Success Story with Scott D. Clary

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 you said the most creative people are children who survive in childhood and we're taught to follow a very specific path in life and that all the individuality all the quirk ness gets beaten out of us we learn how to go along to get along what if design could change everything not just how we see the world but how we live in chris do started with a simple idea use creativity to unlock real value i think humans are hardwired to be social animals you can feel very lonely very depressing to feel no one understands you no one gets you so we go that path entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart there's all kinds of things baked into entrepreneurship but it seems awesome to be able to have that to be a massive your own time but the reality is it's fraught with risk safe is risky and risky is safe and only so much you can do to remove the risk but entrepreneurship from teaching design to building an empire that shapes the future of branding and business education his work has touched millions turning art into action ideas into impact but it wasn't always clear there were moments of doubt struggles that tested his purpose a relentless pursuit of clarity in a noisy world pricing is positioning has a higher price has a perceived higher value personal branding is not what you do it's who you are and drooling into who you're are selecting that into the world in the most un var real and raw authentic way that you can so very few people can actually do that i wanna unpack one of your ideas just to kick this off so you said the most creative people are children who've survived so explain what that idea means yeah i think the thing is in in childhood and we're taught to follow a very specific path in life and that all the individuality all the quirk ness gets beaten out of us in one way or the other we learn how to go along to get along it's if you remember back into your early primary school days the the kid who was like painting and getting stuff on his face was that the out cast and that was shunned and and kind of left to be alone and and it can be a very sad place to be and we're pretty quick to pick up on these social cues and we're socialize to to learn how to create a persona so that we can get along and be accepted within culture and society because i think humans are hardwired most of us are hardwired to be social animals and so it could feel very lonely very depressing to feel that no one understands you no one gets you so we go that path and so the creative people are the mis fits who didn't see that or could not follow along despite their best efforts and and it survive through adulthood to to kind of retain that curiosity the the ability to continue to ask what if and try weird things and to live in their imagination when you look at those people that have survived childhood what allowed them to survive what allowed them to step outside of traditional school education framework society and maintain that creativity which obviously serves them very well in adulthood i think there's a term that brian collins has been using that i like a lot it's this they're gifted mis fits they can't follow the plan for whatever reason when the instructors said raise your hand first they didn't raise their hand or color inside the box they just couldn't do it for whatever reason maybe they're no diver or they're diver thinkers and and they see multitudes or or multiple possible options for the future and they like to explore that i'll give you an example so in world civilization i think i'm in junior high john stein beck middle school mister thompson was always talking about things and he's a very engaging speaker and he would teach us about world history and civilizations but i was constantly just doo characters in my notebook i was listening but i was doo and mister thompson and thank god for him because he allowed me to express myself in the way that i wanted to and knowing very well if he asked a question i wasn't day i wasn't not not paying attention i was very much paying attention i just happened to find some activity for my right hand to do and it was funny because there was a a woman next to me a a a girl and and her name is heather and heather like how can you giving me a hard time when he's drawing all the time he goes watch i'll ask him a question he no the answer and you won't that's the difference and so i think we have a couple of people who see something in us who who are our champions whether they explicitly say it to us or not they're rooting for us to succeed and they give us just enough space to explore our creative side and sometimes it's apparent or a sibling and i've had a lot of that in my life my mom would buy me an airbrush and a compressor because she saw me staring at the people at the fair airbrush names on t shirts and she just knew there was something there my older brother got me a credit card to help me start my first business and he just encouraged everything that i did like in metal shop i would build wire sculptures and you go that's really neat piece of art i'm like that's not art just some junk i made is there a way to architect architect creativity or if you've not had that support growing up and you find yourself in a nine to five job and you're listening to this podcast and you consume like the future and you consume your content in your show in your youtube channel like damn like i want to break out of what i know i wanna be creative i wanna be a builder but this is not the environment i came from so i don't wanna just throw in the towel how do you architect creativity very good question scott i like that question very much i feel like there's a frequency that's being transmitted that only some people can hear i suspect that anybody who's watching this on our channel or your channel listening to on a podcast they're already tuning themselves in to hear this so maybe we don't need so much to reverse engineer architect so much as to give them permission to explore this other side that they've repressed for a really long time there's this itch and it's been sitting there and they know it and they followed someone else's game plan on how to live a successful life they went to the proper school study the proper subject and got the grades and the diplomas to prove it and then they're in this grind and they're just sitting there thinking and day is there more to it i find some parallels to to the matrix and the matrix is one of my favorite films of all time probably the top film of all time for me and in it the character the main character neo knows in his heart and his soul there's something more to this but he can't quite put his finger on it and so when he gets his message on his on his tell his screen his terminal it says something follow the white rabbit and that's all it is it's not very clear what that means and some people are encourage him to go to a party or something he doesn't want to go but when she turns around there's like a little rabbit tattoo on her back or something and he follows the rabbit and so maybe they're listening to this and saying is this my moment and it might not be the moment for you but i suspect it is and if you're listening to this you're already picking up on the frequency now i wanna provide a broader definition of what it means to be designer or creative person so that you're not thinking oh i don't draw i don't paint and i don't sing i don't play music i'm i'm excluded from this conversation in his book the brand gap marty knew my quotes herbert simon i think is name who's a nobel lau on his definition of what a a designer is and if i can remember correctly it's something like this a designer is one who devi courses of action to go from a an existing condition or situation to preferred one and i really like that that means the world is the way it is and we seek to improve it in small or big ways and anyone who does that is a designer you i mean you've gone you've gone out and you sort of stated that your current season of your life or your current version of yourself started at a later age you started at forty two when you started creating content did you consider yourself a creative before that or was this like this was there some sort of inflection point that pushed you down this this path that you're on right now i gave myself permission to be a creative person i think in senior year in high school i i'd always been drawing making things thinking about building businesses and and building them and failed spectacularly and it wasn't until i met a real life graphic designer when i was eighteen years old that i thought this can be a possible career path for me and so i think this is a very important thing to share with people until we see someone that we can relate to doing the thing that is that we what we want to do we don't allow ourselves to dream that hard and that's the sad part of like real life so when i meet this real life graphic designer working in his home studio his name is dean walker has the early macintosh five twelve k you know monochrome monitor and he's doing professional design work with his mouse and hands i was like this is so cool i i've seen this on tv but i have not met anyone who does this you know all we see are like mac paint and like really rudimentary illustration tools which didn't interest me at all but here he was drawing letter forms and building complete logo systems and i was thinking this is really really cool i knew then and there that i was a creative person i mean always knew but didn't give my myself permission to do that and it's very easy to spot if you ask people who are listening to this podcast are watching this retrace back into your childhood the fond memories that you have they're almost always run play and imagination whether you put on a costume and pretended to act out a scene you built a fort you might have a designed a a go kart or a soap box derby thing there's something that you did and i brought joy to your heart and then you were told that's not a serious thing that's play and we have to work now and you put those things away and just just try to recall those moments those are clues as to who you're supposed to be before that idea or dream was snuff out so i already knew that that you know at an early age i a creative person but not i didn't allow myself to pursue it on a professional level first of all i want your story to be a less of people that are later on in their career obviously saying that's a very important message because i think that those people feel pigeon hold and stuck in what they're doing especially when they've been doing it since they were twenty so i think that's a great story that i want you to talk about but what was that thing that gave you the permission to do this radical shift for context so from about two thousand to two thousand and eighteen i i worked and studied as a professional graphic designer i went to a a prestigious art and design school i got my degree design i started work in commercials and music videos and that's where i stayed for almost twenty five years something significant happened in two thousand and fourteen that would change the course of my life so i'm met there's a couple of things i have to mention okay because they're kind of important for people to understand and unpack number one i had been working pretty much solidly as an entrepreneur for twenty some odd years nineteen ninety five when i started my company and so that's almost twenty years at that point i think and i've built up enough financial reserves such that i started to think about what i wanna do with the rest of my life it's not a mid midlife crisis but it's when we remove the need to make money it start we start to ask ourselves who am i supposed to be in this world and it was a confluence a couple different things happening within close proximity in terms of a timeline that got me to shift in a very different direction i'm teaching our arts center i'm teaching sequential design and my wife is hanging out with me and she's a designer too and in class she's she's kind of asking me this question which is i think you were destined to do more and to be more that your genius needs to be shared with more than just eight students at a time private arts school very small classroom good student to teacher ratio and i was like shoot how do i do this because i felt that i needed the institution i needed their their enrollment process i needed the curriculum i needed the credentials i needed all these things and i didn't have an answer for it but just like less than six months later i get reintroduced an old friend from arts art school his name is jose cabal and we're meeting at like the aig boardroom talking about the future of design and and i was asking him questions about web design and that began a chain of events that led us to this conclusion that we're both very passionate about education he was already teaching using youtube and i was teaching like in brick and mortar schools and he was challenging me why don't we make content together and at first i rejected the idea i thought that only pretend near to do wells people who don't have any real skill get onto to youtube and babylon on about things that don't only think about because that's kinda how the landscape is back in two thousand fourteen right right and some things have not changed too but now you see lawyer you see therapists you see people with yes people that really do know what they're degrees and people who are serious entrepreneurs creating content on youtube people who've exited out of companies for a hundred million dollars doing content on youtube because they see the opportunity but back then it was kind of dark but he insisted i do this and he gave me a very generous offer that one that it could not refuse and so i started making content it took a couple years for it to click for me like this is gonna work there's zero business here and allowed me to transition from doing client service work to doing just pure content and education and that's what i've been doing for the last i guess ten years now do you think that that is the ideal version of entrepreneurship where you build up the safety net so you can or should so you can take more risk or should people maybe work a nine to five not have complete financial safety but start to build that at a much younger age agent well if you could just give somebody the perfect playbook for der risked and highest chance of success entrepreneurship what would that look like i'm gonna say things that may be controversial so if i say him you wanna push back i i encourage you to entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart there's all kinds of things baked into entrepreneurship there's the side that people share about like being your own boss having your own ability to to write your future so to speak and to to make the money and manage people and it seems awesome to be able to have that to to be a master of your own time but the reality is it's fraught with risk and entrepreneurship is risk and it's risky to to to be able to do that but there's an admin who said safe is risky and risky is safe so if you want to go the safe route you're gonna have a very predictable job but those jobs can go away and you're kind of at the whim of whatever corporations want to do with your life and so that's problematic right they downsize they merge they sell they they go in a bad management spiral and you're kinda of just stuck and you don't know want us to do so we'll let people know there's only so much you can do to remove the risk about entrepreneurship because entrepreneurship rewards people who want to take risk i think that's a great thing about america which is where capitalist society and we reward people with with patents and ip things that they can trademark or copyright we give them special tax incentives so that they can build businesses because they know that pretty high percentage of failure and i think if that sounds like you then you might consider this but i don't think i can make you like more risk tolerant people are ave avert to risk or people are tolerant to risk i'll give you an example my wife is very risk ave verse she doesn't wanna take risk she wants to have a very stable life especially as we're kinda getting up there in years she doesn't want this and i get that but i thrive in the kind of pool of stress and and on the unknowns and i think that's the first sign you know you're right for entrepreneurship number two is to realize this one thing which is your life is relatively short for the moment in which you're born you're counting down the days in which you're going to expire either by natural causes or unnatural causes you're going to die and if you come to that that realization if you get one spin at this one play why not make the play the biggest bold thing that you can do in your lifetime so that it fills you with joy and it gives your life meaning and purpose because i know no one sits there and wakes up one day and it's like my big dream is to work nine to five helping you contribute to somebody else's as wealth when you look at first time entrepreneurs you speak about this a lot and i think this is one of your your most viral posts it's about pricing it's about it's about what you should charge and what you are worth i think there was something like sixty four million views on this one post but the the the concept of starving artist of solo of not charging enough is a very hot topic because i think that for first time entrepreneurs it's it's very nerve wracking to ask somebody for money and ask somebody for a lot of money i think that i think that we you generally default to impostor syndrome and not asking for enough so maybe just walk me through some of the some of the arguments you make for charging more for knowing your worth for knowing your value and maybe even talk through it in terms of like a timeline of as you're building out your solo venture like do you adopt these ideas of charging premium in month one or is it like this is this like a month twelve or or year two conversation okay gonna make some analog if i get lost amount analogy pull me back okay i just wave at me like y we don't know what the heck you're talking about by anymore alright here's the how i wanna look at this i don't know if you ever played to gain battleship a battleship where there's a little screen you kind of what you do in battleship is you don't try to just sync the battleship you you do something called range finding you you put a couple like targets on the board and you kind of eliminate whole areas of where the battleship can't be and if you're out in the field maybe before computers and and ai assistant weaponry was was available you'd fire a shot like a catapult right t and you'd fire shot you're like okay that was way too far and then you fire the next one you don't just make small movements there you'll then go really short so you know somewhere between those two markings is where you're going to hit and based on that the third shot will keep you really close now what some people do is they just fire shot and i go get that didn't work and they just do wild things there's no strategy for it and i want you to think of your value as a game and the pricing is a game so we don't know where the target's is going to be so what people tend to do is they say okay what did jimmy or mary make on that job they're like okay it's thirty bucks an hour well based on their portfolio i'm not as good as them or not as fast as experiences them so i'll do twenty five so we compare to that benchmark but we're using pretty bad data because how do we know that mary or bob put in the good price to begin with and then we start to adjust ever so slightly well we'll do twenty six dollars and would do twenty eight dollars and we slowly work our way up after years of working saying now i feel like i'm ready to charge with bob and mary charge my game is i know that what i do is good because i put in the time and work when i was in school and i knew where i stood relative to my my my my classmates so when i went on to the professional world i started putting out a price and they said yes and that that got me to think well is at the ceiling because i always want some tension in the conversation i generally avoid tension but in the pricing game i love to have tension so i wanna raise that price again and see like what they say to to the next client or to the same client because i know whatever they paid me to do i'm gonna do a better job i create more value than what i charge and i always know that i'm on the right side of that equation because in my mind even at that time there's no amount that you could pay me where i wouldn't work harder to earn that business and make you feel good about it right and if you don't feel good we don't ever have to work together again and that'll be a bad mark on me and i know that and a lot of creative people feel this way so i just keep asking for more money until they start to say no but i don't stop there i'm like why did they say no this time i wonder why because the perception of the value i've created in the in the prospects of the client's mind doesn't exceed the pain at cost for them to give me that money good news is if you sell to affluent buyers people have serious problems their pain threshold is very high relative to the price they're willing to pay to get rid of that problem let's put in a different context now if you're in a boat and the boat is sinking and you're out at scene and you don't know to swim and you have a family a four in there and you're gonna perish anybody who pulls up to you who offers you a a emergency vessel or life jackets or a beacon or instant repair to your boat you will pay just about anything because it's worth a lot to you but the problem is the person who pulls up on that boat to save you and your family of four they're like well it only costs this much materials in this much time and they're pricing based on what it cost them versus the value to you now that might not be a very good analogy because you know now you're charging money to save people's lives and so maybe that's a bad analogy but i think i've made the point there so what you do then you use is you need to understand the other person has a pain point can afford this and it would give them pleasure to give you money to make that problem go away we don't want to deny them the that process of figuring out what the value is to them and so that's why i i just kept playing the game so i went from doing probably two hundred fifty dollars a day which is about thirty dollars an hour for an eight hour day to three hundred to four hundred to six hundred to eight hundred and i was starting to feel like i'm heating a ceiling here so in my mind it wasn't there was a problem it was just the problem to solve was how do i create greater perceived value what i do who do i need to sell to such that they would see the value what it is that i do and kept finding more buyers for the work so here's the first lesson pricing is positioning whenever we look at comparable objects anything it has a higher price has a perceived higher value that's the bottom line so if we look at t shirts we look at sneakers we look at cars i'll give you the example i'm really into limited drops sneakers and i'm not talking about air force ones which everybody knows about i'm talking about like they're like these weird ones that come out that no one seems to like but there's only so many of that are made and was late to the you got like a text when they drop i and i was i'm got i'm too late to the game it's like there it's an eight year old shoe and i'm shoot i really want that shoe and i'm trying to figure out what the price point to that is and the value it is to me right so when i see a sneaker that's six seven eight hundred dollars and that's a way above retail i'm like that's the real one and then because of targeting somebody sends me not somebody like some company starts target means says oh you want that limited edition shoe ours is a hundred and fifty my media thought is that's a fake because i know the market price everywhere i've looked it's between six to eight hundred dollars so one that comes in hundred and fifty and sure enough when i dig into the details they don't use the brand's name they say like that kind of shoe so they get all the seo stuff but they can say it's that same shoe and i like many people don't wanna buy a knock off because buying a knock says something about me and my values i'm not a counterfeit buyer i don't wanna support counterfeit companies so pricing is positioning so many of you if you want better clients what you have to do is you have to charge more because you're gonna attract a different kind of buyer one who has a bigger problem one who thinks whatever it is that you do is the solution to something that they feel is urgent to solve quick question what's your go to when you got ten minutes before a meeting or a workout for me it just used to be whatever i could grab which usually meant skipping meals entirely or just grabbing something that left me crashing an hour later because it was just full of garbage that's why i'm partnering with fuel this black edition ready to drink is a complete meal so it has thirty five grams of protein six grams of fiber thirty five 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hiring do it the right way with indeed why do you think because when you say it makes so much sense common sense is never common that's sort of like my my my rule that i live by but again so i was just looking at my notes sixty four million views on this one particular topic why do you think this is such a viral topic why do you think that people have such a a hard time with this when it seems like it should be yes charge more it makes sense if they say no then figure out why they're saying no i think that video has the most views because there are two sides this argument and whenever you can find that whenever you can find something that both sides will argue on i think you get a video that gets a lot of views because if we all agreed we're like well that's a planet to we all think breathing is necessary and love is good in the world and kindness right so if you make videos about generosity and kindness and love you get some views but there hardly anybody who's gonna say well that's a terrible idea so where we get a lot of views on this is we touched a nerve so for all the creative and and i'm talking about now it's expanded way beyond graphic designers and people make logos i have people who work at airports who see that video who served behind kitchen counters at fast casual restaurants or people who do plumbing and tile or electrical work saying i'll watch your video that changed the gain for me so what i'm doing is i'm giving them a logical argument about why charging based on time time based pricing punishes you for being good for being efficient and for being experienced because you could do a job two three four five times faster and better than some rookie and if the rookie you were to charge similar hourly rates and they would make more money so you're being punished for your efficiency and for being good conversely there's other people who take the other side which is you're just an idiot trying to raise prices on people with no foundation i have no idea what i'm talking about because this is not how it works in the real world based on their experience so you're getting both sides coming at this from the side of the buyer and the seller arguing with each other and myself included saying either i don't know what i'm talking about or chris preach and that's why that video has so many views so it's interesting and it it it's funny that people say this isn't how the real world works because i've in past companies i think i spent about fifty grand for a a powerpoint from from deloitte or see so that would be cheap this world definitely does work like this yeah and that is a cheap powerpoint point that was a for a pre revenue company that was the most willing to spend for your revenue but i mean there's endless amounts that you can charge if you if you can find a way to quantify the value if you look at even i mean we can sort of talk about content for a second i know that you actually i don't talk about content yet at the fun you could talk about it a lot but i was listening to a couple of other podcast podcasts you're on and i and i liked the disposition that you took so on on brand and personal brand so everybody's trying to build a personal brand and i think you're talking to eric sue if i'm not mistaken about this and your position was are you really building a personal brand and a lot of people that think they have brands do not have brand so please explain that to me because i love these spiky points of view that you don't hear a lot and i think that's something that hopefully people that are listening to this audience again there's entrepreneurs in the audience there's entrepreneurs that are still trying to build but ultimately i think what's ironic is even though i don't think people should just build a personal brand just to have it i think that's a vanity metric they're chasing the biggest question i get is how do i grow my instagram audience which i actually find to be the most useful measure a useless measure of my success excuse me like i mean it doesn't actually benefit me to any significant degree downloads from the podcast don't come from instagram i can grow in instagram but if you're talking about where i monetize my actual brand and my actual audience it's not on instagram so for me it's silly that people wanna do this but i get that people are just trying to chase fame or followers or vanity whatever talk to me about per talk to me about personal bread there's atlanta unpack here so i just made some notes here i i think we need to get into a spirit conversation so here's a warning for everybody it's gonna get a little spicy okay you might feel triggered or called out in this conversation and scott i'm gonna have to rely on you to represent the side of the scene because i'm gonna go insane in the membrane right now deal deal first the words words matter we have to agree that words matter and the definitions of words and having a common shared definition of words do matter too because otherwise anybody can use any word to mean something other than what it really means and when we talk about brand brand has become an elevated term and it's become so popular in the creative culture that people misuse that word so much so there are people who design logos and say well i'm i i do branding no you design a logo well i design an identity system no you're an identity system designer the the people who can legitimate claim that are doing branding or brand design are the people who understand the entirety of the company culture the mission division the purpose understand its customers their wants a needs and develop a complete three hundred sixty degree approach to communicating and sharing an experience with their customers so that doesn't sound like a whole lot of people but because they feel den that they're calling themselves a local designer they start to call themselves a branding expert which they're not and this is not to diminish the value of a really great mark i will pay a lot of money for people who understand how to design a great local type or word mark or a combination mark or something like that or symbol because there's not that many people who can do a really great logo but there's this false connection that if you make a mark or if there you pick colors then you're doing branding because branding is much bigger than that so if we look at the entire customer experience around branding then we start to get a sense of what it means so marty new already done a great job of this he defines brand in his books multiple books brand has a gut feeling a person's gut feeling about a product service organization and it's a feeling so the feeling is generated through a lot of different touch points and it can come from how you greeted at the door how they respond to a customer service problem to the very smallest details of the packaging experience apple does it on levels way above everyone else if you've ever purchased an apple product the entire experience from walking into the store to leaving is unlike most experiences that you've had anywhere else they've been doing this for decades yet companies still cannot copy the the experience that one has right can i add one thing to that just so you to to understand how detailed apple is in their overall brand experience if you hold up any of their phone boxes they've timed the friction on their phone box so it takes only so many seconds for that phone to open on its own so every time that you pull up a phone from like the counter or whatever and you're just holding that box it'll take i can't remember how long it is it could be three seconds or four seconds but every single box will open at the exact same moment that's the exact amount of friction that they put between the upper portion of the box and the lower portion of the box so the the the attention to detail it that's like a master class and and brand even the way that you pull one little tab and the whole plastic thing comes off because those are points of frustration for most products when you get them like you gotta get a knife in there you get a dig out or tearing away with your teeth sometimes they just fall out and it feels like whoa i could have broken that or it just there's too much friction like now it can't get it out and it's making me really angry so the the level of detail that they pay attention to is incredible and and that's what we talk about when we talk about branding okay so now we move away from branding to personal branding and there's some differences here so we still understand as a person's got feeling it's about the entire experience and there are many definitions of branding like people will say it's a person's what what they say about you when you you're out in the room it's a reputation but sometimes i think those things are a little too red productive and i i prefer to to use the definition from people who spend a lifetime developing brands okay now a corporate brand is very different than a personal brand and that a corporate brand is the culmination of a lot of different people's opinions and ideas it's it's kind of doesn't represent a person it represents the entire culture of a company although one person starts it it grows way beyond that in terms of like how it exists today so steve jobs and steve was started apple in the cup latino garage but neither of them are connected to this company more but apple yet still has a very strong brand the problem with this is there's a whole group of people from copywriter strategist art directors designers legal department hr kind of filtering out the experience for people and so it becomes an ama proclamation of a lot of different inputs and we know that anything designed by committee is not the sharpest thing it's because it's the lowest common denominator versus the one outlier if you contrast it with a personal brand a personal brand is representative of exactly one person you or me scott or chris and here's the problem and this ties back to where this conversation began if we've been socialize to create a persona to get along we've created a alternate version of ourselves that we have lived in this suit for so long that we forgot what our individual voice point of view is and we're are also fearful that if we really say what it is that we think that we will get hashtag canceled that people will find what our thoughts are so repulsive that they'll shut us down and it'll eliminate future opportunities for us for work for clients for partners and i i was listening to this one program where there's two people went on a first date and she's like i'm i'm never going out with him again why is that or because he's a x supporter some some president emotional candidate and that was enough for her to say i'm not interested in you so that's why we have good reason to be scared so what is happening is you have a lot of people out there who they'd have this personal brand but what they're putting out there is not a reflection of their real true identity they're not really being authentic they're they're they're manic or c all the things around in their lives like they go to one nice hotel and like this is my life they rent a car and like this is my car they they hire models and say these are who i'm dating you know and it's all manufactured and fabricated that's one type of personal brand the other type of personal brand which i'm not for either is what people are using to get clients okay so they look at personal branding as a form of marketing and advertising to talk about what they do the kinds of benefits or features or outcomes that they're able to create for other people again none of that is about who you are as a person so for me and i i think i'm a alone minority in this world when i talk a personal brand personal branding is not what you do it's who you are and drilling into who you are reflecting that into the world in the most un var real and raw authentic way that you can so very few people can actually do that the first the first i can never get on board with i can't get on board with renting cars or renting models to pretend to be their girlfriend or or renting a private jet and saying that you own it like that's just ridiculous the second i understand what they're trying to accomplish you're trying to build a business and they're not trying to do it malicious they're just trying to figure out okay how do i use my insight of my experience to sell a product or service that i'm fully qualified to sell and i feel like if i'm injecting like my political views into this it's only gonna hurt me it's not gonna accomplish a net positive so let's focus on that second person because i think there's a lot more i would hope there's a lot more of that second person listening to this podcast and the person who's renting models and and posting them on instagram so the person who's trying to achieve an actual business objective through their content and they that's what they speak about and they don't bring their whole self into it what's the advice for them because i don't think they're doing anything wrong just don't think they know how else to act because they're scared of hurting their income so let's let's try and unpack that first of all i gave extreme examples of like the fake persona but if you dial that back to like how people really show up for example filters on their face you know only one corner of the house looks imma and everything else looks like a total pig style right and so we do these things we curate all the time and it's natural for us to do some of that to the extent of which you can start to say that's fake a f right now here's the problem in corporations the way we go get new business is we do something called marketing advertising and public relations but we don't call that personal branding so if you act like a corporation we just gotta call a duck a duck there's not personal brand building it's just another tool for you to get clients and that's why corporations don't talk about politics or strong points of view because they have to toe that middle line they run it through hr and strategy and copywriting and legal and they figure out what we need to say to get more customers but no one wakes up and says oh i just love that corporate face list entity they might like their products or how it makes them feel right like unfortunately the most of these fashion houses the person who who originated or or or created that brand in the first place we're no longer connected they've been outfit from their own company so when we say we love gucci it's like no one from the gucci family is actually associated with gucci anymore if you believe the film right now here's what's happening corporations are trying to be more personal my friend y santos sent says people don't fall love with corporations they fall in love with personality so they're trying to act like a person here's the ironic twist to all of this people are trying to act more like corporations which is really weird so you guys just wanna meet in the middle and have a weird party that's cool you guys go do that right so i think it's important what when you have a business brand for you do exactly what you're talking about you you you don't say too many inflammatory things you're not polarizing and you're very careful with what you produce no one really connects with that content except for clients which i understand you write case studies and you do p releases about some cool project you've worked on and you're very careful like you reread it you send it through legal all that kind of stuff what i'm talking about now is something totally different which is there's a business brand scott's create a business and scott as the human those two believe it or not can coexist in the world and in fact the more you are you scott the more you're gonna you're going to drive interest around scott's company and we can see this happening if you look at virgin versus richard branson in terms of the follower count if you look at elon musk versus tesla tim cook versus apple you just go down the list basically people want to connect to real people and yeah we'll follow the corporate accounts but we're not really paying that careful attention to it because we know almost everything they put out in terms of content it's designed for one purpose to control our thinking and to influence this or nudge just towards behavior that benefits them maybe not so much us when you look at what you've built i think most people objectively would say that you've built a personal brand by the by the classic definition or by the definition that i think the majority of people would define a personal brand going into this podcast before they just listen to how you broke it down but would you consider yourself to be somebody who's built a personal brand if yes why if no why and i'll i'll tell you for sure so in the early ages or the dawn of social media i don't really understand social media so we were creating things for my services i'm company blind and so was always worried like what i write because i don't there's there's a lot of people created directors who are on the front line and i don't want to create a situation where they have to explain themselves and there's ten twenty years between me and them in terms of our age difference so we're into different things they're much more inclusive and softer in their language and i'm a little bit bra and kinda more direct and blunt and i don't want to have them apologizing and on on every new business call so i find it really difficult to write in any kind of real way with passion and with energy and emotion so they wound up becoming very boring so when i created the future by circumstance or by design it was just me i had one volunteer who was an unpaid volunteer at the beginning and so it wasn't like i was gonna write we everything was in i i'm thinking this i like this and some people would push back there chris you're supposed to always write the we i'm like i don't know what school you want to you right the way you want i'm gonna write the way i want because i'm spending all of my money to do this and i don't even need to make money i'm just gonna do what i want so please don't tell me what to do i felt it as ina to write in the we because there's no weed there's just me i'm not pretending to be anything but to be myself and i are right here's the thing that's going to maybe shock some people my personal account grew faster than the corporate account because it's got keeping in line with the the data that we already see today and there's no surprise there because people wanna show for a person and we understand that i can alienate people i can be off putting to many people and that's totally okay because here's a really cool part the stronger you are is who you're supposed to be in this world the stronger it creates its filter to attract the right kind of people and repel the wrong kind of people we totally to get that right so we we were talking about certain political figures before we went on air they attract certain kinds of people and they repel other kinds of people because they're speaking from who they are and our frustration with american politics is people show up and we don't know who the heck is there it's like some corporate puppet that's backed by billion dollar investors or something and they have zero personality they can't speak clearly or directly and we're really frustrated hence why i think we got the result we got okay so for me i believe i have a very strong personal brand people know what i stand for i'm saying things that i believe in my heart to be true i'm very passionate about it and it will piss people off but it will attract more people to to the conversation then that will drive them away and i'm okay with that if you were going to give somebody a a