How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

0:00:01 – All right, turn on the camera, turn on the camera.
0:00:02 I got a rant for you.
0:00:05 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:00:08 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:00:11 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:00:12 ♪ On the road ♪
0:00:14 – I got a call yesterday from a entrepreneur
0:00:17 who was going through something that is so relatable.
0:00:20 They were stuck, they’re at a plateau,
0:00:22 their business is not growing, they were pitching me
0:00:24 on all the new things that we’re gonna do,
0:00:27 new features they were gonna add, a new project,
0:00:28 and then they told me to start telling me
0:00:30 about the side hustle that they got going on,
0:00:32 and I had to stop them and I had to tell them the truth.
0:00:36 The truth is, stop searching for answers.
0:00:39 We are all guilty of this, you know, like, if I’m fat,
0:00:42 all of a sudden I’m keto, I’m paleo, I’m reading books,
0:00:43 I’m listening to podcasts,
0:00:45 and I’m not just doing the obvious things.
0:00:47 The trap that people fall into is thinking
0:00:49 that the answer to their problems is elsewhere,
0:00:52 that maybe a mentor has it or a book has it,
0:00:55 or there’s some knowledge that they don’t have,
0:00:56 and that’s what’s holding them back,
0:00:57 but that’s really never the case.
0:00:58 If I talk to nine out of 10 people,
0:01:01 only one might need a strategy change.
0:01:05 For nine out of 10, the answer is up your level of intensity.
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0:01:44 The best part about intensity is that it’s contagious,
0:01:46 that you can actually create a culture of intensity.
0:01:48 There’s a wonderful story about Peter Thiel
0:01:49 when he was running PayPal.
0:01:50 So Peter Thiel was one of the,
0:01:51 he was a CEO of PayPal,
0:01:53 he’s the first investor in Facebook,
0:01:56 and I was curious, ’cause Peter Thiel is kind of like,
0:01:58 sort of a weird dude, and I was like,
0:02:00 he doesn’t seem like a classic manager,
0:02:02 leader, inspiring guy, super organized,
0:02:06 buttoned down, running daily stand-ups.
0:02:08 It turns out he didn’t really do any of that shit.
0:02:10 He had a very simple system.
0:02:12 His common sense system was,
0:02:14 well, everybody in the company
0:02:16 should figure out one priority.
0:02:19 Like you, you should have one priority in your brain.
0:02:21 You’re gonna do one thing, what’s it gonna be?
0:02:23 And forcing people to figure out one priority,
0:02:26 not a to-do list, but a single priority
0:02:27 was an incredible forcing function.
0:02:28 Everybody had to say something,
0:02:29 and if you said something stupid,
0:02:31 it would be like, that’s your priority.
0:02:32 And so everybody picked one priority,
0:02:34 but now that’s good, but that’s just like,
0:02:36 the very, very first half of the battle.
0:02:38 What’s the second half actually sticking to that?
0:02:42 Because human nature is everything feels important.
0:02:43 I have my one priority,
0:02:45 but then there’s the second thing that’s important too,
0:02:47 and then there’s the third thing that’s important too.
0:02:50 And the problem with this that Peter said was that,
0:02:51 imagine you have three priorities.
0:02:52 And even if you stack rank them,
0:02:54 you said this is number one, number two, number three.
0:02:56 What happens is that we often don’t know
0:02:58 the answer to number one.
0:02:59 Number one lacks a clear solution.
0:03:00 It’s a gnarly problem.
0:03:04 It’s an important problem, but it’s not an obvious problem.
0:03:07 So what we do is we just gravitate towards the second task
0:03:07 because it’s much clearer.
0:03:08 I know what to do there.
0:03:11 So I gravitate towards the known, right?
0:03:12 It’s that a Warren Buffett story
0:03:15 where the guy lost his keys outside of a bar.
0:03:16 So he’s crawling around on the ground
0:03:19 trying to find his keys and the officer says,
0:03:20 sir, what are you doing?
0:03:21 He said, I’m looking for my keys.
0:03:22 Did you drop them here?
0:03:24 No, no, I dropped them over there.
0:03:25 Well, why are you crawling over here?
0:03:26 ‘Cause this is where the light is.
0:03:28 And that’s how most people operate
0:03:29 in their day-to-day priorities.
0:03:31 We crawl around where the light is.
0:03:32 We crawl around doing the known things,
0:03:34 the things that feel familiar to us,
0:03:36 rather than the important things,
0:03:38 the things where the solution actually is over there.
0:03:39 It’s just in the dark.
