Schmerz vergeht, Aufgeben bleibt

0:00This is a This is going to be a weird one for you, but just stay with me. If you've ever been so drunk that you're throwing up and you think to yourself, "Man, I'm probably not going to remember this." The good news is is that once you do succeed, that terrible period of vomiting, or whatever the difficulty is that you're going through, it'll actually compress in your mind. And so, as difficult as it may seem in the moment, it actually doesn't stay with you.

0:27All you'll have left is the thing you accomplished. You won't remember the work that it took to get there. There'll be a significant discount on the punishment you endured. I tend to have a bad habit of really not looking back very much. And so, I occasionally will go through my photos, and I am reminded about all of the mistakes and the detours that I took along the way to where I wanted to go. And I'll tell you the story that my father told me when I was uh very impatient. He said, "Listen, you think that this is taking too long for you to be successful." He said, "Do you know how long it took me to become a doctor?" And I was like, "No." He's like, "Well, so my father's Iranian, and he left the country to get educated. And there was a program for anybody who's Iranian that the government would pay for your schooling as long as you came back with the education. Now, the revolution occurred during the time he was away, so he actually never got to go back. He went to uh France, Paris, to try and enter medical school. Only problem, he didn't speak French.

1:29And so, he's trying to do pre-med in another language as someone who doesn't even share the same alphabet. And so, he failed that year. He then took a the second year. He tried again, because you're allowed in in in France, it's a different system. You can just basically try as many times you want. He started again. And the second year, he failed again. And then, he talked to his brother, and he's like, "I don't know if being a doctor's for me. Like, I just feel like imagine this. Like, failing two full years in a row." And his brother said, "Hey, why don't you go to Belgium? You know, change the environment, you know, different different school, different people. Go there."

2:03So, he went to Belgium and then his third try, he made it past his first year. Now, mind you, at this point he had 2 years of learning French and so he was able to finally actually understand what the professor was saying. So, was it that he wasn't smart enough to understand how to become a doctor? Or was it that he just had other skills that he lacked along the way? And so, a lot of people right now are judging the fact that they didn't succeed because they somehow think it's some innate trait. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. But, sometimes you just lack some prerequisite skills. Right?

2:35Like, if you're like trying to learn calculus and you've never done arithmetic before, it's going to be really hard, right? Dare I say impossible. And so, if you jump straight into calculus, you're not going to win. So, sometimes you have to take two steps back in order to build the foundation to get forward. Now, I'm going to keep the story going. So, he then graduates in uh you know, 7 years cuz I don't know how long it takes. The actual medical system is different in in in in in Europe. They actually do college and the the next degree all is one thing.

3:03So, 7 years later, he graduates. Okay. Then, he's this Iranian dude, can't go back to his own country, meets a girl in Belgium. She says, "I'm from the US." And so, he comes back to the US with the lady who would eventually become my mother. And when he's in the US, he then his doctor his his MD doesn't apply here. So, he then has to basically do it again in the United States. And in order to do this, you have to get a residency. Now, getting a residency as someone who's a foreigner back then was pretty tough.

3:36And so, it took him 2 years where he had to basically work minimum wage jobs. He was like uh you know, he had to like run slides like radiology slides back and forth as like a runner, a courier, when he was a full surgeon. But, he couldn't do it here in the US. And so, so how emasculating it is, right? Where your wife comes back, she's able She was a US citizen and had all this other stuff, right? And she could She got her entry permit immediately because she was US and she was a girl, whatever.