tactical guide on how to adopt this ideology into their own personal brand would you say that there is something some sort of framework that you abide by twenty percent talking about my kids and my wife eighty percent talking about my business like yeah i'm sure you thought through this because there there can be probably over indexing on your views so just for somebody who wants to get into this what's the playbook there's a very specific way that i found that it's worked for me it might work for them okay initially if you just talk about you unless you're like a lifestyle brand no one's gonna care no one will care about your life your story or history or anything like that the first arc of this and maybe it's multiple phases is for you to give tremendous value to the people that you wanna serve so find a customer that's passionate about something that has a problem that you'd like to help them solve this is not advertising by the way this is just me trolling up to try to help people initially it was design content i thought i'll help you teach you about typo and logo design and corporate design cool i kinda got bored with that i'm like i wanna do something different when i found that people were really hungry for business information and insight despite not having any product to serve that audience i just created a content for this community later on i found products because they would ask me chris you have something on x y or z now people are asking do you have a course or a workbook or anything on personal branding because we love your perspective on it so first you serve the audience in the community now here's the thing when when you teach you're really just giving value upfront at some point i know where the tipping point is people want to see you in the content so it's described his face this content now like i'll write post and it mostly typo graphic and design driven couple of photos but just really not me speaking or doing anything and that brings in an audience and then this is question mark who is this is this a team of people writing or is this a person i can relate to and connect with and and share some kind of cultural currency with and so then you have to start to put yourself in there because if you just lead with all value it just becomes like a robot account this is kind of important and this is where i wanna warn everybody it's my opinion stay away from faces ai content don't know what you're building there you're just taking shortcuts right so now that you're creating content you're delivering tremendous amounts of value people want to know a little bit about who you are so that they can get into the story and this is very important now because if it's purely education based there's no there are no emotional hooks there right like somebody's gonna tune into this content they're gonna see my face my glasses is my hat or hear my voice and say hey there's somebody that resonates their frequency connects with me and we're kind of in sync we're we're drawn we're drawn towards each other if i were to come on this show and be very professor which i could not be to be very careful my wording of things to speak without a lot of passion to be kind of cold in in my delivery people are like well some people love that and some people will hate that and i find that when i speak with passion more people will tune in hence that one viral video that you're mentioning one thing that i think is a great exercise of is if you look at your favorite creator and you look at their content and video contents great for this and go to their youtube and go to oldest his videos and look at how much of a robot they are versus who they are now and you can see that listen being comfortable putting yourself out there and being comfortable having spiky points of view and opinions it's not something that i would ever expect somebody to be okay with day one i don't think it's easy to say it's very hard to do but i think that if you you know you put yourself into the arena you do enough reps you start to realize that showing up as yourself authentically on camera or in your post or tweets or instagram stories or whatever it is it starts to become second nature and i think there's a positive feedback loop from your you'll get negative for sure and i think that that could actually be a a barometer of whether or not you're doing it properly but there will be some sort of positive feedback loop that i think outweighs the negative in almost every situation i've seen i mean even the most i think think outspoken personal brands they usually that's usually a net positive for whatever objective they're trying to accomplish whether or not you love them or hate them like if they're still doing it and they're still online there's a reason why i've have a one last question about personal brand we did not have time to go into like a whole bunch of content today we do that for another another another episode but just one last question because i'm happy when we went into this you have a very specific look and i and i'm sure that that is like curated to a degree i know that seth gordon has his glasses i know you have you have glasses as well what is what is that factor in personal brand because i don't really know many people that evolve personal brand to that level is that on purpose or is it just is just by chance i i wanna take up things do you know mark manson is of course yeah okay he wrote the book the subtle art took not keeping enough right i follow him and he said something that i thought was really good he goes you know if you want to be a one percent to stand out and to achieve what the one percent achieve he says you have to be a contra to say what everyone else is saying is not really contributing to the dialogue right we understand that but any fool can say the moon is made from cheese or the ocean is pink and be a contra we get that so he goes the trick is you have to be a correct contra i don't say things to be controversial or to be polarizing i just have thoughts that oftentimes rubs against popular belief i i will argue with people because i'm so convicted in what it is i'm thinking that if i hear a better argument from the other side i will adopt their point of view but most often it doesn't happen that way so i say things that will be a little shocking to people and people will say oh i never thought of it that way so then i know that that's a piece of content that i can double down on and how i'm talking about personal branding is quite contra to how i think ninety nine percent of the people who quote unquote are personal branding experts talk about it they're talking about marketing and advertising and building funnels to grow your business which i find nothing wrong with i just don't think that's personal branding that's everything from the corporate world and we borrow from the things we know the most about to get that part now i wanna get into the second part to this the aesthetic part is i'm a designer and so meaning like i used to design layouts interior signage all of that kind of stuff and that kind of designer and i'm obsessed with lots of different things and fashion is one thing that i have become very aware of now in my previous life i used to make commercials and music videos one thing that you learn about character design for an animated film is before they really design the character they design design shapes and silhouette so if you look at kung panda which is one of the best examples of this there's poe who's like bubbly and round because he's the lovable panda and it kind of feels as if that's jack black in a panda form there's man there's snake and there is xi which is like i don't know what he is but he's small and so and there's the the the rang tang believe who's like they all have different shapes and so when you turn off all the lights and it just shapes you can tell them apart from each other and so i'm designing the character of me and so if you're all stripped naked we have slightly different shapes but for the most part we're human what's real interesting is if you look at the world of fashion i think alexander mcqueen said this the late alexander mcqueen said if you want to design in fashion change the silhouette you change the silhouette you change everything and i i see two parallels now when you designing characters for animated films you look at the silhouette and we're designing fashion you change a silhouette and so it's really important so i'm think okay i'm a designer i'm gonna design me i'm gonna design the way i look to represent who i am in this world so that i'm not just in a brown paper bag right so this is the packaging of chris and so there's certain pieces of jewelry that i'm wearing now or funky glasses that are statement pieces that really bring this kind of hey i don't know what that guy does but he's probably creative artistic or something like that and it's been real interesting as an experiment as i'm showing up and being more adventurous with how i come across with my the way i look people automatically assume i'm a fashion designer and it's pretty wild because that is actually where i'm moving because i wanna design my own fashion line and it's wild that you can signal to someone else without words from old people to young people to people on airplanes and people at restaurants and cafes are like oh you look really interesting you must be a fashion designer and it's wild so what i'm signaling to others they're receiving and that's really important to me so what i wanna communicate is i'm a person who's very particular about certain things but there's another thing to note here in the sea of saying the last thing you want is to blend in you need to stand out in your perspective you need to stand out in the the kinds of things you have to offer the way that you teach and the way you speak and the way you create content but you also wanna stand out like physically now me dressing and looking in certain ways is very intentional because i'm i'm a really socially awkward guy i don't know what to do at parties when no one i don't know anybody i always feel like oh what am i doing here i'm i'm i'm plotting my exit scott i'm looking for like where how long do i need to stay at this thing to say i'm i'm the same right but yes i i totally get it yeah yeah so if you dress a certain way what if you have purple hair or you have like bright shoes or weird tie or an interesting dress when you walk into that room people find a reason to talk to you because they look across everyone looks the same duck duck duck duck there's a goose right there let me go talk to the goose they might have an interesting perspective so i rely on this wardrobe or this look or the silhouette to help invite people to come and talk to me but also for people to be able to recognize me in the street because i love talking to people and they're afraid to talk to me and i just wanna make it easy for them to know that is chris and 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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 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 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 there's a couple of other things that i said i don't know if you wanted to talk about them or comment on them i i mentioned using failure as a barometer of of successful personal branding or not failure excuse me negative comments as a barometer or of successful personal branding that was one idea i can't remember i think we covered most everything else about brand i was gonna say like is there any other factors that you consider when you are putting yourself out into the world that somebody else should think about whether or not it's looking for negative comments as yes i have a spiky point of view check or is there some other x factor that you included in the way you speak in the in the the way you present and the type of content you put i don't know you through the expert there's there's probably some a lot of things but what would be another thing that stands out that people should just take a note of you now have reminded me what i wanted to talk about okay good and this is cool i forget who said this but i rather be hated for being me than to be love for not being me and this is gonna cut deep for a lot of people right so we're too entirely focused on what other people want and it's like you can't be an influencer if you're chasing followers it doesn't work that way and i'll give you a prime example okay people will make weird comments about like oh this guy's a douche bag look at the way he's dressing oh dress your age i'm like you dress your age you know i'm fifty two you wanna dress that grandpa wear your pants really high up and ill fitted suits like an accountant you do you and i'm of the mind that i'm gonna do me i don't really care what you think or have to say and eventually like i said the people who like you will will will follow you and the people don't won't like artists don't sit around and take polls about what they should paint or sculpt they just make it and they people to like it they suffer the consequences they can change or they don't have to it's entirely up to them so people will literally say never trust a guy who wears a baseball cap inside okay i don't know where you got that story from but i'm not gonna change me for you that doesn't make sense so again we're so conditioned to create and put a persona or conform ourselves based on acceptance from others that we don't even know it's funny how we chase all these vanity metrics do i mean we just chase all these and and i just like or just acceptance i i wouldn't even put that as vanity metrics just acceptance sometimes it manifest it as vanity metrics but i'll talk about that too okay so you have to ask yourself am i leading or my following and if you're leading if you're the thought leader if you're the influencer if an influencer has a bad taste in people's mouths but people write articles who make films who design fashion and build buildings they are influencers they nudge people's behavior depending on how they do certain things and they start trends or they create movements of both political and social then that's the kind of an important thing to think about now this whole idea of like vanity metrics as you mentioned it like three times now i wanna talk about a little bit you know why it bugs me so much and i i think i mentioned it too it's because again it is not the things that people ask me to help them solve for listen i'm not even a consultant these are just dms and replies to my my newsletters the things that people ask me to solve for to help them out with have no bearing on my actual business like they are the they they are not my my kpi that i try and optimize for when i'm building my business and i mean i'm i'm in it so i understand that i understand like what moves the needle on the podcast and what moves the needle on newsletter subscribers and those are sort of precursor is because you know i can tie a subscriber down to an advertising dollar i can i can tie a i can tie a an additional podcast download down to an advertising dollar and then if i'm gonna try and sell a product it would probably be coming through a newsletter subscribers so i can follow that funnel but ultimately followers are not a metric of success there's a lot of other metrics that i look for that are sort of leading indicators not even just lagging indicators but again when i put out into the world hey what would you like me to speak about because i pull the audience and i i pull on my newsletter and i pull in stories and i'll say what do want me to speak about what do you want me to do more content around or create more content around it's always about how do i grow my instagram how do i grow my instagram and it's just frustrating and i don't know why people think that that's a useful skill okay i'm gonna help shine some light on that okay so here's a hot take here we go buckle this is probably the second most explosive thing i'm about to say there's this rejection of followers and vanity metrics and the term vanity is not a good term there's a negative association with that it's about appearances and nothing meaningful and a friend of mine who is an influence yourself would say followers don't equal dollars and that's fine when you look at social media and content as a means to go make more money like i've already established that idea that for me it's not about that at all but when you create things scott that help your community you're doing something wonderful you're creating goodwill and goodwill goes a long freaking way so that when you have something to sell to them when you need their support because of whatever reason like your accounts being banned or some weirdo or are stealing your identity the people that you created all this goodwill for will show up and fight for you because they've said in their mind this guy fights for us so we got your back however if you make the relationship transactional this really important concept to understand when i give somebody ten bucks or twelve bucks to buy a burger the the relationship is kind of over you give me the burger i give you the money it's a transaction i don't owe you anything you you don't owe me anything i don't feel compelled to go on social media like oh best burger of i've ever eaten in my life please go here now some people do because they're trying to build influence in that space but regular people don't okay now here's the thing and and this is kind of like an interesting shift in like how people perceive things there's something called social proof and social proof is very valuable and some people now are shifting of their mindset that social media has become the new resume so let's unpack that okay the resume is something that's fabricated that most people don't don't actually dig much deeper and so there's all forms of puffer and exaggeration that are used in resumes i'll give you an example i was working with this one person was helping me with some marketing stuff and i said they went to stanford on their linkedin profiles at stanford but when i talked to them i dug a little deeper and like oh when did you graduate how long you know they went to stanford for one semester and dropped out that is a very misleading thing to say you went to stanford no they're not lying but they just say went to stanford right but they know how people are going to interpret that and people give themselves all kinds of crazy titles head of product design and development you did a sketch that so people exaggerate and we know this about resume so i think resumes are worthless now work product matters a lot if you're you creative space just show me your portfolio but there aren't as many industries or verticals that you can be in that there's work product that you can prove you know what you're doing so we go to the next available thing we go into the realm social proof testimonials awards certificates things that you've accomplished and we all know this when you go and find two people who speak on the similar subject the one that has ten million followers versus one that has ten thousand you automatically associate the person with ten million followers as having greater presence reach depth of knowledge charisma and all the kinds of things because humans are lazy we use heuristic to help us not have to think so much good or bad that's an important thing to note now i would say this and this is where i'm i'm willing to kind of fight on the hill and and die on the sword on my sword on this which is everything that everything that you do scott everything that your audience does benefits on a exponential level if they have a really strong personal brand that is backed by a lot of social proof period so let me land that part so if you sell donuts and you're the doughnut king on instagram your business will explode if you are like an it professional who helps people deal with cyber security and you're the foremost expert or a prolific content creator about security and patches and things that people need to do your it security business will blow up in the positive direction and so you you well we what people don't understand is and it's being proven again and again people who have a strong tribe in community can make dumb simple commodities very very valuable so you take ryan reynolds with aviation you take the rock with terra and you take all these people or even previously logan paul and forget the other guy's name so he's pumping prime and prime became like a the fastest growing energy drink company in the world because of the association that they can drive i get way better public speaking gigs and rates and speaking slots not because i'm a better speaker not because i've written the bestselling book or have been included in fast company or any of these ink income magazine or entrepreneur magazine it's mostly because i have a large social following so the social following is the new currency in the twenty first century and this is going to shatter people's heads because they're like no it's not chris and they're gonna argue with me they're all vanity and i'll tell you right now because of the social following i get better book deals i'm literally negotiating a deal with a publisher because they're looking at the social following i get better sponsor rates or brand deals where people will open doors at even know existed forget about like me trying to open the door and you're getting invited to meetings and events and you're being brought into the room the room where it happens according to hamilton you're getting brought into the room where there people there that you've looked up to all of your life because of the perceived authority that you have because of your social following i just got back from a trip from ireland as a business retreat with twenty other very accomplished individuals and the first thing that they say when i'm introduced is chris how many followers do you have again not you want an emmy or you worked on this account or you grew your business to x y million dollars they just say how many followers you got again like you're saying they're incessantly chasing after you scott saying how do i grow my instagram account because instinctively they also know something that you may or may not have accepted yet that in the twenty first century the attention economy is the economy i'll tell so two things k it's his business partner i just looked at no somebody who's doing in the research fact check and the second thing is i don't disagree with you i think my frustration comes not from because yes the following has given me incredible opportunity and put me on stage is that it would that i would not have had the opportunity to go on without that following i think what frustrate me is people substitute audience building for building a profitable business from the ground up and figuring out product that has product market fit and then and be and and traditional entrepreneurship they think that if they just build an audience similar to what your friend said will actually counter to what your friend said actually they think if they build an audience it's gonna lead to dollars and that is that is what i'm trying to push back against i'm trying to say hey i know this crowd is entrepreneurial i don't know the i don't know the ambitions or the the financial status of every single person that follows me but if you are trying to build a business let's focus on the business fundamentals first let's focus on solving a problem that people actually need solve and then an audience will just make that a little bit easier but just collecting followers with with no rhyme or reason is really not gonna solve what you're trying to accomplish i think that's probably a better way of saying that's why i get frustrated let's let's let's weave this these two ideas together right if you're trying to run a business and then you're entrepreneur you have to focus on the fundamentals marketing sales a customer service those kinds of things product delivery that's a paramount to you being able to play this game so once you have your house in order or in parallel you can develop your personal brand such that both these things help each other here's the example if you're an una accomplished person you've got no experience and you're trying to say i've done things where are the receipts the people on the social will say where the receipts you've done nothing you don't know anything about what you're talking about which is the criticism mind get a i'm like hey i have receipts do you wanna look at them or do you just wanna dig your head into the ground and say you blah la you don't know what you're talking about right so i had the receipts so people are saying to me chris you wouldn't have been able to launch or create such a a large following if you didn't have this business that backs up everything you're saying i think some of that is fair however now on the opposite side because i've been able to grow my social following to the to the size that it is today whatever business i wanna get into is going to be fueled by that and i'll give you an example right now i'm at of conference it's called reframe it's for a bunch of accountants there are a bunch of sponsors that are sitting along the wall to support this event so there's there's a a guy who's in the app development space he's he and his entire family is super successful multiple ipo between his siblings he says chris it's very easy to get you money if you want to get venture capital and like really he goes well most people most entrepreneurs get venture capital they build a product and then they spend all the energy trying to build an audience so that somebody will use their products and their tools he goes you already got that i will help you go get venture capital and once you build your product there will be immense anticipation or build up for it because you'd tell your community i'm working on this product for you guys i've solved the problem that i think you will find that makes your life easier or better and because of that a person who has never launched an like a an app or a digital product like that has not only access so the conversation is being had with me and another zero entrepreneur who's very successful who says we can get your capital i can partner with you to build him on this and we know it's gonna be successful and then we can create a whole bidding war for a second like series b venture capital that is built almost primarily off the social following that i have and the goodwill that's been created nobody's talking about blind the company i spent twice as much time building almost no one's talking about that today so i wanna balance those two things right so it is foolish to go out there and be a life coach at seventeen you haven't live life life enough or to say like you've done x number of conversions or you you're a sales expert when you've you've not done anything you're kid in a bedroom which you know maybe there's some of there i get that if you have experience and you know what you're doing it's a great time for you to start creating content and scott i understand your frustration because people have holes in the ship let's plug those holes up real quick while they spend ten to twenty percent of the energy building a personal brand because those things work in concert to help each other if you have built a brand and you you have built an audience excuse me should creators we can we can adopt a generalized view to this to this idea obviously we can make arguments for either but should creators try and build a company or should creators leverage their audience and take equity positions in startups or small companies where their product aligns with the audience avatar what do you think in most cases is a better use of their audience is a more leverage option yeah we have to kinda be real careful here this goodwill that you've been building up trust is hard to build it's easy to lose and once you lose trust it's really hard to come back from k so as a general rule i don't promote or leverage my for anything that i personally don't like use or i'm in love with otherwise i have a real problem because i become a pitch man for other people's products and i'm trading on the goodwill to make a quick buck and you can do that but i don't i don't that's not the game i'm playing there is an interesting trend that's happening right now there are a lot of saas companies out there who are looking for that very thing we just talked about a large audience to seed their software or their tools right so what they're doing now is i have two such deals equity deals where i'm helping to promote a product that i like and use that we've been using to our community to our audience and offering value to them in in better deals in exchange for equity in these companies this is a an amazing time to be alive if you have a powerful personal brand with a good community a strong following and it's it's awesome because not only here's what i think if anyone of these companies have equity in are sold or go ipo i think instead of my community getting upset at me they're gonna just be saying good for you chris they're gonna be so proud to say we're here to support to one thousand percent and because that's the culture in which i've cultivated in in the community that we have right they want we want to see each other win i'm there rooting for you i'm there supporting you with content with educational materials so that you can build a life built around your passion so when i'm also rewarded our community stands up and it's like this is freaking amazing we're so happy we're proud we're here for you what else do we need to do and i'll tell you something something really remarkable has happened in the in this whole content game that we started in two thousand and fourteen which is people out of the goodness of own heart just give us money nothing to buy just as reciprocity right so i ask people who are marketers who are building brands out there how much do you pay to acquire a customer and and do you pay a dollar ten dollars a hundred a thousand it would depends on how big your offer is you'll pay a lot because your lifetime customer value is quite high and then i said how great would it be if your customer actually paid you to market to them and that's the rare position that we're in right now because we've been doing this for ten years creating goodwill and we've been honest and we've been doing it with integrity and and i have stayed away from anything that's made me cringe so it's like people are in it for the long haul if you're building an audience and you don't wanna take bad brand deals right away you just want to you wanna you wanna stay in integrity with your audience and you wanna monetize the audience in some way because you are fully set on becoming a full time creator what do you think is the most ent way to monetize an audience when you're first starting out and you don't have a massive amount of people to sell into or you don't have a massive pool of trust like how do you monetize it when you're starting way i'm gonna answer this question is delay the ask or monetization for as long as you can this is why if creating content is your primary source of income you're not gonna be able to do this and this is why i'm gonna back you on your let's build the business first because that gives you more runway and what happens is there's this like idea of car equity right the the more i do good for the world the more i make a deposit in the equity bank and it compounds interest over time especially if you consistently they say something like the minute your child is born or your your partner pregnant you make a deposit and you keep adding money to this account such that by the time they go to college especially here in america they have a college tuition ready to go and we were very responsible as parents so both my kids the college tuition fund was already built so both of them can have all their tuition money now or whenever they want so that they can figure out if they wanna to go to school or they wanna travel the world and be a student of life and so if we put these deposits in but we're asking or doing monetization or doing deals or ask and and running ads all the time we emptied the account out it never has enough momentum to build into something substantial there's this thing that peep there's this thing that darren hardy wrote about in the compound effect he goes would you rather have a million dollars or a penny that doubles in value every single day for thirty days it's quite fascinating so most people i'll take the million dollars i must be more how can a penny be worth more than that so what gets really interesting by day twenty eight it's still less than a million dollars by day twenty nine it it surpasses it by day thirty becomes a much bigger number and so you can look at karma or goodwill or helping others or the active generosity as that penny that keeps compounding and doubles every single day and so i wanna warn people don't be so quick to monetize stay away from that because what's going to happen is you can do much bigger deals two three four five years into this that are gonna feel really like it's it's like you're you're gonna get better terms and and the kind of money you're gonna be paid is gonna surpass all of what you could have done cumulative in one deal so some of the biggest deals i've done are six figures hundred and twenty hundred and forty thousand dollars for one social media brand deal and if i sat there and try to take a thousand dollars out each time i'm gonna wear my audience down i'm not gonna feel good about myself and i'm shi products that i shouldn't be associated with because they can't afford to pay what one will pay to work with somebody like myself out of all the things that we've spoken about what would be the last major misconception or red flag that you'd like to sort of like you know put a stake in when it comes to somebody building their personal brand building a personal brand is not advertising because as far as i know this is a seth golden thing i think it's in permission marketing almost no one opens their email to find spam almost no one listens to through radio watches tv to listen to an ad in fact we pay money to get the premium subscription service such that we don't have to listen to ads whether it's on apple music spotify amazon or whatever else we just pay money to get rid of the ads ask yourself this question this is this quick smell test does a smell like an ad because if it does your audience is much smarter than you give them credit for so be genuine when you're advertising to them don't try to disguise it and be real when you're creating content and don't ask for anything and what people do a lot and i see it all over social whether it's on linkedin on twitter on instagram or on youtube it's an ad with a very sloppy package as value and what what happens is it turns people off no one watches it no one shares it and they know that okay you're here to sell me something i'll grid my teeth and and bear through this painful experience so i can pick up one or two pieces of information from you but that's not a positive sentiment that they're feeling it's quite negative i don't know how many webinars you've been on but the ones that seem to be successful quote unquote follow very specific formula promise three things take forever to deliver those three things and wait till the very end to deliver it while you're pitching to them every ten or fifteen minutes that's pretty rough by the way i would say that the webinars that i actually appreciate our webinars that are are actually so in endeavor and teach so much that it actually makes me by the there's actually no pitching and this is just subjective to me i don't know the science of webinars i'm not an expert but when somebody comes on and basically teaches me the exact same thing that they'd be selling me anyways for free but i know that i'm not accountable enough or have the or have the the the the will to do it myself and they're saying hey this is what you do by the way pay me twenty thousand dollars and i'll do it for you and i'm like you know what yeah because you've already told me what you're exactly gonna do and you haven't tried to sell me and now i believe you can do it and i probably could with enough energy and effort do it myself but i don't really want to so yes here's the twenty thousand dollars or the five thousand or the whatever doesn't matter but those are the webinars that actually resonate with me as as a customer and i hate the ones that sell every five minutes or the oh my god are the events where they just put the sponsors on stage and the sponsors can't have like a an educated conversation they're just pitching their product it's an immediate turn off it's an immediate turn off so don't create that experience hundred percent i i'd like to end our podcast today with the story and a question that was shared with me and i want hopefully for you to think about it feel free to do a follow to this there's everybody my name is trevor in trevor like chris and he hosts events with his his his boss neil right they they've hosted most multiple events throughout the year for a bunch of real estate professionals he goes what's your game man i'm like what do you mean what's my game he goes what is it that you're trying to sell when you speak like and i really had to think about it i said i don't think i'm trying to sell anything he goes see i thought the same thing because every other speaker who goes on stage is selling a book they want you to enroll their mastermind or or or hire them to do your personal branding or whatever it is they're always selling something you're one of the few people who speak on stage and you don't sell anything but i don't believe that to be true there must be something you're selling otherwise why are you doing it it's quite simple number one is i do it to honor you guys as the people who who've chose me to speak today i wanna make sure i bring value to you to validate the decision to bring me and it was a good one number two and it's a c number two i do it to give value to the people who spent their time energy and resources to be here rather than be with her family or to spend their money time on something else and so that's what i'm trying to do that's my agenda so i said that people are much smarter than than you think when you come in with an agenda they can smell it a mile away and no matter what you say you're undermining the value that you're giving because you're making it you're making it transactional you see them as an as a dollar sign in in a bank account and i don't wanna do that and he goes like i get it and people think they're so clever with they're not so hidden agenda i don't know why people keep doing that and it's like you've been paid to speak these people have paid good money for you not to be a commercial again i'm i'm fairly like the the minority in this versus the norm and i'm okay with that because it allows me to shine and so what happens afterwards scott is people will come up to me what are you buying oh me i'm sorry what are you selling i wanna buy something from you i'm like i don't know what do you need i look at my catalog no i don't think i have anything for you but i appreciate you wanting to buy something from me and the really cool thing here is i i don't know if you know this but i do one on one coaching it's very expensive to hire me and so i think all this goodwill i'm building up people are like shut up take my money i wanna hire you on one one and they just sign up for it so when you're so good at delivering value they will find a way to give you money the good ones always do chris where should people connect with you consume your content all the socials your website all of that for following me on on almost all social platforms i'm at the chris do do is spelled d o and if you wanna find up more about our programs just look into future so if you go to the future dot com you can find us there the future is spelt without an e then so it's f u t u r or if your french is a fu tour so that's that's who we are but you've had an incredible life multiple seasons to your life if you could go back and tell your twenty year old self one thing what would that thing be i'm gonna tell myself it's gonna be really uncomfortable you're not going to want to do it there's no proof that it's going to work but create content as soon as you can even when you don't know what you're doing because those early years are very important to help you become the person that you're supposed to be in this world and my life has transformed the relationships i have have transformed and i have now when i'm so proud of this friends that are from all over the world who will fly and meet me wherever we're going to be and we travel like a pack of wolves and it's it's an amazing thing to have adult friends that kind of we do like adult camp and it's the fun the most fun i've ever had with people that genuinely like and we want to see each other win so that's the byproduct of showing up and creating content building community

