're doing and you're like you know you have like this conviction you'll take money from whoever is willing to give it to you and i think that think i think that going back we we've raised money from all kinds of people some of them turn out to be amazing like the best and and sometimes will be not that amazing but if you take me back if i wouldn't take that money i wouldn't be able to find the the the opportunity and to learn about the you know the the the the amazing opportunity that we have with with with sequence so if you can take the best investors you know but sometimes you can't you know it's like and so my my my my real advice here is to talk to people who waste money for those people and the companies didn't succeed and then maybe you will be able to learn would you take a different decision i to be honest i don't know because you said said okay i just need this five hundred k and then i can start building move forward so it's really easy to say and very hard to do i was more curious to take it a step deeper even more technically because you mentioned you raised two safe why was that a bad idea like from a from a a raising perspective because when when you have to do a down or when you have to do when there's like a pay to play or when you have to do restructuring then the people with the safe have much better terms than no other investors that's create inequality between the investors and also towards the founders because basically with the safe over the convertible note they they are they you owe them right they are they are like debit of the company so i'm not saying don't do safe at all but try to avoid them as much as much as you can especially if you already done one price round because then you're basically you're basically putting the new vessels in a much better conditions or or a much more favorable down in position when when the down comes and and you really need a great experienced patience and smart loyal yeah of course they've been through a couple of those don't use your friends cousin or your neighbors dot find somebody find somebody you who's done that and be ready to pay but it's worth because without our lawyer i don't think that we could have done that those people that made that were making your life miserable because they didn't want to accept the new terms what was the the final strategy you you mentioned you're not a good negotiator but you got the deal done so what eventually moved them over the finish line i think that they they they got to point in which understood that this is the best outcome there is no better outcome you they almost killed the deal they made the the lead investor very anxious and nervous and and even even even i talked about it before in previous podcast but he pulled the term sheet i woke up one day and and the investor who's like super smart and and and amazing investor i wake up i see like hey i'm sorry but i see that your current investors are not not seeing of the best best interest of the company and i'm putting the township sheet and i was like that's it real fucked the point invest nobody is doing me anything but he actually did it because he wanted to help me and unfortunately didn't tell me oh i understand so he was saying that if we if if if he pulls the term sheet then that means that those investors are shit out of luck they have nothing going forward and they're gonna lose their money but he didn't tell you this but he knew in his head this was like a psychological negotiating strategy he a he said i'm pulling the township sheet the don't is pulled and and then i went i obviously like you know i just remember like waking up in the morning seeing the this email and they're like fuck what i'm gonna tell my call that was the first thing that i was like that i was like but then we went back to the i i just took a screenshot sent to the investors and told them i think that i can still save this but you have to play along or else we are always we are all all getting zero that's smart smart on his part it's smart me in the process but it so things move forward you have this non consensus but correct idea with sequence so talk to me about just frame the problem but how did you validate how did you how did you get what was the word like radical conviction that sequence was a correct non consensus problem that actually could turn into a business i mean the we we try to come to this and it's something that is some sometimes very hard for men to do but we try to come as a humble as possible we came with like one of the important things that we told ourselves we know nothing let's see how people are how how people are actually reacting to to what we are building so it started with the landing page and the ads and ended up with hundred or a hundred and and and a few more that were we that paid only one only once we got to that point we started building because we've had a lot of experience with lance we started building fairly quickly we knew exactly what we were doing in terms of you know they infrastructure and everything very quickly very quickly we've launched you can't really call it call it an mvp because the like in in in when you move money around it can't you can't have something not working and you also need to get a put on the bank so you have to have the fdic in place you know so everybody needs to give you like the stamp so it you can't call an mvp people it was our first product to the market and it was closed just for the people who paid two hundred dollars and that was mid oh yeah like maybe q three q four of twenty twenty three when when when we launched the very first version version then we said okay we know nothing so let's so once we felt ready that the product was stable enough we said let's open to anyone who was willing to pay and then we moved from optimizing to conviction to optimizing to learning and also optimizing for learning it means that you need to increase friction so we said no free tier no free try no free nothing you want to use sequence you pay and it's still the case today taking a few steps back in lands when when we when we ask people to pay for what we for what we were doing nobody was willing to and said okay let's drop let's give it for free and that's because i you know it's like a bank nobody's is willing to pay for bank so let's let's give it for free which is always the wrong thing to do because basically what they told us is we don't see value in what you've built so we are not willing to pay so we've learned the lesson time and for seconds we said you have