How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

alright turn on camera turn the camera i got a rent for you i feel like i could rule where them know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a roll year i got a call yesterday from a entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable they were stuck they're they're at a plateau their business not growing these fast were pitching the on all the new things that were gonna do new features they were gonna add the new project and then they all start telling me about the side hustle that they got going on and i had to stop them and i had to tell them the truth the truth is stop searching for answers we are all guilty of this you know like if i'm fat all of a sudden i'm keto i'm paleo i'm reading books i'm listening to podcast and i'm not just doing the obvious things the trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere that maybe a a mentor has it or a book has it or there's some knowledge that they don't have that's what's holding them back but that's really never the case if i talk to nine out ten people only one might need a strategy change for not out of ten the answer is up your level of intensity the best part about intensity is that it's contagious that you can actually create a culture of intensity there's a wonderful story about peter t when he was running paypal so peter t was one of the it was a ceo of paypal he's was the first investor in facebook and i was curious as peter ti is kind of like a sort of a weird dude and i was like he doesn't seem like classic manager leader inspiring guy super organized button down running you know daily stand ups it turns out he didn't really do any of that shit he had a very simple system his common sense system was well everybody in the company should figure out one priority like you you should have one priority in your brain you're gonna do one thing what's it gonna be and forcing people to figure out one priority not a to do list but a single priority was an incredible forcing function everybody had to say something and if you said something stupid it would be like that's your priority and so everybody picked one priority but now that's good but that's just like you know the very very first half of the battle what's the second half actually sticking to that because human nature is everything feels important i have my one priority but then there's the second thing that's important too and then there's a third thing that's important too and the problem with this that peter said was that imagine you have three priorities and even if you a stack rank them you said this is number one number two number three what happens is that we often don't know the answer to number one number one lacks a a clear solution it's a gnarly problem it's an important problem but it's not an obvious problem so what we do is we just gravitate towards the second task because it's much clearer i i know what to do there so i i gravitate towards the known right it's that a warren buffett story where the guy lost his keys outside of a bar so he's crawling around on the ground trying to find his keys and like officer says sorry what are you doing i'm looking for my keys did you drop him here no no i drop them over there well why are you crawling over here because this is where the light is and that's our most people operate in their day to day priorities we crawl around where the light is we crawl around doing the known things the things that feel familiar to us rather than the important things the things where the solution actually is over there it's just in the dark and so peter till what he would do is if anybody tried to talk to him about something that was not their their big thing they're one thing he would literally just leave the room he's like oh you're talking to me about that i thought your thing is this okay see you hey he's like i'm not gonna sit here try to convince you but i will signal to you that this is not a priority by literally just leaving the meeting or leaving the room or just not refusing to talk to you about anything besides your one thing to deal what he what he said was he goes if you allow yourself to have more than one focus you've already blinked i love that you've already blinked you've flinch and he says you know you've determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome my singular focus philosophy is that solutions may not be clear but the path to excellence and value are and the path to excellence and value is to have a singular focus and i believe this to be true i believe that the mind is a very powerful tool i call the brain a answering machine it's just about what question you asking if you ask yourself a bunch of questions like why did this person cut me off your brain will tell you because they're an asshole because you've told your brain to focus its attention on why this person cut you off in traffic right you've focused your powerful tool on a silly thing to focus on and you know the brain can really only handle one question at a time is is not a as much as we think we can multitask we really can't we can kinda solve one problem at a time it's just a question of what are you gonna load into your brain and are you willing to let it sit there and until it is solved that peter t one priority philosophy is a very powerful one something that i implement on my day to day basis alright so first let me dis dispel some submit because i can already hear you in the comments i could hear you type it away because what you're thinking is probably what i used to