ENTREPRENEUR MENTALITY - Powerful Business Motivation

Being the best at what you do in the world in which you live is enormously valuable. How do you become the best one? You don't quit when everyone else does. My truth and my experience has been I have to jump higher, I have to show up earlier, I have to be the first person to turn off the light and the last light. I have to make sure that every number is correct and every T is crossed and every die is dotted. The way that I show up is by being consistent. So consistent that people cannot doubt your capacity to succeed. You have to work harder than the average person. And if you accept those terms, you cannot complain about those terms. I have only known success on the back of consistency. And if you don't show up in your business loving what you turn over for your customers or your clients, your business is in decline. The earlier you figure it out the better off you are. But it can happen later in life. You got to listen to yourself. You got to be a bit bold. You have to embrace what makes you different. I say what makes you weird because I know personally I'm a very weird person. I don't mind being weird. I use it to my advantage. I put it in my books. We are so brainwashed. Unless you buy the newest iPhones or newest something and then you feel like you're out of the group. So like finding the right environment is also very important. While somebody is sitting on their couch behind their keyboard, they're going to have an opinion of you starting a business or not starting a business. The fact of the matter remains are you going to let somebody else's opinion dictate what you are going to do in your life and the reason you were put on this earth. But people who have the worst circumstances and then they're either crushed by it or they use it to develop themselves. You cannot get ahead in this world as a social animal dependent on other people in every aspect of life. The biggest difficulty is that people fall and then they stay down. The greatest entrepreneurs are the people who understand that falling is part of the process. Somebody else's opinion of us doesn't pay our bills. The person who has an opinion about what it is you're doing was most likely never going to become a customer. How do we become remarkable? We begin by understanding what remarkable means. It doesn't mean standing out. — Doesn't mean having a gimmick. Doesn't mean being the only one in It means worth making a remark about. If somebody else talks about you in a positive way, you are by definition remarkable. Why would they do that? They're only going to do it cuz it's good for them. People don't talk about you cuz they're rooting for you. They themselves. So what it means to be remarkable is to be of service. To bring enough empathy to the table. To not fit in. To not buy the indoctrination. But to stand out on behalf of the people you're trying to make a difference for. And was there How did you start to uncover this idea or this kind of philosophy? Was there an episode early on or something that happened early on? Well, in my book Purple Cow, I wrote about my late friend Lionel Poilâne. Lionel had died in a tragic helicopter crash and I wanted to dedicate a book to him. I didn't have a book. I'd been out of the publishing world for a little while. So I wrote a book inspired by what I learned from him. Now, we can say a lot of things about Paris, France, but we can agree they have a lot of bakeries. They have more bakeries selling bread than just about anywhere in the world. So why is there a line out the door still to this day when his daughter runs it at the Poilâne bakery? It's not because he has a gimmick. It's because the bread he makes and the way he makes it is worth flying across the world to get. It's worth bringing to your friend's house. It's worth talking about because it gives you status. It gives you connection. He didn't do that by copying what other people do. He did that by determining what would be worth making. You've got this way of seeing the same thing we're all seeing but from a slightly different angle and all of a sudden we're like, oh, I now see it the way Seth sees it. It's it's amazing. What do you feel like the world needs to see slightly differently right now? You know, there two things going on particularly for young people. One is the indoctrination. The indoctrination continues. It's the factory of school and the factory of work saying fit in all the way. Do exactly what you're told and you'll get a prize. And we're discovering that indoctrination with the issues of caste and injustice that come with it doesn't really work for a lot of people. On the other hand, there's this false narrative of authenticity, of social media, of being the next Kardashian, of

somehow being this authentic voice that everyone wants to listen to, being an influencer. And that's like winning the lottery. That doesn't happen either. So those are the two poles. And what we have to do instead is dig in and figure out where the system is. Why are we being indoctrinated? Where are the opportunities to contribute in a way where we can point to and say, I helped grow that. That big problems demand small changes. Small changes over time that add up to making a big difference. You touch on this experience that a lot of people are going through and we work with a lot of youth. A lot of youth watch our channels and you know, you can feel their fears. hopes. You can feel all sorts of things, but you talk about fear in a really interesting way. You talk about it as kind of an indication that you're onto something meaningful. How have you managed fear? You know, how could those who are listening understand fear differently? You know, life on this planet 500 years ago is different than now. Many people, billions of us, have a roof over our head. We