to pay and we opened as wide as we could we got anyone from you know pow tools all the way to like small but like you know like medium sized businesses and anything in between startups ups micro businesses freelancers gig worker side hustle and anyone that was willing to pay we've spent q and q just like you know getting people on boarded and once we read like around five or six hundred paying customers which was yeah exactly mid the twenty twenty four we we we started looking at the data and it was very very clear that the by far best users are are small business owners when i say small i mean like one to ten employees and we still didn't really understand why but we saw we saw the data and then if we shifted our marketing and really zoomed in on those on those people and then we went from like two hundred thousand dollars in arr we've seven that in like eight or nine months in the market mint is that is that the main competitor or i guess like sort of like a comparable because it meant they have millions of users but they've never figured out how to really make money move automatically and that's what sequence is doing so it's interesting the what is the actual problem that people have that you're solving debt for example mint doesn't solve because mint again like millions and millions so that would be like the incumbent that you're trying to displace to a degree well well no there are a bunch of like p right personal finance management tools they rocket money wine ne means is obviously the the the biggest and most famous one which does the like i mean they they closed it and but we actually start where they finish i am not into financial planning and into execution we see people take those tools bring them to sequence and execute right so i'm actually not competing with them because budgeting is again i don't know how to ten x anything down we've we've built something that is that is different and and sits in a different place we are we are an execution tool ma'am i like to think of sequences like a fitness app that goes to the gym for you right you set it up and and and and and we do the execution we we we we always put you in control you know what's going on you know where the money is going you see how you build what whatever it is that you wanna build either you know how to rep repay debts start saving stop investing yeah so explain i guess explain just is explain in super layman's terms like how the automations actually work because i was i was listening to some of your past content and you said that the average american has fifteen different financial accounts so like super fragmented so what is the actual problem like what is the workflow that i mean obviously different customers different workflows but when somebody the average pick the average pick the the the the the most common customer what are they actually doing with this but so maybe maybe just a just a the the the opportunity is a great question i mean what what what what we came to understand for working with our audience is that our financial stack both as consumers and smaller micro business owners went through a massive un bundling right the average american holds fifteen different holds money in fifteen different places and if you're a small business it's even more than that and it's very hard to follow where all that money is it's even harder to manage and it's almost impossible to make smart financial decisions in context and the the the and it's and it's getting worse the gap between the consumers and small business tunnels and all the different places in which managers keeps going because of open banking banking the service in embedded finance all of that there are more and more services more and more products more and more apps which are all great and what we do our strategy is to lean into the fragmentation we don't bundle and we don't un bundle we just make sense of at all we bring everything into one place we help our users harness all those amazing offerings i mean you can really build wealth through that and but we also bring everything to one place and we put them in control and the combination of just a little bit of intent some guidance and a lot of automation can change the trajectory of your life seriously we are seeing that i think that i think this is very useful because i even noticed like sometimes i'll find and i don't no this is like the perfect example but i'll find like a a paypal account over here that has a couple thousand dollars that i forgot even existed or is other i mean you know like maybe i'm also canadian too so i i have a canadian accounts and have american accounts and i have investment accounts in canada and i'm investment accounts in the us and i have a canadian crypto account in the us crypto account and i have two canadian or two canadian banks to america it's like it's all over the place it's actually chaotic it's absolutely chaotic so this is this is the solution for all of this absolutely it's not it's not it's not it's not only the solution to not lose two k on paypal but it's actually a way for you to make sure that every dollar that you have is put to the best use right and it helps you achieve your goals on autopilot and i mean we are seeing people that are i mean one one of the thing that i'm really passionate about is helping people get out of that and something that many many of our users do that doesn't mean that you are you know that you are aware i don't know if you don't have money at all some people that are that are high earners will still have student loans and a bunch of things like that so or credit card of stuff like that we we help them to automate and optimize the debt repayment which means that very quickly they are moving from repay debt into saving what's important for them or investing and making sure that they're making sure that they are you know that they are taking care of on their kids future of whatever whatever whatever is important for them their their older parents you know the or just living a life the the life that they want to live and that is very our company is very mission driven something that we really really really like believe that we can as i said before we are changing the chapter of people's lives chip station is a success story partner now last month i was looking for a new office chair online and there's tons of options but one review stuck out someone said they've been using it for two years working from home and their back pain was completely gone and that's what convinced me to buy it see if