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 uses 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 why is it so hard to connect with gen z gen z is a really interesting market and the reason why we felt that it's really so hard to connect with them because they engage in content very very different than the majority of people being able to reach them even getting some of that is very attractive but it's not an easy thing what if the line between struggle and success was just one choice la juan knows that line well from growing up with little more than a dream to becoming a powerhouse in the world of entrepreneurship and branding tour my achilles and i couldn't play anymore coming back to new york city completely depressed one of the things that i did was really just play video games and it was this interesting and i said oh you know what gaming could be social but could also do a lot more i feel like you have to kind of take risk if it made sense was engaging if it had a strong community and it produced revenue those are still the basic things his journey is anything but ordinary transforming obstacles into opportunities that fu see coming but it wasn't just the winds that defined him it was the moments when everything could have fallen apart those moments shape la vision his grit and his relentless drive to uplift others and i made tons of mistakes along the way but doing all those things kinda gives you a sense of confidence can't be scared to fail every step of success or work ethic has led me into exactly what i do right now honesty is really big thing and that's a hard thing for people if you can master that in saying it's okay i think you're fine for so la why is it so hard to connect with gen z so gen z is a really interesting market and the reason why we felt that it's really so hard to connect with them is because they engage in content very very different than the majority of people and what i mean by that is that like close to ninety percent and i i found these i quote these statistics because they were staggering when i first like researched the market but ninety percent of them were considered cord cutters over fifty percent of them use ad blockers and interestingly for us close to ninety percent of them play video games that weekly so there's a lot you know people have tried to throw the very traditional marketing and say look at this and here's some influencers and throw all these things there and between being savvy between you know being very technology focused and also just being very influenced by their peers authenticity is a very very very important thing to the generation and so but obviously people wanna reach them because you know they have a three hundred and sixty billion dollar spend or disposable income in market cap so you know being able to reach them even getting some of that you know it's obviously a is a very attractive but it's not an easy thing so what we did with bright house and interestingly you know the first way we did it is that we actually got ambassadors and i don't talk about that a lot but we got five ambassadors and i was in the whole point was to build this digital platform on the intersection of college sports which you know from can go to my backgrounds really important to me college sports gaming you know and i i do use gaming different from esports because one the market cap is different you know esports the three billion dollar mark gaming a three hundred billion dollar market but also if you look at really what gaming is the actual definition of gaming it's the ninety nine percent of people who casually game who enjoy gaming who's the part of their life not the competitive you know people who game out and teams so we created something on the intersection of gaming college sports and social interaction because that's obviously very important and the reason why we pick those things is because those are three cultural forces for gen z and then we actually got ambassadors and the ambassadors came and they were like we love this and we actually listened to them so when you know people used the term authentic which is used more more now and it was used five years ago when we started it is really something that's important to us and it's kinda why we built the platform for them around them and that's one of the reasons why you know it's been very sticky so i think that's you know kind of how we've been able to do it and you know happy to talk about more of the specific features of it but that was kind of the genesis tell me how because you didn't pick an easy business to start so this is not like an easy business it's like obviously a little bit passion but at the same time it's it's like fashion it take you so far so where did you come from that you wanted to build something around the intersection of gaming and and sports and a younger generation like what was the the inflection point that made you say hey i want to build this particular business because your background is interesting as well i think that you had a legal background obviously had a college sports background what was the thing that prompted you to like build this out great question and i i'm a separate into two parts you know so college sports was always really big to me and one of the reasons why i was big to at a played baseball at ut and one of the reasons why i was big to me is because of the community it's like you were part you i'm a new york city guy and you know went to this big school and i was kinda you know lost but you have a community you have a karate with you know people that are there and that community motivates you helps you do things so that was something that was really really important to me the first part of the story is tour achilles and i couldn't play anymore and i remember coming back to new york city completely depressed and one of the things that i did was really just play video games out of depression but what it did and this was kind of my first really kind of taste of it i was also working with other communities and i kind of felt what i had lost with being on a team working with other people and it was just interesting and i said oh you know what and you know through other things you know that was kind of the first thing where i was like you know gaming could be social but could also do a lot more so you know fast forward went a law school you know and then kind of got back on the entrepreneurial stuff after you know private practice at a law firm on wall street and then i remember you know looking at ea sports and i always played and they're one of our partners so now but i always remember playing college football and of course i played texas poc horns and i was like playing all the characters from there and then you know show my age you know in two thousand fourteen they stopped and they said likeness this image weak supreme court decision you can no longer you know have the game because they couldn't use athletes images and that was devastating to me but the reason why it was so devastating is because it was a community that was i was tapped in the community you played against people you had that passion you had that rivalry you had that everything was there in a video game and then from a business perspective because you know i was a nerd i looked at all their filings and they made billions and billions of dollars just with that game so i said by taking that out you lost that market cap you lost that community of millions and millions of people being engaged and and i said wow that's really you know it's like i was like i can't believe that's gone and i kept telling myself someone way smarter than me is going to pretty much try to reinvent that but make it even better and they're going to say hey you know what college sports is such an important thing from a community standpoint for stickiness for revenue you know put that into a game and people will connect that's the social part someone is gonna do that so i waited it's scott every year i finally left the law firm i did two successful startups ups and which i you know i i exited very well and i just kept waiting and i kept waiting and nothing happened nothing happened and in two thousand and eighteen i said you know i i just sold one other companies and i said i'm gonna do something that's really important to me if no one else is gonna do i'm gonna create that because i miss it and the whole point of it at the time was to create an ecosystem to create a digital space and i remember that space because i was engaged into it everyone i knew was engaged but we look for it every single day we talked to each other we coordinated we found ways to talk i'm gonna create that but i'm gonna make minds more vertically integrated that everything is in one platform but it has all those same attributes and that was the genesis for what i said and i said okay so you know i actually took you know everyone our company started in two thousand twenty pretty much officially i went to my cofounder and nice who's was also my best friend and i hey great idea but what people don't know is in two thousand eighteen i actually built a lot of the technology really tried to understand it and then in two thousand and nineteen going in two thousand twenty is when we brought on the ambassadors to kinda take a look at it and say hey what do you guys think of this and then we launched and we pretty much went viral after that so there was research it wasn't like you know one of those stories that you just like launch something and everything those goes well you know i i did do a lot of recent it never is but it's always always up down but it but it did go viral after that and then we went from five ambassadors to you know having probably twenty five to fifty students on each campus pretty organically and i think again that's the power of you know building something strong in the community and you'll hear me say this kind of throughout the entire you know show is like being authentic again and the reason why i use these things more and more is because if you wanna going back to your first question what do gen z value they are very smart and they can see if you're an influencer and you're saying buy this because you're an influencer and you have a million fans but if you do something that they think is authentic and again tiktok and they're like you could be you could be famous in the next day and they'll be like great we like that that person and it's it's very interesting because and i can see why companies have such a hard time because it's not a one fits all so what we did is we put this community together almost let them build a community but we took attributes that were really strong to them so we took college sports again whether you played sports whether you just were in college sports i mean so where you just in college you you appreciate that community chest club just hanging out with friends like you it was a community so we built on top of that kinda community that's there as i mentioned only ninety you know over ninety percent of you know of gen z college students play video games weekly in a very casual way and so we use that way to kind of really connect them and then we built out fun things you know it's no secret that you know draft kings and fan doing all those things are really big on college so i was like i'm not gonna be a gambling platform but why don't i ga that kind of particular action and make it fun for people so we came up with bragging and bragging was really just being able to make these you know no no monetary value with the actual brag but you take brag books you make predictions and you win up a pot and you're like oh it's awesome and people love that they loved it so much that we actually then put a away that it can actually earn you know things of value more kind of like a loyalty but again this was very crafted you know obviously it's always a lot of luck and stuff but we did have a very methodical plan and and we were actually guided by the actual community and we put that together we started seeing the stickiness for it and then as we started growing you know a lot of brands and this was all organic started reaching out to us because they saw that we were able to capture you know three times five times more of the community than they would from a traditional ad talk tell me about you mentioned like community and the importance of community just so people can because it's so obvious to you but for other people it may not be so obvious even though i think the ability to build a community is a superpower for any business but tell me the difference between building a community versus building an audience i think by so when you build a in the way i thought about think think about this if you build a audience i'll start from the former you know it's kind of a you know you're building some type of content that people are going to enjoy but it's all based kind of on that you know and that content you know it could be good could have times when it's not good but it's just kind of based on that and i feel like that's you know a little outside because you're just focusing on this area if you build a community you automatically have this you know again i'm use word stickiness as people are now connecting with people that they feel everyone wants to connect with someone they feel comfortable with period that's just you know it's a human nature so if you build this community that everyone feels safe and that's always a a big thing for us you build this community that you give experiences that you won't get anywhere else you know again we give casual people the experiences you know some of our events you it was a it the proudest moment i have is i saw these students win and they were like celebrating like i they were michael jordan and i was like this is amazing so you give these experience or you build that community the audience is going to come automatically and no matter what the community changes i mean no matter what con they actually create their own content so a lot of these things again we have a you know full production inside you know black house but a lot of the stuff you can't make up it's kind of like how people respond to some of the key they say some of the funny you know interactions they have there's going to be an audience to watch them we recently did something you know we did students in in our partnership with lee field we tested out a few platforms we did a student one they had every type of group supporting them watching them bragging on them you know that audience was is now built in then we did something for college athletes and it was just college athletes because we're gonna be working with n and they loved it but it was a completely different audience that was now supporting that group and i think that is the beauty of it is that if you start with the community which is what we did you now always have a particular audience because the content you're gonna create someone is going to wanna be part of that and i think of that is kind of like why we keep seeing success and we keep replicating everything i'm just looking at some of the notes about how you actually built this so you basically outright refused traditional ads unless they're naturally created yes right that's so you you've tripled like this is this is the strategy and this is working very well one thing that you that you said i love this quote you can't buy community the same way you can't buy culture these take long intentional builds and then it creates something that money can accelerate but you can't you and then you said i don't think money can replace it referring to a community and and culture can you expand on that a little bit more like why to play devil's advocate even though i fully agree with you why can't you buy community why can't you buy culture again it goes to the sophistication of how the new generation interacts so it always goes back to the same thing and you know i've seen what people have done is you know the the traditional media they're like yeah we don't wanna do that that's that's annoying that's boring for us so you there it's almost to a point where we you know and i'm speaking to say we at me mean gen z i'm not gen z but when gen z's is like we wanna be part of something instead of you know going to kind of what the masses are going we wanna be part of something that could be a movement that could be what our friends are doing that could be something we like but we wanna be part of something so what all the other traditional things have done is they said hey we're gonna we're gotta put this and when influencers they said well you know they really influenced by their peers so they paid professional influencers and they were like well and then gen was like well that's the same difference so they just kinda see through all of these different ways and then it changes so you can spend all this money get two percent five percent whatever even a a good number of people to respond but then next week there's gonna be a different expression is gonna be something different so when you going back to the first way you said when you build with the community first the content is created people are now following because they trust their own community so first thing was starting with a safe place for them and that's the reason why you have all these brands you know you know throwing money at all these digital ads but they don't have a central hub what we created was a central hub where people and we put that community there and that was the most efficient way because no matter it changed no matter what the community is could be athletes could be chess club could be you know cheerleader leaders soccer club could be anything you know we had women's swim team on you know in the university of virginia and they had such a strong community behind them you know and i i remember one one thing i say this is a and i used this story one of our early interns she was like well you know i i i love this this is great i think this is needed but i don't really game and i don't think i'm going to have anything to offer and i was like well i you know i i disagree i think everyone has something to offer and she was like i know but i don't she was like i don't really game my boyfriend games and i you know i kind of don't and i said well let's you know do an interview and you just tell me why you like black house because you'd said you like brad house she did the best interview i've ever heard and then she finished the interview and said i really like this the community we're building together and i really like la done blah blah blah blah brag on and brag on with such an important slogan and i give her full credit for that to this day because and i was like look what you did you created an expression because and people followed it everyone in our community inside followed it everyone in her university of virginia followed it you know people started saying it all the time and again that's what money can't buy because that expression may not be the same today i like i've what before as it is today as a new expression but you also have the a now new audience who's is now following and not just something that just you know money can't buy scaling is difficult scaling without losing what you've built especially from like a community first perspective is i'm assuming very difficult and you probably took it to the extreme because you went start up to nasdaq and publicly traded company in seven years i have to ask this is obviously not your first rodeo you said you had two companies before this so you you and you obviously were a securities lawyer before so you knew how to navigate to a degree but this is not i think the normal path for somebody seven years into building a company to take a public so obviously the the question is why what was the strategic importance of that but also less less so than why from like a company strategy i'm more curious how do you scale that quickly and go public while still maintaining the thing that makes your company in brag house so special which is like this intimate community feel because that's something that again you don't wanna lose you don't wanna lose that as you turn into like another quote unquote big company it it's it's it's a it's a great question and i will say probably that was one of the hardest things just to be honest with you because at the same time it's like you know we created a dips of community but then we had to obviously build revenue models on top of it you know you it's a so we you know we need to have a real business there so what we did is kind of really thought about and we spent on a lot of time thinking how do we continue to grow how do we you know get these models there and you know at the same time not lose what we've been talking about the entire time community authenticity so what we did is is you know again realize and i've always kinda go back my research because it's my it's my default to what i know really well and i kinda said well you know what is what is you know what do these you know i know what brands want brands want these students they want new customers you know it's really an easy math there they have a cost of acquisition and if we can lower that cost of acquisition which we do five ten times better than anyone else that's attractive for them but what are the what are the extra consume because again it's like you you people start getting you money they start paying you and you saw your focus there and i'm like a digital advertisement was kind of the main revenue source at that point and i said okay what what to do the actual community want so we started looking at that part of it and i said well you know what they don't mind being you know sold to or you know saying hey you know but they don't wanna be marketed too just blank about everything if they what they want they they want what they want but there also didn't it becomes the the quan well what do they want so what i did is i said let me just ask them and i think that was kind of and i did it inside the platform so what i did is i created these kind of data models and and this is where the luck part comes and i i won't lie to you i created these data models to understand more what they want so i created dynamic surveys that adapted to every user i created these brag book integration which were like activity based rewards so they did this it kinda worked on behavioral insights and then i had activity triggers which just shows you know usage and all that stuff and then i and then we ga a five the entire a b testing experience so you know how to respond different colors different ads and stuff but we ga a fight that into this game bright house you know people are are still doing that and then i took all that stuff and i said alright let me just categorize these behavioral insights kinda figure out you know what they want and then i said okay and what i realized that we were producing and again a little bit look don't get me wrong i realized that we were now identifying data that was very different than what everyone else was having so what i mean by that is the data that generally people's like how many likes you know what are your names all that kind of stuff we were we were collecting behavioral data and that was something that i i realized soon was very different that people weren't people didn't have this kind data and i think you mentioned before like if if nike or anyone could say we like this campaign we want this campaign we will not buy this that's a that's a million if not billion dollar thing to know how someone do that but at the same time then our actual audience is protected because we don't just run ads or do anything like that we curate personal things and if we know what they want we now can communicate that and say hey they you know this is what they want they want these experiences in you know watching football or they wanna do this and now it's a quid pro quo because the audience doesn't feel like they're being overs sold to but now you're giving something even more valuable i would think because we were giving direct access which is great but now we're giving information again about an audience that's so hard to reach so now that they can craft these brands can craft these better campaigns smarter campaigns and they can say hey you know what i heard you like this group of nike sneakers let's just give you that instead of selling you fifteen ads that you're you're gonna block anyway so in that way it became yeah they all ad blockers on exactly and that way it became a more quid pro quo because the the audience was happy they were like this is great they were doing what they were doing they were playing you know it's amazing because you know a lot of companies jetblue blue a lot of companies gonna do surveys people enjoyed doing our surveys because again i and i i break it down to the simple dichotomy gen z wanna be heard they wanna be understood and i can't tell you it was like a hundred out of a hundred people who said hey yes please you know because we asked them first you know we don't sell data or anything like that you know we just say hey and we just said we suspect respect all the privacy and they're like yes please please please i wanna fill the survey please tell me what i need to do and now we have something more valuable and again it's all driven by the community if people could literally poll which is what we do their entire you know gen z population ask them what they want that's valuable but again it started very slow i don't you slow very methodical in building the entire thing there on top of that so that became a very very powerful way to scale because now you know it didn't just revolve around content we didn't have these have to have these super big activations we still do and our scalability i think is increased now because of our partnership with lee field communications which you know now in essence we have this billion dollar conglomerate that owns the meteorites rights to all these universities and because they own the meteorites rights sold the universities we're the sole platform that their students engage to connect them to traditional sports so in a way it's like my dream what i wanted to build oh that's how you no but that is that answer answers is so how do you scale without losing the soul and the intimacy it's like you give people what they want which sounds so obvious but i think so many brands just throw it out a wall hope something sticks and that's that gross marketing feeling exactly the people feel exactly that's it that it's that gross marketing feeling it's exactly what it is there was i was just scrolling through tiktok and there was a an interview with like tom ford and he was saying it was like you know of these thirty second clips and he was saying how he hates the word marketing because a product if the audience wants it should really do the marketing itself if a product is something that people want people will buy it so if you have a great product then it's in line with what they actually wanna purchase yes you can help them be aware of it but he was saying he hates the word marketing because marketing seems to just cover up the fact that you have a shitty product that nobody wants that nobody finds useful and you're just forcing that i agree with that statement completely to see that it exists and that's just like you just i hate the word marketing for that reason if you have a good product that people actually want i'm para obviously is much more el but have a good product that people want you shouldn't have to you shouldn't have to like just break them with ads nonstop you should pair product with person they buy it it's very simple very simple very simple and this is really what you've done this is really and i think that also i mean like i don't know if you knew this maybe maybe you did understand the opportunity when you started building this out but the access to that data is like come like you mentioned it's not just like a million dollar opportunity it is like a multi billion dollar opportunity to get access to how that particular audience segment thinks and feels and cares like that's huge i i remember like i said it was it was design that we created it to understand it because exactly what you said give them what they want they'll be loyal to you and you know and then you know the the revenue models will be intensified you know again to my statement that i said money will will build on that and it'll just make it better but helps share a funny story with you so you know one of our brand partners we always provide this report and a report says hey you know we've connected x amount of new users to your platform every company has a different roi you know so download my app do this whatever we did that and then once we had these data models i started putting that in the report and the report was like you know students from the university of you know arizona you know are really looking for this type of product you know they're really excited know they don't really like this type of product that's here this is something that's really gonna help the students and this is the time that they think would be better that they can consume it and i put all these kind of things down there and i remember like the brand partner was like wait we where did you bridge get i like it's just you know internal we kinda like could we just have this on a regular excess and then i was like wow that's pretty important so so that's well you i mean like you this is not your business but like you you could with the with the data that you have that could be a whole business model like i could it could totally be that's that's how important understanding the behavior and the fact that you do it in such a way like listen the the world is is is getting more aware of how data is actually being used i mean it started with like cambridge and now gdpr and nc and you know europe's very strict us not so much but i'm assuming over time they the us will get even more strict and sort of keep up with europe to a degree but you can't just harvest data without consent and just sell it to companies and the fact that you have found like a a way to get people to want to give their data i mean that's also like incredibly smart and very very smart i think more companies i don't think enough companies well i mean you work with some of the biggest brands on earth and they find your data valuable so obviously a lot of companies don't really understand how to get that data from from their consumers i'm like i mean i'm not i'm talking about the meta of the world that have unlimited amount of data but the average consumer brand i don't think has really good really really good intel on what their customers want to buy especially if it's a younger generation that again doesn't want to yeah it doesn't want to give that data up because it feels like you're giving it to a company that's selling to them but i feel like with your platform i feel like they they feel like telling the platform telling bright house what they want actually makes the whole experience better so they enjoy it absolutely absolutely and that that was always the plan and that was definitely by design because we knew that if we kept this community happy just kept growing it and again this was to be something you know again when i first started creating this ecosystem and this digital platform for them because again that's what i remembered i remembered this digital space where i play games and it made me feel so safe and i enjoyed that so i said if we create that you know and i think the other thing that i probably didn't mention but i think you said it is that in addition to giving them kind of the product and they want the product is also part of our platform so we we also make sure that they're enjoying it we make sure that they're you know again we're building on things like college sports and stuff but you know part of the lee filled partnership the reason why they approached us is because they were like you know when i was a kid and even now you know yankee made the playoffs i can sit and watch four or five hours of baseball no one does that as a den age so they're losing even the colleges you know billion dollar conglomerate is losing this core engagement of the audience which when you lose engagement you also lose spend so what we've done is we taken that experience and also said hey how can we make this more fun and that's a little creative and for example one of the things that you know we're really proud of is you know we work with every single sport of every single of of each college so every single sport there there's a brag broadcast activation where our students can enter and we tried it out a couple of betas with baseball and what we did is like how we make this fun you know it's like you know we can do ml b baseball but how can we make so we said you know what students are enjoy playing fortnite at let's just make up baseball rules did a full production around baseball and you know how many kills you have that could be strikes they could be runs we did this a really fun thing it was beyond well intended over you know it overs subscribed to it everyone loved it and the roi only you know it's like you know the roi for that it was a test model was really just to connect the students to traditionally what the baseball game was going on and we've heard that it was you know we're still getting in data for it but we heard that it was probably more attended than any other baseball game virtually and people kept love the scores as they know and that was something that where we wanted to do and again if that's the way people are consuming and it it's important to understand that so it's like the way people are consuming now is digitally i'm gonna use bright house and i'll know everything that's going on with this game with a soccer game but i'm not actually watching the game this is how i watched the game and that's fine you know that's just what because now people are interested they have fans and stuff so you know that's something that i think you know we we work really hard to and i think that's ever changing as well to make sure that we're giving the community what they want from the product side and the data side but also inside their safe space 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 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 to 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 future hold for business if you ask nine experts you'll get ten answers bull market bear market rates are up rates are down at the end of the day it'd just be 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com slash scott cla that's nets sweet dot com slash scott cla nets sweet dot com slash scott cla indeed is a success story partner now if you're hiring indeed is all you need let me give you an example if i needed to hire a new editor for this show i'd go to indeed and be super specific not just can you edit audio i'd say i need someone who's edited a conversational podcast for at least three years gets our style and knows our software someone who's done this before and here's the thing with indeed sponsored jobs i'd get people who fit that description i'm not digging through resumes from people who've edited one youtube video i'm getting actual podcast editors who know what they're doing people who've worked on shows like ours and can prove it that's what makes a difference you get people who actually are what you're looking for according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are ninety percent more likely to report a higher than non sponsored jobs and people are finding quality hires right now in the minute that i've been speaking to you companies like yours have made twenty seven hires on indeed according to indeed data worldwide spend more time interviewing candidate to check all the boxes less stress less time and more results now with indeed sponsor jobs and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollar sponsored job credit to help you get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed dot com slash just go to indeed dot com slash clarity right now and support our show by saying you've heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash terms and conditions apply hiring do it the right way with indeed so your lee field partnership you have access to like hundreds i think two hundred plus campuses this is the numbers that i have you may have even more at this point but a partnership like that it could bring bureaucracy it could bring it could bring corporate ideology it could bring even corporate constraints so when you bring on a partnership of that scale obviously massively beneficial to the business speak about it but i'll speak about how you manage bringing on something of that scale into again a community driven trust driven brand and platform yeah i know it's a great question and it's definitely something we dealt a lot with earlier i will say that lee field has been so far events over a year now an amazing partner and the reason why is because and i appreciate this because it's hard to let all the reins when you have that much bureaucracy and you control these meteorites rights but part of the partnership they came and they said create what you need to create you know obviously they you know check the the the the system made sure everything was safe and was built correctly but they really give us the autonomy and that has been a key way that we've been successful for it so what we do you know just you know and kinda recap that is that in every single university brag house creates an we call them an activation but you know our platform people can use it just every day anyway but we'll create an activation almost like a sporting event and that will be that people can engage and it and the goal you know we've we've tested it out for baseball pre season football and we're going be doing a kickoff activation for playoffs for college football but every single sport there will be a brag house activation that people can enter it and we craft that we do that completely ourselves you know it's a fifty fifty percent partnership so they bring in their clients you know their partners they bring in you know we bring in you know peep obviously our our partners whoever wants to partner with that and again the way we're doing it because we believe that that's the only real way to connect is a genuine way is people aren't paying for like something to happen on one day they're really paying to be part of this activation so they're almost going along with the ride of what we're producing and that is they see roi much much better so our partnerships are like you know hey i i wanna be a year with you guys and you know to do and they're just be incorporated into all the different activations and productions the way we see fit so that i think is is kind of one of the you know you know i what i believe it's gonna happen is i believe that with this opportunity and scalability black house will be the sole platform throughout every single college for people to interact with and i think you know and at a certain point you you go above even what you know it's just meant to be and you have a bunch of other you know you have it'll be the sole engagement at a certain point so that's at least what i think the goal is for it and i i can kinda see that happen just from our current engagement just to understand you as an entrepreneur this is one of this is one of my favorite quotes you said it on past podcasts and i want to understand what this means because i think again we're very much like kindred spirit we think alike but you said life and adventure your career is part of your life it's just one big adventure but make your career dangerous so what does the idea of a dangerous career mean so i it it kinda goes with two things one and i'm gonna say this you know but i i also caveat of two you you gotta take risk and you gotta of you know i think if your risk call them calculated call them you know that you like all the risks that we've taken we've really thought about them we didn't just say hey let's wing in a prayer it's like you know i said i took a year to build out the technology test out i used to go to bars in new york city just to and say hey could we have people play brag house on this you know just to see if people even liked it so you know i feel like you have to kind of take risk i you know it kinda goes back to earlier statement i didn't want to you know if i was gonna do something and put everything into it i didn't wanna do something that kind of everyone else did or just make one product better i wanted to do something that was very very different and i thought that that you know if it again if it if it made sense if it you know did all the things supposed to do if it was engaging if it had a strong community and it produced revenue i feel like those are still the basic thing so i've always did that and i've always kinda said i'm gonna just go to the edge of creativity with that said which i will caveat though for me i probably can go to the edge to the point of like either this is gonna work or not work my wife gave me a little bit of advice which i thought was pretty awesome she said i never wanna stop your dreams because we're very creative keep doing it but maybe set a goal somewhere that you need to accomplish these five things and if you haven't accomplished these five things within whatever period of time then just re analyze and do the analysis over so that's my only caveat that i thought that was very helpful because i'm also someone who really really has no problem playing dangerously because i just believe in it and i think you kinda need i do think you kinda need that passion to to really do it so that's kinda what i meant by that because but you also need to balance yourself with people so my c cofounder is the opposite of me he's not dangerous he's risk adverse and he's our chief operating officer and you know i've told him you know it's like i was like oh we're we're we're gonna go public we're gonna do this we're gonna build this gonna get these clients we're gonna do this and why i forced him i think almost to think outside of what the realm of possibility is because he's so gifted at putting an organizational structure on it so i just so my job is literally to think even bigger every single day to a point where it doesn't even seem like it's it's reachable but i believe it's reachable but i also believe it's reachable because we methodically planned it too so that's kinda what i meant by that i love it though no it's like that it's like that ying and yang of like dream and and executor right like the visionary and the operator and it does take both like you can't just have one and i actually think that it's important to have it in your company i mean this is a whole other conversation that i i i i bring it up on the podcast once in a while but like having having that balance in your house and having somebody you can be like a sounding board for all your crazy ass ideas like and like a spouse or partner or a girlfriend or a wife or a husband or boyfriend or whatever like it is so damn important like it is so so so important like i think that that i mean like having the right partner at home it can make or break like really yeah and i and it's you know and and also dealing with you youtube because and i been i say dealing with me because i wake up with this ideas and i probably had in my mind twenty billion dollar idea i just was like this is going to be great and you know and and it's some and it it it's hard to because it's like you meet that sounding board and sometimes my wife and and interestingly my wife and my best friend are the same person and his wife very very long but we're all like best friends but i hear these two kind of you know skeptical people but the sounding board is so good because you know sometimes it's very annoying because i just want people to say you know but like this is a great idea but they ask all the follow ups questions okay well what are you gonna do here and where you gonna do here and i'm like okay and then that's how you kinda come up with the idea so you know it it it's super important and and i love it and again you get got the support as well so the support is huge talk to me about because you've done it very very well the the psychology of starting over because i think a lot of people get trapped by their own success so you've made so many dramatic career pivot like you'd again i guess this is living living dangerously right in in or in air quotes but lawyer sports management sort of full entrepreneur building something that's really never really been done before a lot of people get trapped in their own success and i think they get comfortable whether or not it's golden handcuffs or they've built success once and they don't feel like they have the confidence to build it again how do and i and i think that that's incorrect i think that it's important to feel like you can lose everything and start from scratch i think that's a very important mindset to have because it just makes you it makes you a very effective human being but how do you how do you like where did that come from where where did the ability to do this come from like where did the ability to leave you know probably pretty high paying lot like lawyer job and and go out on your own where did the confidence come from what gave was it the people around you was it you just taking a chance on yourself was it you know listening to too many podcasts like how do people no it's so it's so important to be able to do this but not many people can i i think that's a key key part of being an entrepreneur i think it kind of came to me first really when you know i was very regiment it always wanted to be play baseball and then you know professionally and i you know train well and then i hurt myself and just really depressing because i'm like wow you kinda do everything the right way and it didn't go your way and then you know i kind of you know pivoted really you know just kind of like str onto there and did very well in the law you know i was at a you know beautiful like really big kind of wall street firm and i was just like wow i you start to believe in yourself and i was like i went from here to here and i you know believe that i've been successful in each of these rules and i was like then i started climbing up the ladder but the other really important part is i wasn't happy in kind of my own i always you know and again and i think i think the short answer is is really just believing in yourself and i think you have to believe in yourself i've actually gotten even better if we're doing that because everyone's a little insecure just that's just life the way i prove my insecurity is i say i'm gonna i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this and i keep trying to do something and that helps me get confident in myself because i'm like wow i i accomplished this so when i was at the law firm and again you're right very successful there you know i i've i've enjoyed everything that was there learned a lot has been pivotal to learn all the things we're there but i often said and you know maybe it's a little bit of just i've worked with the clients and i was like well wow they make i wanna be them i really wanna be them they you know we like they pay us they are doing what i wanna do and i think i'm great enough to do that so i really had to kinda think about that and then you know so you know the confidence of taking and being being dangerous you know testing yourself happiness but then i think the other thing is i just said hey what is the worst that could happen if you fail it's a powerful question yeah it's a very powerful what if you fail and it doesn't happen i mean i've still built up all these strong attributes it's fine doesn't define me because this didn't work so you know and i i think that kinda go back to the first statement you know you do have to live a little dangerous you know i say if people are very cal again and i'm not peep you know it's people calculated my wife is calculated so and it works where it works for her but you know and she says i could never do what you can do i do think you have to be you have to be okay with saying i'm gonna try this and i'm gonna give it a hundred percent and believe in yourself and if it fails that's okay you know just try try something else if that's what you wanna do and that was such an important lesson to me because i was just like i tell people i'm almost you know i'm probably more nervous now because things are going so well that i wanna make sure that i still think methodically out everything it's actually easier for me when i think oh this could fail because i'm gonna put a hundred percent in there and if it fails i know i gave a hundred percent and that's for me all i need if i know i put a hundred percent in everything i did and it still didn't work then i've given everything and i'm okay with that i'm okay with that result and i think you have to be okay with that result when you start over i don't believe that you really start from scratch i think that you take experiences