0:03:41 And so Peter Taylor, what he would do is,
0:03:44 if anybody tried to talk to him
0:03:46 about something that was not their big thing,
0:03:47 their one thing,
0:03:49 he would literally just leave the room.
0:03:51 He’s like, oh, you’re talking to me about that?
0:03:53 I thought your thing is this, okay, see ya.
0:03:54 And he’s like, I’m not gonna sit here
0:03:56 and try to convince you, but I will signal to you
0:03:58 that this is not a priority by literally
0:03:59 just leaving the meeting or leaving the room
0:04:01 or just not refusing to talk to you
0:04:02 about anything besides your one thing.
0:04:05 To teal, what he said was he goes,
0:04:07 if you allow yourself to have more than one focus,
0:04:08 you’ve already blinked.
0:04:09 I love that.
0:04:10 You’ve already blinked.
0:04:11 You’ve flinched.
0:04:14 And he says, you know, you’ve determined
0:04:16 that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome.
0:04:18 And my singular focus philosophy
0:04:20 is that solutions may not be clear,
0:04:22 but the path to excellence and value are.
0:04:24 And the path to excellence and value
0:04:26 is to have a singular focus.
0:04:27 And I believe this to be true.
0:04:30 I believe that the mind is a very powerful tool.
0:04:32 I call the brain a answering machine.
0:04:34 It’s just about what question you ask it.
0:04:37 If you ask yourself a bunch of questions like,
0:04:38 why did this person cut me off?
0:04:40 Your brain will tell you because they’re an asshole.
0:04:42 Because you’ve told your brain to focus its attention
0:04:45 on why this person cut you off in traffic, right?
0:04:47 You’ve focused your powerful tool
0:04:49 on a silly thing to focus on.
0:04:51 And, you know, the brain can really only handle
0:04:52 one question at a time.
0:04:54 It is not as much as we think we can multitask.
0:04:55 We really can’t.
0:04:56 We can kind of solve one problem at a time.
0:04:57 It’s just a question of,
0:04:59 what are you gonna load into your brain?
0:05:00 And are you willing to let it sit there
0:05:02 until it is solved?
0:05:04 That Peter Teal, one priority philosophy,
0:05:05 is a very powerful one.
0:05:08 It’s something that I implement on my day-to-day basis.
0:05:09 All right, so first let me dispel some myths
0:05:11 because I can already hear you in the comments.
0:05:12 I can hear you type it away
0:05:13 because what you’re thinking is probably
0:05:15 what I used to think, which is,
0:05:16 dude, I don’t want to work 24/7.
0:05:17 That’s not my goal.
0:05:20 Well, intensity is not working 24/7.
0:05:21 That’s the first thing.
0:05:23 Intensity is a formula, actually.
0:05:28 It is focus times common sense times insanity.
0:05:29 That’s it.
0:05:32 Focus times common sense times insanity.
0:05:34 That is what I mean when I say intensity.
0:05:35 There’s a great quote, by the way.
0:05:38 I saw Conor McGregor and Conor McGregor’s story is insane.
0:05:40 He went from a plumber on welfare
0:05:43 to the highest paid richest athlete
0:05:44 in the world on the Forbes list
0:05:47 to the first two-weight world champion in the UFC.
0:05:50 And he did this all in like five or six years.
0:05:53 And there was a video of him after his training session.
0:05:54 And he says the following, he goes,
0:05:56 “I have lost my mind to this game.”
0:05:58 Like Vincent Van Gogh, he dedicated his mind to his art
0:06:00 and he lost his mind in the process.
0:06:03 That is what’s happened to me, but fuck it.
0:06:05 When that gold belt is around my waist,
0:06:07 when my mother has a big mansion,
0:06:08 when my girlfriend has a different car
0:06:09 for every day of the week,
0:06:12 when my kids’ kids can have everything they want,
0:06:14 then it will pay off, then I will be happy.
0:06:16 I have lost my mind.
0:06:19 And that is the level of intensity and insanity
0:06:21 that you can get to if you really do this at a level 12.
0:06:23 And not everybody’s gonna wanna do this at level 12,
0:06:26 but you should know what level 12 looks like.
0:06:27 You should know what it is.
0:06:28 And then you get to decide
0:06:29 how you’re gonna dial that knob down.
0:06:31 The problem most people have is
0:06:33 they think they’re already at a level 10.
0:06:35 They don’t even consider level 12.
0:06:36 They think they’re already at 10
0:06:38 when in actuality they’re at six.
0:06:41 And today I’m gonna show you how you are at a six
0:06:42 and you’re not at a 10.
0:06:43 Because that is a lie.
0:06:45 It’s a dangerous lie we wanna tell ourselves.