4:02And my father didn't. And so he then had to do two more years where he didn't have progress. So he He told me this whole story and then eventually obviously he got the He got the residency and then he he was able to get in the path. But if you look at that, he basically had four or five years of his life where there was basically no net gain in progress towards his goals. And so he's telling me this story when he's 50. He's like, "Look at my life now." He's like, "No one knows." He's like, "No one asks me how long it took. They just know what I have now and what I can do now." And so you have this idea that it's that it should take a certain period of time. It It should only last this long. It should be this level of difficulty. But the thing is is that that level of perseverance when he decided to go out on his own and start his own practice rather than and and left the practice that he was working in, he then didn't know anyone. And he still had a heavy accent, was a new guy in a new area, and it took him time to build up. And what did he do? My dad learned how to be a general contractor. He built his own surgical center because he couldn't afford having these outsourced third parties that charge $250,000 to build a surgery center. He built his for his for a fraction of that. And so it was my dad going to Home Depot, measuring and figuring these things out as a full plastic surgeon. It's not about the resources you have. It's about how resourceful you're willing to be.

5:19Right now, getting started is 100% under your control. And I love taking this frame, which is that every self-made billionaire is self-made. Now, if you're like, "Wait, there are billionaires who aren't self-made." Right, that's why I didn't say all billionaires. Every self-made billionaire is self-made. And every self-made millionaire is self-made. And here's the one people hate. Every self-made person in poverty is self-made. Now, that may make you feel uncomfortable. And you know what? You may be right. You probably did have more disadvantages. You probably did have things that worked against you.

5:55And now what? You're right. So, that's it then for you. The rest of your life will never go the way you want to go. The harsh truth here is, if you want to feel better, blame others. If you want to get better, blame yourself. And so, my father told me that story multiple times in my life, as I'm sure your fathers have told you stories multiple times in your life, or you had a parent or an uncle or a brother, and they told you those big meaningful stories.

6:23And so, I'll tell you another time he told me it. So, after I lost everything for the second time, think about like I tell the story, but it's very easy to gloss over. But think about this. I had left my job, went to new area, didn't know anyone, started a gym, didn't have enough money to have an apartment, slept at my gym, just grassroots got it going, made the gym successful by working there every hour of the day, was finally successful enough to be able to open a second location, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth. Finally feel like I I tasted success. Like I'm actually doing something. I'm actually pretty good here. Like that bet that I made actually paid off.

7:00And then, I lose it all. And so, I I I sell all those locations, I put the money in a new thing, and then it's gone. And so, I could look back and say, "Wow, I just spent all those years, and I actually have nothing to show for it." The only thing I would have had to show was the money that I made. But my father retold me that story, and he said it was never about the amount of fears failures he had. It was about the education that he had. And so, one of the other repeated fatherisms that he gave me was that education is the only thing that no one can take from you. The skills you have, the skills you acquire along the way, are the only thing that are truly yours. There's nothing else in this world that actually belongs to you.

7:43Your your clothes can get stolen, the belongings you have. And he said this from a place of reality, which is my family came from a country that took all of our assets. They seized everything. They seized land, they seized homes, they seized wealth. They just said, "Oh yeah, all that? That's ours now." Good luck. This may not be as real for people in the United States, but having people who everyone in my family had everything taken from them, that is very evident in how they talk to me and how I've always seen the world as these things are ephemeral. These material goods, the studio, the setup, the lights, the whatever, the platforms.

8:23Like gone. But the thing is is that my father came here with a thousand dollars because of the revolution and had nothing and built the life he has. And you can lose it all and gain it back. And so we've seen so many entrepreneurs who've actually lived through this cycle. It's actually a common thing in entrepreneurship. And it's because you have to understand and respect risk. The beauty of it is that after you fail, the likelihood that you're successful goes up, not down. This is the part that people miss.

8:51They fail and think it somehow decreases the likelihood of success, but it actually increases it. And so it's like you want to just get the failures out of the way. Why would you not want something that increases the likelihood of achieving your goal? And the reason that it increases that likelihood is that failure is a requisite probability for taking action. And so anyone who has failed has taken more action than someone who's done nothing, which means it increases the likelihood that they are successful.

9:15And so when you fail, you get feedback. And when you get feedback, you get better. And when you get better, it increases the likelihood that you win. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you're 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 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 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.