and you take sort of the lessons and you mentioned before it the after attributes from all like the previous stuff you've built and you apply them to the new thing do you feel do do you agree with that do you feel like sort of you've sort of stacked skills across every single time you've restarted so that by the time it you get to brag house it's actually yes starting over but not really starting over and the reason why i ask that is because maybe the answer in the answer on how to be as successful entrepreneur is to start multiple things be okay with failing as quick as possible but then retaining the skill sets so that eventually when you start the thing that is meant to happen you have so many compounded skill sets from all these different things of your life even if the actual project was a failure the skill set is is a learning and a lesson that you can use to you know go from zero to a million or zero to ten million or zero to a hundred million in a fraction of the time i completely agree with that and i think that that is something i didn't realize until probably we were a public company and i really started trusting myself even more that's seven years into it so from going back to playing sports i learned about teams everyone has a say you're working together it's not you know i'm the ceo of the company but getting the insight and really listening to the opinions of my team and my management my board of directors that's important and i learned that very early on you know at first i you know i was kind of focused very linear but then i kinda said oh these all the attributes i picked up and those attributes have saved me forever when i was a lawyer really the analytical thinking and i focused on like securities and corporate governance and i realized i was running a business that way which you know in in essence kinda made it a little bit easier to go public it's not easy but it made it i no doubt not easy but i don't i don't wanna ever use that you know but it made a little bit easier because i realized i was keeping minutes i was doing you know i was trying to make sure that everything was proper from our accounting because i didn't wanna have any issues or anything later so then we got to that process and get audits and all that kind of stuff things were reasonably organized you know that people are like oh this is this is not hard most start companies don't even have notes you know everything is terrible and then from my startups you know again i i probably focus more in the dangerous part in the happiness but what i realized from my first one which is being a sports you know sports agency i was i was successfully built as the first time i successfully built a community amongst people and then connected them to a revenue model that was very genuine and i was like wow that and it was also rewarding it was fun my second entrepreneurial business was a soccer team i had a good friend from law school and he said hey can you can you you know be interested in buying the soccer team was it was wasn't super expensive it was a small soccer team and it were part of a league that wanted to bring like minor league baseball to minor league soccer excuse me to to the united states and i remember the first thing i did as i said in order for this team to be successful we need to get the actual community behind it so it was in new jersey we went to a local neighborhood called iron bound which is a a predominantly portuguese and and brazilian neighborhood we recruited people only from there and we had every single one in that community every day remember i said build the community you'll get the you'll get the audience everyone wanted to support people that were there these were kids from their community and it was super successful we became the prize soccer team but it you know i don't know a lot about soccer but i took exactly the same way that we built everything else and i was like wow this is really good and then when i came to black house what it was i really just said hey i believe i have really good ideas and i'm going to try my best to build those ideas in a very methodical way as i possibly can because i believe in that i've made the right decisions and doing these things not perfect i've made tons of mistakes along the way but it but doing all those things kinda gives you a sense of confidence so you you just you can't be scared to fail you have to just say if i again it goes back to if i fail i gave everything possible so you know exactly what you said is right every step of success or work ethic or whatever has led me into exactly what i do right now and i think that's a big big part of being successful 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 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 they explain 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 task over and over and over again it made me realize that i've 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 do 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 eats commerce companies they use ships station and it has completely transformed how they handle orders they 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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 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 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 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 when you reinvent yourself for repeatedly i think it's a good thing i think that people have to do it i think that i think that anybody who's been successful has gone through multiple sort of reinvent conventions of who they are but it affects everything right to affects your business your finances your relationship all of it so for somebody who's listening to this who is thinking okay i'm motivated i actually do wanna reinvent myself take the first step stop or at least gradually exit what i'm doing and maybe try to do something else or maybe they are gonna be dramatic about and just quit what they're doing not that i think that's a smart idea but know you never know how people interpret these ideas so regardless a lot of people listen to this show at some point over reinvent themselves to some degree what is your words of wisdom to them what do they have to what are the things that happen when you stop one thing that's successful and start a new thing psychological with relationships with your friends with your time with your energy with your money like what are the things that they just have to be aware of so that they make that transition a little bit easier i think you so for me i'm a very nuts that getting the dangerous quote i'm a very i just have to do it jump into there and i have to do it so i think you have to so probably people listen is to have that passion and you should you need that passion if you don't have that passion i don't recommend it but if you have that passion go for that passion and then i think you just you you need to do two things you need to believe in yourself which is which is crucial and you need to be okay with failing how i do that and again i had help from it is i set out these things that my wife has told me to do that i'm like okay i'm gonna go until i can't go anymore and that's i've always been but then you can set these things and there's almost like checkpoints because if you if you if you mentally try to do it at least in my experience you won't do it so if you're like i have one foot in the law firm one foot out here your fifty fifty in both spots you can't really go as fast as you need to and that's hard so you have to i believe step out of that and say i'm gonna go there but i guess the you know which i never had the security blanket so i price that i could just do it but i guess the security blanket that you kind of that i've at least you know set that was helpful and i remember we first started i said hey i'm taking my own money i'm gonna do this i believe in this i'm gonna go forward for the first year like burn the burn the boats like fully that's what you did just fully but then i said okay i'm gonna go ahead and do that but what i'm gonna do and my wife told me that she was like if you don't secure funding or an investment by x amount of time i think would give us over a year that's fine don't quit your business but at least kinda re analyze look at the things do the accounting over again so i think that was a helpful thing to me because again i'll be very honest with you i will just go and i'll be like that didn't work and i'll just keep on doing something else but that was a helpful thing and then a funny story of it was we my my wife told me to do that and i said okay you know i'm gonna do i'm gonna set it because you know have a family now and you know i'm gonna do that so you know gonna be smart so i said i think it was like this december and december it's you like right before christmas gonna get an investment and we were doing really well we went in viral everything's doing great but we didn't have any investment and i said okay well you know reach the twenty fourth that's what it is january second venture capitalist was like love this idea let us be your first people invest and this is gonna be big and i was like okay but it it helped me because i also don't so you know the device i would say like you may you you can't you have to be a hundred percent into it and then if you you know need something to protect yourself set yourself some type of reasonable goal it doesn't mean you stop but that reasonable goal is just kind of a check point you know and say hey you know do i need to rebalance it so i to change something about this though so that was something i never had but it was been very beneficial to me because it gives me these kind of milestones to say okay you're building is huge thing where are you and your scale of doing it i love that idea i like that like i love the idea of like seasons in your life and and and i've and and seasons the way that i've sort of interpreted it always was just like this business is for a season this career for a season do for five years ten years but you set these checkpoints much earlier on so at least you can say like am i directional moving am am i am i moving in the right direction right am i am i sort of progressing and i think that like especially when you live quote dangerously you live a certain way i think it's important to do that because like i see people that i see people that don't check in on themselves and i think that they end up just doing something that doesn't work for too long when if they just took like a a second and and like gave themselves like a little bit of like a like a check point like you're you're mentioning you don't have to kill it but maybe realize that like the pitch isn't good or the customer you're selling to it's not really aligned and they're not really like buying what you're selling or like there's a million different things you can iterate on and improve and change so it doesn't mean kill it but just means like just check just like just check for a sec you're exactly right i mean i i again we had this you know amazing model that i worked but there was even like you said the pitch you know we worked on the pitch you know i had to understand what the tam was i had to understand all these concepts that i didn't really really know wasn't it wasn't a bad idea i just had to kinda of refine kinda what you were it's like the same idea yeah like said differently to the customer to the market whatever exactly and and that was it and it's like you know you had this great you know you had great business and you're hundred percent right messaging is so important and one of the things that you know again i i feel like you can't as long as you're going in this direction that's good even if there's a couple of drops here and there and one of the things that you know we had to do is i said okay well what is the audience you're speaking to because then you have to change it a little bit you know it's the same business but an investor their first question is how we're making money you know so they're excited about the people and the users and hard to reach but how are you're making money and be able to convey that and still keeping the authenticity you know that took some time you know it took some time to kinda understand that is so i i think that's i'm glad you brought that point up because i think that's an awesome point too you have to be okay to criticize yourself and change that's that's a huge thing because you're right you can keep going down the same rabbit hole saying this has to work and it won't so i i think honesty is is a really big thing and that's that's a hard thing for people but if you can master that and saying it's okay i think you're fine i think that's an excellent excellent excellent point because you can live in your own head you know you could be the you know it's again it's it's it's success you can live in your own head for success which i think we said and say look i did this i did this and i'm great but you could also live in your head of not being successful but just focused on one idea and thinking this was gonna be so it's like i think the best leaders and and i and i hope i exhibit that is being able to take constructive a criticism listen one advice i would give any entrepreneur and this is something that i did a lot i just sat down and talk to other ceos i literally set up calls with them i found them i went to different events and i just talked to them you know we were in a accelerator one time and i just sat down and just had conversations with people and i did that because i was like i just wanna know what makes you think i wanna know what you do and that was probably one of the most helpful things and it's funny when you don't want anything from anybody they have all the advice in the world because i wasn't asking for to invested me it wasn't i just wanted talk to them and had so much to say and it was the and i it it probably was if i can kind of point to you know a few things that really helped me was sitting down and just talking to people and when i did that i was like okay yeah you know the way i'm thinking about this is right because i wasn't in my head i was having other people that were either successful or just starting out like me and i was seeing how they think and i was like okay and i was and it gave me things to leverage and bounce and you know if they wanted to give me constructive criticism i was like please because i wanna make sure that i'm doing everything possible the right way i i love this i think that i've experienced the same thing when you're not asking for anything people are so willing to give advice that's why it's so it's sometimes frustrating but ultimately it helps but i think that there is zero excuse there is really zero excuse if you if you are struggling with something or if you if you aren't sure how to move the needle in your business your life it's really because you haven't sought like you haven't sought out help and you haven't really looked for it because there has never been a moment like you wanna or forget forget now you know you're well you know like you have like people follow you online or people know your business so obviously they're gonna say yes to a meeting no i'm talking about like when i'm like twenty years old like zero zero impact on this world nothing nothing nothing tied to my name and people will still sit down for coffee and still give you the same great advice and really just pour themselves in their experience into you you have to ask yeah you have ask i mean that's what we have to do that's right first advisers was he it was a lawyer but he was like more of a not like an entrepreneur chair of like you know this big entrepreneurial group in a law firm didn't know him at all you know someone that told me and i just reached out to him and say i'm an entrepreneur entrepreneurial also a lawyer and i remember like it would first call he was kinda like you know what do you want like this and stuff and after that i was like and i sorry i immediately said i was like i want nothing except just kind of your advice he was like oh my god let's let's schedule like an hour he wanna meet you wanna do this her and i was it's crazy you know he eventually came on as an advisor but i just wanted to pick his brain i was like you've seen a million startups and you see what failed in them and i'm trying not to make that same mistakes i'm pretty sure that they're very common mistakes you know i just wanna talk you know i'm i would love to take out the lunch they caught it exactly what you said people i was nobody i was nobody on the map no one no one heard of bright house but people love to give advice if you just have to ask i would i would also say that now i'm you know fortunate or i'm out a position in my career or people ask me for some advice every once in a while and the one thing that i value just maybe this will be useful for people who are listening but the one thing i value is when people ask for advice and they actually implement it because i find implementation is so rare like i i i mean i talk about my podcast a lot and how many people have asked me how to start a podcast like i'm sure at this point like fifty or sixty and i know the ones that have actually done it because the people i've given people like my sop i've given people my list of equipment i've connected people who have been past guests so they can be like first guest on their shows like four people have started a podcast out of like the sixty people that i've emailed like my podcast like full systems too and like the four people that started it like those are four shows that actually like rank on apple like pretty highly so like it's it's just a matter of like if you're going to take somebody's time at the end of the day i guess if you don't wanna execute on it fine it's it's not really hurting anybody but like just if you take someone's time you don't understand how much it means to them if you take their advice and execute on it and if it doesn't work they're okay with that too because we'll work through that but don't take advice and waste that information i think that that is another reason why i and i never really understood that because for me when i get advice it hits i'm like bro i'm doing it like before we get off the call like if you tell me that there's something that works in whatever it is i'm trying to do like i'm i'm literally doing it while we're on the call but maybe that's maybe that's just a personality trait i don't know but that to me is like i love it i get so much happiness when i tell somebody to like this is work for me that i see them do it and then they're like killing it i'm like yes like it's fucking awesome exactly exactly i don't know so try try and execute more too it's not just collecting wisdom it's like actually doing something with it no it's it's true and that's another big component about it is actually doing it like i i mean literally this was yesterday yesterday they asked me to be on a it was like fintech or some like segment in the new york stock exchange and i was sitting down and i was you know talking to the guy and kind of explaining you know the platform and after it he just started telling me all these things he was like this is brilliant he was like you should do this you should do this she should do this and at no point that i say i know everything i literally sat there for an extra half an hour listened to him some his ideas i thought were absolutely brilliant some we thought about but some are absolutely brilliant even just the the you know like you he came up with this slogan which i'm happy at these him was called ready player brag and i was like i look oh i like that i was like i i that a lot i was good was like i love that and again but being able to listen to that that's really a mindset that you have to do and then you have to and you said it then you have to say okay i'm gonna execute this it's like i love listening to people it just and then you know and if you come to me i love giving advice to people but i i i'm not scared to ask for that and that's probably been one of the most helpful things there is not knowing at all was there any moments that were more difficult where you just sort of after you sat with yourself you asked yourself like what the hell am i doing i'm sure there was but there's always those moments there's been many in my life so i'm sure there was but when you hit those moments for somebody that's going through that moment themselves how do you push through we had two really big moments like that first one was so the first one i think it was like you know building our business things are going well and then i think the economy crashed again i think it was like the ukraine war all these things like started happening and it was you know probably a pretty low point because things kind of were stopping they were slowing down and i just remember kind of like you know sitting there and saying wow you know this is hard but i you know again i always asked myself was like hey but if it wasn't hard you know you know then everyone would do it just be like you know i was saying so i kept telling myself that but it was it was a lot to kind of force myself to say hey you know keep on pushing things are slow right now because you have a good business you have all these things and it it was hard it was really really hard and what i've done the trick that i do is that i slow down i put one foot in front of the other and i slowly accomplish everything on my list that i need to do and that's the only way that i can get through because if i think oh well this and in this and i think too far and i get worried then i'm like you know you you you psych yourself out so i'm like alright well what do i have to do have to do this i have to do this i've do this i have to do this and i did that and i just kept doing it and said well you know you still need to make a business plan you need to do this you need to do this and i did that and i think it was four months of doing that and then i think we got approached by well i think at that point you we're we're also pitching and talking to people and stuff and you know just going and i was editing my pitch doing this again but it was one methodical step after another and one of our bishop was very successful i think we raised like two million dollars and you know obviously that changed everything at that point but those four months before that i had to really just say okay let me just go slow let me go slow let me just make sure we're doing it the second time that happened was actually the ipo and nothing goes right everything goes wrong there you know auditors their things there and i just remember slowing down and just say okay these are the steps we need to go to ipo period i'm just gonna do one finish that go to the next one finished that go to the next one so in my mind i didn't even it was it was a very linear way of thinking and when i got to like you know maybe almost the last three steps and i was closer to it then i could think a little bit with more emotion and kind of think but before that i just said you gotta one foot for the other and it was the it's it's what is always work for me when things get really really complicated just take away the emotion and that's alright go mirror take away the emotion and just put one foot in front on the other before before we wrap up i just want people to understand a little bit more about how they can participate in the bright house universe and where they can go to sort of to see what you're working on and and just immerse themselves so where would you want people to connect with you and and just go and explore more i think the website we have a pretty awesome platform create account go to w w brad house dot com create account jump in there you know play join other communities know we have everything from the public side to the gaming side to the community side on there but i would just say just just jump on there just jump on there you know you know start us start a you know start an account and you know i think you'll see how much fun it is and again we are really just you know with all the success we're still really really just starting you know in december we're going to be doing twelve sec schools that are gonna be participating you know after that we're gonna be moving on and getting you know midwest schools california schools so you know more things would be there but again it's the community that makes the platform so you know i would say just start an account jump on there and you know i i we i i think people be really pleased if you could if you could go back and tell your twenty year old self one bit of advice after all of these entrepreneurial journeys that you've been on what would that piece of advice be and why that's a good one because it's kind of hard because a lot of these things kinda shaped what you were doing but that could be an answer to i've actually heard that before that's a i think that's actually very wise but i'll let you go with it but yeah i mean it well i just it's i a lot of the things i learned is because of the because of all the mistakes and successes and stuff i have i think if i had to tell myself one thing it would probably just be believing yourself and don't quit that's what i think i would just probably wanna tell myself because you know i never quit you know but if for more of a myself it was kinda proving that i can do something so i was almost saying i'm gonna do this and not know if it's gonna be successful but i wanna prove it to myself and you know having that confidence i i now again i listen to everyone i'm wanna be i wanna make sure always stay very humble and accept advice but believing in yourself early on and saying i can do this and having that confidence to do it we'll alleviate you a lot of the other stuff now i feel comfortable in saying hey i can make this decision here and i feel like it eighty percent and ninety percent that's the right decision if you only pass on one lesson to your kids and that was the most important lesson that you've learned outside of betting on yourself think that's a very important one but what would be the one thing that you'd want like your kid to learn that they can take through their life i think the other thing is to have a good circle around you i think that that's really important because i believe i've always had these attributes but every step in my way at people who believed in me people who you know gave good advice and people who were actually trustworthy so i would say that the people you hang out with whether your friends whether your colleagues you know i would say make sure that those the people that you feel comfortable around that they add value to your life because you know i i i get all the credit i mean i get all the blame to it everything goes wrong but i get all the credit but you know if it wasn't for my cofounder you know if it wasn't for my wife if it wasn't for mentors you know i clerk for a federal district judge who was the hardest person on me the entire world at the law firm i had several mentors who pushed me harder than anyone else pushed me before so it's like you know those were people you know that are like you know even best friends and then had a lot of negative people around me too you know i i'm a very both ways you gotta be careful of yeah i'm a very social person and i had people who you know probably shouldn't have been there so now i have a lot smaller circle and but the people that around me they know they can tell me i don't agree with this and they can tell me but this is the way i would do it and i and i have absolute trust in them that they have the best interest for me and for the company so i i would i would tell my daughter that i would say you know that's a really really important part addition you believing in yourself you have to have a really really strong circle of people who also believe in new and i'm going to push you up 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 but 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

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 explore how new technologies are transforming industries and the future of work discover how the fusion of ai iot and three d printing is reshaping production and innovation understand why connected systems create smarter and faster organizations and uncover how automation is redefining how people work and businesses evolve so when you when you work with companies what what is what is the thing that you're seeing having the biggest effect like you know you look at iot you look at ai you look at companies that are trying to figure it a way to push blockchain into trust list transact like what's the thing that's that's changing companies is the most that you can see the impact in the next six months well i think it's it's the combination of ai with these technology technologies so it's it's ai and iot so you move to you know manufacturing four point o where you can do predictive maintenance and you know people who are doing ai in three d printing blank just got approved for the first three d printed our ge got approved excuse me for the first three d printed engine part think about how that part was made before five summit sub assembler made little pieces they sent them to an assembler and put it together put in a warehouse put it on a ship put on a truck and got it to ge now ge gets a part that's cheaper lighter faster stronger and no inventory and people say well three d printing is slow it only has to be faster than the ship from asia right and is yeah so you know i think it's the combination of people taking big data in ai and putting it behind whether it's robotics or blockchain or drones to really change products and and the other i think big change you're seeing is cloud connected products so companies are seeing that cloud connect them products allow them to act like a web company in a web company like travel velocity we knew what every customer was doing every day we watched every interaction and saved it and improved our product because of it and communicated with the customer well now john deere has a internet connected tractor they don't have to wait for the annual meeting to ask the dealer well what are the farmers doing this year they know it every minute and then go out and update that tractor and delight the customer just on my tesla it gets new every month i get new stuff and what car ever did that before so by being cloud connected you're a faster learner and you're faster to change to market needs and customer needs and these are all these are these are all organizational changes now take it a level further or a level deeper future of work what are you seeing with companies now because now you mentioned a few things and future of work in two ways future of work in terms of how people work but also future of work in terms of what jobs are people gonna be doing right well and and they're both changing you know recent survey show that most leaders want everyone back in the office but most workers want a flexible schedule they like two days in the office in three days at home or something like that so i think there's gonna be a collision here and and i think the workers are gonna win because we have great demand for labor right now and you know two of the boards i'm on companies one company has sold all their real estate another is sold off half of it already they're just not planning on coming back because the cfo loves the economics and their productivity is good yeah it depends what business you're in obviously a manufacturing business can't do the same thing so i think we're gonna see much more in continued work from anywhere and it's gonna be part office part not i think we have to be careful not to lose the creativity aspect that that evolves from bouncing into other people and talking with them at the water cooler or whatever and then i think you know job jobs are changing and we're we're automating lots of mundane task and robotic process process automation combined with ai getting rid of a lot of those tasks but on the other hand we're learning new tasks like you know a great video salesperson is in terrific demand right now you know somebody you can build a relationship and close deals without ever going there that's that's a big new deal data analytics is screaming off the chart anybody can analyze all this big data because you know some companies have these crystal clear data lakes but most people have data swamps and and you know we've we've gotta change that to to use these data to to great effect so i think work will change i i think another big thing we haven't talked about is is how business models are changing so you know kayak is one of those asset list asset list companies that just puts you know creates a platform putting buyers and sellers together and it's worth almost two billion dollars but we have other new models like outcomes so philips the lighting company recently went to skip all airport in amsterdam said we're not gonna say light bulbs anymore but i wanna say it light they said what so we wanna light your airport we on a twenty year contract to light the airport and they got it so what do they do they immediately what what does that mean what just that deadbolt yeah we'll keep your airport lit we will pay for the power we'll keep the bulbs there we'll make sure everything is is lit all the time so you don't have to have people change your bulbs you don't have to pay for the power we'll just light the airport and it's lighting as a service last so what did they do they put in bulbs that last seventy five percent longer that they weren't selling before they put the same bulbs use half the power because helps this spam for the power and they even recycle the bulbs and rem manufacture them now because it's in their interest so they've went from selling bulbs to selling a long term highly profitable contract and yeah they saved a ton of money for the airport so honeywell is doing things like that ge is selling power by the hour you know and then we're seeing models like subscriptions for things we never thought we'd subscribe to like dinner you know i subscribe to a box meal service or razors you know who thought you'd subscribe to razors billion dollar business and then people are going direct to consumer on crazy things like d suitcases and d mattresses know things we always had to go to the store for now suddenly we don't i mean who would thought you'd buy a mattress online and get a hundred day try it but so we have and you can ship it back if you don't like yeah if you if you do that or or just changing experience just changing customer experience i mean apple killed nokia by changing the phone experience spotify killed the itunes by going to streaming it right what what what about uber they're just a cab company with software i mean that's the difference it's just software but it's a better user experience so people are looking at new ways to disrupt by changing a model or changing the customer experience or both 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 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 whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee you aren't 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 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 filled 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 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 candidate 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 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 i choose and 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 so we spoke so i think that's an incredible insight and you spoke about some use cases for large companies that are looking to disrupt but also you spoke about some existing startups that obviously have disrupted what are some other startups that people or use cases that people may not know about that are innovating and you think they will be mega disrupt and completely displace some major incumbents in the next two years do you have any what about the next two years example take i met a company three years ago zip line and they started doing drone deliveries of blood in africa and because it's very hard the roads aren't good blood is perishable and they said we started in africa because they don't have any drone rules so didn't wanna start in new york state where they wouldn't let us do it it was very smart and you know they said you you talk about software crashing they said well our airplanes crash a bunch you know we had to learn how to how to fly these drones and and you know they they they catch up in a net it's it's crazy but now they got noticed in the us they've made a huge trial in north carolina flying covid tests and drugs and blood to remote hospitals so drone delivery got approved during covid i think it's gonna go like crazy and there's another city in in the the southwest or southeast where they started doing drone testing as a rural place and most people were opposed to it now they're hooked on it they love it so that's gonna grow very fast and i think that we're gonna see manufacturing change as well dramatically with three d printing and i think there's gonna be a lot of three d printing that's done by boutique houses that will create things so taking ai to iterate a thousand cad designs that could never be built but they can only be built by three d and then showing like ford did recently they re a seat bracket this is sort of mundane thing but guess what it's twice as strong and it weighs thirty percent less well think about all the parts in your car that might weigh thirty percent less what would that do to mileage right they're only be done through three d printing so i think those two are really exciting but my my book talks about ten technologies that are coming to change the world that's the first half with examples you know like like drone fire drones using for firefight fighting and blockchain for smart contracts but the second part of the book is what do you do about it the first part of the book is just scare the hell out of here say part the book is is say yeah yeah know i just there what can i do like increase risk test more c project not people but you can turn that book around for an entrepreneur and say these are the places where you wanna go think about a new idea because these are places where corporations will move slowly and the books both books are kinda cookbook books they're seventy two three page chapters so they're super faster read and you can use it as a as a how to book do you see do you see these ideas being adopted by some legacy organizations do you like who who's buying this book is it is it is it just the the the person is already in line with innovation is already looking into these technologies or do you see some people that are talking to you buying the book trying to understand these ideas that are in companies that are hundred years oh yeah sure not the ge or the ibm or one whatnot some of there's some of the other ones what you you're doing it i mean i mean mac truck is is deploying iot in all their trucks i just talked to the largest truck stop which is on ia eighty and iowa and we were talking about look if mac has smart trucks then you gotta work with them so you have sensors at your at your stop so that you could say hey this truck is coming it's not gonna make it across the country without new bricks we can fix it and get you back in the road in four hours and you can actually bid on it so the connection of big brands who are automating you know they need people to help them wherever they are that that's what ge is doing with their jet engines so yes large companies are looking at this and saying how can i deploy five g with iot to have smarter networks in my factories and one of the companies on on the board of is doing that but at the same time smaller companies are looking these technologies and partnering up with large companies to help them do things that the large lumber giant just can't get done quickly enough 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