0:06:47 The other misconception by the way is,
0:06:48 oh great, I gotta do more.
0:06:50 I’m already busy, I’m already overwhelmed,
0:06:51 now I gotta do more.
0:06:52 No, no, no, it’s actually the opposite.
0:06:55 You’re gonna end up doing less.
0:06:56 There’s a great Steve Jobs quote, I’m gonna butcher it,
0:06:58 but it’s basically something like,
0:07:03 focus is saying no to 100 great ideas.
0:07:06 So you can say yes to the one exceptional one.
0:07:08 Focus is saying no to 100 great ideas.
0:07:11 Great ideas are ideas that you could totally make a case for
0:07:14 that you would seem smart for you to go do,
0:07:15 but doing 100 of them doesn’t work, right?
0:07:17 You can do anything, you just can’t do everything.
0:07:20 And so focus is saying no to the 100 great ideas
0:07:21 so you can do the one exceptional one.
0:07:23 So if you do this right, you’re not doing more,
0:07:26 you’re actually doing less, you’re just doing it better.
0:07:28 So okay, let’s jump into some examples
0:07:29 and I’m gonna start with some business examples
0:07:32 because there’s plenty of like inspirational athlete stories
0:07:35 or just kind of like general motivation.
0:07:37 But this is a business podcast, I am all about business.
0:07:38 So let’s do the first one.
0:07:41 So first one is Mark Zuckerberg.
0:07:45 So there’s a great story of Zuck when he bought Instagram.
0:07:47 And by the way, today if Facebook had not bought Instagram,
0:07:49 Facebook might be dead.
0:07:51 Instagram like literally ended up becoming
0:07:52 the next social network.
0:07:54 It was gonna be his biggest competitor and Facebook bought it.
0:07:55 Well, okay, that’s cool.
0:07:57 That’s just a business decision, right?
0:07:58 It’s a strategy decision.
0:07:59 No, no, no.
0:08:00 It was a story of intensity.
0:08:02 So here’s how the story goes.
0:08:05 The founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom used to work
0:08:07 at a place called Odio.
0:08:09 He was actually kind of like an intern sitting at the desk
0:08:12 next to this guy named Jack Dorsey.
0:08:14 Odio pivots to Twitter, that becomes Twitter.
0:08:17 Jack Dorsey ends up being the CEO of Twitter at one point
0:08:19 in time and Jack Dorsey is kind of like his mentor.
0:08:22 So Kevin creates Instagram.
0:08:24 Twitter doesn’t have photo sharing.
0:08:26 Twitter says we wanna buy Instagram.
0:08:27 And they offered to buy it
0:08:29 for something like $400, $500 million.
0:08:31 And again, this is, they have the relationship.
0:08:33 They were first to make the offer.
0:08:35 They offered a big sum of money.
0:08:38 So they did what they thought was level 12 intensity.
0:08:40 But then Zuck came and showed them what’s up.
0:08:43 So the way that the story goes down is
0:08:45 Mark Zuckerberg starts texting Kevin Systrom.
0:08:47 And he says, hey, I wanna meet.
0:08:49 I wanna, I wanna talk to you about buying the company.
0:08:51 And Mark’s intensity is almost known
0:08:52 and sort of legendary in the industry.
0:08:55 So Kevin is texting his investor and he’s saying,
0:08:56 should I meet with Zuck?
0:08:58 I don’t, I’m worried if I, you know, if I go there,
0:09:00 I don’t really wanna sell.
0:09:01 And I feel like if I tell him I don’t wanna sell,
0:09:04 is he just gonna go into like psychomode and crush me?
0:09:06 And the investor goes, yeah, probably.
0:09:08 And so he’s like, okay, I guess I’ll take the meeting.
0:09:10 He already has a deal on the table
0:09:14 to sell to Twitter for $550 million.
0:09:16 He then meets with Sequoia, the number one VC
0:09:17 in Silicon Valley.
0:09:19 And they say, you know what?
0:09:20 You should stay independent.
0:09:21 Instagram can be big.
0:09:24 We will fund you at $500 million.
0:09:26 So same valuation, but you get to keep going.
0:09:27 You get to keep your independence.
0:09:28 But he goes to meet Zuck.
0:09:30 And he goes, unlike Twitter,
0:09:32 Zuck did not take no for an answer.
0:09:34 So he rejects Zuck first.
0:09:36 Zuck says, no, no, no, just come over to my house and talk.
0:09:38 Can you just come over today?
0:09:39 And he says, I guess I gotta go over there.
0:09:40 I don’t wanna really piss this guy off.
0:09:42 So he just says, okay, I’ll just go over there.
0:09:42 So he goes to his house.