you run an online business you know customer reviews are everything and nothing gets you better reviews than fast accurate shipping i started using ship station thinking it was just for printing labels but it does so much more everything's in one place super easy to manage it automatically finds the cheapest shipping option across over two hundred carriers and saves you up to ninety percent on shipping costs the automation alone saves me ass hours every week there's a 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it's not just the great keynote you're gonna dive into breakout sessions where you can immediate implement what you learn and plus san francisco legendary startup ecosystem provides the perfect backdrop for networking with aldi these great entrepreneurs decision makers industry leaders peers who are actively shaping the future of business from september third to fifth at the mo center you're gonna be surrounded by forward thinking professionals who turn insights and ideas into breakthroughs don't just watch the future unfold be part of creating it visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today walk me through give me tell me a story about a customer and what sequence or automation they set as a people start to realize like how this could actually impact somebody's life so i think a good example would be we have a i think that maybe the best example will start with this describing our ic cp or our ideal customer and so our our ideal customer is a small business owner right and i say small business owners are not a small business because those people men they were many hats outside they manage both their business finances and or personal finances on sequence we have a guy that has the an amazing business of short term rentals and you as a family three kids and that's and that is business that's that's say you know that's that's say family like family business his wife is working with him as well they manage between thirty and forty apartments and they register the apartments on all platforms from booking airbnb those apartments are not there right most departments belong to other people and they're the ones are just it yeah yeah there's a lot of money movement is coming from different platforms for different departments for different owners that's the cleaners the security deposits they need to make sure that they are saving enough money putting stuff into marketing and paying themselves and taking care of their kids future and and saving other the vacation so it's not rocket science right but there's a lot of money moving and you need to be you can't you know you can't not pay an owner right so before sequence they used excel sheets and i i think that the guy told us that he was spending between three to five days a month just making sure that all the money is moving into the right place the right owners coming from the right for from the right platform putting aside for security deposits paying back the security deposits you know the so it's a mess right and with with sequence we bought it down to like an another and which is which which is which is amazing because it gives him our time to take on more apartments gross business he's taking care off you know all of his like you know it's like like the five twenty ninth for his kids we he started investing and we're actually now working on a series of of case studies that we're gonna that we're gonna share soon but it's pretty amazing to hear the stories and what people are actually achieving yeah no it bring it gives your life back and as a as an entrepreneur myself finances is one of the most annoying parts of a business it's it's just i mean i'm not like a everybody's a numbers person to some extent but not a most people don't enjoy it i think there's a certain kind of great person who enjoys numbers and they all become accountants but the rest of the world hates it it's boring it's tedious it's not fun right and and there's a lot that people feel nervous about it you know and it it makes you nervous and yeah well i just the other guy spoke with a guy who has was like a he has like a like a franchise business and he he has like a few like a a smooth stalls like we like i like six or seven and he said like like you guys have so much time and and and give me so much peace of mind because i know that i'm always back my employees on time that i have enough money in each sub account and it's just for me as as a as some as a one of the people who build this product it just makes you happy you know you wake up in the morning and you're you're you're are saying i'm building something that has a positive impact on the world and that's and that's that's that's what i always wanted to be build all my life now the very obvious question i think that if somebody listen do this important that you answer this because you're you're moving people's money around based on an algorithm so what's the safeguard so that something doesn't go off or something doesn't get transferred because then if it's all automatic it's if if somebody is using this properly that means that they're trusting sort of their financial management completely and that's stressful i mean i'm sure you you have these conversations all the time yes so first of all the for many years people talked about the the self driving money and and i can tell you that people like with hundred percent confidence people don't want self driving money they want help they want some automation but they really are not yeah they are not ready to hand you everything and say i'm not i'm not gonna look at it and i was the famous saying that the three most important things for for people is the their health their family and their money but it's not necessarily in that all anyway we are saying that people even when everything moves one hundred percent without them having to do anything they come back two three times a week to see what's going on right so you can you can fit you can configure the system in a way that some things you'd have to do manually so it won't go like automated just been to pass a button until you get more and more confident besides that again we are we have a custodial bank that is fdic insured and regulated we are regulated by proxy right so everything is like one hundred percent legit the way that it works is the we as a sequence we are not a bank so we can't touch the money the money is in in in thread bank our our our partner or australian bank that they have they you know heavily regulated like like any other bank so money can't