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 uses 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 built for what's now and what's next in tech hiring in this lessons episode explore how woken evolve from social awareness into a powerful cultural system discover how the two thousand eight financial crisis merged activism with corporate interest to form world capitalism understand how vi signaling and hypocrisy divide society and weaken shared spaces and uncover why separating capitalism from democracy may be key to preserving american freedom how did woken get to this point where it started in it started it started with in theory good you know there was there was good thought behind why we should be woke why we should be more accepting why we should do all of these things to perhaps get rid of some late ideologies that are not so great that we see in society how has it got to the point where it's almost gone to the other end of the spectrum and now yeah what you're stating is that it's actually a negatively impacting society to a point yeah look i i think that when woken was born it was about challenging the system about standing up to the system and agree or not there's something about that that i respect for somebody who has the courage to stand up to what the prevailing system is okay but today i think couple decades later w is no longer about challenging the system w has become the system and i think that the the untold story of how that took place actually traces back to the two thousand eight financial crisis when corporations were the bad guys the old left wanted to take money from the wealthy corporations and red distributed it to poor people agree or not that's what the old left had to say but there was the beginning of this new woke movement that began to say actually the real injustice in society wasn't was poverty per s it wasn't economic injustice per s no it was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and after o eight that actually presented the opportunity of a generation for big business and for wall street because they could go in one fell swoop from being by definition the bad guys in the eyes of the old left to being the good guys if they wielded their corporate power in the right way and so they started adopting these woke values plotting diversity and inclusion putting token minorities and women on boards and as i said earlier mu about the racially disparate impact of climate change in fancy ski towns and and that actually worked out pretty well because corporations were happy to lend not just their money but they're legitimacy to this new woke movement they were happy to use their market power to effectively propagate these woke values but they didn't want to do it for free they had a new expectation that this new left would look the other way when it came to leaving corporate power intact they recognize that maybe they don't love corporate power but at least they would leave them alone if they were using corporate power to advance the goals of the new progressive work left and that's how this arranged marriage came to be and so to answer your question about how woke went from being about a fringe theory that challenged the system to becoming the dominant system in my telling of it certainly in the book and i and i believe it to be true it is when woken met capitalism that it truly became unstoppable that it went from being about challenging the system to becoming the system and if you traced back to the two thousand eight version of it or the post two thousand eight version of it what i like to say is a bunch of big banks met a bunch of woke millennials together a birth woke capitalism and they put occupy wall street up for adoption they only bet many people don't what that was that was what the old left represented woken represented a new vision that proved convenient for big business and the funny thing about it is that you know the the woke left in big business i don't think this is really an arranged marriage of love it isn't arranged marriage but i don't think it's in a marriage of love i think it's more like mutual prostitution where each side has secret scorn for the other in any marriage in which each side has a scorn for the other is not gonna end well but it's a marriage that's working right now as long as each side gets something out of the trade and silicon valley has now copied the same thing saying they're gonna sensor content that the far left doesn't wanna see online but in return they expect the new democratic party to look the other way when at when it comes to leaving their monopoly power intact that's how this arranged marriage is working out right now really well for both sides but the net child the bastard child of that arranged marriage has been the rise of this new woke industrial complex that i think is far more powerful than either big business or big government alone it's a hybrid a combination of the two because each is able to do what the other cannot and i personally think that's actually the biggest threat to liberty today not just big government per s but the the new birth of this new woke industrial of leviathan 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 monk 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 whether i'm grabbing my morning coffee you're aren't 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 i keep going back every business has different goals and square is 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 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 withholding and benefits administration that's exactly why i use gust myself and the smartest business owners use it as what's 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 all 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 chatbot real people who know what they're talking about plus they're the number one payroll software according to g two for fall of 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 i i wanna i wanna highlight specific examples because people are listening to this like oh yeah well you know it makes sense and but where can you point to where our company sort of vi signaled just to pla kate you know the the masses and one one example you brought out was with with solomon david solomon taking companies public that have a woman on their board of directors or or whatnot and that's a great that's a great thing it sounds like you know in theory that that's a great initiative but you brought out a data point that was something along the lines of the fact that most of these organizations already had a woman on the board of directors and it actually didn't really impact any organizations that were already ipo so i have goldman sachs made a declaration yeah in twenty twenty that it would not from from the mountain tops of da by the way that's da tends to be a place where people go to me the proclamation i've i've learned so so from da he says that goldman will not take a company public in the united states by the they they don't apply these standards in asia that they just kinda look the other way over there but in the united states won't take a company public unless it has at least one diverse board member where they didn't really say what canada's diverse but then they kinda said our focus is on women okay well it turns out that in twenty nineteen by the end of twenty nineteen certainly there wasn't a single one of the five hundred companies in the s and p five hundred that did not have a woman on their board let alone one diverse board member and so they they ultimately managed to exhibit courage precisely when the thing they were doing lacked any modi of courage at all they were just conforming what i like to say is that's just goldman sachs doing what goldman sachs does earning another great risk adjusted return taking no downside risk but getting all the p benefit taking an already popular social value and prominently em blazing the goldman sachs logo on the very front of of of the of the social cause but the list of examples just goes on and on i mean it's in some sense unfair to pick on goldman sachs because basically every major company in corporate america is doing the same thing and if you're coca cola it's a lot easier to complain about voting laws in georgia that make you sound more like a super packed than a soft drink manufacturer or or have employee trainings on how to be less white by the way that's an actual linkedin learning module that they sent up to their employees until they were called out on it a lot easier to do those things than to reckon with the impact of your own products on the nationwide epidemic of diabetes obesity by the way in the very black community that they're profess care so much about or or if your nike it's great to criticize slavery two hundred and fifty years ago a lot harder to give up your reliance on slavery in the present day through your supply chains reaching out in asia it's a lot easier to criticize the united states and take take down the betsy ross flag sneaker that they wanted to release in twenty nineteen because colin ka thought it was in of racism without saying a peep in china where we see true human rights atrocities today over a million week in concentration camps nike doesn't say a word and in fact john don just in the last month ceo of nike goes to china and says that we are a company of china and for china that's his quote not mine this is this is actually how this game is played is this two faced behavior in the united states in abroad is sup to the cc lying pros like a lap dog but that same lap dog bites the united states at every possible turn and i think that hypocrisy reveals the essence of what's going up they're doing whatever allows them to make the most money or aggregate the greatest power in china that's it's behaving one way by not criticizing injustice and nowadays in the woke moment in the united states it's doing the exact opposite finding injustices to criticize as a way of exhibiting moral superiority now you make a another statement that this is not just not just play skating masses but also detrimental to traditional american ideology potentially you said like you know pursuing the american dream and having opportunities and and all these things that are you know they they are so congruent with what americans hold so true and dear to them now how how is this going to potentially negatively impact these traditional american ideologies what what's the what's the bridge between i'll give you i'll give you a simple low hanging fruit because some people may disagree on the importance of certain american ideals over others can get into that but i actually think that it that this new trend undermine american solidarity as we know it because in a divided po body po like ours okay in america in a healthy democracy where people disagree and debate one another have fears disagreements in the sphere of politics the thing that we need in order to bind ourselves together as one people is others fears of our lives a political spaces where we could all come together irrespective of whether we're black or white irrespective of whether we're democratic or republican to me the baseball stadiums of america are a perfect example of where people come together for their love of sport for their love of watching sport and you don't have to know whether the fan next to you supports your politics or not you probably don't and and that's a beautiful thing about it the private sector running a biotech company one of beautiful things about it is that you come together because you care about developing medicines for patients who need them not because you have one view or another on a particular political hot button issue of the day and now with the spread of this world capitalist brand we lose those a political spaces no one can go to a major league baseball game anymore without also implicitly endorsing the major league baseball stand on moving its all star game from atlanta to colorado this year in a flag display of vi virtue signaling without actually probably even having read the voting statute that they were protesting in georgia going to a state that actually doesn't have dramatically different voting laws in the first place but did it just because it was an opportunity to signal virtue maybe that benefits the ml be in the short run maybe it doesn't we can debate that but it hangs america out to dry because it again e one more space that could have brought us together in a divided moment that we have now lost too as biotech companies go the same thing happens where pete whether you're on the left or the right black or white you could come together say i wanna pursue the development of medicines for patients who need them but now the biotech industry association bio the lobby group that represents the biotech companies says that it encourages companies to consider dis investment in states that pass laws like the ones in georgia and that effectively have forces people to signal what political tribe that they're in where i personally think that the thing we need to do isn't to force capitalism and democracy to share the same bed what we actually need is to keep them apart from one another in order to preserve the integrity of each and i think that if we continue to force capitalism to mix with democracy we will be left with neither and in my mind those are the two parents of america capitalism and democracy both in seventeen seventy six the year of the declaration of independence and the year of the wealth of nations individual unity all in one that is what america is at its best and and and we need both of those parents of america sometimes those parents may run rough shot over the other and sometimes in order to save the baby you actually need to keep the parents apart this may be one of those cases where america needs to do the same thing 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

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 we're exposing my luck find some people and not others derek sieve sold company for twenty two million and everyone said he got lucky what they missed was that he'd been building for eleven years while his competitors quit at year two luck isn't random it's probability that increases if you position right and don't leave i'll speak about two conditions that make you actually find when opportunity shows up and my most people quit eighteen months before luck would have arrived this is how you make yourself luck here derek sieve sold cd baby for twenty two million dollars in two thousand eight and everyone called it luck right place right time the internet boom caught the away right but what they didn't see is that he'd been building music distribution systems since nineteen ninety seven so eleven years of showing up before the big exit and during those eleven years dozens of other music distribution companies started and most quit within two years some made it five years before selling for nothing or shutting down but derek was still there in year eleven when the buyer showed up so was selling for twenty two million lucky absolutely the buyer could have picked any competitor timing could have been different a dozen variables outside of derek control had to align but here's what people miss derek created the conditions for luck to find him and then he stuck around long enough for it to show up and that's not the same as just working hard and it's not the same as just getting lucky it is something else entirely see a lot of us don't understand what luck actually is most people think about luck and binary terms either you got lucky and you didn't deserve it it was just random chance or you earned it so hard work means no luck involved right this is wrong this is a lie and believing it's how luck works destroys your ability to actually benefit from luck so here's what actually happens luck is always involved in any success story but some people create conditions where luck can find them and others don't so when someone wins a lottery that is pure luck they bought a ticket anyone could have won the work required was minimal the outcome was random but when someone builds a company for ten years and gets acquired that's also luck but it's a different kind of luck because they didn't just show up they position themselves in a place where good luck could reach them and then they stayed there long enough for it to arrive the difference isn't deserved versus un the difference is probability see pure luck has the same odds for everyone who participate you buy a lottery ticket you have a one and three hundred million chance of winning but earned luck has better odds so you build something valuable for ten years in a growing market you have a one in fifty chance that somebody wants to buy it so it's still luck but it's much better odds now most people don't understand this distinction so they either work hard and get better when luck doesn't show up or they wait for luck and get bitter when hard work doesn't make it appear or they get lucky once and they believe it was all skill or they watch others get lucky and believe it was all chance all four of these ideas miss what's actually happening but let me explain how this works with the story from my own life i have been writing online for a very long time i would say total writing anything online over five years i guess the current newsletter that i put out has been about three years but i've been writing for a very long time because it's been multiple previous iterations of writing and i've killed some of these projects but say the first two years i've ever written anything nothing happened i wrote every week sometimes multiple times per week and the engagement sucked it was flat there was no opportunities no growth just showing up to an empty right and year three which was really around the time when i started this newsletter someone with fifty thousand followers shared one of my pieces traffic spiked i got five hundred new subs in a week so was that luck completely they could have shared anyone they could have never seen my work there was a dozen different variables that had to align for them to share my work but what people don't see is i published well over a hundred pieces before that person ever saw my work and if i'd quit at newsletter fifty or newsletter one hundred i wouldn't have been there when they went looking for something to share and that is the definition of earned luck i didn't make them share my work but i made sure there was work to share when they were looking now you're four into my writing career i got invited to speak at a very large conference decent size paid well changed the entire trajectory of my career how did i get invited well the person who shared my newsletter in year three had recommended me to the person who was putting on the conference because they like my work see that is luck stacked on luck but both pieces of luck required the same thing i was still there still publishing still building when opportunity showed up see most people quit for luck has a chance to find them they work hard for six months see no results decide it's not working they were building the conditions but they left before the luck could show up now you understand there are different kinds of luck there's pure luck and earned luck but this is really what makes earned luck different from pure luck the probability of earned luck increases over time it compounds if you're positioned right so with pure luck lottery ticket right you buy a lottery ticket once your odds are one in three hundred million if you buy a lottery ticket every week for ten years your odds are still one in three hundred million each ticket is independent but if you build something valuable your odds start low you start a company you write a newsletter you start a podcast podcasts put content on social media the odds start low but they increase with time if you're in the right place so year one of you building your company you're unknown no network no track record odds of a big break are pretty close to zero year five you have a body of work a network that knows you proof you can deliver so your odds are meaningfully better year ten you have become unavoidable in your niche odds are legitimately good that something happens now this only works this formula only works if two conditions are met your position in a place where opportunity exists and you don't leave before luck shows up and most people fail at both they position themselves in a place with no opportunity or they position themselves right but they quit too early now why do people make this mistake well a few reasons but the first mistake is they confuse effort with positioning so you can work incredibly hard in a place where luck will never find you the odds never improve and you're just grinding with no probability of a breakthrough so working eighty hours a week in a dead end job isn't creating conditions for earned luck you're working hard but you're not positioning yourself anywhere that luck can actually reach you now writing a novel for five years but never showing it to anyone also isn't positioning you're creating something but you're hiding it from the mechanisms that could create opportunity see effort matters but only if it's happening in a place where luck can find you now the second mistake people make is leaving right before probability catches up so most people quit around month eighteen right before their work is starting to compound right when they're starting to be known right before the probability curve starts working in their favor see they work hard they position themselves right then they left before luck could show up and this is one of the most painful things to watch because they did everything right except stay long enough now let's go back to derek and cd baby derek sieve didn't just work hard for eleven years he positioned himself in the exact place where opportunity would eventually show up he built something that musicians needed in a market that was growing with a model that created leverage and then he stayed there while his competitors quit while the market shifted well years passed with no big exits in sight but by year eleven he was one of the few people still standing in that space and when a buyer showed up looking to acquire a music distribution company there weren't many options left now was it lucky that the buyer showed up yes it lucky they chose cd baby yes but derek spent eleven years making himself one of the only options that is not pure luck that is earned luck the buyer was gonna show up eventually music distribution was valuable someone would want to consolidate that market that was predictable what wasn't predictable was which company would still be there when the buyer arrived and derek made sure it was him now what does this mean for your life you can't force luck but you can make yourself luck here not through positive thinking not through manifestation through positioning and persistence position yourself in a place where opportunity exists where the thing you're building has a chance of matter and where luck can actually find you if it shows up and then stay there long past when it feels like it's working long past when others quit see most people leave right before probability catches up they work hard for eighteen months see no results decide they're unlucky but they weren't unlucky they just didn't stay long enough luck doesn't show up on a schedule you cannot force it to arrive in year two or you're five but you can make sure that you're still there when it does arrive that is the thing that you can control see the people who seem lucky aren't luck than you they positioned themselves better and they didn't leave that is the whole game position persist be there when the luck shows up because luck will show up eventually if you're in the right place but that only matters if you're still there when it does 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 but 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

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 uses 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 built for what's now and what's next in tech hiring my adult children pushed me to tell a authentic story eat my drive for excellence fear failure and the depressive episodes they experienced when i was going through them in my case over the decades i sought it out help and learn to really listen to my body he turned a small accessory shop into a global luxury icon lou frankfurt is the visionary behind the rise of coach transforming it from a niche leather goods company to a worldwide lifestyle brand when you're running a growing business you can never be complacent even with success you need to be relentless do need to make raw career decisions to find the right destiny the logic comes from analytics collaboration and the magic comes from imagination and beliefs his leadership is about more than growth it's about craftsmanship authenticity and sustainable legacy building through bold risks and unwavering values redefined what a luxury brand could be be open to possibilities maintain a feeling that things are possible life is a journey challenge itself to become a better version of yourself he so lou first of all thank you so much for for coming on the podcast i'm really excited about this i guess my main question to just kick this off is ten years after you left coach a decade after you you know quote unquote retired from that season of your life what prompted you to cod your life put it in writing speak about the things that you went through what was the thing right now that's made you write bag man which is the book that's coming out the story behind the and improbable rise of coach what was the the inflection point right now that pushed you to do that and write that it's a it's a great question and su simply my adult children on all of of whom are involved in some way in in business who i'm very close with and actually pushed me to tell a authentic story that not only discusses my values on and building an iconic brand but my drive for excellence fear or failure and the depressive episodes that they experienced as my children when i was going through them and one of the reasons they wanted me to do this is was because i've been mentoring people gen z millennials even gen x and baby boomers people of all ages are both in portfolio companies where we're active as well as friends of friends who have been going through transitions and almost invariably when i meet with someone who is going through some form of transition there's anxiety there's fear this and they they get hardened when i'm able to share with them that they're not alone that it's very frequent and very commonplace place and where i discussed it techniques that i've used both to identify low periods as they were coming and the actions i took to prevent them from slipping further and to avoid them because your body doesn't lie to you so when you're all under stress the what you're feeling can turn into insomnia it can turn into waking up with terrible dreams and sweats fatigue loss of mojo a feeling that you might even be an impostor or you don't really have have you can lose a lot of confidence and so i'm someone who went through a lot of this very although in my case over the decades i i sought it out help in a in a variety of areas and learn to really listen to my body and i encourage others to do that talk to me about some of the things that you have like some just high level themes about going through high pressure high environment situations because again you grew coach from successful to just ultra successful over the course of your career ipo like i think twelve billion plus minus around the time when you were at its peak that's not a low stress environment so when somebody is operating at that level what are the things that they are dealing with that the public that the outside doesn't see that you are dealing with internally that you've had to deal with through your life when not when you're running a growing business particularly a rapidly growing business especially in discretionary categories where fashion or style makes a difference you can never be complacent even with success so whenever you reach a milestone yes it's important to acknowledge and celebrate but you need to be relentless and in being relentless ceo jobs are twenty four seven and it's i'm really talking about share of mind and it's really very important to find ways to turn that off to be able to compartment not only for balance in life but for renewal and refreshing and and i start with exercise very important i mentioned earlier listening to your body and that might lead to massage it might lead to it might lead to yoga it might lead to therapy and all of these things can be really helpful depending on where you are and in your journey and to your to your point gen z is a very different generation and when we talk about societal shifts they're occurring at galactic speed and attention spans are going down younger younger people are looking for self actual rationalization are looking for fulfillment wasn't a long ago when when you looked at a thirty year old who was a college graduate and you asked how many jobs did they have since school maybe one point three today it's six or seven and what when on your parents and i went to work the thought was it was a career and that you weren't looking to self actual you were looking to a mas hierarchy depending on where you sat you went to the better life for yourself for those around you what was the the framework or the decision free that you went through in your head to figure out where you wanted to end up said differently did you always think that you wanted to be a leader you wanted to work in incorporate you wanted to build something great was that something that you knew from a young age or did this this journey into ceo of coach was that more just something that happened through just figuring things out and trying different things and and learning up and ending in different places along the way it's a combination of things one of the things for my experience and many others what i often say is you need to make raw career decisions to find the right destiny and i encourage people who have the discretion to explore to see what really gives them fulfillment for myself from the early days i felt i was a natural leader i was present of my student body hunter college in my senior year and i'm i i i ran as an activist on anti war platform the vietnam war had divided the country i felt social justice was very important and i always was value driven and when i went into city government i knew that i wanted to be a service i wanted to improve the quality of life of new new york in new york and i went to work initially for an inspirational mayor john lindsay and over the next ten years i had a series of positions culminating in running head start in day during the city's fiscal crisis and i felt my customer so to speak was children and their families and i wanted to do everything i can to give them the highest level service with qualified staff in clean facilities with the right type of support programs so i was very focused on service and i built a team of like minded individuals who were looking out for the greater good now that period of your life there was a point where i find this very interesting in your story you were called two principled and that's what led to that particular two principled you were passed over for promotion and that was a catalyst that eventually put you on the path to coach so speak to me about the concept of of being too principled what that actually means and and what does that say to who you are as a person and your character and sort of what you're put on this earth to do i've always been a believer in speaking truth to power and i'd like to say informed truth to power not just the highest paid opinion but a studied view looking at all of the constituencies all of the issues involved and when i first started in city government i i was not in an environment with my leaders were concerned with the greater good to the extent that i felt was appropriate and warranted and i found i an opportunity with someone who became a mentor and eventually a very close friend who was really focused on re reducing education educational inequality who was concerned with the immigrants and let's call it the under class people who were coming into the united states to give them the type of tools that where they could have a better life for themselves and their families and that was very motivational when i took the job of running heads start in daycare during the city's fiscal crisis i i said to the deputy mayor at the time if i do this i want no political interference because it's a hard enough job as it is you and my and the job was to really bring the programs into compliance with federal owned state law which meant that i had to with analytics look at the numb the percentage of children who are eligible who were receiving cab because you needed to be below a certain household income you you also needed to have staff within these programs who were qualified i've got no interference from city hall however there was a congressman at the time at koch who came to my office and i had been fore one that he was interested in protecting a particular program and by this time my team and i we did analytics and try to understand against the set of criteria we ranked programs and that particular program was in the bottom ten percent of programs that only add as an example fifteen percent eligible children meaning could i only find income verification for one other of seven kids the other six kids presumably came from more affluent households and i said to him congressman i i like to just show share with you why i don't think that's possible he said i don't wanna see that i just want you to save the program very polite he walked out little did i realize that he would become my boss about eighteen months later when he was elected mayor of the city in new york so he became mayor and i continued to work in the agency for child development day care had thought and there was an opportunity to basically have a be able to shape on union contracts and the workforce in the city in new york i i'm a very big believer in merit hypocrisy and really a big believer that you need to have metrics to measure how people work whether it was in government elsewhere and i was passed i did not i was passed over despite lots of support within the city in new york and when i went to see the mayor he said to me privately louie just too principled and what he basically meant was that he could not trust that i would follow his position or authority as mayor in situations where i felt the city would be better off doing something else when you think about after this period in your in your life and you think about the next career step it would also be obviously there's lots of good corporations out there but i think there's lots of corporations where i think people would also find that being too principled would actually be a detriment to your growth within the corporation depending on the company right so talk to me about i know your personality i know what you stand for how did you make the entrance into into corporate america into leadership being who you are and wanting to work with a company that works with people who are of the same sort of caliber and ethos as as you was was coach the first stop or were there other things along the way that didn't work out great question a coach was actually the first first and only stop after government and it was serendipity i had not even updated by resume yet and i was in the yellow taxi was someone who was an adjunct professor at columbia university and also an a e w official in washington who had oversight for programs like hats start and was familiar with my work i had just spoken at it one of it's graduate classes where there was a case study on the work i did in day we share a taxi going downtown and he said what do you do for a non encore and i said great question i have no idea but i i need to leave government and he said well i have a friend who has a small pocket the company a childhood friend on who's sixty years old and he's looking for a pro from outside the industry who has good values and i i thought to myself well i think i have good values and i'm certainly from outside the industry and he set up an appointment for me with the a founder of the business and what occurred in the from the appointment time to my getting the job and taking it early on being eternally curious i did my do i did some due diligence because i i had barely heard of coach it would i somewhat windy need to mention the name coach for me to know that it was a handbag company i wouldn't be able to have done that an una the winner so i pretended to be a business week reporter and i called and visited places where i spoke with the bloom dale buyer that bon tell general manager and others who said that coach was a small brand very strong following the founder regulated production and they often ran out of product by thanksgiving but people really loved coach for my last interview i visited a small handbag store on the west side of manhattan on seventy second street there were back then in the seventies there were many many small groups of stores mom and pop stores small chains it was before the department stores basically drove most of them out of business and so i go into the specialty store and i say i don't see a coach bag and i say dear you carry coach and the owner said yes and went under the counter lifted one coach bag and she said it's not just i only have one bag now and it's and it's reserved for a loyal coach consumer and they said tell me about coach and she said it had a coat following and that intrigued me the idea that people felt passionate about coach and it gave me a sense of purpose to try to understand what were the qualities of the brand that emmett resonated with people that encourage them to buy coach rather than another brand or a no name brand and that curiosity i brought two coach and early on of consumer insights and data analytics became a cornerstone of the way in which i learned the business and to some extent led the business do you feel like it's a a little bit of a superpower to have no pre conceived notions as a leader going in just blank slate but also following up on that how do you do it successfully when a lot of people from outside industries try and go into them and they don't they don't actually work out i don't think it's actually a superpower what i do believe for the right person who is curious coming in with no predisposition and having a willingness and openness to explore best practices trends understanding the three sixty perspective of a company which is product brand marketplace team and so forth is i think something that people can learn from the outside without predisposition and in fact it it shows up in corporate america every day today 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 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 to 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 future hold for business if you ask nine x 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 a 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 to actually let you peer into the future with actionable data when you're closing your books in days instead of weeks you're spending 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show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast indeed dot com slash terms and conditions apply hiring do it the right way with indeed what do you think was because now you have your in coach they have a cult following so so obviously they have a a cult i guess you can define it as like not enormous group but very like a very niche group of people that absolutely love the brand so your job now is to carry on a legacy is i guess the founder wants to to retire at some point and you have to find a way to take the cult appeal and then and then you have to find a way to get the world to have that same love for the brand as this as a smaller group of people but you also at the same time can't dilute dilute what made it special to those small that small group so what do you end up what you end up doing that is so successful what's your what's the magic well before we get to the magic i was or the the of the combination of magic of logic when you i realized i was going from a position where i had three or four hundred people that reported directly into me within the agency to situation where it's gonna have it a desk outside the founders office so first thing i needed to do was built his confidence that i could actually get things done and and and i also had to work within the guidelines that he allowed me to operate and to the founders credit he believed that there was an opportunity for us to reach consumers directly without middle men because when i joined coach we sell to anyone who pay their bills even late and we had no direct no direct consumer business alright so one of the very first assignments i undertook was starting to a mail order business a catalog business and in order to do that i had to learn the catalog business and i had to learn what success looked like and i used my investigative skills to to meet veterans in the industry study best practices and and developed we developed a successful catalog business and but even before the catalog business i shared the founders desire to gain control over our destiny because i also looked at brands around the world even before i started a coach but especially in the first six to twelve months while a coach and there was one brand that really got my attention and there was a small french brand called louis vuitton and they had only about twenty stores at the time and that was the only way they distributed their product they did not sell through the wholesale channel and they had complete control over the environment over service levels over merchandising and i thought to myself that if we could open stores retail stores and actually be able to express the full personality of the brand or that it would lead to even faster growth and more loyalty and there would be a laboratory for us to real time here and see what consumers are saying about product two years after i joined coach i convinced the founder to allow us to open a our first full price store which we opened on eight sixty fifth street in madison avenue and it was a in october forty feet by eleven so four hundred and fifty square feet longer and narrow and with a full basement and for twenty five thousand dollars we we created library walls and and treated our put our bags which at the time were online leather bags on the shelves library styles so you could see the gus it in the range of colors and that christmas we had lines down outside the store down to the corner about hundred feet away and i knew that we had something that was special and if there was a way for us to scale it we would could we would be a very successful what i called multi channel business at the time there were no other american manufacturers that had a fleet of storage they all sold to third parties and some were starting catalog businesses so we did over a million dollars in the first year and four hundred and fifty feet the average ticket might have been a hundred dollars which meant lots of transactions why when you say boundless growth opportunity was was was there truly boundless growth opportunities or were there things that had to be layered on take it to the next level so it's yes multi channel for sure interesting actually choice that the founder had never gone i guess the the the more modern way of saying it is like direct to consumer but that's that's that was just a strategic choice at the time and i guess it's a little bit more expensive to take a product and launch a store it's like a little bit more high risk than going through establish that channels i i don't know rather felt the their brand like that that this it's very capital intensive and of course now that we're in the digital age and perhaps thirty percent of discretionary repurchase in the united states maybe even high out or online the stores brands that have stored up have reduced their physical footprint to adjust societal changes where people are spending more online catalog is not and does not require a capital so we started with a mail order business you the capital was the course of the catalog but you do your economics and you understand when you layer in the course of the product and the course of the marketing what you would need to break even or be profitable i i i will say being an outsider even though i had been worn by an insider before we he opened the the first store that i might need to go back to city government he said because the first store was going to fail i'll for multiple reasons first we would be thrown out of bloom dale which was down the street and second people would not wanna buy coach in its own store and well before we opened the store i was asked by my colleague who ran sales revenue to meet with a chairman and the bloom girls out who wasn't who was an icon marvin trail and i went to his office i'm just blocks away from my coach store which was under construction and i went into this conference room formal conference room everyone was wearing suits not me at the time but the department in store staff and i was waiting to get blister by this fellow and marvin t and this guy that was with me and i only brought one one other person with me the rent fellow had the relationships and he said wait until you hear what marvin says before the meeting started i had seen his picture of course in women's wear daily and elsewhere yeah he he came to the conference room when asked that luke come out and i went out i went outside the conference room just the two of us and he said to me lou i'm going to tell you when we go into the room that you're doing the most i'm partner like thing you can imagine is that it's gonna jeopardize our future and that you're not a good partner but what i want you to what i wanna tell you but you must never say anything about this to anyone particularly the fellow was working with it's the smartest thing you could do open your own thoughts because he was a visionary and he understood consumers and he understood trends and consumers were looking to have more intimate experiences with brands that they cherish talk to me about the idea of magic and logic so where did this come into play when did when did you first think about the the concept of magic and logic as it relates to coach so you've obviously now the stores you you're building out stores successful the whole brand is is is going in the right direction why did you why did you come up with this particular philosophy when we say on logic and magic we can we can say science and art we can say left brain right brain and the way we came up with the term was due to a presentation that we needed to make to the chairman of the one of the five leading pop stores in japan and this was back in nineteen eighty eight the department star's name was mit ko and i was introducing this new concept of coach in japan and for background japan at the time did not have local significant local brands the economy in the late eighties as it is today is really act shaped with almost no poverty because of limited immigration in the social support systems basically a that shaped economy middle class of course now there's some needles at the top with people that our billionaires adds but but the reality was that european luxury brands dominated japan and they every household that could remotely say or afford food savings had a luxury bag which they coveted and and i'm talking the leading grants at the time was l gucci prada to name a few and the market had not grown for many years so it was a five billion dollar market there's the population in japan really wasn't was not growing and people so there weren't more households than these bags or forever so we needed to change we needed to provide a distinctive product that would meet the needs of younger people and now i'm i'm bridging from your question and magic and logic i'm actually telling you how we employ both magic and logic and it was clear to us from all of our research and analytics and interviews that i did myself that were translated into english if indeed the person did not speak english that japanese women in nineteen ninety who were graduated from college were looking at professional careers they were not looking to be immediately married they wanted to travel they wanted to be able to express themselves and with that societal trend which we evidenced by tourists coming into our stores in hawaii into third party retailers like duty free shoppers in their own handful of by that time ten or fifteen stores that these were young women looking for product that they could relate to emotionally that also gave them good value and we went into japan ins waiting ourselves as an alternative to european luxury grand where an average bag at the time might cost a hundred thousand yen which would be a thousand dollars from a european luxury brand while a coach bag might cause forty thousand yen in japan that for that sixty thousand yen savings a consumer could go to taiwan or korea for weekend air fair hotel and expenses or could save that six hundred dollars for rent towards an apartment and we ins ourselves effectively by as an alternative by getting prime real estate this is when we opened stores so back to nineteen eighty eight with mit i shared with the founder of the the notion that there was society shifts through analytics and research showed that the appeal for japan american made coach products by our experience with japanese tourists so we had a presentation and we needed to name the presentation and we coined it magic and a combination of magic and logic and the founder who at the time was probably seventy years old and had been in the position for a career person at mit for twenty five and thirty years loved the term magic and logic and the and the the logic comes from analytics consumer research rigorous application