Niemand denkt so viel an dich wie du glaubst

0:00You're not afraid of failing, you're afraid of what other people will think of you if you fail. But, if you're afraid of that, imagine what they think of you when you aren't even trying. Oh, yeah, they aren't. >> [laughter] >> I'm such a dick sometimes. Um Does it Is it Is it strange to hear >> [laughter] >> your like angry toilet tweets read back to you now [laughter] in the cold, harsh light of day?

0:27God, that was a particularly difficult poo I was cracking out there. >> [laughter] >> You know, real talk, the the tweets that I have, people don't know this, but the tweets are notes to self. Yeah. So, they're just directed at me so that I can look back on them and like be reminders of like, "Hey, don't don't do that." And so, like I think to myself, man, I'm afraid of doing this. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm afraid of what this person's going to think about me. Because if I were to be able to fail in quiet, in complete isolation, then I wouldn't care.

0:54And then I think, well, what if I What if I What if I don't succeed in public? What do they think then? Nothing. Right? They don't think about me at all. And so, obviously that comes from the perspective of uh seeking to gain approval and attention from others anyway. So, it's like, listen, if you're insecure, which everybody is, let's be real. Um you might as well use the insecurity to get something out of it. Right? Like one of my one of my favorite things about entrepreneurship is like use what you've got. And so, a lot of people think that they need to fix their conditions in in order to get like the perfect conditions before they start.

1:23But, the perfect condition is whatever one you're in because it gives you whatever assets you have, that's the cards that you're dealt. And so, it's you just play the hand. And a lot of people have great cards. It's like, man, I'm so afraid of It's like, use it. It's like, I have nothing. What makes you very dangerous cuz you have nothing to lose. Right? Like one of the um really interesting things about I think about from a business perspective, but it probably applies to everything, is that there's always an advantage and a disadvantage from every position. Right? So, like I remember when I mean, Gym Launch is still a big company and still continues to grow, but in the gym licensing space, there's not many people who can compete with us there, right? And I would talk to you who are in the space. You know, I'd talk, you know, talk at a conference, whatever. And, you know, younger guys would be like, "Well, I want to I want to be in the space, too, and it's not fair because, you know, you have this big advantage." And I was like, "You have a way bigger advantage than I do."

2:08I was like, "Cuz if I were in your position, I would go to every single gym owner and be like, 'You don't want to be with Jim Launch. You don't want to be with Alex. You're just a number to him. Like, you're never going to talk to him. Like, you're just a cog in the wheel there. With me, you're going to get my personalized attention. There is just some employee down the chain that's following some process, right? I was like, 'But on the flip side, if I'm talking to that same gym owner, then I'm going to say, "You don't want to talk to Jimmy. He lives in his mom's basement. He has no proof that he's good at what he's what he's at. The reason that we're number one in the space is cuz we've done it so many times and we have a system that we know that if you go in this side, you will get this result on the outside.'" I was like, "There's always a position and there's always an advantage." I was like, "You just have to play the one you've got." And most people just look at what everyone else's advantage is and don't think, "Which one do I have?"

2:44When you're talking about it's not you that's afraid of failing. >> Yeah. You're afraid of other people's opinions about why you're going to fail. Like, the reason I think that cynicism is so popular on the internet is that the upside of never trying is never having to feel the pain of failure. >> Yeah. That's fundamental It's sour grapes at an existential level, right? It is a cynicism safety blanket. It is protecting you from ever having to feel the downside of anything.

3:13I will assure Yeah. my own failure in private so that I never have to face my failure in public. It's kind of like investing. Like, everyone's afraid of losing money when they invest, but the only guaranteed investment that doesn't work is never investing to begin with. And so, it's like they take the long failure rather than the short one. Right? I mean, it's what it is, right? You just fail long. >> [laughter]

3:39>> And they're like, "I prefer that." Um but that's I mean, that's Yeah, I It's It's like you and I are going back and forth on trying to figure out how many different ways can I say that either the people that you're worried about judgement are going to die or that you're going to die or that even if you do achieve the thing they won't care anyways or if you don't do anything they won't think about you to begin with and don't you want to be thought about to begin with? Like don't you want some level of significance?