get lost and then when when people are building the rules there are a lot of ways to make sure that that stuff like want like that you there's nothing that you don't want will happen you can build the guard in the in the software so you can say i want to always pay the full outstanding credit card the balance but never pay more than a thousand dollars or ten thousand order alright so you can always build those those guard and we have if somebody is interested and seeing how sequence works so obviously youtube but we have a crazy active community of amazing people on discord and any question some some people in the community knows the product better the night to be honest some of them are extremely smart and like just great people that we feel lucky to build with and for that's a smart play as a founder too building a community that's very smart that's such an underrated that's such an underrated asset that you've built i think the more founder should try to do that and i mean like we always talk about audience we talk about audience build audience not build community i can go on and on and on about it it's one of the things that i'm most passionate about i have all my life tried to build communities around things i was like we had some few like minor successes here with sequence that was the very first thing that i come that i immediately understood that can be like like can become like a can become like a moat around the business and and my take is that community product fit is much hard and product market fit and if and if you have a community and you see like early signs of community being created you have to do whatever you can in order to cultivate it and that and that's what we've done very successfully the hubspot podcast network is a success story partner now the house hubspot podcast network has great podcast like the ops authority if you are constantly putting out fires in your business 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little corner spot now they've got three locations they're selling online they've even added some food so what i love is that no matter which location i go to whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee i'm picking up lunch everything just works smoothly the ordering the payments the loyalty points it all syncs up perfectly and that is the power of square and honestly it's why keep going back every business has different goals and square the platform that supports them all whether you're opening new locations selling something new or expanding your reach i see it everywhere now the corner bagel shop that became the chain specialty markets managing thousands of items even my barber who takes appointments online square point of sale has the flexibility to run and grow your business exactly how you want so whether you're in retail running a restaurant offering services or you're just doing it all there's a square point of sale mode built specifically for what you need different settings for different parts of your business so you're always ready to make the sale go to square dot com slash go slash success story to learn more about how your business can grow with square that is s q u a r e dot com slash go slash success story if we look at if we look at sequence and already what it's enabling but we look at the future of bookkeeping and finance i'm assuming that you're already understanding how ai is gonna impact this and how ai is gonna so like realistically how far are we away from bookkeeper not being relevant anymore cfo i mean cfo is to a certain degree i mean cfo can play a bigger role if you're like going public or at that later stage maybe you want the experience but say like a very tactical cfo or very tactical bookkeeper or an accountant with sequence plus i'm assuming ai that you'll eventually roll out what is a future of finance bookkeeping small business finance look like so bookkeeping i think is i mean the the the the the the more like hand like you know like tedious swap that you need to do the the easier it is to to to replace you right so bookkeeper would definitely be worried and i think that it's the matter of like it's it's we are not far from there and cpa is and accountants and cfo can become strategic alright so that's a different story depends what kind of of an accountant or or cfo url and because those those people can become very strategic and that's far from replacing them but they will be able to do way more with much smaller teams right because all the like you know like putting numbers in and making sure that that you that you reconcile stuff that's gonna that's gonna be solved very you've already you've actually already almost solved it even without ai to a degree yes yes the the the problem that is we're there with the long day right so you need ai you need good ai to understand what what was that payment where that money went we i have to categorize it we are no it's got it's very close but it's not one it's not bullet bulletproof yet but again if i know ten years ago you needed temp a team of ten people and now one person can do it right so yeah so so so that's that and i think that our place in the wall world or sequences place in the world is to become the connective issue of of all those things we don't want to replace no player and we don't want we don't want to give loans we don't want to give credit cards we don't want to compete on interest rates we we have the connective tissue we are connecting our users to the best offer for them and we are using ai already now to analyze the customers to be able to give them the best offer specifically for them i can tell you hey scott i say that you have this aim am card if you move to discover you can you will be able to pay less of vice versa say and so really always on our mission to improve people's life through the financial well being and there's a lot to be done there and there's also a lot of money that you can make of course well because okay so i was gonna say like so we have open banking and better finance banking as a service there's all this un you're doing the re bundling you're doing you're you're being the connected network of all of these so i i but i'm not bundling right sorry not the connecting different yes correct those the famous like you can either bundle or hand bundle and we disagree we think that there's now or at least where we play and we are leaning into the fermentation we are leaning into the hand but we make sense of at all i don't want banding means that i will give you the cards i will give