of metrics collaboration adaptability and the magic comes from imagination and belief so when we talk about i had a belief that we could be successful with the japanese consumer i really felt strongly and it was driven by things that i was familiar with which is analytics and trying to measure cons where consumers were had been where they were today and where they were traveling and my entire philosophy from the beginning was to meet consumers where they were going not where they were today or where they were yesterday and so taking looking at its new consumers who fuel businesses you need satisfied consumers to buy again and again and we had lots of satisfied consumers in japan if we were entering the market it would be all new consumers and with that phrase he never went into the presentation and for ten or fifteen years afterwards whenever he would see me in japanese he would call me mister the magic and logic so we would have dinners you're mister the magic and logic he and he embraced us and it was a very successful partnership which evolved over a twenty year period and subsequent to that very successful meeting i started to use the term magic and logic a coach and this logic in magic and this magic in logic and i we help build a learning culture that really focused on collaboration and looking out for the greater good so when we talk about a greater good mindset that's logic you need to the magic is having belief and possibilities imagination curiosity is immersive curiosity is what i call i call that magic as well instinct following you've gut is magic but you can't follow you can't just use one of them it's always a blend of magic and logic it's some and certain companies and brands and products it's more magic others it's more logic i'm now talking about companies that produce physical products that have emotional connections to consumers because all of brand is is a is a lasting sum of images and associations that people have when they see the brand or the product does the set of images and associations and if those associations are positive and and in the case of coach it was very positive bags are are a very not intimate an object for women because they opened at sixty and seventy times a day they touch and feel it they kick out their most important possessions less so today in the digital age than before because you can almost do everything on an iphone but the iphone needs a vessel to put it in your keys on grooming products and they alike and in in the case of coach we used a natural leather with which we still do which develops at pat tina over time it burn so it gets better over time and today in the marketplace the collectible are selling for more than many of the older bags are selling for at prices well more than the new styles being introduced today because they're coveted 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 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 they 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 could 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 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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 for three incredible days in san francisco the global 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 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 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 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 well i wanted to sort of get your perspective on on leaders who lean more towards magic or more towards logic because now you now you mentor a whole bunch of of entrepreneurs and leaders and i guess this is again a two part question first of all do you see people leaning towards on average leaning towards one or the other more often than not end like is that a detriment you know one more than often than not and also for somebody who's listening to this who is a very say logic or magic driven person visionary or somebody in the in the data and they want to have more of a balance is there a way for somebody to become more balanced or is that something that you have to hire for to compliment your sort of native disposition or or native pro to one versus the other it's a it's also a an interesting question and and not surprisingly it varies by whether it's a service that you're introducing or a physical product whether it's a a disposable product where you just buy it every few days versus a discretionary per purchase which is something that you would keep for a longer time that has a lasting value so it all depends one of my jobs in mentoring and leaders or in determining whether we're going to invest in in a particular early stage requirement is to understand the superpower of that particular person and not only the superpower but their their very nature and whether they're collaborative coach strong ethics looking out for others rather than than themselves and clearly when we talk about entrepreneurs for the most part that they have the idea and many of them don't have the the training or the disciplines to turn it a great idea into a successful business and we what we try to do is complement that founder with others who have complementary skills and health to founder respect value of those skills so financial disciplines are absolutely critical to every start up in every business and to the extent that the founder has a big idea and it's a visionary but isn't really focused on profitability or or developing comprehensive strategic plans to sequence things you need to look to find people to compliment them and and vice versa just to summarize and wrap up the story with coach talk to me about how that period of your life ended and obviously what you've transitioned into now and some of the things that you took from those years that coach and i guess your entire career and what what you've you know that was a season of your life now you're in a new season of your life what you're focused on now and sort of what that period of your life led you to do when i was working a coach i was looking to build a brand that would withstand the test of time recognizing that most brands do not and and trying to understand what are the underlying equities within a brand that lead to be nurtured and developed so that even if the company goes through a tough run or bad management it can be revitalize again i i i really do believe coach is a legacy brand because it has endured for multiple generations and today under the leadership of todd kahn and stuart vi it is undergoing a remarkable renaissance reaching all time highs as it focuses on gen z continuing to look at societal shifts and and have it really responded to what gen z is looking for and they actually created a term called accessible as called i'm sorry they created a term called expressive luxury we had created a term accessible luxury prior to go in public as a mon for investors in particular to understand where we were playing between mass and luxury there was a lot of white space it was and you know we had a single lane over the over the following fifteen twenty years it turned into a super high accessible luxury because that is what americans gravitate towards because we don't have a history of luxury so bringing it to to other brands and businesses when i look at a when we look at a a discretionary brand that is entering a a new space we look at the unmet need the what lead perceived or existing they're going to fulfill or even if it's not unknown need so in a beverage category as an example more than a dozen years ago we got involved in a concept that was in the sports drink category called body which was developed as an alternative to gatorade and power aid that industry was about five billion dollars in the united states and not growing the both companies had drinks with unhealthy ingredients artificial sweetness and the alike and the visionary founder created a sport sports drink with a great taste with natural ingredients ten percent coconut water and and it was clear to me with shifting norms towards healthy eating and drinking if we were able to market it correctly and reached the hearts and minds of target consumers it could be successful and the category started to grow as a result of body the armor and ultimately the business was sold to coca cola when we had i believe one point five billion dollars in sales about ten or twelve years later and that's an example of a visionary with a great idea reinforced by what i would call a second founder who built a world class team of seasoned people to really build this business or to it's ultimate worse the last thing that i wanted to go into because you know you've had credit you've had an incredible career obviously you still provide tons of value from a a strategic standpoint and a tactical standpoint for the founders that you work with and the companies you invest in but a lot of what you speak about in your book are some of the not so fun parts and we sort of touch on them at the beginning but you speak about fear and depression and anxiety and i'm sure things that every single founder you've worked with in every single founder and even non founder that's planning on doing something is dealing with right now why did you why did you think it was important to put this stuff out there actually i'll say that differently because it's important to put this stuff out there but what was the thing that made you comfortable speaking about this publicly because i think that's less common first i started to clearly i talked openly with my family who witnessed my highs as well as experienced my lows and i found over time i was increasingly comfortable sharing that with individuals who i was coaching mentoring or even in select cases people on my team and when i decided to write my story which i mentioned was motivated by my adult children i wanted to tell an an authentic story a real story and that's what they wanted me to tell too and the reality for me is that is always driven by a drive for excellence and a fear of failure if you only fear failure it doesn't work if you only a driving for excellence and not scared that you might fail that can lead to complacency and eu and so i was always driven and continue to be through today by a fear of failure but it's motivated by a drive for excellence when someone's afraid they can do two three things you can do when you're afraid you can flee you can freeze or you can fight and you need to be driven by positive things to fight otherwise you can freeze and many of us freeze or you can flee and avoid the tough stuff until it explodes because you cannot but that's also a port portion of you can freeze or flee you wanna fight and to fight you need to have belief so the positive side is when you drive for excellence you have to believe in what you're doing and you need to lead consistently you need to motivate people and there has to be a genuine because people people employees customers everyone is smart they will know when someone's faking it so i i i also say say to people you need to listen to your body because your body doesn't lie to you and again if you're if if you're feeling like maybe you're an imp you because you're alone in the big office and the you got the world on your shoulders and being a ceo it's often very lonely i would say leave your office con confined in your senior team and work together i also suggest that you get help and that and there's a lot of self administered that helped exercise is so important to get your adrenaline endo meditation therapy massage punch and so on all of these things are really very helpful and i also believe you need to create if you want people to perform at their best you need to create a culture that allows people to be authentic and honest and where they can explore their issues and you could be helpful to them either just do coaching therapy medical support leads of absences you feel like having a a little bit of fear although it can be destructive if it's too much but a little bit of fear is actually required for success for fifth for sustained long term success yes and i i underscore sustained long term success and and often oftentimes people who don't have the fear but i might say get complacent or feel the eu verse that they're in a moat that no one can get into are frequently shocked and then they have to catch do double time to transform their business to catch up with the new competitors of the changing trends is there is there a specific tactic that you've used over your life that turns sort of fear into some productive action versus just paralysis like i mean i know their stories is about when you were pre ipo when you were stressed out and you had nightmares how do you work through that ten because it's not really easy and one the most important thing for everyone to know is that you're not alone every family is affected at some level at some time by issues by mental health issues whether it's a loss of mojo whether it's depressive episodes whether it's uncertainty about life and that is the human condition and i think with the ascend of gen z in the digital age as you said earlier it's much more open people are much more open to therapy are open to becoming better versions of themselves and wanting to lead a better life what i try to do i'm focused entirely on purpose and relationships at this point and feel having authentic real relationships is critical as is purpose doing something that i believe in and when you have belief in something and you're able whether it's a coach on a team or running a business it is not only renewing it's and judging and very fulfilling so i encourage people who are going through periods of tough periods to stay active to get help develop routines that will we require them to get out from who they are you cannot dwell and medicine often helps so if you could go back and tell a word of wisdom to your twenty year old self that would be comforting that would help them on their career journey what do you think that would be be open to possibilities maintain a feeling that things are possible optimism is is a critical factor and be willing to try new things they're not for life because you can often find your best destiny after for after having another experience that leads you to understand that's not where you want to go be open be positive be willing to do anything that's required and in in your job also look for it to the extent that you have discretion meaning you have the means not to necessarily or in a a paycheck next week or you have multiple opportunities look for an affirmative culture where your values are consistent with the values of the company and how they actually practice if you have the opportunity look for a learning environment where you can find mentors either individuals or because it's a learning environment classes and courses that you're encouraged to take to help you develop skill sets and a level of consciousness that you might not have today i love i like that a lot a good answer a good answer your book so bag man the story behind me improbable rise of coach that's coming out october fourteenth and you can get that obviously anywhere you get books i would say if somebody picks up this book what would be and they could only take one lesson away from it the most important lesson what would you hope that they take away from this life is a journey be open to possibilities challenge itself to become a better version of yourself have humility be able to listen to others be able to grow from experiences be less judgmental understand that the world has a lot of gray in it and i think that the last thing that i i i like to ask and you know even even before we press record i'm sure you'll have a very good answer for this because you're speaking to me about your family or asking me five kids yet and how important it is to you know that's that's the legacy that's really what we we all do this for so after all the things that you've learned over your life over your career if you could only pass on one lesson to your your kids or i guess even your grandkids you can pick one or the other maybe it's the same same lesson for both what would be the most important thing it doesn't have to be about business it could be but what's the most important life lesson that you would want your kids to take away live a life that's authentic and real with good values understand that we're part of a global society and our place in it and it's all about the journey be prepared work hard but look for special moments and and be sure that you're there your family along the way claude is a success story partner now as 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 sports injuries test you your mind your body and spirit others transform you elevating you to a stronger bolder version of yourself at summit at 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 you just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday how can you find amazing candidates fast easy just use indeed stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with indeed sponsored jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsor jobs don't 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 at indeed dot com slash p o d k a t z thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash p o k t z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast terms and conditions apply hiring indeed is all you need

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 how to build lasting resilience through simple mindset shifts and daily practice explore the pace method that turns pressure into strength through perspective acceptance community endurance and rest and understand why gratitude healthy habits and recovery are vital to sustaining growth and success what are some what are some tools or or or tips that you've picked up on that really help you with resilience with that mindset you've meant to you sort of worked around and dabble and spoken to some but just really concrete strategies for people well i think that especially with everything going on right now and and here in california we've got our mask mandate back and and times are uncertain and just figuring up being an entrepreneur is our work hours are different things are always changing we usually have several different hats that we wear for a few different businesses or more and so i think that it's so important to work on our resilience and that's something that we can do every single day and it's something that we can do in a moment where we feel tired or we feel anxiety or we're starting to feel like we're gonna hit a wall and so for me i have something called pace and it stands for perspective acceptance community endurance and rest and we've talked a little bit touched on that a little bit throughout the conversation but perspective i think is really the quickest and easiest way to change the way you feel about your situation and i think that that can be in any way whether it's your financial situation whether it's you're getting caught up on comparing yourself to someone else on social media or or how much success they have versus that what you have or or if you're anxious about something a big event that you have coming out i think it's important to get grateful and when you're in gratitude it's a it changes what you don't have into what you do have and what you can't do into what you can do and just last night i will share with you we went out on the date for our anniversary and it's the first time i've tried to put heels on now my ankle used and and my foot to deformed but i managed to put this little heel on it's only about that big but i was like i wanted to feel like a sexy for our anniversary and we get home and i i i fell getting out of the car by the way just to say but i i wore the hills i tried my best to walk the right way hubspot is a success story partner now success store is part of the hubspot podcast network they have tons of other great shows one of my personal favorites is the hustle daily show it's hosted by julie bennett r rob lit ben berkeley and mark dent now the hustle daily show brings you this healthy dose of irr off beat and informative takes on business and tech and news it's fun it's topical it's relevant it's every single day and it's news you'll actually enjoy and things that actually matter to you the hustle daily show is part of the hubspot podcast network listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your 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 uses 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 built for what's now and what's next in tech hiring 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 monk 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 dot com slash scott okay listen there's people that haven't had accidents that fall getting out of the car wearing he heels so you're good good my husband just like he just shook his head he was like oh gosh why didn't he just wear your boots you know but i'm like i'm doing it and it's these little small accomplishments yeah we do even if we don't do them well that they start to build our confidence and make us feel good but when we got home sat in the middle of the bathroom floor and i taken the strap that looked like more of a tour around my swollen ankle and i'm like oh my god and i just was looking at my leg kind of been disgust and he goes when i look at your leg i say oh my god what a miracle it's a miracle you have your leg and pat shifted my perspective like yeah it is a miracle i went from disgust to gratitude real quick and sometimes i think that if we have a hard time shifting our perspective it's important to surround ourselves with people that can help us do that and in order to have resilience or any kind of transformation leads me to the next part of pace which is acceptance and that sometimes easier said than done for me it was really hard i was in denial about being diagnosed with a nerve disease i had to accept that i could no longer run the way that i used to i can run to chase after my daughter and i did just beat her in a contest running from a stop sign to the car she's always competing with and my husband's like you had a little old lady beat you to the car and i'm like that's right and so i still can run it's not always pretty but i can do it but acceptance i felt like it felt like defeat and i had to shift my perspective on that acceptance is really your it's freedom it gives you the choice to take action steps to make your life the best that it can be and when we are in acceptance and we're authentic with our feelings and what we're going through oh my goodness that's when we can start to have the life that we've always imagined and that's what really changed things for me and it led me to a community of people on instagram in my sobriety community you know in my life and i think communities you know is the next part of pace and i think it might be the most important part of pace because when we have community it's powerful and sorry if you can for the gardner he just got here no i can't i know you're good you're it's the life of being in covid right like go or right home office but community is so powerful i felt so alone when i was going through some of the darkest moments of my life and i can guarantee you that if you're feeling alone right now and you're listening to this and you're feeling like well nobody under stands what i'm going through nobody's gonna get me i don't know where to turn i guarantee you there is somebody more than one person that's going through exactly what you're going through and so reach out reach out to someone and you know what that doesn't even have to be somebody that you know i connected to a community of crp warriors when i started looking at the hashtag crp warrior i wanted to be connected with people that were had passion and drive and so i think it's really important to take a look at the people that you surround yourself with and that doesn't just go for the people that are in your family in your life i know we can't get rid of family members but we can limit the time that we spend with them if they're bringing us down or they're not they don't believe in our vision or our dreams and and that's okay people won't always believe in your vision or your dreams it's important that you do and that that you find people to connect with they're are passionate and that's dose for social media too somebody that you're following brings you down don't all them follow people who are paving the way who inspire you and because it takes a lot of endurance and that's the next part of pace or endurance i think is when our grit and our passion come into play it's where you know we're not always gonna be motivated but if we look at why we're doing something we focus on our why then like i said before it gets us through almost anyhow but i think that we have to in order to have endurance i think it's important to set set up really healthy habits and not rely on motivation or willpower because let me tell you that willpower is out the door if we are tired if we haven't it eaten if we haven't taken care of our health so set up those healthy habits and that's why i think i've been able to get through covid in a pretty graceful way because i have set up healthy habits not to say it's been easy but because i have this strong foundation of habits of non negotiable in my life that i do i've i know that i have that foundation to tap into my inner source of resilience and which leads me to the last part that i'm horrible at i well i'm gonna rephrase that i'm getting better at it it's risks and i i when i was explaining what i do every day to be more resilient to my husband i said honey i've got a quick word that's gonna help me get through every day if i just remind myself of these things and i'm explaining it to him and he's like i get to the word are rest and he's like you are so shit kinda cuts on here and i don't usually cuss but he does and i was like what do you mean he goes you don't rest he goes yeah you do all that other stuff but you don't rest and it was really a wake up call and i had to learn the hard way of being hospitalized after going septic from not looking at what was going on in my body and pushing and pushing and i was good at the grid but i think it's so important to be resilient we have to strategically stop sometimes and plan times to rest and recover and however that may look like that might be taken a break after zooms and going out in nature taking your shoes off walking through the grass and getting grounded taken time to play you know scheduling out times where you do have some time off to be create but if we don't rest it's hard to spark creativity when i'm rested and i can get out there and do some of the things that i love and i mean i love my work but how i can keep moving forward with my work is if i do things to take care of myself if i do set an alarm on my phone for okay it's time to shut off the devices and go to bed the emails will wait till tomorrow the text messages will wait till tomorrow the social media is done for the day and i think as an entrepreneur with our hours being all over the place that it's really important to schedule out those times to wrist 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 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 debug 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 than 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

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 how redefining leadership transformed a struggling car dealership into one of the nation's top performers learn how people first culture drives long term growth and loyalty how the lead framework turns managers into true leaders and why servant leadership and empathy outperform traditional sales tactics in any industry let's let's speak about and unpack the the first iteration of the strategy that you use to upscale and up level those people in dealership because obviously it's evolved and i wanna understand how it's the vault but i also wanna just speak about like the very the very basics like the grassroots of that id i think it's important and it obviously was successful so let's talk about what sales traditionally is in car dealerships and let's talk about what you made it yeah definitely so the auto industry at large is an industry where you did not have to be integral you did not have to even be excellent you did not even have to be good to be able to make return of profit so back in the day everything was very regional if you had a dealership located in an area that people drove by you were gonna sell some cards and you were to make some money and for the longest time it was the hiring process was filled with many under handed cd people just because the way the industry was built it was built we're like we need you there from seven am to eight o'clock at night seven days a week right so what kind of person do you have to be to be able to be at work seven o'clock in the morning till eight o'clock at night seven days a week well you're probably not much of a family man or a woman you probably have some type of outside fluids to keep your energy levels up alright and and and you probably drink your sorrows away because there's there's these empty boyd that come along with that and so it attracted a certain type of of human and regret we still deal with the ramifications of that today and even though the industry is evolving rapidly and and and tremendously and so going in it was important to me that we like literally i wrote a a mission statement in my team we read it together every single day and the statement said i am on a mission to eradicate the negative stigma associated with the car business i can do this by making people feel special feel important and feel like they're the only one i will offer an experience that will exceed my customers expectations today tomorrow and in the future i will not just sell cars i will create fans and so we created a culture in an environment around that i wouldn't hire anyone with more than two years experience i wanted people that were brand new into the business or zero experience so that ultimately we could cultivate them and shape them the way that we wanted to not based on previous bad habits and we brought people into this inclusive environment scott it was very important to me that we put people first or our people first our customer second and our profits third so all decisions were made in that order right if it makes sense for our people if we're gonna elevate our people then the answer was yes customers you know they always say customers always right we didn't believe that our employees were always right first right unless we found out they were well but we always tested our employees and stood behind them before any other customer because they were the most important and i follow this lead process that i'll share with you and then i'll share with everybody listening this is a really powerful acronym that i put together and and really made a big difference for us so the word lead is spelled l e a d d right led e a d now some of your are listening going so this guy stands about right but i'm gonna break down why it's led d d i'm gonna break that down for you right now alright so the l lead stands for listen you have two ears in one mouth for reason i know your mom told you this you should listen twice as much as you speak right so we very much had this mindset as leaders in the organization that we're always gonna listen twice as much as we spoke we always made sure that our employees felt seem heard and significant that comes through listening and by listening we were able to tap into not just why they were there but who they were what mattered in their lives what problems do they have outside of work so on and so forth right so listening was the first key to great leadership in the leadership and evolving our people the e lead stands for courage as we were listening to our people we weren't listening to defend we weren't listening to object we weren't listening to overrule we were listening trying to find opportunities to encourage the behaviors we wanted to see more of and the greatness that exists inside each of these individuals right so we would always for example in a meeting every single meeting that we had started off by listening letting our people speak first and then we would encourage we would celebrate if somebody got a great review we would celebrate if somebody took care of a customer in the way that we wanted to we would celebrate anytime they sold the car or or did be any picked up trash in the parking lot we would celebrate so every meeting started with listening and then encouraging now most managers that i know they start every meeting with the a in lead which is advise so most managers just wanna go in tell people to do smack them on the butt and sit them all their way right here's what you need do here's what you did wrong here's where you suck here's where you can get it right now and get out of here right that's the typical meeting especially in the auto industry so we start by listening then we encourage now when you do that you've now earned the right to advise see i'll take advice from someone who listens to me and encourages me i will totally one hundred percent do that i won't necessarily take advice just face value from anybody like see me first make me feel important that i'll listen to you so we listen we encourage we advise and then we develop the dean lead stands for develop please please please everyone listening here please do not advise people and then not take the time to develop them telling someone what to do and then take the time to actually show them how to do it two completely different processes you can have all the knowledge wisdom in the world you can share it right and they are not gonna move anybody's life forward unless you take the time to really develop them right give them teach them to fish as they say right mh develop that and then the last d and d in lead stands for daily you need to do these things every single day not just on saturday in the meeting not just when the cameras are on every single day so we listen encourage advice and develop and we do it daily it's scott i'll tell you this works with your spouse this works with your children this works with employees this works with prospects that you're looking to close a deal this works in every situation humanly possible if you listen encourage it buys and develop if you make that your mantra and that's what you do you will go incredibly far you'll have incredible success and you'll help develop everyone that comes behind you and and this is just i had no idea this was the strategy that you implemented to grow the dealership and i and i'm very happy that we dove into this because you just highlighted the fact that this the the the i'm gonna say an air quotes sales strategy that allowed you to grow the but was not a sales strategy at all it was it was a it was a very empathetic self aware you know employee centric a leadership strategy and you just took this and i don't know where i don't know how you came up with this we didn't even go into that because that's incredibly impressive but you just took this you transplant it into an industry that is honestly known for dis horrible salespeople people and so sales practices and you just like you know you see you see the the stuff that you just mentioned you'll see maybe this in very forward thinking silicon valley venture backed startups ups you know with the kombucha and the dog in the office and the ping pong table whatnot but you don't see it in in traditional industries as much right and right and it's just incredible like how you can take that apply it to any business and you see the results so my my question to you is where did the where did this come from because because you didn't have this when you were killing it in the car dealership and you were making money and you were going out drinking at night you didn't have this mindset for sure i know you didn't but then also to to speak to cummings when you when you started working at this place in kentucky and you convinced him that this was gonna be the strategy that you're gonna money probably look looked at you look at three heads and said no we just gotta go poach the top seller from you know from toyota from porsche i don't know what type of car dealership it was but we gotta go get the top seller and bring bring them over here so sure even how'd do you how'd do you think of the strategy and how did you how did you convince convince his dealership taken on so a couple things the universe aligned beautifully so josh cummins and his brother dusty had just bought the dealership eleven days before i started working there they had just bought it from their dad and josh is incredibly forward thinking incredibly empathetic is the picture perfect servant leader now that term servant leader gets thrown around a lot so i wanna make sure to define it for all of those that are listening a servant leader is not someone who says oh i'll do anything if people you know somebody asked me i'm i'm willing to do anything that's not a servant leader a servant leader someone who seeks opportunities to serve and so josh would always seek opportunities to serve including me i mean the guy but yeah other than wash my feet he basically washed my feet right he just an incredibly least servant leader and so i learned a lot from him about what servant leadership looked like and he was a forward thinking human and so together we really had some great synergies i was more charismatic i was more face of the dealership i was more rallied than troops motivate inspired that type of thing and he was more like analytics and back type thing but ultimately a servant leader through and through and so together it made a pretty incredible force and at one point i sat down and i wrote down all of the things that i hated about being an employee in a car dealership from the old dealership i worked at and then we also wrote down the list of all things that the consumer hated about buying a car from the typical dealership and once we had that list scott it really was as easy as doing a hundred and eighty degree opposite of everything that on that was on that list right just doing that's all i do this incredible leadership moment just take a car dealership and do the opposite and you have the epitome of good leadership that's funny that good i thirty exactly where came from so once we had that list you know josh and i worked together to cultivate a team of of incredible humans and and really pouring to them and josh was just very he saw something in me that most people didn't and so he trusted me to make good decisions when it came to to the store now when it came to like numbers and certain strategies that way they'd look at me like you know i had three i's sometimes but after our first year where we had we increased from selling a hundred and twenty to like two forty which they they had never done in fifty plus years and then the second year we started selling three hundred a month in the third year we were up in the fours and the fives and i remember in two thousand sixteen we sold in two thousand sixteen we sold seventy five hundred card sorry we sold six thousand cars in two thousand sixteen six thousand cars that year and till that point every time i set a goal or a target they'd look at me like i was crazy but once we hit the six thousand target day immediately were like so good what's next right now they're lever but does the average what does the average dealership close and just to put if your average dealership will sell rough flee between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred cars a year so you almost five an average dealership yeah and then we took it further than that too we my my best month was march of two thousand eighteen we sold a thousand forty three cards in twenty seven business days in a tiny little town population ninety six hundred people wow so you're doing something right i don't think everybody had seven cars or eight cars so you're figuring some that's something was working yeah i'm very good green agriculture every single salesperson on the floor sold at least one car a day every day that they were at work which the national average is they say that your salesperson should sell ten cards month which is one car every three days and i thought that was just nonsense sit scott i'm like you're gonna take people away from their families you're gonna make them work seventy hours a week you're going to not turn them properly you're gonna do all of these things and you're gonna make them work two out of every three days for free like in my culture that's called slavery trial when you make people work for free from the from sunrise to sunset and so we changed that right away we took on the responsibility as the leaders to make sure to create an environment where every salesperson could sell at least one car every day while they were at work we took that very very seriously and we were able to ship shift the cold 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 out in the 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 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influence with in ent the place that i start is like looking what's your self concept who do you think you are and i believe the natalie chart is a great place to start on unraveling changing the narrative so that way you are understanding who you are and enlighten the potential all entrepreneurs all the people that i have admire they don't have easy charts they have very difficult charts and that difficulty in their charts is the same muscle that pushes them through everything her work blends bold storytelling community building an action shifting culture while building impact she's not just advising others she's living what she teaches aligned courageous and purpose driven i think faith is healthy when it questioned itself question even what i'm saying how did you experience it you need to have a alive you need to make their own choices i focus more on big trends that we're gonna see and unraveling through time for people to study develop and get a sense of it mia you've built one of the largest astrology platforms in the world by teaching something that most astro won't they can completely rewrite what their chart says about them explain to me why that is so novel and so not common in the world of astrology first of all i think everybody looks for like faith or a source or in this case astrology to know what's gonna happen to them like i need something to tell me that this is not gonna last forever this break up the the loss of a job or the loss of a person and i just need something to give me external certainty i practice cabal astrology and the whole foundation is the certainty within you so i'm not gonna teach you or not i'm not gonna tell you like be dependent to me or to the astrology or be dependent to an answer outside yourself let's create the answers i believe like we can all create like this refugee inside of us that place to go but that place to go has to be like a stable rock like even in the storm if you wanna see it that way and that's gonna happen when you understand how you're thinking when you're listen to the things that you say it to yourself and the place that i start is like looking what's your like self concept who do you think you are and from that i start creating with my clients and students like the pillars of this person you wanna be and i do believe that if you have the desire of the this way or that way you have the potential to do it why you and i don't have the same desires like i don't wanna be the president of united states do you no i don't either so maybe that's the same but yeah a lot of other people for example maybe you wanna be this great podcast that's not one of my desires i have other other desires and i do believe that that seed of the desire if it's within you is because you have something there a light that can be sparked to develop it so i do start in okay who do you think you are what what do you know so far and i believe the na chart is a great place to start to start unraveling but changing the narrative so that way you are creating these new neuro pathways understanding who you are and enlighten the potential of what it is but it's all based on because qa astrology tells you that each position in your nile chart is not like a degree of destiny is okay we have this here how do we wanna develop it it gives you at least this idea of freedom to say i can pause and choose if i wanna move it this way or move it the other way and i believe in the power of taking this seat inside of you for you to think i have a choice i always have a choice to be reactive or to respond to this so i think that's the difference so i love this and the reason why i love this so much is because my biggest i don't wanna say issue i don't know much about as astrology but i would say my biggest issue with sort of following anything that seems to place the responsibility outside of yourself it could be a religion it could be a spiritual practice it could be a astrology it could be anything that