Solve Rich People’s Problems (They Pay Better)

0:00If you want to make more money in your 20s and 30s, solve bigger problems. Right? If you want to make a million dollars, you have to be willing to endure a million dollars worth of pain. If you want to make 10 million dollars, you have to endure 10 million dollars worth of pain. And here's the thing is that most people have never endured that. And so when they start getting into it, the thing is is that the nature of the pain changes. And so in the beginning, the pain is I don't know what I'm doing. Later, the pain is people judging me. And later, the pain is lawsuits. And a lot of the pain is just not knowing what the hell you're doing at whatever stage of business you have.

0:30Because that never goes away. And so not knowing is a constant. So trying to solve for not knowing is silly cuz it's never going to happen. And so this is why you have to get comfortable with uncertainty. You have to make uncertainty your friend. If we're going to solve problems, right? We might as well pick big ones. And I'll give you a great a great analogy that I got from Stephen Schwarzman, who's the founder of Blackstone. He said, "Big goals and small goals are usually just about as hard." A common VC saying is that having a really successful restaurant, you might have to work 80 hours a week and manage all these different people to have a really successful local restaurant. And you might also have to manage all these people and do all this other stuff if you want to build a billion-dollar unicorn. Both those things are hard. And so if it's going to be hard regardless, you might as well go big. And actually, it's been a very like that is a very helpful frame for me because one of the beliefs that I have about business and life is that suffering is a constant. Like I have to remind myself this on a regular basis, which is that if we are growing, I am in pain. If we are plateaued, I am in pain.

1:29And if we are declining, I'm in pain. Which means that I am pretty much always in pain. And so to think that there's something wrong with pain misses the point of how this works. It is a constant. And if it's a constant, we don't even need to think about it. It shouldn't be a reason to do something or not do something cuz it's just always there. Competition for big goals, believe it or not, is actually much rarer. It's thinner air. People believe that it's so unrealistic that they don't shoot for it, which actually makes fewer people there to compete against. And so it is probably harder in some ways to have a local restaurant that is really successful than it is to have a, you know, big business. And what I found is that most problems are solvable, which means that most things are knowable. And the reason that you probably haven't gotten to where you want to go is cuz you haven't actually started trying yet.

2:14And so you're going to have to be obsessive about it. And I think one of the big things that I didn't understand was just how obsessive I was going to have to be. It's normal to not be like your other normal friends if you want to have extraordinary outcomes. If you think about the reverse, it wouldn't make sense if we do the same things as our normal friends and somehow get something different. It's a positive indicator. It's a green flag that you're living a different life than everyone around you. Like I had a conversation with my EAs this morning. They're like, "Man, I feel like if you were a normal person." That's what they said to me.

2:43They're like, "I feel like if you were a normal person, you would drive this kind of car." I like looked at them and I was like, "So basically, if I were not me, I would do things that not me would do." Right now, it would make sense that you're going to do things that normal people won't do because you're trying to not have the same outcome as them. Real quick, if you are 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-dollar 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.