Fear Is the Only Thing Stopping You

0:00Hey, Alex. What question are you most tired of being asked? Uh this question. Okay. Uh either something you've answered a million times or something that you think people can find out on their own. Um I think the most common question that I get asked is why don't people start? What do you think is holding people back from being successful from from doing what they want? And it's the question that I just answered before this, which is just fear. And it's because people are so afraid of the idea of failure that they won't even sit in it long enough to actually look around the room that failure lives in to see what the decoration looks like.

0:36They won't look at the floors. They won't look at the ceilings. They won't look at who else is in the room. They won't look that they're actually in a room that they actually still have food. That it's actually fine. And cuz like Naval has this quote that I love, but it's um fear is a mile wide and inch deep. So, when you look out on it, it looks like this vast ocean. But when you take your first step, you're like, "Oh, there's nothing here." It's very empty. It comes from an old part of your brain. And to be clear, it was there to keep you alive, and it was a good thing.

1:03But when the reality is that like you're not actually fearing for your death, but you're behaving like you're fearing for your death. But I think one of the things that I think I've learned from Elon, just from observation, and Peter Thiel made this really excellent point about this. He said, "If you were to have like when Elon had started his three companies, anybody would have said even one of those companies succeeding would have been a monumental success. Like a a very characteristically low odds bet that any one of those three made it. And Elon himself, when he was asked, 'What do you think the likelihood of each of the companies work?' he said he put it at about 10% odds of success. Three companies."

1:37And all three of them did work and became, you know, multi-hundred billion, trillion dollar, whatever companies. And so, Peter Thiel talking about this said, "Elon must understand something about risk that we don't all get." And I think there's something very valuable in that. If the richest man in the world understands a concept, the probably one of the most central concepts of entrepreneurship, which is risk, better and differently than everyone else. I think one of the big things that he understands is that he is fearless.

2:03And so when people play games with Elon and that I've I've only I've only observed this from second party commentary, so that's all I can comment on, um is that he is just relentless in his attack and he's fearless. He just fears nothing. He just continues to go in because I think what he has realized, and I think the longer you play the game you realize is that the the downside doesn't really exist. It's not real. You're not going to die.

2:29You're not really going to be shunned. The worst case scenario is you have a story and you have a reasonable excuse like everyone else who had a a startup that didn't work. That's your downside. And so so much of it exists in our ears because we act as that taking that step is going to kill us. So yeah. That is the question that I think uh I'm most tired of answering. But it's also the question that the most people need answered.

2:57So. It is what it is. And maybe that day when they hear it is the day that it clicks. So maybe that's the If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page you can book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.