Unsicherheit gehört zum Unternehmertum dazu

0:00I moved to California to start a gym or get into fitness and I got there and the guy who I said I was going to mentor under was like, "Where are you staying?" And I was like, "I don't know. I just got here." And he's like, "What do you mean you don't know?" I was like, "I don't know. I just I just showed up." And so he went, he said I could sleep at his place that night. The next morning went to the gym and he got on a chair and said, "Hey, who here is going to house this kid?" And one guy came up to me. He was like, "I'll give you a room." So I rented one room in a house for 400 bucks a month. And then when I left that room to start sleeping at the gym, which was an hour away cuz I couldn't make the commute. So I save 400 bucks a month. I remember being actually kind of excited about it. I remember being like, man, this is going to be story. Yeah, this is going to be I'm going to be this is my rocky cut scene, right? The thing is the rocky cut scene lasts 30 seconds in the movie, but it can last 5 years in your life. And when I was sleeping on the gym floor, I'll give you a detail that that'll tell you that the un the stack of undeniable roof. um was that I my first gym was underneath of a parking garage and so there was these metal dividers in the ceiling and so cars would drive over this and it's a concrete box and so it sounded like a gunshot like and it would happen at all hours of the night and probably the most painful from an emotional perspective experience that I would have on a regular basis was that it was also abandoned enough parking lot that college kids my age would go up and party on the roof. And so like while they were partying literally above my head and making noise that would prevent me from sleeping, I would be down below in an inc in a dark warehouse in a city that I knew no one. Like I was from Baltimore. I drove across the country. I went to Huntington Beach. I literally knew no one and no one knew me. And so I'm sleeping there and then I realized that I can't really sleep at night. And so I'm I'm taking basically I'm living on naps for the first 6 months of the gym.

1:48and like homeless people are sleeping in my parking lot and I have to like go out and tell them to like go away and then I get back lock the door and I go back on the astroturf which is where I slept with a blanket and a pillow and I I bring this up because like the visceral feeling that you go through when you're going through the mound of [ __ ] period or the [ __ ] eating what feels like a marathon is that it's it becomes a 30-se secondond soundbite in my story.

2:18>> Yeah. But it was years. And so like even to the same degree people were like, "Man, you're such a natural salesman." The first job I ever got offered out of college was a sales job. And I said, "I'm not a salesman. I'm an academic." Gh. And then as soon as I opened my gym, I was like, "Oh [ __ ] how do I pay rent?" And someone walked in the door and I was like, "Please give me money. Uh, I promise." And I I had no equipment in my gym because I I couldn't afford any. So it's an empty gym with just turf. And I was like, "I promise you I will get you amazing results." And they were like, "Are you going to be here tomorrow?" And I was like, "I I sleep here. I have to be here. I promise I'll be here. Right. It's impossible for me to not be here.

2:52>> I can't live. I can't leave. Right? And so the early people took pity on me when they literally paid the f the first 29 members I signed up in the first two weeks before the gym opened was from pity. It wasn't from charisma. It was pure pity. I'll be real with you. And it was the exact amount that I needed to pay rent. And I remember the first month of rent that I paid with, this is actually wild. I only I only looked at this in retrospect. I made exactly $4,972 in my first month of my gym. My rent was $4,972.

3:21And I remember working like a dog to get that. I'd never made money in my life. Like I'd never like really asked anyone for money. And all of a sudden, I had come up $5,000 in a month. And then at the end of the month, I watched it go to zero. And then I was like, I have to do it again. And that was when like the reality of the situation of like there was no escape. There was no one who was going to come to save me. And there was I couldn't blame my dad. I couldn't blame my mom. I was the one who had chosen this life. But the alternative was that I had to go back to my father a failure and have him look in look me in the eyes and say I told you and come here. Come here. Don't worry about it.

3:54You know, I told you this this gym stuff, this fitness stuff, this starting your own business. It's it's for later. It's fine. Just go back. Hey, you you've got this you've got this great degree. You've got just go to the go to the business school do the thing. And I knew exactly what had happened. But what would have happened after that is that for the rest of my life, he would have had absolute authority over everything that I did. And that felt like death. And so that was what I ran away from when I was in that moment. Like whenever I felt like my back was against the wall and I didn't know what to do. And it felt like the Instagram reels of like the motivation weren't going to get me through what I was going through because no one cared that I was sleeping alone.

4:26I let them know I'm sleeping on the floor. And a month later when you're still sleeping on the floor once everyone's like don't care. Like great, you're pursuing your dream, right? early days. >> Yeah. >> But despite that, the must be easy mantra is the easiest indicator that you have a victim mindset because what it means is I can't achieve this thing because on some level if you say it must be easy. There's some level of desire that's there. You're like I'd like to achieve some aspect of this. And then rather than feel the pain of saying that I'm inadequate or I'm not taking action, we we cast our our inadequacy on some outside object or some outside circumstance. And by doing that, we remove all agency and all power that we have over our lives. And for me, I would rather be somebody who has absolute power and have nothing to show for it than somebody who has all the all the the things to show for it, but know that I'm life's [ __ ] Life being one protracted training montage is a really important lesson to learn. The fact that in the Rocky movie it is [clears throat] 90 seconds and then everything is fixed and that can last for decades. That can last for years. And I think that the lack of glory, the lack of certainty. Yeah.

5:46It it makes it it turns it from worthwhile majesty into it's it's not even sufficiently triumphant to be called sad. Like it's just like weak and pissy and you have no idea if anything's going to work. But what's the alternative? Entropy is going to come and [ __ ] get you. [laughter] So what's the alternative? Like my Twitter bio says locally reversing entropy and I I I think that that really is what you should try and do because it's going to [ __ ] come for you.

6:22>> The lack of certainty is what actually makes it worth it. And so here's my point. Let's think let's consider the alternative which is that you are on the path and you are guaranteed to know that you're going to get the outcome. All of the mystery is gone. There is no excitement. Which is why they said, you know, the ancient Romans or sorry, ancient Greeks would say that the gods always envied the mortals because their life was so ephemeral. They had so much chance that could happen to them, right? Where the gods always knew that they weren't going to die and it was completely guaranteed. And so what we do is we basically have this wish that if it actually came true, we would hate it even more than our current circumstance.

6:57If you knew that you were going to succeed, it wouldn't be worth doing to begin with. The fact that you are uncertain when you start is what makes it worthwhile. And the fallacy of being in the pursuit is the worry or the concern that it won't amount to anything because who you are becoming is the thing that you are amounting to in real time every day. Real quick, 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.

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