0:09:46 And now this is Good Friday, you know, Easter’s on Sunday.
0:09:48 He goes to his house on Friday and he walks in
0:09:49 and Zuck says the following.
0:09:52 He says, I thought about it and I wanna buy your company.
0:09:54 And Kevin’s like, I know, but I already said no.
0:09:56 He says, I will give you double
0:09:58 whatever you’re currently raising your round at.
0:10:01 So whatever your price is, I’ll give you double.
0:10:02 And that would mean that Instagram
0:10:03 would be worth a billion dollars.
0:10:05 And nobody had ever paid this much for a mobile app before.
0:10:07 This would be the first deal of its kind.
0:10:11 Instagram had zero revenue, had like less than 20 employees.
0:10:12 It was tiny.
0:10:14 This seemed like it outrageously over the top way
0:10:15 of going about things.
0:10:17 And Zuck said, well, look,
0:10:19 I can give you a billion dollars for this,
0:10:20 but here’s the deal.
0:10:22 We gotta do this deal this weekend.
0:10:23 And he basically pushed him.
0:10:25 And this was again, it’s Easter on Sunday.
0:10:27 Nobody’s working over the weekend.
0:10:29 The Twitter guys think that they have a deal in the bag.
0:10:31 The Sequoia guys think that they have the deal in the bag.
0:10:33 And the mistake they made was they thought
0:10:35 that work starts on Mondays.
0:10:36 And Zuck just decided to work over the weekend.
0:10:38 So he basically said, look, let’s stay here
0:10:39 and we’ll either hash out the deal
0:10:40 and we’ll make a deal happen
0:10:42 or we’ll figure out that the deal is not gonna happen.
0:10:44 But let’s just agree we’re gonna stay here
0:10:45 and we’re gonna figure it out.
0:10:45 So he says, okay.
0:10:48 So he basically stayed together for 48 hours.
0:10:49 Zuck calls his lawyers.
0:10:50 He calls his corp dev guys.
0:10:51 He says, get over here.
0:10:53 We gotta figure out how to we’re gonna close this deal now.
0:10:54 Kevin calls his investors.
0:10:55 He’s like, hey, I’m thinking about having this deal.
0:10:56 And here’s the quote.
0:10:58 One of his investors says,
0:11:00 I sat back and thought, what just happened?
0:11:01 Like, holy shit, what just happened?
0:11:03 How did he pull this off?
0:11:05 And Zuck had this belief
0:11:07 that if we don’t create the thing
0:11:08 that kills Facebook, somebody else will,
0:11:10 the internet’s not a friendly place.
0:11:12 I have to act with a certain level of intensity
0:11:14 when we find a deal that’s like this.
0:11:17 And so over the weekend, just to give you a perspective,
0:11:20 to do a billion dollar deal generally takes time.
0:11:22 Six months will go by, nine months will go by.
0:11:24 Zuck, his lawyers and the founder of his channel,
0:11:26 they end up cutting this deal over the weekend.
0:11:29 They do a billion dollar deal in 48 hours.
0:11:31 And by the time the competition woke up on Monday,
0:11:32 the deal was gone.
0:11:35 So that’s the story of how Zuck buys Instagram.
0:11:37 And by the way, this is not the first time.
0:11:38 He also bought WhatsApp.
0:11:39 How he bought WhatsApp was the same way.
0:11:41 And WhatsApp had the right culture.
0:11:43 Well, WhatsApp also operated with high intensity.
0:11:45 There’s a famous story that the founder of WhatsApp
0:11:47 had the sticky note on his desk.
0:11:49 And they took a picture of it when he sold it and it said,
0:11:51 no ads, no games, no gimmicks.
0:11:52 That was their mindset.
0:11:54 Every other messaging app was always adding
0:11:56 more and more features.
0:11:57 They would add games, they would add stickers,
0:11:59 they would add some ads into it.
0:12:01 They would just keep adding things.
0:12:03 And they said, the way we’re gonna win
0:12:05 is we’re gonna do the basic thing, messaging,
0:12:07 and we’re just gonna do it better than anybody else.
0:12:09 They were like Chick-fil-A.
0:12:10 Have you ever been to a Chick-fil-A?
0:12:11 Like you don’t go to Chick-fil-A
0:12:14 because Chick-fil-A adds fish filets on the menu.
0:12:15 No, no, no.
0:12:17 Chick-fil-A decided to have a common sense strategy.
0:12:19 We’re gonna sell chicken sandwiches.
0:12:21 And they just do it with a better level of intensity
0:12:21 than anybody else.
0:12:23 They sell a better chicken sandwich.