think which is dude i don't wanna work twenty four seven that's not my goal well intensity is not working twenty four seven that's the first thing intensity is a formula actually it is focus times common sense times insanity that's it focus times common sense times insanity that is what i mean when i say intensity there's a great quote by the way i saw conor mcgregor and conor your stories is insane he went from a plumber on welfare to the highest paid richest athlete in the world on the forbes list to the first two way world champion in the u a did this all in like five or six years and there was a video of him after his training session and he says the father he goes i have lost my mind to this game like vincent van go he dedicated his mind to his art and he lost his mind in the process that is what's happened to me but fuck it when that gold belt is around my waist when my mother has a big mansion when my girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week when my kids kids can have everything they want then it will pay off then i will be happy i've have lost my mind and that is the level of intensity and insanity that you can get to if you really do this at a level twelve and not everybody's gonna wanna do this at level twelve but you should know what level twelve looks like you should know what it is and then you get to decide how you're gonna dial that knob down the problem most people will have is they think they're already at a level ten they don't even consider level twelve they think they're already at ten when in the actuality they're at six and today i'm gonna show you how you are at a six and you're not out a ten because that is a lie as a dangerous lie we wanna tell ourselves the other mis misconception by the way is oh great i gotta do more i'm already busy i'm already overall overwhelmed now i gotta do more no no it's actually the opposite you are gonna end up doing less there's a great steve jobs quote i'm gonna butcher it but it's basically something like focus is saying no to a hundred great ideas so you can say yes to be one exceptional one focus of saying no to a hundred great ideas great ideas or ideas that you could totally make a case for that you would you would seem smart for you to go do but doing a hundred of them doesn't work right you can do anything you just can't do everything and so focus is saying no to the hundred great ideas so you can do the one exception one so if you do this right you're not doing more you're actually doing less you're just doing it better so okay let's jump into some examples i'm a start with some business examples because there's plenty of like inspirational athlete stories or just kind of like general motivation but this is a business podcast i am all about business so let's do the first one so first one is mark zuckerberg so there's a great story of z when he bought instagram and by the way today if facebook had not bought instagram facebook might be dead instagram like literally ended up becoming the next social network it was gonna be as biggest competitor in facebook bought it well okay that's cool that's just a business decision this a strategy decision no no it was a story of intensity so here's how the story goes the founder of instagram kevin sis used to work at a place called audio he was actually kind of like an intern sitting at the desk next to this guy named jack do audio pivot to twitter that becomes twitter jack do ends up being the ceo of twitter at one point in time and jack do is kinda like his mentor so kevin crates instagram twitter doesn't have photo sharing twitter says we wanna buy instagram and they offered to buy it for something like four hundred five hundred million dollars and again this is they have the relationship they were first to make the offer they offered a big sum of money so they did what they thought was level twelve intensity but then z came and show them what's up so the way that the story goes down is mark zuckerberg starts texting kevin system and he says hey i wanna meet i wanna i wanna talk you about buying the company and mark's intensity is almost known and it's sort of legendary the industry so kevin is texting his investor and he's saying should i meet with z i don't i'm worried if i know if i go there i don't really wanna sell and i feel like if i tell them don't wanna sell is he just gonna go into like psycho mode and crush me and the investor goes yeah probably and so he's like okay i guess i'll take the meeting he already has a deal on the table to sell to twitter for five hundred fifty million dollars he then meets with sequoia the number one vc in silicon valley and they say you know what you should stay independent instagram can be big we will fund you at five hundred million dollars so same valuation but you get to keep going you get to keep your independence but he goes to meet z and he goes unlike twitter z did not take no for an answer so he rejects z first z says no just come over my house and talk can you just come over today and he says i guess i gotta go over there i don't wanna really piss the guy off so he just says okay i'll i'll just go over it goes to his house and now this is good friday you know easter is on sunday he goes to his house on friday and he walks in and z says the following he says i thought about it and i wanna buy your company and kevin's like i know but i already said no he says i will give you double whatever you're you're currently raising around it so whatever your prices i'll give you double and that would mean that instagram would be worth a billion