Reframing Entrepreneurial Success

- The over-promise of what success looks like is what's causing people to lose. (soft music) It leads to a bigger conversation of self-awareness. I think the biggest mistake most of us make is we hope who we are instead of auditing who we are. - [Man] Okay. - [Gary] Like everybody wants to be somebody. - Look I really want to be the fucking quarterback of the New York Jets but truth is, I don't have it like that. Like I don't have those pieces. And I think everybody believes that they can be an entrepreneur, a businessperson-- - [Man] Yeah. - [Gary] and the truth is there's a ton of kids right now who could be the number two, number three or number four. The number six guy at Facebook made a fuck load of money. - [Man] Yeah. - [Gary] And right now that guy and that gal because of all the entrepreneurship talk is trying to start a company. There're a lot of people especially when they were built to be good students and be good number fours and sevens that when the go to be a one and after a life full of winning because they understood that system they go into the actual marketplace, no more rich friends and families and connections and private school and good universities. Nobody gives a fuck who your dad is. It's almost like when rap got big. Everybody just decided that they were gonna be a rapper. You can't just decide you're gonna an entrepreneur. I think a lot of people have been extending their college lives and disguising it as entrepreneurship. I worked fucking hard for my money. I came here with zero. I didn't have a single fucking vacation day or weekend since I was in the seventh grade. I'm not pumped about losing my money. You have a lot of people that are built DNA-wise and skill-wise and have studied and went through school and have been formed and have trained to be unbelievable consultants at Bain and McKinsey and other places, have a great career, and then get involved in entrepreneurial ventures where they can leverage the monies they made and invest and things of that nature who are starting consumer apps out the gate and have no fucking clue how to be a true-bred entrepreneur because they don't have the stomach to deal when the market says "Go fuck yourself. " I think that we've just lived through the Golden Era of people saying they were entrepreneurs but what they were was they were operators that were building machines A. K. A. companies that were built for financial arbitrage. People have been building startups that are predicated on raising the next round. You've been building your company for user growth to raise your next round. You're not building a company. We are lacking self-awareness in this space in a very substantial way. And there's a lot of people that are about to met with a lot of disappointment, and are stuggling and one thing we're not talking about is the level of success. Everybody thinks they have to build fucking Uber. make millions of dollars. It's unbelievable what we've done and I absolutely want to make sure that we're starting to have real conversations. Making $100,000 a year that's massively successful. We need to recalibrate what success looks like in our space because we're forcing through the branding of what we're doing very impractical, very high risk, very low return results for so many 'cause everybody is shooting for $10 billion. And if we keep telling everybody that it's so easy to do it. And if we don't start talking about that the entry level to be in the top 1% earners in America is only $400,000 a year. And I use the word only because nobody here is even in the mindset of million dollar or bust, right? We need to start having proper conversations.