0:12:24 In and out does the same thing.
0:12:26 In and out, it’s like we’re gonna sell a burger in fries.
0:12:28 It’s not a revolutionary strategy.
0:12:29 They did not pivot.
0:12:31 They did not innovate in that.
0:12:33 They just brought a higher level of intensity to it
0:12:36 than anybody else was willing to do at the time.
0:12:38 And so those two fast food chains
0:12:40 make more money per location
0:12:42 than chains that do 10 times more things
0:12:45 that have a wider menu, that have more locations
0:12:47 because they operate with a higher level of intensity.
0:12:51 That’s the same way that WhatsApp and Zuck approach business.
0:12:52 The founder of WhatsApp always said,
0:12:55 he goes, the f-word around here is focus.
0:12:57 He says, I don’t think about things
0:12:58 that I can’t figure out.
0:12:59 I don’t think about the future.
0:13:00 I don’t go to conferences and give talks
0:13:02 about where the industry is going.
0:13:04 He goes, I focus my brain around the things
0:13:05 that I could wrap my head around.
0:13:07 Like this customer’s complaining about this thing.
0:13:09 Let me go fix that bug.
0:13:11 And he said that the reason they sold to Facebook
0:13:13 was because Zuck chased them for two years personally.
0:13:15 He would meet them for coffee, then hike.
0:13:16 No deal would happen.
0:13:19 And he would keep inviting them, hikes, dinners, coffees.
0:13:21 And if he did that for two years until finally,
0:13:24 they relented and they ended up closing the deal.
0:13:25 Okay, I want to talk to you about Stripe.
0:13:27 One of the stories I love about Stripe comes from Paul Graham.
0:13:30 Paul Graham was running YC at the time
0:13:31 when Stripe went through it.
0:13:32 He met the founders early on.
0:13:34 And these were a couple of teenagers
0:13:35 that were basically saying,
0:13:36 we’re going to change the financial system.
0:13:38 We’re going to change the payment system.
0:13:39 We’re going to go work with banks.
0:13:42 And he’s like, these two redheaded teenagers
0:13:43 think that they could do this.
0:13:44 All right, well, I’m curious.
0:13:45 Let’s see what happens.
0:13:49 And he noted that Stripe was doing one thing very differently
0:13:51 than the average company through YC.
0:13:52 And remember, YC is the best of the best.
0:13:56 So these guys were uncommon amongst the uncommon companies.
0:13:58 And so he called it the Collison installation.
0:14:01 He said, most companies,
0:14:03 when they would talk to a potential customer,
0:14:04 they would bump into another founder,
0:14:06 they would say, oh yeah, here’s what we do.
0:14:08 They would say, oh, that’s interesting, that’s cool.
0:14:09 He’d say, awesome, you’re interested.
0:14:10 Cool, I’ll send you a link.
0:14:12 I’ll send you an invite to the beta when we’re ready.
0:14:14 And you could sign up.
0:14:15 That’s what most people do.
0:14:17 He said, what the Collisons would do is very different.
0:14:20 We started calling this the Collison installation,
0:14:22 which would be as soon as somebody showed any sign
0:14:23 of interest, they would say, awesome,
0:14:25 do you have your laptop on you?
0:14:26 I can just set you up right now.
0:14:27 I’ll do it for you.
0:14:30 And they would literally brute force get customers on board.
0:14:31 The person would open up their laptop,
0:14:32 and they would literally install Stripe,
0:14:33 they would explain it to them,
0:14:35 and they would onboard them on the spot.
0:14:39 And they did this to the first 100, 200 customers manually.
0:14:40 And Paul Graham noted, he goes,
0:14:42 I wonder why don’t more people do this?
0:14:45 It’s not like this was some outrageous strategy.
0:14:47 It’s not that it was even like that hard to do.
0:14:49 He said, the reason people don’t do this is two things,
0:14:51 shyness or a fear of rejection.
0:14:53 And he goes also a misconception.
0:14:56 He goes, they think that big things come from big things,
0:14:59 but actually big things come from an accumulation
0:15:00 of smaller things.
0:15:02 I thought it was a beautiful way of putting it
0:15:04 to understand how a big thing happens
0:15:06 is just a accumulation of smaller things.
0:15:11 And he said that, many people believe that startups,
0:15:12 take off or they don’t take off,
0:15:14 that your business either works or it doesn’t work.
0:15:16 And he said, actually, what I’ve learned doing YC
0:15:20 is that startups happen because the founder makes them happen.
0:15:23 They take off because the founder makes them take off.
0:15:24 And he goes, it’s like an engine, right?
0:15:26 You can’t force something that’s never gonna work to work.