you the the loan i will give you the insurance i don't want to give you anything i want to make sure that you are getting the best offer out there because for me to compete against i don't know again we're like we know chase fargo it doesn't make sense you said that starbucks is one of the biggest banks in america because of stored value cards so what does this really tell us about where the future of banking is heading and i think that bank accounts as as a as an infrastructure is already a commodity and we are building on top of that that's where all the come in so i think that it will be i mean again like people have their money in starbucks right it's a bank by definition and we and and that's just one example i mean they're are like so many more and and uber is giving loans and like you know so so we are starting to see more and more and more companies that their core offering isn't financial services offering financial services and it's something that that that we don't not only that we that we can't stop we don't want to stop right it's great people have way more opportunities more options competition is good right and but there needs to be connective tissue and that's what we are willing if you look ten years out what do you think what do you think the future holds for finance and banking traditional banks all these other sort of un bundle products where you are in all of this i think that the big banks are not going anywhere they they have they they have a brand and and brand is there you know they're kind of the strongest things that you can have i think that they will need to find ways to to make to to give better service i think that the small and medium banks should be more worried and then we need to think of the strategies in order to stay relevant into the future yeah and i think that i think that the the the the problem of this massive fermentation is gonna go and it's it's again it's opportunity but also it also it also has its challenges and so so that that's why i think that there's huge opportunity we are very well positioned to to take advantage of it but maybe there will be other players that we come in if people wanna connect with you if they wanna learn more about sequence where should they go so my my most active on linkedin somebody linkedin perfect is fairly active and get sequence dot io o perfect that's our website you can see everything there i'm happy also to share our link to our this discord community which is again very active if you wanna ask questions about sequence talk to people that are using it at you are more than welcome so we can share the link to that too so just a couple questions because again so your entrepreneur you've failed publicly and then you succeeded but what is your framework or how do you think through extracting the maximum amount of learning from your failure so really thinking about what went wrong without letting it para you that's a that's actually a great question for me the more pressure the more feel and the more anxiety makes me do stuff i feel best when i have a plan and and i know what i'm going to do so for me being paradise was never an option and and i think that just get out there and do stuff try stuff build stuff and even if you even if you think that you know if you've been even if you all really trust and and in in a bad place with yourself just get out and do stuff do stuff that's the that's the best thing that that that that you can do a lot of startup culture it celebrates a lot of optimism which i don't hate but you really advocate for brutal honesty and truth and almost like removing a lot of the delusion about how successful you really are because that's what led to all the stressful times you had with lance so how do you maintain even your teams in morale when this world of brutal honesty and truth and not optimism well no i don't think that you can that it's one or the other right i mean you need to be you need to you need to get close to the tool as much as possible sometimes the that you're doing good and sometimes that things are you know i'm going all like down the drain right and the the important thing the the the most important resource that we have obviously is our time and if you are lying to yourself or faking stuff then you you you know you're like to yourself you're wasting your most important resource so try to think about it not like a sugar coating and order just like you have a limited time here make sure that you're putting your efforts and and your energy in a place that makes sense fake it you make it is one of the things that i hate the most why why do you hate it so much why is that wrong because it takes people into a journey in which they are ninety percent of the time faking it there's a mental toll that the that they are paying and and when i say faking it and i i i don't mean like if a cla customer you do you have that feature and then you say yes and you're go and build it and ship it next week that's not it that's making it that's true and but they wanna ask you all things are going and really we are crushing it it's amazing when you are when when you're obviously not or when you and when you are just like you say i have five thousand customers but you actually are five and that's very dangerous and and that's where things can become it so don't don't fake it right and i think that also for an entrepreneur i hate i i also don't like fake it till you make it but for some reason that seems to be a prevalent idea in entrepreneurship and and i think that having that lack of alignment between where you are what you publicly state you are like how well you're doing publicly versus how well you're you know you're doing in your head i think that just destroys people especially if you do it for a long time i agree i agree i agree that that's why i don't like it and and also like you i mean if you're gonna tell bullshit at the end people will know it right you can't hide everything all the time right if you think about some of the best advice because i'm sure you've had many mentors and and just friends over the course of your career and many of your companies what would be some of the best advice that you've ever received take money charge if if now is paying you're you're not getting something valuable i think this is this is key and then i would say that the last thing that i i love to ask because you have two daughters and obviously you wanna leave them with the best possible advice and set them up for success in the future so if you could take all the life