dollars and nobody had ever paid this much for a mobile app before this should be the first deal of its kind instagram had zero revenue had like less than twenty employees it was tiny this seemed like yeah outrageous over the top wave of going about things and z said well look i can give you a billion dollars for this but here's the deal we gotta do this deal this weekend and he basically pushed them and this was again it's easter on sunday nobody's working over the weekend the twitter guys think that they have a deal in the bag the sequoia guys think that they have the deal in the bag and the mistake they made was they thought that work starts on monday and z just decided to work over the weekend so he basically said look let's stay here and we'll either hash out the deal and we'll make a deal happen or we'll figure out that the deal not gonna happen but let's just agree we're gonna stay here and we're gonna figure it out so he says okay so they basically stay together for forty eight hours z calls his lawyers he calls corp dev guys he says go over here we gotta figure out how we're gonna close this deal now kevin calls his investors and like hey i'm about having this deal here's the quote one of his investor says i sat back and thought what just happened like holy shit what just happened how did he pull this off and z had this belief that that if we don't create the thing that kills facebook somebody else will the internet's not a friendly place i have to act with a certain level of intensity when we find a deal that's like this and so over the weekend just to give you a perspective to do a billion dollar deal generally takes time six months will go by nine months will go by z his lawyers and the founder of his they end up cutting this deal over the weekend they do a billion dollar deal in forty eight hours and by the time the competition woke up on monday the deal was gone so that's the the story of how z buys instagram and by the way this is not the first time he also bought whatsapp how he bought whatsapp was the same way and whatsapp had the right culture walt whatsapp also operated with high intensity there's a famous story that the founder of whatsapp had the sticky note on his desk and they took a picture of it when he sold and it said no ads no games no gimmicks that was their mindset every other messaging app was always adding more and more features they would add games they would add stickers they would add some some ads into it they would just keep adding things and they said with the way we're gonna win is we're gonna do the basic thing messaging and we're just gonna do it better than anybody else they were like chick f a they ever everybody a chick f a like you don't go to chick f a because chick f a adds fish f filet on the menu no no chick f a decided to have a common sense strategy we're gonna sell chicken sandwiches and they just do it with better level of intensity than anybody else they sell a better chicken sandwich in and out does the same thing in and out it's like we're gonna sell a burger and fries is not a revolutionary strategy they did not pivot they did not innovate in that they just brought a higher level of intensity to it than anybody else was willing to do at the time and so those two fast food chains make more money per location then chains that do ten times more things that have a wider menu that have more locations because they operate with a high level of intensity that's the same way that whatsapp and approach business the founder of whatsapp always said he goes the f word around here is focus he says i don't think about things that i can't figure out i don't think about the future i don't go to conferences give talks about where the industry is going he goes i focus my bringing around the things that i could wrap my head around like this customer complaining about this thing let me go fix that bug and he said that the reason they sold to facebook was because luck chased them for two years personally he would meet them for coffee then hike no deal would happen and he would keep inviting them hikes dinners coffees and if he did that for two years until finally they re lent and they ended up closing the deal okay i wanna talk you about stripe one of the stories i love about stripe comes from paul graham paul graham was you know running why yc at the time when stripe went through it he met the founders early on and these are a couple of teenagers that we're basically saying we're gonna change the financial system where we're gonna change the payment system we're gonna go work with banks and he's like these two you know red headed teenagers think that they could do this alright well i'm curious let's see what happens and he noted that stripe was doing one thing very differently than the average company through yc remember why he's is the best of the best so these guys were uncommon amongst the uncommon companies and so he called it the call installation he said most companies when they would talk to a a potential customer they would bump in another founder they would say oh yeah here's what we do they would say that's interesting that's cool you say oh awesome you're interested cool i'll send you a link i'll send you an invite to the beta when we're ready and you could sign up that's what most people do hey he said what the call would do is very different we started calling this the call installation which would be as soon as somebody showed any sign of interest they would say awesome do you have your a laptop on you i could just set you up right now i'll do it for