0:15:29 What you can do is if something has the potential to work,
0:15:32 you can crank that engine manually, hand crank it
0:15:34 to get it going, and then it starts.
0:15:35 And once the engine started, you know,
0:15:37 you’ve pushed the boulder enough,
0:15:38 eventually it starts to roll.
0:15:41 And now you’re chasing the momentum of it rolling downhill,
0:15:43 but at the beginning it felt like pushing it
0:15:44 to the top of the hill.
0:15:46 And I thought that was a great analogy
0:15:49 of how Stripe operated with a higher level of intensity.
0:15:51 And if that’s how they onboarded customers,
0:15:52 imagine how they did the 10 other things.
0:15:55 Because how you do one thing is how you do everything.
0:15:57 The trap that people fall into is thinking
0:15:59 that the answer to their problems is elsewhere,
0:16:02 that maybe a mentor has it or a book has it,
0:16:04 or there’s some knowledge that they don’t have.
0:16:06 And that’s what’s holding them back,
0:16:07 but that’s really never the case.
0:16:09 So rarely is that the case.
0:16:11 Almost always the answer you seek is with it.
0:16:13 One of the great stories about this comes from Ben Horowitz.
0:16:17 He has this phrase, he goes, “Led bullets, not silver bullets.”
0:16:19 And he’s talking about when he was running his company,
0:16:19 they were at a very tough point.
0:16:21 There was tough competition, the company was on the line,
0:16:23 it was just gonna go bust,
0:16:25 or they were gonna figure out a way to make it.
0:16:26 He goes, “My first instinct was to pivot,
0:16:29 to try to find a magical win.”
0:16:31 It’s a magical solution, a rabbit out of a hat.
0:16:33 He’s like, “I so wanted to stand in front of my company
0:16:36 and say, ‘Aha, I have the answer.
0:16:39 I went for this walk, I met this guy and here’s the answer.
0:16:42 We just gotta do this and it’ll all work out.”
0:16:43 He said, “But that’s not really how it worked.”
0:16:45 He goes, “I stood in front of the company and I told them,
0:16:48 I said, ‘There are no silver bullets for this,
0:16:49 only lead bullets.'”
0:16:52 They didn’t wanna hear that, but I had to make it clear.
0:16:54 We simply had to build a better product.
0:16:55 There was no other way out.
0:16:59 There’s no window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door.
0:17:00 We have to go through the front door
0:17:03 and deal with the big ugly guy that’s blocking it.
0:17:05 We needed lead bullets.”
0:17:09 – So here’s the deal.
0:17:12 I made most of my money from a newsletter business.
0:17:14 It was called The Hustle and it was a daily newsletter
0:17:16 at scale to millions of subscribers.
0:17:18 And it was the greatest business on earth.
0:17:22 The problem with it was that I had close to 40 employees
0:17:25 and only three of them were actually doing any writing.
0:17:27 The other employees were growing the newsletter,
0:17:30 building out the tech for the platform and selling ads.
0:17:32 And honestly, it was a huge pain in the butt.
0:17:35 Today’s episode is brought to you by Beehive.
0:17:39 They are a platform that is built exactly for this.
0:17:40 If you wanna grow your newsletter,
0:17:41 if you wanna monetize a newsletter,
0:17:43 they do all of the stuff
0:17:45 that I had to hire dozens of employees to do.
0:17:47 So check it out, beehive.com.
0:17:51 That’s B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com.
0:17:54 (upbeat music)
0:17:56 – In my experience, the thing that’s actually come out
0:17:58 of this philosophy of there are no several bullets
0:18:00 is that actually there are silver bullets.
0:18:01 But the only way you discover them
0:18:03 is by just firing a shit ton of bullets
0:18:05 that you think are lead.
0:18:06 And then you sort of pleasantly surprise yourself
0:18:08 when you find one idea, one experiment,
0:18:12 one tactic that totally works in an outsized way.
0:18:14 You find your silver bullet.
0:18:15 But the only way to do that is by being the guy
0:18:18 who believes there are only lead bullets.
0:18:20 I’m willing to fire all the lead bullets
0:18:21 in order to make this work.
0:18:23 Versus the guy who’s gonna run around
0:18:25 trying to just find the one magical silver bullet
0:18:27 and really take no action.
0:18:29 If you wanted to look at your pie chart,
0:18:31 you should be spending maybe 10% of your time
0:18:33 on the idea or the strategy side of things.
0:18:35 And it is important to get a good strategy,
0:18:38 but it’s usually a very common sense strategy.
0:18:39 If your strategy is convoluted,
0:18:44 if your strategy requires multiple new innovations
0:18:46 and leaps of faith, you’re likely gonna fail.