lessons and wisdom that you've experienced over your life and you could only pass on one lesson to them what would that lesson be don't be afraid don't be afraid even even ever even if you think that something something happened at the end of the world it's not it's not it's a it's it's gonna be lay way less worse than you can get the take imagine so don't be afraid go for it it's claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problems sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link cloud dot ai slash success think big bi small is a success story partner now if you love hearing from bold entrepreneurs and leaders who carve their own path you'll definitely wanna check out think big bi small it's back for a brand new season it's one of my favorite shows think big by small is the chart topping entrepreneurship podcast from harvard business school the show explores an innovative approach to business leadership it's called acquisition entrepreneurship that's where you buy a profitable small business and then you become the ceo rather than trying to start a business from scratch if you need somewhere to start check at their season three debut episode with ensemble performing our ceo and harvard jeff hoe in the conversation you're gonna follow jeff's journey through the search process all the way through to building up a sizable business which is interesting because this all began as a passion project for him to don't miss out follow thing big by small and apple podcasts spotify or wherever you're listening now
67 Minutes listen 9/24/25
 Podcast episode image
➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Eric Siu, author of Leveling Up and advisor to brands like Amazon and Uber, shares the principles behind the power-ups that fueled his entrepreneurial journey. He explains why iteration often bea... ➡️ Like The Podcast? Leave A Rating: https://ratethispodcast.com/successstory In this "Lessons" episode, Eric Siu, author of Leveling Up and advisor to brands like Amazon and Uber, shares the principles behind the power-ups that fueled his entrepreneurial journey. He explains why iteration often beats originality, highlighting how borrowing ideas and improving them can spark breakthrough success. Eric also emphasizes the value of maintaining an apprentice mentality—staying humble, open to feedback, and always ready to learn from others. Finally, he underscores how endurance, mindset, and the ability to navigate setbacks are essential in building lasting results. ➡️ Show Links https://successstorypodcast.com YouTube: https://youtu.be/UeWMmc9AX84 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/eric-siu-ceo-of-single-grain-author-of-leveling-up/id1484783544 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0COftydJcQNbdNBHkpM7u3 ➡️ Watch the Podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/scottdclary
in this lesson episode explore how cultivating habits and mental models can serve as powerful tools for success discover why iteration often outperform the pursuit of pure originality understand how adopting an apprentice mentality foster growth and resilience and uncover how endurance and mindset shape the ability to navigate setbacks and achieve lasting results and let's break down some of the lessons that you've learned over your career that you speak about in this book and there's there's a few like there's i can't remember there's a what there's fifteen different chapters and there's a whole and there's like a lesson per chapter so let's you know for the value of people listening pick your favorite ones that you wanna that you wanna speak on i don't know which ones you'd like to touch on but i'm sure there's a few favorites that you love and we can go into those and unpack what those are and how those can help you succeed yeah totally so there's fifteen power ups in the book and power ups to me are again like i mentioned there either habits that you cultivate or mental models such as understanding things like second order consequences and things like that are different tools that you can go around collecting just like you would in the gaming world now i talk about fifteen in the book it's it's just the very beginning there's a lot more than fifteen power ups in the world and you have to there's positive power ups and there's negative power ups right you eat too much fast food than you know you you end up you know your body goes in a different direction right and so what one of the chapters is titled theory and i i think there's a cog there's a lot of cognitive dissonance around it because us as human beings who like to think i'm original right we we hold this thing to be very sacred and i think it's important to understand that even apple the most valuable company in the world you know when steve jobs came out with the mouse and the graphical user interface gets we stole it from stole it from xerox right and so he even him he said in life everything is just remix and when you think about spacex and and elon musk's rockets coming back back to earth the the the rocket design is still fundamentally the the same foundational design as from the the fifties or to sixties right the big difference is they come back to to to to earth and so you know picasso himself and said that you know everything in life back i mean great artist steal right and so it's like oh my god i don't wanna steal i don't wanna be a thief but like reality is those you listening to this podcast right now you're trying to get at least one nugget from it and you're trying to apply it to your life and so you life is just you're you're going around collecting all these nuggets and then maybe you're making a ten to thirty percent iteration right like that iteration for bringing the rocket back to earth that's a massive iteration right it's not easy to do by any means but he had to combine you know elon and his entire team had to think about okay you know how what are all the dynamics that are at play and how can we make this work right so there's a game within itself there so my point is you know i think the the sooner people let go of the pressure of having it be completely original the easier it's going to be for people to kind of move on and make make the the best version of themselves which is in itself you know very original we're all original we're all kind of one of one yeah and i would say that to constantly think that the things that we have to do in life or take to market or like let's let's look at it from an entrepreneurship blend if you want to if you