know where dinner is coming from. But fear, the fear we evolved into from generations, doesn't know any of that. It simply knows how to trigger fight or flight. It knows how to — make us feel like the world is about to end. And it kept us alive in the old days, but now it's a trap. So writer's block. Writer's block doesn't exist. It was recently invented. It's a myth. There's no such thing as writer's block. But people say they can't write. They're afraid. Well, my friend Steven Pressfield calls that resistance. And resistance is that feeling we get when we're about to do something important. And our option is the same way a marathon runner views getting tired as a symptom they're doing a good job. Being afraid is a symptom that you might be about to do something that involves responsibility and making an impact. And I look for that feeling. If I don't feel it, I'm not trying hard enough. So it's so interesting that fear, I mean, I think a lot of us would try to get to a place where we learn to live with fear, but you almost learn to look for fear. That's kind of a really interesting almost signal to know I am doing something important. I am feeling a certain way, but that doesn't mean run. That can mean something totally different. And I mean, I think it's pretty clear to a lot of people we live in a world right now that's so full of fear. And hopefully that can switch or change, but in this time you've decided to write a book on strategy. Why strategy? I think the big challenge we have is people don't even know what strategy is. We don't talk about strategy. We think it has to do with planning. Plans are about you exercising your agency and authority. We make a plan and then we work to make it true. Strategy isn't that. Strategy acknowledges that there are other people. systems. That what we're thinking of doing might not work. And it's hard to talk about that. To say I'm going to go build these assets and go on this project and it might not work, but this is my strategy. So instead we default to following the crowd whatever the crowd is doing. So saying I'm going to go on TikTok and get 50 million followers and then make a lot of money. That's like saying I'm going to go buy a lottery ticket. And people know that the lottery isn't a strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is a reasonable and rational plan of how we are going to engage with other people's plans so that we can all get to where we want to go. Well, it's never too late. It's better to start earlier on in life. I mean, I wrote a book Mastery that deals with that subject. The earlier you figure it out the better off you are. But it can happen later in life. Now, I figured out at an early age that I wanted to write. I didn't know what I wanted to write, but I loved words and I loved writing. And if I didn't have that connection when I was 8 years old all the way into high school and college, I would have been a lost soul. — And I empathize with a lot of people who don't have that feeling when they're 8 or 18 or in their 20s. But I try to tell people everybody has it. You're just not listening to yourself. You've lost touch with who you are, the core of your being. You're on social media too much. You're listening to what other people are telling you. You listen to what your parents told you should be doing in life. Listen to what your friends think is cool. You're listening to what the culture is all about, you know, the entertainment industry, etc. You got to cut all that it out. You got to listen to yourself. You got to be a bit bold. You have to embrace what makes you different. I say what makes you weird because I know personally I'm a very weird person. I don't mind being weird. I use it to my advantage. I put

it in my books. Law number one, never outshine the master. I could sit here and cry and tell you all kinds of tragic stories about how I outshone the master and how miserable it made me, right? So, I was one of those people who was a bit naive and didn't understand this kind of secret language that power that people in power have. Negative emotions are trying to teach you something. They're the opposite. Something else is going on. Frustration, if I was simply what would be worse than frustration would be despair, giving up. No hope, but frustration is a sign that you haven't given up. You're You know you can do something, but you haven't figured it out. So, when you have those kind of feelings, look at them and there's something positive in that. How can you ever change yourself? You think that you're a Gandhi, but how can you be — be a Gandhi if you won't like look at yourself and change yourself, right? The only way you can become good or kind of overcome some of these qualities is by looking at it, seeing the reality, and then confronting it, and then trying to change it. You have weirdness to you, whoever you are. Things that you might sometimes be a little bit ashamed or embarrassed or uncomfortable with, right? But you shouldn't be. What makes you different, what makes you particularly strange, if you want to use another word, — is your strength, is your source of power. You've lost touch with it. Let's go back and try and find it. And that's the That's the whole problem here. How do you find it? Well, it's a process. You have to be patient. It's not going to come like a light bulb in your head. Ah, I was meant to do this. write 48 Laws of Power. That's not how it works. It takes time. To do anything in life takes time and hours and patience and work. I recommend oh starting a journal and such and writing down some of the things that I think are important to you. So, I like to tell people to go back to their earliest childhood memories of things that really excited them before they got mixed up with parents and teachers and all that other people telling them stuff, you