0:18:48 You’re likely diluting yourself
0:18:50 into thinking that the pie chart is 80% ideas
0:18:51 and 20% execution.
0:18:54 It’s much more like 10 or 20% ideas and strategy
0:18:56 and 80% blood, sweat, and tears.
0:18:58 And that blood, sweat, and tears
0:19:01 should come from a certain level of intensity, right?
0:19:03 It’s not simply about working more hours.
0:19:06 It’s not simply about just burying yourself in the office.
0:19:08 There are times where you’ll do that.
0:19:10 And that’s the other kind of philosophy
0:19:11 that you should internalize,
0:19:14 which is there is a time to sprint, okay?
0:19:15 You cannot sprint the whole time.
0:19:17 You cannot always be running your max speed.
0:19:19 It doesn’t work that way.
0:19:20 But you should be able to recognize
0:19:22 when you need to change gears and you need to sprint.
0:19:23 One of the stories I love,
0:19:25 I’ve talked about this in the podcast before,
0:19:27 is the story of Sylvester Stallone.
0:19:29 Sylvester Stallone wants to be an actor.
0:19:30 And so he goes and he auditions everywhere
0:19:32 and he can’t get a role.
0:19:33 Nobody wants to cast him as an actor.
0:19:34 He doesn’t look the part.
0:19:35 His mouth moves a little funny
0:19:37 ’cause he had a problem at birth.
0:19:39 And he just wasn’t the guy.
0:19:41 He wasn’t the classic Hollywood face.
0:19:42 He doesn’t give up.
0:19:43 He decides to take matters into his own hands.
0:19:45 He says, “If I can’t get cast in a movie,
0:19:48 “I will make a movie and I will give myself the role.”
0:19:49 And the problem is he hates writing.
0:19:52 So he decides, “Well, for this, I gotta sprint.
0:19:55 “I am gonna do this thing the best I can,
0:19:56 “but I will plow through.
0:19:58 “I will brute force my way to this.”
0:20:01 So he goes to his house and decides to write a movie.
0:20:03 He writes the first script of Rocky,
0:20:05 the rough draft of Rocky, in three days.
0:20:06 Three days.
0:20:07 Most people don’t believe that it’s possible
0:20:08 he did it in three days.
0:20:09 He talks about how he did it.
0:20:11 I wanna read you this quote.
0:20:14 This is Sylvester Stallone talking about focus.
0:20:15 His daughter asked him, she goes,
0:20:17 “Did you really paint your windows black to focus?”
0:20:20 He goes, “Yeah, I did paint them black
0:20:22 “because I didn’t wanna know what time it was.”
0:20:23 It didn’t matter what time it was.
0:20:24 It was time to write.
0:20:25 Otherwise, I would tell myself,
0:20:28 “Oh, it’s time for breakfast.”
0:20:30 And I would immediately derail myself.
0:20:32 I would say, “Well, I’m just gonna have breakfast
0:20:33 “when I’m hungry.
0:20:34 “I don’t need to know what time it is.”
0:20:35 And that was the kind of thing, you know,
0:20:37 I wanted to eliminate all my possible excuses,
0:20:39 all my possible distractions,
0:20:41 ’cause I knew how hard it was for me to write.
0:20:42 I was begging when I was writing,
0:20:44 “Please, someone just call the phone.
0:20:47 “Just please get me to do anything else besides this.”
0:20:48 But instead, I unplugged the phone
0:20:50 so that nobody could call.
0:20:51 I painted the windows black.
0:20:54 He says, “100%, black windows, no phone.”
0:20:57 And that approach of painting the windows black
0:20:58 is a certain level of intensity.
0:20:59 He doesn’t do it all the time,
0:21:00 but he knew there was a time to sprint.
0:21:03 So one of the key things in life is to identify,
0:21:05 when a great opportunity comes your way,
0:21:08 or when it’s time to buckle down.
0:21:09 This is the moment.
0:21:11 You’re going on one path or the other path.
0:21:12 And that is the time to sprint.
0:21:15 That is the time you dial up your level of intensity.
0:21:16 So I have three actions for you.
0:21:18 How do you actually go do this?
0:21:20 First, you need to narrow your focus.
0:21:22 I did a whole podcast on this called Laser Focus.
0:21:23 Go watch that.
0:21:24 It’s like 20 minutes long, it’s good.
0:21:26 So you need to narrow your focus.
0:21:27 You need to stop giving your brain
0:21:28 so many different priorities
0:21:30 and so many different problems to think about.
0:21:31 You need to narrow it down.
0:21:33 That’s the first thing, focus.