wanna do something that's slightly outside of whatever your nine to five is or if you already are trying to take a product to market there's there's sort of two ways you can go about it right you can you can go for that that blue ocean where you're taking something to market that's never ever been done before or you can just iterate in an existing market and and be wildly successful so there's something to be said for not making life harder than it has to be for you either right and you'll still be successful you'll still be revered and you'll still be like you're not you're not like you said not fe in a bad way but just iterating all what people have already done and i think that's something that also probably lends a little bit of insight to your apprentice mentality learning from others as well it's not obviously in the same context it's not t but it's not like just learning and iterating but it's also making sure that you don't have to go through all the failures and that other people have already learned from right yep totally i i mean so it's you know the apprentice mentality is really just you know understanding that you're never gonna be too high on yourself or they're not never gonna be too low on yourself it's it's understanding that you know you can have strong views but you should just hold them very weekly and if you're presented it with new data new information to be be ready to adjust on the fly because the more ego that you that you develop the more the more you're gonna be stuck in your ways but the world's evolving so quickly especially with all the stuff we see with with technology monarch money is a success story partner now you know what's it's weird i'm doing well financially but i have this constant low level financial anxiety that i was missing something because i have crypto on all these different exchanges i have multiple investment accounts old four zero one k's saving scattered everywhere i knew the pieces were fine but i had no idea if the whole picture made sense i finally got monarch money to pull everything into one view and the first thing i noticed i had ten thousand dollars sitting in a temporary savings account from eight months ago when i sold some stock that's eight months ten thousand dollars it could have been workings instead have just waiting for me to remember it existed also it showed me that i was spending tons monthly on all these subscription services that i couldn't even remember i signed up for every sunday morning it takes me five minutes to check everything all my financial stuff in one place no more wondering no more anxiety the wall street journal just named it the best budgeting app of twenty twenty five but honestly it's more about finally having control so don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks use code success at monarch money dot com in your browser for half off your first year that's fifty percent off your first year at monarch money dot com with code success survey monkey is a success story partner now look we get it you can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about ai this or ai that and if you're like most people when it comes to ai you're impressed but you have a few concerns but what if ai was used not as a tool to replace people but as a way to help understand people better ai from survey monkey is designed to do just that i'm crafting the perfect survey which is harder than you might think to analysis that digs deep binds patterns and services trends quickly survey monkey powerful suite of ai capabilities makes it faster and easier than ever before to get insight from real people helping you make confident decisions for your business try today at survey monkey dot com slash scott incognito is a success story partner now have you ever wondered how all those scammers get your phone numbers all those tele marketers how you're always drowning in all these spam calls it's data brokers right now hundreds of companies are collecting and selling your personal information without your consent your address your phone number even your family members names to anyone is willing to pay and this puts you at risk of identity theft scams and harassment and that's where cog comes in they contact over two hundred and thirty data brokers on your behalf and legally force them to delete your personal information no more spending hundreds of hours doing it yourself in cog handles all the paperwork follows up on objections and keep your data off the market with repeated removal i've actually been using incognito myself it's scary and also incredible to see how much of my data was out there but they get rid of it they've got a thirty day money back guarantee you can try at risk free use my code success adding cog dot com slash success to get an exclusive sixty percent off their annual plans you have to take back control of your privacy today so it's so friend it's apprentice meant apprentice mentality i don't wanna get a twisted so it's not it's not just you going out towards and going finding mentors and getting people to help you out it's truly i understand what you're saying now so it's it's just having this this humble this humble persona that allows you to accept learnings from other people right it's more than just defining mentors okay okay i mean like you know when i so for example i've been hanging a lot in club house but when i when i go into the rooms you know i i try to listen and i try to be the the the idiot in the room right so when i approached things from an idiot kind of a or apprentice i'm not gonna say you know apprentice or idiots but like i'll i'll take it even further right i'll use an extreme word and say oh look i i'm not so smart i have a lot to learn but you know sometimes i'll see people join the room and there's a lot of bra there's a lot of eco and you can tell they're closed off to listening they're closed off to learning it's it's my way or the highway in some cases they might be large influencers and you know but you know they haven't learned to kind of maybe they might have had the apprentice mentality at one point but they haven't dialed it back and and and kept that habit going right they haven't cultivated or or more so refreshed that habit over and over yeah and and that i think that the most successful people at least the people that i found in my life that are the most successful that could be worth multi millions or billion dollar plus in total net worth those are the people like when you do speak to them when they constantly have successes and