4:11I just you're going to die. And I think like I was I was very grateful that so one of my biggest inspirations or whatever you know influences when I was in Baltimore was I would have lunch with my grandfather three times a week. So he was 90. Old guy. So I'll go to the nursing home and we'd have lunch three days a week. And listening to him talk about the regrets that he had in life it's so much more painful to watch someone who has no options left. Like he's going to die. He means he died tomorrow and he died a couple years later. I mean like it he lost all his mental faculties.

4:50You know almost sadly basically when I stop when I left Baltimore one of the sad parts is I was one of the only people that kind of like kept him lucid. You know what I mean? And after that no one really no one really visited him no one really did anything. And so I think he he just rolled down here. I think the lunches might have been the only thing that he looked forward to. And um seeing someone old with no options and nothing but regret. Now not that he had everything to regret. He had things that he did really well and I took those things from him.

5:18Um He would he would repeat the same lessons. You know like every lunch there used to be a lot of older people kind of repeat a few key lessons. And everything that he had he flew during he fled during the during the World War II. You know he fled from the Germans and all that stuff cuz he had a Jewish sounding last name. He wasn't but it was enough that he was fleeing right? Um And he always used to say he's like you have two hands and one brain. He was like use them.

5:45And that was always this thing that he said to And, um, I think just like when when I think when think about the things that he was going up against compared to the things that we're going up against now, it just made me feel like, all right, like this is not as big of a deal as I really think it is. I don't have Germans at the at my door. What were the regrets that he had? Him? Yeah. >> [sighs and gasps] >> He would have spent I mean, again, there's deathbed regrets and then there's real life regrets, but there's there's things that he would have done differently in terms of the business.

6:11There's things he would have done differently with his wife. He had he got divorced. Um, that you know, uh, he would have done things very differently with his kids, so my mother um, and her sisters. Um, which actually talking to him about how he raised my mother helped me in some way forgive her for some of the things that I felt were wrongdoings that she had done to me. And so, it's funny because, you know, one of my favorite quotes from Blaise Pascal is to understand is to forgive.

6:41And like when you when you I think there's another saying that I like a lot, which is it's really hard to hate close up. It's like if you really see someone and you see all the things that they went through and the things that they that happened to them to become who they are, then you understand them and then you understand why they did X, Y, and Z. Because if we don't understand, we assume that it's because they're just evil people. And most people aren't that way. They're this way because they've been reinforced or punished for doing something like that in the past. And especially for her, she was reinforced for acting a certain way over and over and over again to the point that it was it was core to her character. And so, when that got put on me, I was like, I hate you, you're terrible, you're evil, like blah. But like, when I looked at it on a much longer time horizon of like, she was 4 years old when she came here.

7:18She couldn't speak English. She got beat up as a kid. Like all these things. I'm like, you know what? Maybe give her a little grace, you know? And I remember when when I came back and it was right around that same time where I realized I was giving this person all this power. She yelled at me for something when I came back home from college my freshman year. And it was a standard fight, you know, like here's the button that I pressed to get into the normal fight that we get into. Um, I just remember she hit the button and I just like wasn't that upset. And I it's like I felt nothing. She like hit the button. She like hit it again harder and I was like And I just remember looking at her and being like, "I get it.

7:47I'm sorry. Like you had a tough tough life." And then she just broke down and you know, started crying because it was like she felt understood. And I think um I don't know, that was a roundabout way of getting back to regrets, but he regretted how he had raised her. But his through his regrets, I got to see why she was the way she was. And then it diffused the bomb that was between me and her. 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 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 into 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 your business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just 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.