0:21:34 The second thing is you need to write down
0:21:36 your common sense solution.
0:21:37 I call it a common sense solution
0:21:38 because that’s the check.
0:21:42 Your solution to your problem should sound very easy.
0:21:45 It should sound as simple as I got to go figure out
0:21:46 why all these people are churning,
0:21:48 canceling their subscription.
0:21:49 I need to go solve that.
0:21:51 Or I need to make a better product.
0:21:52 I need to make a product so good
0:21:54 that people want to share it.
0:21:56 That’s my strategy.
0:21:58 Make a product so good that people want to share it.
0:22:01 My strategy is I need to make 30 sales calls a day.
0:22:02 If I want sales to grow,
0:22:04 I just need to do more calls.
0:22:05 30 a day.
0:22:06 I’m gonna take a giant sticky note.
0:22:07 I’m gonna write 30.
0:22:09 And every day I’m gonna cross that 30 out.
0:22:10 And then tomorrow I’m gonna wake up.
0:22:12 And the first thing I do is I write the big number 30 again.
0:22:14 By the way, this is something I actually did
0:22:15 for my companies.
0:22:17 Write a giant number on the wall.
0:22:19 And that number is the one thing I need to do today.
0:22:20 If I do that one thing alone,
0:22:22 I have made today’s successful.
0:22:24 So you need a common sense strategy that you can execute.
0:22:27 So like a no brainer, fifth grader strategy
0:22:30 that you can execute at a level 12.
0:22:31 And that’s the last question.
0:22:34 The last thing you need to do is ask yourself,
0:22:37 what would level 12 intensity look like
0:22:38 at this thing that I’m doing?
0:22:39 Just as a thought experiment.
0:22:41 You don’t even have to do it.
0:22:43 But just ask yourself that question, right?
0:22:45 If I dialed the intensity knob all the way to 12,
0:22:46 what would that look like?
0:22:47 What would I actually do?
0:22:49 Now I’ll give you a very simple example.
0:22:51 A lot of people, probably you out there listening to this,
0:22:52 have had a goal at some point in time
0:22:54 of getting in better shape, right?
0:22:55 You wanna lose weight.
0:22:57 You wanna go run a marathon at a certain time, whatever.
0:23:00 You wanna get into the best shape of your life.
0:23:02 And we’ve taken what we think
0:23:04 is a level 10 intensity to this, right?
0:23:05 I did the best I could do, right?
0:23:10 I hired a coach or I wrote down my goals and I tried.
0:23:12 It just didn’t work out.
0:23:14 Well, Jesse Yitzler, a guy who’s been a guest
0:23:17 on this podcast, he had the same goal as you.
0:23:18 He wanted to get in the best shape of his life.
0:23:20 He wanted to get in the best running shape of his life.
0:23:22 So what did he do?
0:23:24 He hired a Navy SEAL to come live in his house
0:23:26 and whoop his ass every day.
0:23:28 He said, “I will do everything you tell me to do.
0:23:30 Whatever time you tell me to wake up, I wake up.
0:23:32 Whatever many miles you tell me to run, I’ll run.”
0:23:35 He would train two to three times a day for 30 days straight.
0:23:36 He ate exactly what this guy said.
0:23:38 He drank exactly what this guy said.
0:23:39 He did pull-ups when this guy said to do pull-ups.
0:23:41 He ran when this guy said run.
0:23:42 It was raining.
0:23:42 It was hailing outside.
0:23:43 It was freezing cold.
0:23:45 He’d get out there and he would run.
0:23:47 That Navy SEAL, by the way, was David Goggins.
0:23:49 This is before David Goggins was even popular.
0:23:52 He hired David Goggins to come live in his house for 30 days.
0:23:54 He would come into the bedroom where him and his wife
0:23:55 were sleeping and wake him up and say,
0:23:57 “Wake up, bitch, we’re running now.”
0:24:00 That was level 12 intensity.
0:24:02 And the sad part is we don’t even know
0:24:03 what level 12 looks like until we’ve heard
0:24:04 something like this.
0:24:06 So if I did one thing for you today,
0:24:08 I hope I just inspired you to go figure out
0:24:10 what level 12 intensity even looks like.
0:24:12 Maybe from the examples I gave you today,
0:24:14 maybe from some people in your life,
0:24:16 find a way to see it and find a way to ask yourself,
0:24:18 “What does level 12 look like?”
0:24:20 If I ratchet it up the intensity
0:24:23 of the thing I’m already doing, that’s it.
0:24:25 ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪
0:24:28 ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪
0:24:30 ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪
0:24:34 ♪ On the road let’s travel never looking back ♪