wins you can see that the second they they implant themselves into into a group they they immediately just like they just want as much information as possible and i think the people you're speaking about think it's probably a little bit more for prolific on club house just because if if club house in some of the rooms not all of them on on some of them and i know you're like i watch all your stuff i follow you on social you're always on club always speaking about club i think that there's a lot of people that kinda flex on club a little bit more than they should and that doesn't help anybody right you know it's not gonna it's not gonna help but i think they put a ceiling on their success a hundred percent because i mean yeah i love sharing the numbers right you know when when i in club but i don't do it to flex and i always try to preface like this is not to brag this is just saying hey this is what's possible but it also takes this amount of time to get there so i i come from a position of trying to be transparent but teaching as well but i think to your point when you're just flexing about oh you have you know you bought this company this this public brand over here and then you you you took this company public or whatever you know how helpful is that really or are you just is that more ego than anything like how helpful is that generally yeah not gonna help many people who who wanna do something more with their life or you know start side hustle so like they're not most people are not trying to take a company public most people are just trying to do better at what they're doing right they you know maybe ipo is a plan for some but i think the majority of people would learn more from a chat with than somebody who just lists off the companies taking public or you know the the success they've achieved is great it provides credibility but it doesn't actually offer tactical or tangible insight or lessen if somebody can take away right like you mentioned that nugget people listen to they wanna a nugget want them they can take away and they can do tomorrow really if you just keep flexing it's not gonna help anybody and i think that that's something that those are you know it's almost like those are the people even if they have had success i i prefer not to learn from them just because i know that where their heads at where their minds at is not in the place where they're going to accept other points of view accept other opinions and actually it's funny because you see people that were a wildly wildly successful you know the monet momentarily successful what otherwise and over the past twenty years they become irrelevant right those are the people that just they they had success and they became completely irrelevant because i think they never had this i've never heard of frame this way but apprentice mentality or that's a very very very smart point now these are these these level ups these these power ups are these mindset or are some of them like actual behavioral items or like daily routine items that you can that you can do to sort of accomplish that one percent day over day yeah some of it is is mindset so we have one on endurance right so that's really you know how much pain can you take because any level of six you're hoping to achieve you know pain is a prerequisite right i i think people tend to run away from the pain but framing your mind into running towards it and getting through it right you know there's a lot of people like when you're thinking about starting the new business or or or whatever that's you know you go through impostor syndrome that's part of you have to endure that there's the start up the the startup kind of you know that that one or two or three years that it takes to get things going right just things don't work out the right way initially things don't go as planned maybe some type of pandemic hits like just things don't work out right but it's you have to learn to endure and so i i learned a lot of that from from poker having to endure like sometimes you have swings where you lose for could be three six twelve months at a time and you just have to learn to deal with it and then be patient and and choose how you how you react to that right so some of its mindset some of it would be you know habits but you know it's what they say the the the cliche you hear over and over is you know oh it's all about mindset at the end of the day you hear from a lot of kind of self development april and it's it's actually true it's it's it's how you're programmed at the end of the day that's how i like to think of it you know what type of information are you are you consuming and that's really gonna program you that's gonna guide you who you hanging out with right that is your programming and that's gonna say how you take you decide to do things in the future thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you wanna dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one claude is a success story partner now as a podcast my worst nightmare used to be going into an interview under prepared now claude has completely changed my prep game and if you don't know what claude is claude is the ai for mines that don't stop at good enough it is the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you not for you whether or not you're debugging code at midnight or you're strat your next business move claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter i feed claude my guest articles before i do a podcast i feed it their company updates past interviews and it helps me spot the angles that nobody else is talking about last week claude research capabilities pulled together insights from over thirty sources about my guests industry and it helped me ask questions that always make them say great question nobody's ever asked me that before claude is by far the most useful tool to grow any business any podcast and really just help you extend your thinking on whatever it is you're working on if you're ready to tackle bigger problems sign up for claude today and get fifty percent off quad pro when you use my link claude dot ai slash success sports injuries test you your mind your body and spirit others transform you elevating you to a stronger bull or version of yourself at summit orthopedic our experts are prepared for both for every challenge for every comeback because you deserve nothing less than the best live life at your summit with summit orthopedic summit ortho dot com
12 Minutes listen 9/23/25

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