know? Like for me it was words and language. I just was entranced by the sound of language itself, right? It's like music to me. You had something like that. There's a book I recommend. It's a bit technical, but it's a brilliant book called The Five Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner. The point of this book is that there are five forms of intelligence. We normally associate intelligence with intellectuals, with our Noam Chomsky, with Albert Einstein. And he says, "No. Intelligence comes in all forms. Working with your hands is a form of intelligence. A carpenter has a high form of intelligence. People who are sports or athletic who use their body, that's another form of intelligence. There's music, there's math, there's language. You have one of these frames of mind. By the way your brain is wired, you have You are inclined towards one of them. Figure that out. If you are somebody who's word-oriented and you end up going into a field that's about math or about numbers, you're in for a lot of pain in life. Right? So, you got to figure that kind of what I call primal connection to some kind of field. You have to look at the things that you love and hate. You're looking at things that are very powerful inside of you that are emotional. They're not intellectual, they're thoughts. — They're I'm sorry, they're feelings, they're emotions. They're visceral things that you connect to. I know you do. And I am completely egalitarian. I believe everybody has that. Every single day and I think to myself, I am the most unqualified and like non-development tech founder in the face of this internet, and yet I'm still going to do it because I don't want to lie at the end of my life and think I wish I would have tried something. I had no business starting a business. And yet I started one, and I have found ways to create and make and sustain multiple — seven-figure revenue streams. And while that may or may not be the case for everybody else, I strongly believe that every single business owner, once armed with what they know have to do, and once armed with the marketing, discipline, and once armed with the consistency, that they too can build a six-figure revenue stream. I believe that with every fiber in my bones. Can you deliver on the promise that you are making? Can you sustain those customer relationships? Because if then, I believe hands down you can create a six-figure revenue stream. And in America, if you are creating a six-figure revenue stream, you are in the 1% of the 1%. And I think to myself, as a person who received government-issued food and substances, I went to college on the back of government aid. I was the recipient of people's benevolence and taxpayers' money for me to go back and give back to a community. I think to myself that my business has become a passport for me to move entire legacies, — industries, timelines, um predisposed ideas of who I should be based on my gender, color of skin, or how I was

raised. And I'm like, I became the thing that broke the system and the statistic. But I don't think I'm special. I believe everybody can do this. And so, on the days it becomes very hard, I think to myself, you have the passport. Are you going to keep it for yourself, or you can help other people get out, too? On the days that are the darkest, I always think to myself, can you help one person get a passport today? And that's the thing that continues to keep me pushing forward. The minute that something was complicated and difficult and impossible, and then decided to go after it. Like I thought it was impossible or difficult to ever position myself as an authority to be a consultant. Thought it was impossible. I thought it was impossible to ever create a course, much less create revenue streams of multiple seven figures in the back of courses. Then I thought it was impossible to create a membership. start a tech company. So, the earliest part of my career was I want to become a photographer, and then successful photographer. And then all of a sudden, the game got really slow. I could predict my income, I could predict the publicity, resources, I could predict the connections, I could predict the publications. And when I predicted it, I loved it, and I appreciated it, and then I just didn't want it anymore. And if you don't show up in your business loving what you turn over for your customers or your clients, your business is in decline. And I thought, I must show up 100% for the people who hire me. And if I am not, my time is come. And that's when I started to make shifts in my business. My truth in my experience has been, I have to jump higher, I have to show up earlier, I have to be the first person to turn off the light and the last light. I have to make sure that every number is correct and every T is crossed and every die is dotted. The way that I show up is by being consistent, so consistent that people cannot doubt your capacity to succeed. You have to work harder than the average person. And if you accept those terms, you cannot complain about those terms. I have only known success on the back of consistency. Do I think you could be a success without being consistent? Perhaps, if you have other resources and tools that I was never given. But coming from where I am, my perspective has only been consistency and the discipline has been everything that I have ever gotten on the back of doing it again and again. It is what I teach, preach, is what I believe. I I'm going to give the advice that I heard my third year of business. I was sitting with a group of other photographers who were farther in their career, and I had always found a way, even though I couldn't afford to get educated specifically in the photography world because there was like very high-ticket experiences, I would find a way to leverage what I thought I was good at in exchange. And so, I found a photographer um in my area. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and I said, "Hey, would I be able to go to your event and write a few blog posts about your event? And in addition to, if you let me come, could I also write your bio, like for your website? " Cuz I gave like a little preview. I was like, his bio was just like, "Great photographer. Love my camera. " And I kind of wrote just like of the first paragraph of what could be his bio based on things that I had read about him on the internet. And he was just like, "Yes. " So, I got into this room, and what he said, I felt like it just pierced my heart. And this is the thing that I will tell everybody again and again. — He said, "Jump, and the net will appear. " And it was the first time in my entire life that I had ever heard somebody speak so brazenly about taking a risk. Again, who I am now as a risk-taker is so different than who I was when I began. And the way that you strengthen that risk muscle is by taking risks. And when he said that 3 years into it, I realized, "Okay, now is the time for me to start taking those risks. " I wish somebody would have told me that sooner. — Let's just be real, right? Like people hear that jump and the net will appear, jump and like the universe has your back. And we love it. We're like high-fiving because we've been on the other side. But like, there have been plenty of times where there was no net and there like the universe was just like, "I see you. I'm not putting my arms out. " Because you needed to fall on your face. This is the first teaching that I received from my mentor, Wahei Takeda, who used to be called Warren Buffett of Japan. He was once of a major shareholder of more than 100 public companies. So, Japan is still the third or the fourth uh economic giant. [clears throat] So, think of the uh major shareholder of uh 100 public companies is huge. So, he said arigato your money. That means appreciate your money. Um both coming in and going out. If your attitude is like that, um you feel so happy in general. And then — um you have more positive energy around money. And then — you don't associate money with pain. You associate money with more love. So, uh my favorite question is uh who would it be if money was a person? — For a lot of people, money was a nuisance. You don't want money to be in

your house as much as you want them to be in your house because money could hurt people, money could be uh the cause of some trouble. So, you don't want any troublemakers to be living uh in your life. But, happy wealthy people know uh money can be so incredibly nice. So, for them money is their best friend. It doesn't really matter how much money you have, make. It's about your attitude. Even if you have billions of dollars in your bank account, if you're frustrated, you worry about money uh you're miserable. But, if you have no um money in your bank account if you have so many friends who want to support you can feel like a billionaire. So, I always talk about three states of money. Money being uh ice. If you're living in a cold world uh world where people are fighting against each other, you have to compete against your competitor. If you uh not careful, somebody will take your money. So, you have to be always guarding. You're always in a fighting mode. So, uh it's a sad world to be to live in. So, if you're living in that kind of world, uh your money is ice. And when you are living in a uh better environment [clears throat] — then money becomes water. But, water uh requires management. If it's too much flow, it becomes flood. You know, uh kids of wealthy parents often struggle because they're drowning in the sea of money. But, if you have a drought situation, uh not much uh flow in terms of money, and also it's not fun, too. You know, have a hard time uh making both ends meet, you don't know where that your next check comes in. That's also not fun uh fun. It's a drought situation around money. So, the ideal situation is that money becomes air. So, you can sniff in as much air as you want, and you can breathe out as much. And uh you don't worry about your friends or neighbors sniffing your uh air because there's plenty. So, once uh air money your money becomes air, you don't have to focus on money. You know money's there. It's like we know air is here, and then we breathe in, breathe out. But, since it's abundant you don't focus on air. Uh unless you're in a stuck in an elevator or you're going out of space or you're in a submarine. So, I hope for many people money becomes air. And to do that, you have to be free emotionally and also financially. Uh getting uh uh free from financially takes some time. But, uh setting yourself free emotionally uh it doesn't take as much time as it requires to uh have financial independence. When you want to click and buy, ask yourself am I going to die tomorrow if I don't buy this today? Probably not. You're not going to die if you uh don't buy the newest iPhones or uh new shirts or you know, a new something. Uh I think you can probably do okay for — not spending any money for the next few months except for necessities. But, we feel so frustrated with our life. That's why we spend money even at a dollar shop uh that we don't we don't use. So you need to take control over your emotions first. And also, you need to work on your money IQ as well. You need to find a job. something that you can be passionate about. Uh if you're doing something that you doesn't bring you passion, then you don't feel motivated, so your outcome will be low. — So, you your pay will go as close as to the minimum wage. But, if you find something that you're very good at, that's your ikigai. And then your light you your light is up. So, you'll be more creative, you'll be more passionate. Then I can guarantee your income will grow.