says i'm not responsible for my own life because this is what the universe said should happen to me i find that to be a very defeat attitude i find it to be very depressing i find it to almost be this self fulfilling prophecy where you're like well if it's not meant for me i'm gonna give up and the reason why i don't like that idea is because i've found in my life the exact opposite of that if i put enough energy and effort and like life force towards something i find that the world starts to change and bend to my will and i think that that's one of the strongest ideas and i don't think that it's easy and it's not just my idea a lot of big entrepreneurs believe this if they put enough energy towards something the world will let them eventually figure it out and i just wish more people wouldn't quit before they start just because they believe that they're not supposed to do it if that makes sense and i love the version of what you're talking about because you're saying understand who you are through astrology through charts through all these different in all these different things that we can read and understand and then use that to set up your life and carve your life and and use that as like a guide but not as like a sentence exactly the thing is when i that i was born into astrology in the sense that this was the language of my household thank god my grandmother who raised me never used it as a yeah it's like a sentence you know but then when i started going into astrology myself like me and myself alone and started like understanding what was behind the like the mathematical side and everything first i i was coming out from this this very important person who was a an australia authority in my hometown told me you will never anything because you have this and that in your chart and then i like holding on to astrology to find a different answer developing like my astrology sense reading books starting by myself i like figure it out this formula it was very young i was like maybe sixteen or fifteen and i'm like what if astrology like an umbrella to work other things and still to this day i've been doing this professionally for eighteen years now the way that i that i feel like i attract people is through astrology but if you're looking for a horoscope that tells you this is gonna happen to you and you're gonna have to move a finger maybe you're gonna be like okay me is not for me because in every like if if if it's a tweet if it's a video if it's like a mean whatever it is it's like okay i'm bringing you here but let's let's look like further and let's let's work inside of us so i'm not this person who's gonna tell you what's gonna happen and you don't have to do anything or the other thing i don't do is fear a lot of astro use fear mostly in the recent times like as hook cups or as way to get a lot of clicks on youtube like these headlines and i believe that people don't learn through fear you're not gonna open yourself to learn and grow just by fear fear indeed is effective but i do leave like the most effective thing you can do long term is working on yourself like we're live in yourself like you said when you believe something is gonna happen and you put you pour all your energy into it i believe the world bends to you because you start looking for ways that if you just say to yourself this is not gonna happen you close your eyes to it if you think it's gonna happen you're gonna see windows where you used to see walls you're gonna make it happen and i do believe in that all entrepreneurs all the people that i admire they don't have easy charts they have very difficult charts and that difficulty in their charts is the same muscle that pushes them through everything i've seen very easy charts and very comfortable people so i do lead that little challenge that the lil fire is what makes the world bend to you and so much so if you go back to like when you were a child growing up and you mentioned before that there was this one astro said you would never mount to anything yeah obviously that didn't that didn't turn out like you've obviously did you take that and say i need to prove this wrong i need to do something that's going to prove this this astro wrong this is like was this almost like motivation you know there's a lot of questions people ask me and i was so young that i can see it one way right now yeah but i'm in my forties very different when for when i was a teenager but this is the thing i was warning a very like different conditions from everyone around me my mother had me very young i was raised by my grandparents and when i turn like fourteen fifteen i had this burning question that didn't let me sleep because my mother had me very young and we didn't live together she came to united states to finish high school i stayed in venezuela and i remember every time that i called my mom i was like what do you help me like what made you make the choice of having me you were super young and this burning question i was like why did i came here like other people in this circumstances stand circumstances would have chosen something else to handle differently and i was like i didn't say in my mind like i came for something but i was like what am i doing here and nobody could answer that question for me i ask her and she's like yeah i don't know things happened that way this and that and i'm like no there has to be something reference your your mother was fourteen when she had you it's not like she was like eighteen nineteen twenty no idea exactly but i'm making this question when she was like maybe thirty already thirty but she still didn't have like that answer for me so i go to see this astro and he's like i don't know you should have come to the world your son is next to the south node well don't expect too much from life and mind you i was saving to have this this consultation i was saving like my my weekly money like and this this was like my gift i was graduating from high school at fifteen and this was my gift to myself before choosing what career i was gonna doing like in college it i was like do philosophy i do law school i'm gonna see this guy and then i'm gonna make my choice and the whole hour of consultation was like one depressing thing after another and i remember coming back to my apartment with this little cassette where everything was recorded and like this this folder and i'm like i'm never gonna open this again this it it can't like this this can't be it it there has to be something else i don't know if in that moment i was like i'm gonna prove the world wrong because in in the rest of my life i've never been a person of always trying to prove people wrong no like i don't i don't feel like that's one of my mean pillars of character but i do think it was more like a survival thing that no no no i'm already here like let's see what happens but i never had an idea how in which manner sense i started law school and i loved it i work as a lawyer for two three years i never thought to myself i'm gonna make a difference in the world but i do i've always known i'm a very sensitive person and that i feel things very deeply but you know what things happen the way they happened when i moved to miami and circumstances pushed me to look in astrology again and then i was like i don't know i was just following something that made me feel good i've heard this very long time ago by monica berg in the ka center she said the way you know you're connecting to your purpose is because this is lighting you up it doesn't have to be your work but you feel more light up you feel like you wanna give you feel like there's more of you that you wanna expand and also sometimes you're gonna do things that just contract you of course sometimes because of trauma sometimes because of fear but there's some things that they just close your heart and when i came to miami and i started going to the center and i started to understand potential instead of like destiny your sentence i was like there's something here and i started tweeting and i'm like i just wanna see if this can help someone that it feels like me like there's like a closed road in my perspective i was trying to look for something that said okay this is not gonna be the same for the rest of your life things are gonna evolve things are gonna change and there was like a push inside of me and i felt like more energy less fear and pushing and pushing and pushing and it keeps happening you know like last year even though i've been doing this for a long time at the end of twenty twenty four there was like a very hard situation that i was going through and it sparked the same like fire and when twenty twenty fifth five started i was like i'm gonna do everything that i haven't done because of fear and here i am talking to you about cousin english because what i'm saying is like it's not like oh i knew what i was gonna do and i felt this fire and it's been a blast for eighteen years like sometimes i feel that fear again or i feel that shell again and something things spark something i'm like okay i'm breaking through but it's not to prove people wrong it's because i feel there's something like is like expanding me like you feel you follow energy yeah i follow energy yeah i love it exactly you put turn words no it's very popular no just because as you're saying it like it resonates a lot with me i don't always know why i'm doing what i'm doing but yeah but you just kind of follow what feels good and feels right and gives you energy and doesn't take energy away and i think my whole career not just with career with people too yeah some people give me energy some people don't and for some reason whatever whatever mission that i've been put on this earth to do like even when i'm tired and i'm stressed out like when i do this it's like every this up disappears yeah and i never felt anything else like that and i've done like a lot of different jobs and been successful a lot different things too exactly like that i'm curious how you turn something that gave you energy and lit you up and you were passionate about how do you turn that into an actual job because that's something that a lot of people wish they could do but they don't do successfully okay every business is different and in my case when i started doing this like professionally i was just recently moved to united states and i did have a nine to five actually a nine to five a six to ten a lot i'm i've been very fortunate to have people in my life that have coached me without being coaches i was reading a friends post two today ago that said one of the things that looking people is that they're coach because when you meet someone that is not coach the things that know at all yeah like there's nothing going on there and i was like i'm i'm coach i i open myself to listen to people that know from things that i don't know and even if you say something that ross me the wrong way i'm open to like hearing you and asking myself like what is it that i don't like like i understand that bayer like i is something in me so starting this i had this friend she used to live me in venezuela and she was working for this company who manages personal branding and this is two thousand and nine so i had no idea what a personal brand was or like in those times you didn't talk about content like we didn't say creating content i remember the world the word influencer came in like two thousand thirteen but in that in that moment i had no idea and she's like you have this blog in blog spot this is very good you already use twitter open your twitter and don't keep it privately private start tweeting and start posting whatever you're doing in your blog spot and i'm not thinking about money at all so what happened to me was that tweeting i got like leads for people that wanted for me to do the horoscope for the newspaper this and that and the thing that changed like let's spark this money thing in me was that i found out that one of the people that was publishing my horoscope was charging for ads in the horoscope page because it had a lot of clicks i had no malice like not nothing in me was like like money driven i don't know like i didn't have it in me but when i saw that i was like wait a minute wait making money off of me they're making money off of me and that is not right and also i'm working two jobs so wait and she's like no like let's do this let's create a membership and i'm like how like nobody's is gonna pay for this and she's like you'll see i started looking for pages with like paid content and i think maybe the new york times it was one newspaper that was starting to charge for some like some articles not all and then like this is not gonna happen this is not gonna fly all my people all the people are following me following me on facebook or twitter in latin america i'm charging in dollars like this not gonna happen i remember that we did this we launched the membership in two thousand eleven so it was like some years of me working for free in this moment i'm making the decision because i got fired of getting people on consultations so i'm attending people back to back i was charging like maybe one fifty per consultation one hour of reading tornado chart transit this and that at the same time starting like to have like a very good perspective attending people i was very scared of attending people in the beginning of not being professional enough so i was like really putting myself like the time and effort to be professional i didn't have any role model it was like a little impostor syndrome yeah because like tried to travel back to two thousand eleven while in the world of astrology there was not this role model for me to say okay here or she is doing it this way i can do it this way so i had to just like fake a creating those new new pathways ways to say okay this is happening i'm gonna relieve myself that i'm this person so i'm attending people i'm earning a lot like a little bit of money we launched the membership and then the membership is like either monthly or every six months and i'm like okay this is a recurrent charge i can like start making a plan my first plan was not to buy i don't know purse or anything i was like i need a graphic designer i need a graphic designer and need somebody to help me i refused to start instagram because i was like how am i gonna translate astrology into pictures like i didn't know how to talk about like an alignment or a transit like am i gonna take a picture of the of the chart of the planet that what am i'm gonna do and then i started thinking maybe i can compose this and this is like venus in scorpio this outfit or this and that so i was like okay when i open instagram the world really open because everybody was like going into that social media platform and then i was like just promoting my my my membership my business if you wanted a horoscope you had to go in and receive it every every sunday and my membership also included class every day like monday every day you would get forty minute or fifty minute class to learn how to read your chart and that was a hit like i don't know how i still don't understand how it happened but it happened and then i organize myself like financially a little bit but my first impulse was i need a team i need people i can't do this all on my own well i think i mean you say you don't know how it happened i think it happened by you starting which is a big blocker for a lot of people regardless in terms of business or content or otherwise just starting but then also just working a lot like i think you just it sounds like you just worked a lot like i worked the lot and also you know what it's not magic it's a lot of hard works there's a lot of people that this is like very early there's a huge difference because i think early adopters we had a lot of opportunities in that moment when i see myself i look back two thousand twelve to two thousand thirteen like for example tv programs magazines were catching this drill that the content was gonna come from those people in social media so a lot of people were just like knocking on the door on do this for me come to this tv show come to that so i had so many opportunities that i also feel as humans when we see that something is getting recognition is getting you a plus you get very motivated yes so if i started astrology now now there's a lot of people creating astrology and social media you know what i of course so i think early adopters we do have this advantage that everybody was looking for us in the beginning and if you kept doing it you have an authority in the in the area because you been doing it for twelve years fifteen years but how do you how do you yes i agree but how do you keep reinventing yourself so that you keep staying relevant and you like what's the strategy because i do agree early adopters have this advantage but you still need to find a way to like keep the excitement in your audience or with your customers so this is the thing astrology wise every day something is happening like the planets are moving so regarding content for example let's say i was a fashion influencer i would be attached to trends to fall spring i don't know i'm not a fashion influencer but you have to keep looking what's going on with the brands i guess but as an astro every day something's happened so i don't have to think like what i gonna talk about like i know what transit is gonna happen in december and i'm already talking about it like i don't even have to talk about myself every day there's something going on how do i create like the attractiveness i think is the way of expressing myself i think i can transmit passion because i really love what i do and the other thing that happens is as humans with people something happens something changes i started doing this when i was like twenty three and i was a single girl in miami okay so from twenty three to thirty something i went through dates i went through a lot of breakouts i went through like the sixth in the city time and i never exposed my private life but i had a like a book deal i had to write i i think it was five six books and through book deal yeah it's a good book deal and two of those books were about relationships and that because i'm not a person to say like in this story my boyfriend left but i explained the whole story in the books with a little bit of astrology like for example he was a scorpion and this happened so i think that was a great pivot because the books were literally like sex in the city i had characters there were my friends people saw them in social media so this is glowing this is that so that was a pivot then i went in a book tour i came back to miami after like touring for like three four months i go to a yoga class for the first time in my life and i don't know i i got not at depression but i got like oh my god like my life is changing and then i was like i'm gonna pursue yoga and i'm gonna get i i'm gonna get myself certified and then i took my my followers to like get certified in yoga and and like i've been taking these people and all the people that like but it's not a lie like this is me looking for answers saying okay i did this nutrition course and last year i did this hormone workshop and this is happening and this is peri men menopause and this looks like the like the moon transit like the same way as our cycles i find ways to see everything in life and like how ways related to astrology so i think as women or as people that like astrology is interesting in seeing real life experiences with that parallel but i think that's a reinvent invention i haven't like looked for it i'm just like living life so i have a couple of thoughts i love first of all i think that's very wise i hope i i'm gonna explain what people really have to understand from what you did i don't know if you did it purposefully i think you you understand why it's so good with your content but first idea is this is like why taylor swift music is always better when she breaks up because oh yeah no experience my classes were amazing in each breakup because like let me tell you i know i love tell you what are the transit of a mama's boy like you know like that's the thing but that's a so this is what i think a lot of content creators and i say content creator you run a business but you're a content creator but a content creator is a business at the end of the day and if you don't have good content it's gonna fall flat people aren't gonna follow you but to be a good content creator you have to live a life but you have to live it's to go do shit yeah to go out you have to go travel explore like make mistakes yeah well because get up again that is what again hate the word everyone hates the word authenticity but that's what it is it's just bringing your life into your content to give you an example of how that it like impacts me like even with the podcast when i first started this podcast now just over six years ago i didn't bring any of my life into the podcast i was scared shit i didn't wanna talk about what's going on in my life with my relationship with work anything now i bring everything into the podcast and it does that much better because now people feel like they know me so they still get podcasts they still get the content but they they understand that oh i just spent two months in dubai because i'm trying to figure out a real estate transaction and that was a shit show and i was talking to somebody that's big into real estate and that drives the conversation but it's it's just you bring your life into your content and then people feel like you're not just this talking head is talking at them that you're like living vic through you and then you tie it back to what you do for a living which is astrology and then all of a sudden it's now relevant to your main content and now it's relevant to your business i think that's one of the smartest things that anybody's ever said on this show about how to create good content yeah go live a life yeah but i have to say some things about this i'm me like you like i don't bring my day today to my stories like i don't try to create engagement about what's happening in my day to today i opened myself about my breakups in a book because i felt like it was like a book like it's a book you know what i mean it happened and you needed good space and then you brought it in but this is the thing or another thing for example twenty twenty five was a year as speaking of huge change and i i i i don't like when i follow someone that is talking about something and is not following through like i'm talking about change and everybody that follows me knows that this year i've been making huge changes i'm not gonna just talk about it i'm gonna leave about it but another thing that i think is important but this is in the world of astrology astrology has always been tied to spirituality for a lot of people's spirituality is i don't need meat i don't make these mistakes if i know astrology i know what's gonna happen to me and i'm like i i feel like i'm a very spiritual person but i'm still like i make mistakes i'm impulsive i follow the energy i follow like the they love of the heart i don't i don't post myself as this spiritual elevated person and it's not gonna make mistakes because that's a lie you know i've been trying really hard to separate astrology from spirituality not because it's not tied up but because in my world in my business world if you're an astro if you do taro rake or something like that you you shouldn't charge but that's the thing i'm a very ambitious person i'm not gonna deny that in the sense that i do see all the time that i invest creating content not for social media but for my membership i work every day four to five hours just recording all the time for classes i take like workshops and courses not only astrology other things too so i do see all my effort i do see all the people that i have in my company my as astra is a big company we have people in mexico in colombia in spain in united states we used to have something in in like in netherlands like we are a big big team so i do create content and create a business to provide to all these people you know what i mean and people from outside don't see that they think that oh if it's astrology and it's spiritual you shouldn't charge and i'm like why do people say that so i don't agree with that no i don't agree with that either and i do believe that even though i'm taking all the shit for it in the sense that before me i never saw someone like saying una this is my workshop this is the value my time is valuable i'm working on myself i'm trying to get like more degrees or more like you know everything that you have to do for it and i do believe there's a value on the perspective that you have built it you know so i hope it opens the doors for other people working this type of content saying yeah if i work for your newspaper or your magazine this is like this is how much i chart for this piece because but people don't know about astrology that you study every every day there's always something happening and you have to sharpen your vision because if not for example this is the thing do you see the world as you are not as the world is so i've seen astro say oh this is a a pluto chances this is gonna be awful for you like what this guy did to me if you don't open your mind and get out of yourself you're gonna make content and horoscope for twelve signs from your little bubble from your life so for example one thing i do a lot i go into forums in another astrology sites why because i need to see another astrology perspective a astrology perspective i need to see how they frame world events i need to study the history of some transit if not it you said go out and live because if not it's just a little bubble and that takes time that takes effort that is valuable and another thing that i understood this year and it was like because i wanted to create method and i met people like you or like gary is like you have something very valuable is that you've been creating content for eighteen years so you can teach people about content and i'm like you see it like yeah but since people frame you in like if you're good at this and it's easy for you should be free it's like i know so i do have experience in this and i do have experience in that and i hope everybody that's doing something out of passion can see that there are a lot of accomplishments in all of that journey for sure one last thought on on how you've built up this incredible business because i think this is also a useful lesson for people that are they have passion mh and they're building something that they're passionate about but say they didn't take the leap they're doing it in my opinion smartly so they're still working their nine to five how do you know when you take that hobby and you turn it into something full time like you turn it into your life and your career my life is not a really good example because i had a nine to five and then an an eight to three am and my boss from my nine to five fired me because he told me like your life is not here like you really love astrology like you do your own thing i'm gonna let you go with a two months paid but you know this is i'm so grateful for that but the way that i see a lot of people have done the jump is that they know they they wanna jump and they start like saving what they call a fuck fund have you heard about it yes i have yeah that you have to have like at least six to nine months in all the expenses that you need and then you make the jump so i'm not a very good example because it was different times i like other situation but if i if i had to do it now i would have my job and i would start working on my thing regardless like a little little by little giving attention to both start looking for business opportunities in this thing that is my passion you know in in savannah say that the thing you would love the most your passion shouldn't be your main source of income because it's so pure that nothing should tainted it in a way so i do believe like try to keep your passion is sparking get from that energy to the things you have to do to keep life moving but start saving like no what you need to spend to spend and what you don't need to spend save enough to have that moment when you feel like it's time to do the jump i wouldn't do the jump if i didn't have like a a like a source of income something that is moving like maybe a business model and or an idea i would do that too like when i started i didn't know what a business model was i didn't know like about tax like about anything i had to learn on the go if i would start again i would learn how to handle money first in my personal life like me what's my relationship with money what's my relationship with growth what my what's my relationship with necessary sacrifices and then i will do that like feeling like i have an idea of what i'm doing 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 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 at hubspot dot com to get the full picture of your business today nets sweet is a success story partner now what is a future hold for 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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 so slash clarity terms and conditions apply if you're hiring indeed is all you need was there ever a moment as you're growing this business and by the way that's a great boss to have that understands that you should be doing something different with your life was there ever a moment were you second guest your so i'm sure that let me rephrase when you're building a business there's always moments where you second guess and end out but was there ever a moment where you just really wondered like what the hell am i doing going on this journey or was this something that you always felt like this was meant for you ever since i started i've always felt this is something i wanna do even if i didn't earn money i i would still do astrology for sure for sure but i've had my doubts not not creating content not doing astrology like in two thousand twenty two was a very hard year for me because i didn't know how to be a boss like how to lead a team how to manage my maybe fire and imp like handling teams creating groups hearing like what they needed to say like for me was very hard my best friend works with me she's here and she comes from corporate and it's not that she brought corporate to me as trial but she's she brought some practices that are like healthy practices in a company and for me like understanding for me that was like going through like flow and stream to like like a quad g cooler like a box yeah like a box but some boxes aren't needed it you know you know what i mean yeah like you you're not gonna cheat the system and not pay like you have to do everything oh forget forget even that i mean like terms of give you i'll give you an example what happens to me like sometimes when i'm like with my scrappy little podcast like i've worked in corporate before i've i've never worked you get very comfortable like i run my whole team on whatsapp yeah that's not corporate that's not corporate right corporate but you know you you laugh but no we no but it's true and i've talked about this with other business owners like we got slack and for me was like hey can you send me this and then it's like no hi good more like it does you laugh i'm laughing because you're the same you laugh but all those little things matter like getting the time to talk of one like for example taking the time to tell one of the people in your team this idea this idea you brought amazing and it did super well and the work you're doing you think that doesn't matter but you really do need to learn how to lead because the success of your your work it also relies on the success on the team and how they feel and the connection that is going in the like in in the everyday life you don't you forget because you're creating content and you have like growing the business and doing investment but you're part of their everyday life and maybe you don't know it but they look up to you and they're looking up to what like your lead to do this and that sometimes not only in business sometimes also in life and you have i know it's like another space in your mind that you're like okay i have to take this into account too but you really have to pour yourself into being in a leader knowing how to be a boss owning your mistakes and saying it and also invest in their development yeah like workshop this let's bring somebody let's do this meditation together because we do i thank god i have some like the girl in human resources she's amazing and she also is always like taking care of these things so yeah it's been like a journey to learn those things too yes but i mean when you like again if there's something that you're you are so committed to doing i'm just gonna just say it one last time like when you when you take the first step you you do figure it out like you really do figure it out it it sounds like a lot but again like all the cliches are also very you don't compare someone someone else's is your ten to your you're one like take the first step lean ins surround yourself with good people it does work out but i do have second guess myself in that sense like in my i be up to be like an owner do i need somebody to like in those situations is when i get like either frustrated or feel like i'm not doing enough i should put like and i did the jump like i used to i i remembered four or five years ago that i felt like all my job was to do astrology but no it's also b a boss it's also looking for another business like there's more to it but you grow into it i think you grow into it i also think this is a really good point at a very important point so even if you're doing something that you're passionate about a lot of the work to make that passion of business is not things that you'll be passionate about but it's a part of it it's a part of it so a lot of the a lot of the hiring and the sales and the leadership and the marketing the hr the find it like that's not things that anybody's passionate it may be something not many people are passionate actual ours some people i'm not you would be surprised you think you feel like you're a people's person yeah yeah i am i think because some people are not like i i i mean i think that's why i enjoy doing this i believe become i'm a people's person but all those things like hi good more in these like all those little details they were not like first nature for me and now they've come to be first nature in everything and i do see the value in it like for whoever is listening to us and thinking that's like a lot of things you grow you have time and you grow into it little by little by little own your mistakes like have this even though like maybe like you you manage people in different cities or places yes they're over have this open door policy of you can come to me and ask me whatever you need to ask me like i don't believe in my business in this i'm here and you're here like we're all open to like exchange ideas brainstorming give me guidance i i never hire somebody who loves loves loves the brand because i never wanna be working with somebody that is just like i love a struggle you i love me i it's not that i well i do love i love when people criticize me in our in a right way like has healthy criticism because i know it's gonna help grow the the brand and create something better but that's also why the people that you surround yourself with to your point they can't just be fans right they have to be professionals yeah and they have to be good at what they do but they also have to be comfortable like speaking up and tell him he amazon the you create that space yeah with your attitude uk that space when they can say hey i think this can be a change or this or that and i think that's also healthy in in other relationships too but you have to become aware of what you don't see yourself sometimes i ask my friends and they they tell me like yeah sometimes you're scary and i'm like i don't see myself that way but you have to ask these things there's this practice before ro in that you know when you're like the month before russia the month of you ask the people closest to you to tell you things that you don't see about yourself and it's it's funny because you think you know yourself and then these people is like i i live with you every day and you do this and that and you're like oh but it's true it happens so you have to learn how to see yourself from outside it's very wise because even people that think they're self aware and they they think they know themselves who you are is actually not who you think you are who you are is how other people perceive you that that is your reality that that is reality excuse me it's not your reality but that is reality so it doesn't matter how good or bad or nicer or mean you think you are if people don't perceive you that way it doesn't make a difference i i didn't know that was a practice in in judaism not in judaism i mean i don't know it has roots like bad roots and judaism but it's same calendar and everything but anybody can practice koala and i do follow all the holidays and and everything and i do this practice with my husband i used to do it with my friends like also in the in that is like qa like day of love we used to do this exchange of rose quartz and dressed white and as for our desires for the next year like everything i used to do everything now i do these practices with my husband and but it it's really interesting because cab is always trying to teach you to find a way to get out of your your ego i guess like the way you see yourself in astrology is like we have this method like there's a sun and your rising sign and the sun is how you think you're perceive and the rising sign is the relationship you have with yourself and when you understand both you're like there's a huge gap between what i project and what i really am so it's like i i find like everything you're gonna find a way to understand these things it it's from from numero neurology astrology human design they're always gonna find a way to understand who do i think i am and what am i projecting all of these all of these ideas and practices they're all really leading to the same end result yes like you you choose your umbrella but try to choose something to to see yourself how did you how did you decide what you wanted to include in your teachings and how did you decide okay so for people who don't understand the different versions of astrology i know there's a few versions i i don't know the names of all of them but i know a few different versions but then there is like human design there is ka which i just know because there's is like roots in judaism for ka cabal i don't know anything about human design but i've heard people speak about it before so there's so many different umbrellas how did you choose what you wanted to include what you wanted to learn from how do you combine them are there some that are not so legitimate some that are more legitimate like how do you make that because there's so much and i think that is a whole other the whole other conversation but i think that it's a valid idea i think that as people and society moved away from traditional versions of religion and god and became somewhat more secular i think that a lot of these practices filled the void because i think for faith for faith right people always need faith and i actually think it's very healthy to have faith because if you don't have faith then i think you have a very hard time removing your ego because for a moment if you don't have faith in something bigger than yourself the biggest thing in your life is yourself and i think that's very dangerous i think that's not a good way to operate through life so for me i don't really have any you know care what someone else believes or doesn't believe in but i think that the worst thing they can believe in is their own ego being the most important thing yeah they got yes i think it's very very very toxic i also i there's an an idea also when you remove god from society people find gods in other things and it could be astrology that could be the thing that they look to which is fine but it gets very bad when the god turns into a vice like work or money or something else right where they think that they're only put on this earth to serve money and to serve work or to serve some other you know worse vice like alcohol drugs ga whatever it is there's a million different devices that can replace faith and spirituality but that being said if somebody is trying to understand what they should listen to what they shouldn't listen to maybe they don't have a traditional religious god in their life how do help them navigate because there's so much out there so help them navigate what they should listen to and what they should and you can use your own experience too like how did you navigate because you probably have full view of everything that is more new i don't because for example i mentioned human design yesterday i had a like a live class meeting with all my students and somebody asked about human design i'm very frontal in insane when i don't know about something and i don't know a lot i i don't know anything about human design they told me i'm manifesto or something but it has never caught my attention like i follow what really gets my attention i do believe like for me i don't know for other people i think faith is healthy when it question itself in the sense like when i give classes i'm like okay this is happening astro i'm gonna give you these questions question even what i'm saying how did you experience it for me i take what has worked putting the work in me not putting the certainty outside so for example ka makes a lot of questions i did psycho analysis for eight years as a therapy and there were a lot of questions like in psycho analysis there's there's not like oh this is what you have or this is what it was each session ended with a question like an open question that get me through thinking many things so i follow whatever allows me the time to think never put like the god like i am the god no yeah but the certainty and the work is within me not outside and for example in astrology a lot of people use astrology saying for example you're ill so this is how you are i don't believe that i believe that each each chart is unique and i also believe that you're gonna choose what to what to show from from that chart even when you don't know it you know what i mean so whatever labels you and puts you in a little box i i don't go with that i need to have have space to question myself to question things and i follow what i think it has worked for me how do i know it has worked for me it has helped me grow it has helped me help other people or it has given me a source of strength in very dark times but never ever putting as as i said the certainty outside i don't tell people what to do i place questions like i tell you how is the energy how it can manifest and then i place the question how are you feeling it what do you feel you wanna do with it that way it's more like a dialogue i never wanna place myself in the position of a guru or tell or or knowing how everything is because of it as i told you like i feel a lot of people has used astrology or other ways of like this philosophical thinking from a a place of superiority and i don't believe in that do you ever find that because astrology i guess is is is old it's it's old wisdom cabal is also very old wisdom what is more new age i think there's a lot of things i've been going on for a long time for example human design i have no idea how long has been but i feel like it's it's becoming trend in the past us maybe ten years that it could also be what i'm just thinking of like what new age spirituality means and it could also just be looking at something that's old like kamala yeah and then it becomes popular and people start to study it and then it seems like it's more new age even though it's been around for is very interesting because it's been like a wave i remember when mad madonna started talking about nineteen ninety eight maybe and then it went away then it came back then it went away and i've seen since twenty twenty four it came right like right back but right now look like i'm gonna mention thomas transit we have the north node in pis so we're having a eclipse in pis and every time this happens there's like a search in faith and in spirituality like people need something to hold on like he's having like a renaissance it could be a struggle it could be ka it could be anything but right now and you're gonna see it like if you for me social media is like it's telling me the vibe and the mood of people and i've seen with catholicism or with j like everything is coming stronger but i don't see it like oh it's christian or is judaism for me it's like okay his spirituality something is happening here with faith like people need something to hold on to and you know so this is what's so interesting so when you see astro logically this indicator you do see a play out in real life every time there's like a huge transit coming up for example right now we're having eclipse in vi and pis every time