you and they would literally brute force get customers onboard the person would open up their laptop and they would literally install stripe they would explain it to them and they would onboard them on the spot and they did this to the first you know hundred two hundred customers manually and program noted he goes you know i wonder why don't more people do this it's not like this was some outrageous strategy it's not that he was even like that hard to do you the reason people don't do this is two things shy is or a fear of rejection and it was also a misconception because they think that big things come from big things but actually big things come from an accumulation of smaller things i thought there's a beautiful way of putting it to understand how a big thing happens is just a accumulation of smaller things and he said that you know many people believe that startups you know take off or they don't take off that your business either works or it doesn't work and he said actually what i've learned doing yc is that start ups happen because the founder makes them happen they take off because the founder makes them take off and he goes it's like an engine right you can't force something that's never gonna work to work what you can do is if something has the potential to work you can crank that engine manually hand crank it to get it going and then it starts and once the engine started you know you've pushed the boulder enough eventually it starts to roll and now you're chasing the momentum of a rolling downhill but at the beginning it felt like pushing it to the top of the hill and i thought that was a great analogy of how stripe operated with a higher level of intensity and if that's how they onboard customers imagine how they did the ten other things because how you do one thing is how you do everything the trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere that maybe a a mentor has it or a book has it or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back but that's really never the case so rarely isn't that the case almost always the answer you seek is with it one of the great stories about this comes from ben h he has this phrase he goes lead bullets not silver bullets and he's talking about when he was running his company at a very tough point there was tough competition the company was online it was gonna go go bust or they were gonna figure out a way to make it he goes was my first instinct was to pivot to try to find a magical win it's a magical solution a rabbit out of a hat he like i so wanted to stand in front of my company and say u aha i have the answer i i went for this walk i met this guy and here's the answer we just gotta do this and it'll all out he said but that's not really how it worked goes i i stood in front of the company and i told them i said there are no silver bullets for this only lead bullets they didn't wanna hear that but i had to make it clear we simply had to build a better product there was no other way out there's no window no hold no escape hatch no backdoor door we have to go through the front door and deal with the big ugly guy that's blocking it we needed lead bullets in my experience the thing that's actually come out of this philosophy of there are no silver bullets is that actually there are silver bullets but the only way you discover them is by just firing a shit on a bullets that you think are led and then you sort of pleasantly surprise yourself when you find one idea one experiment one tactic that totally works in an outs outside way you find your silver bullet but the only way to do that is by being the guy who believes there only lead bullets i'm gonna i'm willing to fire all the lead bullets in order to make this work versus the guy who's gonna run around trying to just find the one magical silver bullet really take no action right if you wanted to look at your pie chart you should be spending maybe ten percent of your time on the idea or the strategy side of things and it is important to get a good strategy but it's usually a very common sense strategy if your strategy is convoluted if your strategy requires multiple new innovations and leaps of faith you are likely gonna fail you likely diluting yourself into thinking that the pie chart is eighty percent ideas and twenty percent execution it's much more like ten or twenty percent ideas as a strategy and eighty percent blood sweat and tears and that blood sweat and tears should come from a certain level of intensity right it's not simply about working more hours it's not simply about just bearing yourself in the office there are times where you'll do that and that's the other kind of philosophy that you should internalize which is there is a time to sprint okay you cannot sprint the whole time you cannot always be running your max speed it doesn't work that way but you should be able to recognize when you need to change years and you need to sprint one of the stories i love i've talked about this as the podcast before is the story of sylvester stall alone sylvester alone wants to be an actor and so it goes any audition everywhere and you can't get get a role nobody wants to cast him as an actor he doesn't look the part his mouth moves a little funny because he had a problem at birth and he he just wasn't the guy he wasn't the classic hollywood face he doesn't give up he decides to take matters into his own hands he says if i can't get cast in a movie i will make a movie and i will give myself the role the problem is he hates writing so he decides well i'm gonna for this i got a sprint i am