Was hast du eigentlich zu verlieren?

0:00Now, I have told this before, but my plan B was that I would drive Uber and strip. Now, I think part of that was because I wanted to, you know, thumb my whatever the the Shakespearean saying, I bite my thumb at you, uh, to bite my thumb at my my very respectable parents, uh, and say like, I would take off my clothes for money. Now, of course, they would be horrified by that, but I think part of the reason I was okay with it was I was like, I'm going to I'm going to do it my way. I want to be crystal clear here. If you have no money and you want to make money, you should have no shame. Knock, call, email, text, DM, ask. Life-changing doors do not open themselves. And sometimes I feel like shame was invented by people who have to prevent people who have not from taking action. Because all of this is just an illusion. What are you ashamed of trying? Like let's play it out. Remember I said fear only happens in the abstract, not in the specific. So if you reach out to a stranger, no matter what happens, you always come out better than before because you either have a sale or you have an experience.

1:02Both make you better. And so the crazy thing about trying is that it has an asymmetric riskreward return. So worst case is you get a no and you learn from it. You get better. Life gives you unlimited shots while you're alive. And so if you have nothing, like you you're just basically cashing in lottery tickets and saying, "Oh my god, I lost. But what you're paying with is time." Fine. Pay more time, get more tickets, keep scratching. So, do you know the difference between shame and guilt?

1:26Guilt is when you break your own rules. Shame is when you break other people's rules. So, if you are gay and you're in a religious community, you would probably feel shame. If you also share that religious community's rule set, you would also feel guilt. If let's say you were in a very liberal progressive environment, you might feel neither shame nor guilt. And so the question is whose rules are you following? If you have this feeling, this fear of being ashamed, then the question is who's the one who wrote the rules that you're choosing to follow?

2:08And I can promise you it's not the people who are successful because they're the ones shouting on the rooftops telling you that it's totally different once you get in the pool. It's very different. It's kind of like you the lights of the world turn on and like you're living in this mirage when you're not succeeding where there's all this all this uncertainty. There's all this ambiguity. There's this fog of the unknown in front of you. But as soon as you start taking action, things become very crystal clear. I think there's there's I'm sure some stoic analogy that said this, but basically like if you've ever walked through very dense fog, you can only see a couple steps in front of you. The only thing that you can do in fog is just start walking. And as you walk, more steps become available to you. And so there's this misconception that you're going to be able to see the entire path ahead of you. But it has two fundamental fallacies in front of it.

2:59Number one is that you have the right vision to be able to see that far with your current skill set and resources, which you don't because imagine today all of your conditions change. you had more skills, which is hard to imagine cuz you can't imagine what it's like to have the skill, but maybe let's say you have resources that you didn't have before. Well, that would probably change the way you play the game. So, trying to play out and try and play 17 steps in advance when the game itself is going to change and you as a player are going to change. The only thing that you can boil all of this down to is to take the steps that you can see in front of you one at a time. And I would write this down of like what are the things that are stopping me? And more specifically, whose voice do I hear? Whose voice or judgment am I afraid of? Because usually it's people. It's society is what we say, but it's usually like two people.

3:53And I remember when I had this big decision that I had to make when I was considering selling gym lunch. I thought that $46 million was not a lot of money for the business. Now, some of you may hear this and be like, "Oh my god, that's amazing." But believe it or not, at before we before COVID happened, uh, Gym Launch was valued at 150 million. And so for me going from 150 to 50 or, you know, 46, it felt small, right? It felt like a really small number. And I remember there was a particular person, we'll call it a friend of me, if you will, that I thought would think that they were better than me if I sold for this small number.

4:26And when I was able to narrow it down to just that one person's voice, I thought to myself, am I going to give that person power over my entire life? Which is literally what it was. I was choosing not to make a decision because of someone else. That person has complete power over me. And I was like, well, that's a terrible reason not to do this. And the crazier part is that even if you're right and that person does say that you suck, so what? Most people don't want you to win. And even if you do win, they will try and do a reverse excuse, which is called a justification for why you should be excused of the respect that you should earn for having won. He just has good genetics. He has great parents.

5:13He uh, you know, inherited his wealth. He had connect good connections. She was born in America. He speaks English. He's a man. He's white. He's whatever you want. But giving the person justifications in no way helps you. You might be right. And so what? Like it's it's so funny. It's like let's say you have some advantage, whatever it is, right? Whatever whatever advantage you're born with, right? You might have one.

5:40It's kind of the thing same thing as the parent thing. It's like, well, I don't want to be successful because I don't want to prove that I had this advantage. It's like, would you prefer to prove everyone wrong by saying I had this advantage and I also wasted it? I remember I'll tell you a story and I think it'll probably that'll that'll round this off well. So, when I was younger, I didn't want to be a doctor, but that was pretty much the path that was laid out in front of me. And so, my father's a successful doctor and I I was like, it's it's it's cheating, you know, to to, you know, just assume your practice and just like immediately have a practice that makes a lot of money.

6:12and he said, "Do you think Shaq, when he was 7 feet tall, was like,"It wouldn't be fair for me to play basketball. Other people aren't as tall as me." And I always remembered that. He's like, "You play the cards you're dealt. These are the cards you have. Play them." And I remember thinking that as now, obviously, I didn't decide to be a doctor, but the reason that I didn't want to do it was because I thought other people would say that I would they would disqualify away my success as not earned by me.

6:41when the reality is that they're all going to disqualify your sex no matter what [laughter] because it makes them feel bad and so [ __ ] them. But if you have some cards, for the love of God, play them. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate.

7:15And we've done this across software, physical products, uh, service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.comroadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. Offering.