we're having eclipse in bergen and pis like this for example diego is a south note right now there's gonna be a search in self care every little detail all the steps you do to like for your morning routine like mind you the last time we had these eclipse was nineteen years ago this type of eclipse so there's no way for me to say oh nineteen years ago we had instagram and everybody was post in the routine but before this eclipse is started i gave a class in march twenty twenty four saying to my students okay these eclipse are gonna come up berg that is the sign of like the body and all routines we're gonna have eclipse there so you guys are gonna see a search in everything that has to do with routines and monet everything because last year i was already seeing people with the ordering we did like trying to get analytics for everything and i said this is gonna get stronger pis is the other sign we're gonna have eclipse everything's gonna be into spirituality or faith and this and that i say this before the transit starts and then i'm like okay what have we seen about this like did we see the search before this eclipse says we had it in ares and libra every time there's eclipse in ares and libra there's a lot of things with war and libra rules relationships and my example was let's see what happens to bum to match because libra gonna have eclipse and if we're gonna have eclipse in the sign of relationships and now everybody's trying to connect through like online let's see what happens i didn't know how i was gonna happen the eclipse has happened and something we saw like the tendencies in social media was gen c saying i don't wanna do hint or i don't wanna do that because i wanna meet people in real life so we start seeing the trends and then we see it in real life is no it's super interesting there's this astro richard he has this book called cosmos and psyche isn't it like the huge huge book all he did was talking about transit through history and manifestation that like has happened and he's like okay astrology is not a science it's a pseudo science but it's the science of observation that every time we have certain type of transit these are the manifestations so for example every thirty six years pluto and saturn get into a conjunction and every time that happens there's like the spanish flu on the eight in nineteen eighty two was eight like there's like a viral thing that in the beginning people don't understand and then voila so in nineteen eighty two was the first time like they were handling aids and then twenty twenty came and it was the coronavirus so p tata said i don't know what's gonna happen in twenty twenty but every time we're having this there's a virus so that's a thing astrology has a lot in observation of transit through history so every time a transit it's gonna come i explained my students what has happened before the store the history is not gonna represent itself exactly the same because we're we're in another times you know like war is not gonna be the same in nineteen forty two like it's not gonna be the same now we have so much technology so i present like the basis of the energy and we see it developing in time is like the same base but in a different version if you know what i mean exactly what you mean for example this year we had a lot of transit that i've never lived like for example neptune k enter ae last time it was eighteen hundreds i was not here we were uranus entered gemini eighty four years ago i wasn't here but not only i explained my students students what happened the last time this transit seat came up i also studied people who was born with it for example i was not alive when uranus was in gemini eighty four years ago but we have some people that would was were born with this transit and i'm like taking these people and saying okay let's see for example trump is one of them he was born with uranus in gemini how how would you describe him this this and that okay so this transit is starting now what about these characteristics you think it's happening so for example uranus and gemini you are very radical with your thinking it's either this or that and another thing that happens with rain in gemini is that you say one thing but in action you do something completely different so i never leave the transit but i explained this to my students and yesterday i ask okay what have we seen about doing something doing saying something doing something completely opposite and what have we seeing about people being very radical in their thinking you know what i and exactly so when you think about the the usefulness of astrology you see some sort of how else i described it like macro trends you see macro trends with a person or personality or an event on earth what is it not useful for then what do people what do people assume that astrology can tell them that it actually isn't like in some astrology say like i know what's gonna happen this afternoon is that two micro is that too like of a niche use for it first astrology astro we use what's called an or or is the separation in mathematical degrees for an event to happen there's astro that use a huge or and they don't have precision in their predictions the other thing is they narrow mind for example seeing a pluto transit and saying immediately this is gonna be death because there's others other ways to explain it for example the thing that these astro saw in my chart sun next to the south node he can say okay the south note is a point of release so if the sun that is essence is next to the south note your essence is gonna be released and then you can see another astro say no the thing is that you help people release all thinking you know yeah so that's why it's very important to open your mind keeps starting like get different point of use but yes if you go into micro trends for example just today the moon is having seven aspects like every twenty minutes and an hour and a half if i tell you everything that's gonna happen today you're not gonna leave your life so i don't focus myself in teeny tiny transit that are just gonna drive you crazy one of the things i tell the people that follow me is don't come to me the first thing you're doing in the morning get your mindset going like ask your day like how you want your day to be don't look for astrology to tell you how it's gonna be you know i don't want people depending on astrology i don't want people like getting this source of faith just in that that's not what i wanna teach because you're gonna go crazy so many things happen as logic in a day that micro trends or micro transit they just like i think they entertain people you know what i mean like if you hold on to it you're entertained like when you have a a subject that you talk about it all the time it's good for the coffee table but it's not good to leave that you need to have a alive you need to make your own your own choices so i focus more on big trends that we're gonna see and unravel through time for people to study develop and get a sense of it i assume people go crazy if you if you try and focus on like the minute by minute i've seen astro for example there's there are australians on x that every time there's an aspect they tweet the aspect so imagine can following that and getting every two minutes every five minutes like this is parallel to that this is next to that like you go crazy and i don't wanna like me myself i have no notifications on my phone i i i love silence i would hate to be the person who's always disrupting your attention if you know what i mean for me attention is very important i'm not gonna post something just for the means of like post it every time i post something i'm saying to myself i'm taking attention from this person like why people pay attention you know what i mean so it's very important to be conscious of that in my mind like that's what that's how i think no i i think that's smart i think that's wise i think that listen i'm not a big fan of social media in general but i think that if you use it for the right way it can be very beneficial to people but we don't need any any more people just contributing to stress and anxiety and constant like information over like it's not healthy there's enough people already doing it really that are just inundated people with like non nonstop not just astrology but like this is happening in the world over here and this war is happening over here and this bad thing happened over there and like i just feel like if you can if you can give a lot of value to somebody's life it's beautiful but not not through just like constant bombardment of like up to the second sometimes you know as i told you before furious is effective and attention is a business you know and i what i watch i curate what i read because i know how everything's is just going into me and even when i'm telling myself no like i don't believe in this is just everything getting into me so i try to create what what i what i consume and i also think in the same way with what i give yeah so i'm very respectful of that and a lot of people think with people like you or me that we leave all day in social media and i don't most of the times i post i checked the comments but i try to reduce a lot of my time in social media because like you get so distracted and it's very hard to have a business or to do many things when your attention is just scattered everywhere i i don't check social through the day there you go all maybe your call is like most of my content scheduled in advance most of my content schedule i do believe in answering questions in their comments because you build a community you're there for them and i don't let other people answer comments like if you see me or if you see a typo that was me like that was me but i don't spend the day like just looking at stories this and that i do at the end of the day if i see like memes and funny things i send it to my like my mom and my friends because i i need to like to have a laugh but i take very seriously i'm not taking people's attention for granted or to scare people or for example another thing that i don't do is like every time somebody dies so told start talking about the person who died and saying the transit i i i don't do that because i respect that like this is you're not gonna take that for a hook or for engagement that's what we to do they jump on they jump on these like really horrible world events yeah to make you know content and you see it all the time i i've never liked doing that i don't even like talking about world events in the podcast me because i'm like yes can i can i get more views yeah but i feel like it's i feel like it's cheap content i i think so too i think it also like morally and ethically like i don't know i just don't 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 to hire people 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 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ideas into their work do you ever find that there's any conflict so between ka and astrology or other things like you find it like a teaching in ka kamala runs counter to what you learn in astrology oh yeah of course like traditional astrology yeah and and cabal astrology will clash all the time because traditional astrology tells you that something is as it is and that's what it is like if you're a leo this is how how you are and who you are and cab poses the question like really are you the main goal in qa astrology is that the moment you die nobody can tell if you were a leo or a vi like the whole point of capitalist astrology is like okay this is the potential but you're gonna elevate like above and in the end you're not labeled you i don't know if i'm expanding my myself sure yeah you are but you start with you start with a guide astrology is a guide for you have a guide but yeah the the one that i practice for example i always give this example because is very strong i was born with venus in scorpio and if you go into traditional astrology i'm a jealous person i'm like super intense and like i fall in loved once and i never let go i am a very passionate person but instead of using that dino in scorpion relationships i pour it into what i like and i have a return of investment instead of like saying no i'm just gonna love ones like ka teaches you how to use that energy for something ka is sharing like that's the purpose of ka so how do you use that for something it doesn't sometimes it doesn't even have to be good or purse purposeful but do something with it and psycho teaches you the same thing you're math okay what are we gonna do with it what do you wanna do with that energy you know what i mean like everything has a i use in my in my mind like something to do with it why why is traditional astrology so rigid like how does that help anybody you know what i don't think is rigid it's not astrology is is whoever is framing it you know what i mean okay but i do think this is changing i do i do see that there's like a new wave of astro it's not about age they're not all gen like i do believe there's that there has been an opening and i see more people creating content in a way that is to help you develop instead of framing you like or or labeling you i think that labeling side of trolley was very hard maybe in the early two thousands but it's is it has flourished a lot and i give credit to that also you know it's gonna you're gonna laugh but there's a lot of people that maybe they're not astro but they they make like funny content about astrology maybe some series astro are gonna say they don't help the cause but you know what i do believe that people that create means about astrology are helping two two things like two reasons why first they bring people to astrology that maybe would have never gotten an into astrology and i think the more it grows the better why not and second i love humor i think teaching with humor is very smart and if i can teach you something with humor and you can see the light side of something that you up from now you feel you felt like is very heavy maybe it opens yourself to okay yeah okay it's not that harm i'm gonna work on this you know what i mean so i do believe that everything helps a little bit no i i agree with you i think that listen if if you're trying to influence somebody and this is again not just with astrology but if you're trying to influence anybody and teach anybody anything like you have to meet them where they're at exactly you do you really have i mean this is why this is why a lot of like political people use memes to get an ideology across like this is it's not that you forget politics but the point is like it works if you want somebody to understand what you're talking about you have to meet them where they're at and and humor and memes it's like culturally relevant exactly so language the language that people understand so especially if you wanna get a younger generation on board like you do have to joke around about things like don't take life so seriously either because that starts the curiosity right and they start to learn ass astrology he has a very difficult language if you don't know it you hear about trying sex those conjunctions parallels and you have no idea and i know that if you don't know it as soon as you hear something like that you're disengaged you don't you can't because you can follow it so i do believe like speaking to you in a language you can hear what's my what's my goal for you to understand me yes or no so that always think what's your end goal oh also always think i i see a lot of people not in a astrology in life like talking about relationships in general not not lot relationships like this is how it affects me and this has happening to me is like you happen to other people too are you aware of how you happen to other people so i'm always like very aware of okay when i say this is this gonna make people understand or no and i use the simplest language or the simplest examples in real life i feel like i create astrology for people like me like i wanna connect with something but i wanna understand and be able to carry on with my life so i think the simplest way the better your message has to be like water that goes everywhere talk to me about talk to me about spiritual bypassing so what what is spiritual bypassing because i think that that's i mean we we spoke a lot about like not just removing personal responsibility because you believe in something you can't just remove personal response but i've never heard that term before what's spiritual bypass bypassing is when you use anything spiritual to avoid responsibility for it's literally what it is it is literally but example in the world of astrology would be i forgot to come to the podcast even though we had an agreement because mercury was retro great you know what i mean or for example yes i reacted in this explosive way the moon was con junk mars today so if you come to me with any of those things my dog ate that the the homework forget it but also in life so what's spirituality for you let me ask you for for me it's believing something bigger than myself okay it it's being put on this earth to to be a good moral ethical person to try and do my best to give value to the world to not leave a legacy in terms of like people remembering my name but leave a legacy with my kids so that they can carry on my values to next generation that's spirituality it's just like doing good beyond myself that's how i see it that's great for me spirituality is okay there's a spirit a spirit yeah that came into this body in in this earth in this finite like where material beings right and is seeing beyond the material like for example we're just talking but maybe this can spark something beyond you and i something like that for a lot of people's spirituality is meditating every day or going to temple church every day or every week doing yoga all the time you don't have an idea of how many angry messages i get from people saying that i'm not spiritual because i use makeup or from people saying that i'm not because i charge my for the business yeah yeah so for me spirituality is there's one line i do what i'm say i'm gonna do i do think on the consequences of things that i'm gonna do and i try to see things not as just like i take it for granted like i just what i see there's a ninety nine percent of everything i see you know what i mean like whatever i see in this material world this is the last step of manifestation whatever material we see it came from an idea i came from an energy for me in spiritual is never to forget that there's something beyond what we just can see so i remember going into this this class and the teacher saying for me more spiritual that if a person breaks my window coming to me and saying i'm sorry i broke your window and maybe i cannot pay you today but i'm gonna take responsibility for this of a person come and say i broke a window but i'm gonna pray and i'm gonna be and like you have a responsibility everything else that you take as an excuse not to take responsibility a bypass and i do take this also into astrology when i see people saying no this happened to me because of this and that for example no i have a mental fog because mercury is opposing saturn and i'm like girl if you've been with a mental fuck for a long time do a hormone panel yeah maybe there's mold in your house like like do like do a hormone panel no like be realistic like we have i i called this the school in the sense like okay i'm a spirit i'm a spirit that and having this experience what am i gonna do with this but i do have to take responsibility into account i do have to like take ownership on the of the things i'm doing on my mistakes on everything always knowing that i'm not what we said before this god or this ego you know what i mean i like that one one quote that you have that i thought was really really smart was and i think this ties into spiritual bypassing getting rid of all responsibility assuming that anything bad that happens in your life is not your fault at all but the quote is you'll never be happy if you get rid of unhappiness because you've gotta be fully alive to get happier so i think that i don't know if this is a too much of a stretch but i feel like if people use spiritual bypassing and they say that everything bad in their life is not their fault they're not taking ownership of it so they can't actually enjoy the things that are good in their life because they've never really taken ownership over the bad you know there's also the people that say everything happens for a reason you know yeah but why do you think that is because we're meaning making machines whatever happens your brain is gonna find a way to say oh this is why it happens like an association i believe that like when you understand how the mind works how the body works how energy works too you understand that all the range of emotions serve something so you can't deny any of those parts like going back to the spiritual on the material part let's say that being spiritual is just i'm completely detached from the material world but how are you gonna completely detach from your health or taking care of your body or like for example caring you have a family or caring for your family and caring to provide for them if you have a family in the most spiritual thing to like think about how you're gonna provide for them course yeah so that's the thing i think that anything that attaches you and takes you into a extreme is not gonna help you leave what you came to live you know all the contrast is what makes like the jews happen yeah so i think that terms have to be changing around spirituality or the spiritual bypass and really connect the three sixty of what we are that quote you mentioned about unhappiness yes you need that contrast to see you need your mistakes to like but you need to believe your mistakes or your own exactly yeah yeah but also your emotions are your own like everything is happening like is happening within you understand it and create from it don't run away from it even like everything serves something as i said sometimes i i have done things out of trauma for example when you ask me did you do this because you wanna try to prove to prove this guy wrong that i don't believe that's one of my pillars but for example i'm the kind of person that if my gas tank is in the middle i i wanna feel it right away and i know that's a trauma response of some like other things but it serves something once you see that you you you know what to do with it so when you see happiness and unhappiness once you appreciate happiness you own it and you say okay this is part of it okay you create something out of it like don't neglect one of your mistakes or experiences because everything adds to where you're gonna go in life you know what i mean i i know exactly what you mean do you feel or do you see with people that gravitate towards astrology they are looking at it as a band aid for something in their life just a general out like speaking general not everyone obviously but you feel like the majority of people you have to sort of reframe what it's actually for as opposed to what they're looking for yeah and i think that happens with law but it happens in everything because for example this type of forecast that you do i still to this day like one of the first things if i have time in the morning is i listen to some inspirational and i know it's a band aid sometimes but it helps me to break imaginary glass ceilings sometimes when you interview somebody that tells something that resonates with me like you can use use anything as a band yes astrology is gonna have like this it's like a huge band but it depends on how you guide them am i gonna allow for it to continue to be a band once you come into my content and you start hearing oh but how do you handle this is this your responsibility maybe i'm not that content creator that is gonna rock you to sleep maybe i'm more like a soft slap i like that maybe like a soft cosmic lap but i never i say this in my membership all the time i don't expect to you for being this membership forever i just expect for you to get the grounds and move on like graduate from it what has been because obviously astrology and and cabal and literally everything you've brought into your life has been for some some version of personal growth it's all some some v what has been the most impactful personal growth that you've gotten what is it what has changed in your life the most of the things that i've started yeah what has really actually helped you honestly and what did it do for you this mindset of being more proactive in the sense of am i gonna let this be like a step down or a steps stone as i said we're meaning making machines so the titanic for someone is a lot both for another one it's just perspective i do believe is convenient for you to try to see something that is hard us okay this is gonna polish me or this is gonna give me the strength that i i know i have i mean it's convenient for you to think that way i do believe that if you're gonna create a mindset create a mindset that it helps you but a mindset that you know makes you feel under your potential so i do believe like that mindset even though it's like a narrative it is like that a program it has helped me go through very difficult times is the ability to choose how i wanna see something and i'm not always choosing to see the circumstances like like no this is nothing this is only unicorns i tried to see in as an as an objective way but the way that i talk to myself you know what i mean yeah it has changed the way that i talk to myself another thing that really changed me is meditation and i i know exactly share but the things that i'm a very not impatient like my mind is always thinking creating so for me sitting down and just breathe was very hard like like i'm always doing something but it made a click when i was finally able to do it and i don't do it every day honestly but when i catch myself the way that i talk like the way that i talk to myself a lot of people you know you talk to to yourself every day and a lot of people are not aware of the words they use i've seen people saying i'm so stupid you know it happens all the time and i do believe that's that creates your self concept but a a thousand percent it does also from like a biological response and then you feel it yes like if you if you say i'm stressed i'm stressed i'm stressed yeah you can try to cortisol up and if this is scientifically proven so cab made me pause then i got into meditation and then i started changing the way that i talked to myself and then i got into the daily pages i don't know if you've heard of the daily pages this writing dale yeah no i i've never heard the daily pages but i also write every day just for my own mental health to be quite honest change like this was a game changer free flow right no i used to do the free flow writing daily pages i don't know if that's like a trademark thing i have no idea that's how i call it every day i write in present time things that i want for me to have like i wanted to hop like i want this podcast to go well no no this podcast is going is gonna go well so or for example i'm patient i'm kind i'm a patient listener is not it's something that i want to develop but you write it in present time and the things that your brain doesn't fat fact check all of this so when you say it let's say you're gonna call me and i'm like i wanna be patient no i'm i'm patient i'm kind i'm a i'm a patient listener there's more probability for me to be a patient listener when you're talking to me then just going another a pilot so i do this every day on things that i want i i i right in present time and in that moment you start creating the newer pathways for that to happen and you just practice and practice and practice so let's say this week before every meeting that i have i'm a leader i'm a patient leader let's say that i do this for five meetings that i have this week and then next week i wait before three meetings i'm already practicing it so it it goes developing it's like a new way of being it's like that fake till you make it except you are literally you you're literally taking on the persona of that thing and then you actually become that thing for me it does work it has work i started doing it last year and for me it has worked but depends on how you do it i guess some people do it like i am a millionaire i am like i do things on traits that i wanna like see better in myself this example that i just gave is like my typical daily pitch and patient i listen like those things that i know that because i always go fast and i think very fast so it has create like this new persona until you're that persona you know what i mean if people are consuming your content and they and they know your content and they're looking to help themselves change their lives something's going wrong in their life and they're looking to astrology or listening to this podcast and they and they just are looking for guidance mh you've said that you cannot remove personal responsibility but what is the advice to somebody who is struggling and looking for wisdom in astrology ka kamala with your content anything else where do they go who do they listen to where do they start i tried to share content in my stories and also have to channels on instagram i'm where i leave like voice i love voice notes so i think that's one of the things that i love the most about that platform if they they're following me following me on instagram because that's if i'm gonna share that's where i share the most the channels allow me like to leave voice notes and i always leave voice notes that are not related to astrology are more like reflections of the day and a lot of people tell me like this reflection of the day like has helped me a lot help me see saw saw something in a different way so i would start there just like looking at the stories in the stories i always start the day with like what the moon is doing not telling you what to do like how the bible is and then i share inspirational things that motivate you to like take a step forward take a step forward i know that the membership is not is not for everyone not everyone wants to study the astrology but i do believe like the boys notes the stories i also share a lot of post with you're not gonna realize that is a astrology or but it is related for example yesterday i spoke in a post about collaboration like the importance of collaborating with other people because we're in libra and libra is to collaborate so as i told you astrology is like this umbrella and i'm teaching you about it sometimes without even you knowing that it's happening but you know where the wisdom coming from and this is how you should interpret exactly like i'm trying i always i ask myself what do i want people to feel when they enter into any of my pages and i want people to feel inspired to feel energy and to feel like i i wanna i click seize the day like that way so i always try to share stuff like that not with unicorns and candy candy but like with a realistic approach like an everyday approach simple things but i'm very aware of how i want people to feel so start there starting the story start simple start reading to see if it resonates with you if it doesn't resonate with you it doesn't matter it's all good i have a lot of people that day to day question me like surely he's not a science it doesn't work and i don't fight with anybody i feel like everybody should take what serves for them in the moment and if it if it sparks something they'll continue but i don't believe in forcing or improving anything like trying to prove something to somebody no i don't believe that and if people want to use it as a tool not again to remove responsibility but to better understand themselves they'll start to consume your content but what is the actual place where you can actually start to learn who you want membership that is like in the membership right now i give classes three times per week and it's gonna help you like if you're really basic intermediate or advanced you're gonna find something for you is not only gonna teach you to understand your chart but also understand the language of astrology also every monday i give this class that it's not about astrology but about mindset like how your brain works how to change your mindset how to like be aware of your yourself concept like catching your your bias or the things that you don't see and work like growing into this i don't believe i love astrology but i believe that it needs to work with other tools that make people take responsibility because when you first encounter trolley you're talking about planets that are out there and sometimes you believe that default is in the stars so with either mindset i give people other tools to say hey i'm here so this is what we're doing this week or this is what we and i do have continuity for example this monday goes with next monday so you're like growing step by step by step so i do feel like there's like i'm accountable for these people so i keep like developing the tools one by one we'll tell you where to start how to go step by step in the membership if you're new to it and people love it like people feel like they understand everything sometimes yes it's like oh like behind in classes like this class was one one hour some people love long classes other people they like go slower i do understand that that's why i do believe like if you really want to get to know yourself if you really wanna have a pause in your life like okay i'm gonna take this class thirty minutes for me is an excellent tool it's like an amazing way to start my goal is for you to listen to yourself like have that moment some people do it in yoga some people do it in other things yesterday one of the students told me like you have no idea like just listening to you sometimes i'm listening to you and i'm not doing like re reaching my chart or checking my chart but just taking a pause and listening to you is like the moment that i have with myself so whatever helps girl whatever i love it last thing i always like to ask if you've learned so much over your life and now you teach a whole bunch of different topics to your to your students and your community but if you had to pick one idea that was one of the more impactful ids it's really helped shape your life you could be teaching it to your twenty year old self you're younger self you could be it could be a lesson that you'd wanna pass on to the next generation just something that really stands out what would that lesson be and why i'm taking this question is if i have to say something to my younger self and i would say that you create your own destiny like for me to believe that there are trends energetic trends not like fashion trends like to believe that there energetic trends do we believe that for sure there's things that we came to experience in this life but that i have the freedom to choose how i'm gonna transcend these situations i think that has been my biggest learning to feel like that i have a choice that i'm not in just that this little box and everything is written and i'm just condemned to have certain life you know i do believe we have like i came to me dispute this person and i came to do this and that but you can always choose how you know what i mean like the how is up to you 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 link cloud dot ai slash success

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terms apply see full terms and conditions at owners box dot com slash football fuel points tc in this lessons episode explore why showing your work publicly has become the ultimate currency for building credibility and opportunity online discover how transparency and proof of work drive community growth and long term success understand how creators can product their skills to create scalable income and uncover strategies to stay focused amid distract and avoid chasing every new trend i'm not sure if you if you if you did this purposefully or not but also i found that everything you did you built a great community around it so it wasn't just putting out great content like there was a great community that you built it and if i'm not mistaken even the products that you the the the course the final the second course i'm not sure about the first one but did you build those in public as well like you involve the community in so that's something else that i noticed that people that do it very well especially on twitter just because it seems to be like such a huge or the organic reaches immense compared to many other social platforms so walk me through if you have any tips on on building that community because if somebody does build one sell twice that's they have a product fine but how do you build this reach because that's really what's going to really benefit right yeah i think one of the one of the advantages i have as a designer and one of the things has been like extremely instrumental in the like the development of my career is show my work so it's like nobody's ever cared about my degree nobody's ever cared about where i went to school every interview i've gone to every like job i've even every project i've gotten to work on internally an agency has been because of the thing i did last so and you have a very tangible set of assets to point to as a designer because you you produce a portfolio of work like this is a project i worked on this is a brand i design this is a website i built and i think that was almost a subconscious advantage for such a long time because i'd always had that mentality right it's like it doesn't it doesn't matter what you tell me show me what you did and that's how that's how i'd managed to move jobs and get a job in the first place by showing my portfolio so i think that's in that's a skill that other not even a skill it's a a practice i should say that other the other industries and other disciplines are coming around to now so if you're you know if your academia does this like they published what they're thinking about right they're always producing there's is always an output of okay this is the research that we've done this is how we're gonna present it this is you know our thesis and i think convincing people that whatever is you're thinking about you have an opportunity to put like produce deliverables that convey that right and that to me is it's like a fundamental shift in thinking that seems completely obvious to me as a designer but when i introduce that concept to other people that are like oh yeah that's a great idea i'm gonna start doing that and the idea that you think you're gonna get discovered or people will you know actively seek out your thinking without doing that is i mean it's insane when you look at it that way but it's but that's what everybody does towards what everybody does right right assume that someone's just gonna come and like pluck you out and be like oh can you yeah can you sell me on your services and you know the way the i mean the internet is just monstrous force in that equation right every there's an naval evolved quote the the internet the internet democrat consumption but consolidate production so if you're the best in the world at anything you get to do it for everyone and that's like a really huge overlooked force in society i think that just because you've had this experience offline or because you have this anecdote of a friend of yours that got you know that knew somebody and got this job here proof of work is now like the currency that is gonna move your career forward i think in almost every field and people who can produce visual assets or tangible assets or record podcasts or make videos are just that much more likely to generate luck you know create relationships at scale because you know it's just sheer surface area and that is just a the one thing i think that it's hugely underestimated and it takes a long time to build it and get good at it and all of those things but yeah that but that's what differentiates that's having that asset right is what differentiates how do you so this is something that now you teach over to people that are building the the build one the build once sell twice so as part of that i'm assuming you actually have the the way to idea on on how to product ties your your knowledge and your your experience but also part of that is also the the building the community building the brand and that's is that the core lesson the core learning is to is to show your work in some format or another and i guess i'm just thinking through like for for somebody who is in a designer of podcast youtube whatever it may be that's probably the easiest way there are are there other ways that you can show work i'm just curious i don't know yeah if there's something else that you would recommend people do to build out this brand well another thing that's interesting and this is like there's so much nuance to this and it often doesn't get covered in conversations about it but the one of the fundamental things i think is do you have a skill set that allows you to produce a result for someone on your own if you do then you have a massive opportunity to teach other people that skill set right if you're a a designer a writer video producer if you produce something tangible or you have you can analyze data in a certain way there's is it's like reverse engineering the results so a huge part of the curriculum is to get people focused on the result they generate and then essentially build things that help you deliver that result with a less linear relationship to your time over time so you begin as a designer that spends three days with a founding team getting all the information out of them and then turning that into a asset the second iteration of that is you have systems to collect that information from them and you write better questions and you spend less time you spend less time like grilling people individually so it gets more and more efficient and then eventually you have a program that's so watertight because you've sent a hundred people through it and you've spike figured out all the blind spots and figured out what you need to introduce somebody to at what time in order to get them to think about something in a different way that helps you like slowly divorce your time from the delivery of the result but i think that is the intros question that all of this begins with is like if if i if i can create leverage for someone else on my own then i can produce an asset that essentially replicates my ability to do that and that like we're in a period of time now where it's really hard to build that very specific skill set and stay focused long enough to be able to produce that result right when i started my career i would get like two text messages a day and i'd read them on my lunch break people that are like practitioners and trying to learn skills now are gone on twitter or instagram every forty five seconds and it feels like you're missing the boat every time you look at something else right it's like oh i should be working on this or i should be you i should learn that skill or i should be following this person and and like emulate what they're doing so i'm really empathetic to the fact that it's harder or at least my perspective of it is it's really difficult to build these stand skills yeah you have that shiny object syndrome for sure right that's not always an issue now with social and and constant exposure and you're always questioning whether or not you're doing it right even if you're getting results should you redo it or learn something new or do it a different way so how do you how do you personally focus on what's driving results and not follow that shiny object all the time it it it's increasingly difficult right the the amazing thing about building a business like this is it sort of trails your curiosity so you have to you have to be interested in something that you're not quite great at in order to continue to like deliver those learnings to people who haven't gone down the same path as you but you also have to recognize when you are like just completely distracted and wasting time and the that's the the like the amazing thing about the internet as it cuts both ways right you can go super deep and build once sell twice the addressable market for that is enormous you could go and sell that for a decade probably right there's enough people that have not been exposed to those ideas but you can get in this little echo chamber where you've you've you start to burn out on on that thinking because you've been teaching it for a year for example but then you you could switch too far in a different direction right or for me like my shiny object is crypto so i'm like down all these different rabbit holes you know i played around with n nxt this year and i'm incredibly like i'm a huge believer in all this technology but there's also a cost to being distracted from the thing that a hundred thousand people know you for for example thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscription eye buttons 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 subscribe 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 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