gonna do this thing the best i can but i will plow through i will brute force my way to this so he goes to his house and decides to write a movie he writes the first script of rocky the rough draft of rocky in three days three days most notably that's possible he did in three days he talks about how he did i wanna read you this quote because this is sylvester talking about focus his daughter asked him she goes did you really paint your windows black to focus he goes yeah i did paint them black because i didn't wanna know what time it was it didn't matter what time it was it was time to write otherwise i would tell myself oh it's time to for time for breakfast and i would immediately derail myself i would say well i'm just gonna have breakfast that i'm hungry i don't need to know what time it is and that was the kind of thing you know i wanted to eliminate all my possible excuses all my possible distractions because i knew how hard it was for me to write i was begging when i was writing please someone just call phone just please get me to do anything else besides this but instead i unplugged the phone so that nobody could call i painted the windows black says a hundred percent black windows no phone and that approach of painting the windows black is a certain level of intensity doesn't do it all the time but he knew there was a time to sprint so one of the key things in life is to identify when a great opportunity comes your way or when it's time to buckle down this is the moment it's you're going on one path of the other path and that is the time to sprint that is the time you dial up your level of intensity so i have three actions for you how do you actually go do this first you need to narrow your focus i did a whole podcast on this called laser focus go watch that it's like twenty minutes long it's good so you need to narrow your focus you need to stop giving your brain so many different priorities and so many different problems to think about you need to narrow it down that's the first thing focus and the second thing is you need to write down your common sense solution i call it a common sense solution because that's the check your solution to your problem should sound very easy it should sound as simple as i gotta go figure out why all these people are churning canceling their subscription i need to go solve that or i need to bake a better product i need to make a product so good that people wanna share it that's my strategy make a product so good that people wanna share it my strategy is i need to make thirty sales calls a day if i want sales to grow i just need to do more calls thirty a day i'm a take a giant sticky note i'm gonna ride thirty and every day i'm gonna cross that thirty out and then tomorrow i'm gonna wake up the first thing i do is i write the big number thirty again by the way this is something i actually did for my companies write a giant number on the wall and that number is the one thing i need to do today if i do that one thing alone i have made today successful so you need a common sense strategy that you can execute so like a no brainer fifth grader strategy that you can execute at a level twelve and that's the last question the last thing you need to do is ask yourself what was what level twelve intensity look like at this thing that i'm doing just as a thought experiment you don't have to do it but just ask yourself that question right if i dialed the intensity up all the way to twelve what would that look like what would i actually do now give you a very simple example a lot of people probably you out there listening to this have had an goal at some point in time of getting in better shape right you wanna lose weight you wanna go run a marathon at a certain time whatever you wanna get into your the best shape of your life and we've taken what we think is a level ten intensity to this right i did i did the best could do right i i hired a coach sure i you know i i i wrote down my goals and i i tried it just didn't work out well jesse is guy who's been a guest on this podcast he had the same goals as you he wanted to get in the best shape of his life he wanted to get the best running shape of his life so what did he do he hired a navy seal to come live in his house and whoop his ass every day he said i will do everything you tell me to do whatever time you tell me to wake up i wake up whatever many miles you tell me to run i'll run he would train two to three times a day for thirty days straight he ate exactly what this guy said he drank exactly what this guy said he did pull ups when this guy said and did pull ups he ran that this guy said run it was raining it was hailing outside it was freezing cold he get out there and he would run that navy seal by the way was david go this is before david go was even popped up he hired david go to come live in his house for thirty days he would come into the bedroom where him and his wife for sleeping and wake him up and say wake up bitch we're running now that was level twelve intensity and the sad part is we don't even know what level twelve looks like until we've heard something like this so if i did one thing for you today i hope i just inspired you to go figure out what level twelve intensity even looks like maybe from the examples i gave you today maybe from some people in your life find a way to see it and find a way to ask yourself what does level twelve look like if i'd ratchet up the intensity of the thing i'm already doing yeah that's it i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a travel never looking back but