One Question Friday: Someone Stole My NFTs

alright it's question of the week time or one what do we call it one question friday i like that alright one question friday sam is traveling so i got my boy ben here ben levy not ben a not producer ben not powerful producer ben this is ben levy the the ceo of the mill road and my business partner across my fund and a bunch of other things you guys hear me reference ben a lot but you don't know which ben because i only deal with ben's so this is one of the ben's ben what's up man what's going on i'm riding high today chris paul on the sun's one by like twenty five last night so i've never been happier this is true alright so let's let's do this one question i think we have a audio clip right let's play it let's play the audio clip i haven't heard this yet so let's see what it is hey guys my name is colin i just had all of my n t stolen today so my question is i'm sure you've been through something like it before you know when you get gut punched like has that happened to you what happened and how did you work through it oh man i could feel the defeat i can feel the the pain in his voice there at the end that thank you that was a soul crushed thank you okay so colin you got your he's stolen i you know i feel for you that's no fun i mean that's a it's a crime right somebody came and stole your property it's digital property but you know a crime has been committed so you there you gotta kinda separate here's my my kind of advice to you have i had somebody steal a bunch of my property before not really but you know there's different flavors of of gut punch and i've had i've had my share so here's my kind of like formula for how to handle it the first step is just be still and i mean this in kind of a zen way which is that look what's gonna happen you know for the next twenty four forty eight hours for you is you're gonna your mind is gonna go to a bunch of different places you're gonna get angry you're gonna feel sad you're gonna feel upset it yourself if you're gonna feel upset at others you're gonna feel upset at the the fact that you can't get it back so you're gonna hate crypto you're gonna you're gonna feel a bunch of emotions by default and what you wanna do is you wanna not just react you wanna respond so what's the difference between of reaction and a response a reaction is what you do you know sort of right away it's an impulsive thing and typically we don't love our reactions to things because our reactions are the things that are happening in a more primal way was that whereas our response is what happens when we pause for a second and we we choose how we're gonna respond so a reaction is typically not something you're choosing a response is something you're choosing and i this happens is gonna be multiple times a day where i gotta check my myself alright am i reacting or responding here and which one do i wanna do i know i can do both but i'd rather respond and so the first thing is you gotta be still you gotta distance yourself from it emotionally first then you gotta say alright well how i gonna respond to this well there's some like logistical steps you might take try to get back report it try to figure out who did it you know notify people in the community so other people don't fall for it what whatever the scam was but then you gotta like okay let's say you've done the logistics part and maybe there is no happy ending where it didn't just all turn right that's where you got what i call you gotta decide what story is true so in any event anything that happens there are there are multiple stories but that to simplify i'll say there's two stories anytime something happens there's the story that'll make you feel bad and there's the story that'll make you feel good they're both stories right and they both have truth to them but it's just a matter of which which angle you're looking at something and so you gotta decide which story am i gonna roll with am i gonna roll with the version of this that makes me feel really bad or am i gonna roll with the version of this that makes me feel good and i know that probably sounds hard in the moment you just got a bunch of your shit stolen and you know which is why we first you know try to distance ourselves from it but that's where you're gonna have to go you're gonna have to decide the version of this story that's gonna make you feel good right imagine a breakup most people when they have a breakup in a relationship they feel bad and they choose a story that's gonna make them feel worse which is oh my god all the all those years we spent together time wasted i'm not good enough or she's not good enough or whatever the reasons alright we have we come up with a story that makes us feel bad or we come up with a story that makes us feel good which is man now i know what i really want now i'm ready for for the right person you know you wanna walk out into the street and just look left and right and say you know next you know i'm ready and so there's a version of the story that'll make you feel good or bad in any given situation the power is in being able to choose what the story is and not just having the default one put on you so that's my like mentality mindset ramp then what do you think you you've had your fair cut punches have ever had something like this yeah i mean in crypto i think like a year ago i had like a few eth stolen out of my wallet and i was crushed and i think i actually called you and i was like dude it sucks i just lost a few eth because i stupidly clicked on a discord scam and i think what you said was that's the price of admission every single person in crypto has had that happen and that's just what that's just the name of the game so i don't know my perspective on it is like yeah definitely been got punched to ton in crypto and i also feel like every when i've ever gotten i'm mad that i didn't sell it at the right time or i held too long or bought to wait i think that's the name of volatility too so i'm just like that's you i'm gonna get a huge home run because i play this game and yeah learn from my mistakes yeah there's also like this phrase is investing which is i've never done i've never done an investment right which means on an investment that worked out i should have always been earlier in bet more and on an investment that's wrong i shouldn't have bet or i you know i was too late or whatever and so you've never ever on any investment feel like you did it right y'all always be kind of kicking yourself wishing you had done it either bet bigger or better earlier or whatever on it and so like i think the thing you said that's right which is it's the nature of the game and so you know crypto n t's this is the wild wild west right now there's a reason your n can go up in ten x in price in in one month or a hundred x in price in a year or like you know i don't know how much board apes are or were but like i think a year ago they were under one eth each and now they're like whatever a hundred forty or something like that so you know a hundred and forty exit a year so one of the reasons you can get these types of gains is because it's a wild wild west but what comes with wild west is that dude it's it's not safe there are there are places where you could stub your toe and me and sam i think sent this on a pod once which was if you become an entrepreneur or an investor and then every time things go anytime disaster strikes or things go poorly or things go down you're like emotionally a wreck because of it and i'm not saying colin is but it's very easy to become close to an emotional wreck when when things go down it's like you signed up to go you you waited in line to go on a roller coaster you strapped yourself in and then the roller coaster went up and down and time it went down you were like like oh my god i can't believe this like get me off this thing and it's like dude why did you get on a roller coaster you know like if you choose entrepreneurship but you choose investing if you choose investing you gotta wake up and like the last four months dude i i've lost millions of dollars just because i wake up and everyday is red stocks are red crypto is red everything's red i haven't seen green in months dude i i even see the color green right like i'm starting to text people on android just so i could see the green speech bubble dude like i just wanna see green and but that's the reality like i signed up to be an investor what did i think it's always gonna go up it's like i signed up to you know do this crazy crypto stuff like yes this crazy shit where you know i'm playing this this this game where you're you're self sovereign individual you're custody your own assets well there's gonna be times where you didn't custody it very well and it got stolen and so you know same thing with with being an entrepreneur is you gotta ask yourself am i just complaining that the roller coaster went up and down and and that's a way to not let yourself be a victim i think one of the most positive traits somebody can have is that they never let themselves be a victim no matter what happens in their life they view themselves as the person in control and the root cause of whatever has occurred and in doing set so they give themselves the power to make things good and they give themselves the accountability when things go bad and so so you know i think that's a just a decision you gotta make up front am i gonna let myself ever play victim and look for kind of pity self pity or a pity for others or you just take that off the table you say nope i'm never gonna play that game and so that means on days where my shit gets stolen it did somebody didn't steal my n t's i let my n t's be stolen and you right so you take control over what happened and it hurts in those moments but that decision to never play victim is like one that pays off you know in spade you know for the rest of your life ben what did i miss also it's a great opportunity for a twitter thread right here how i got my tea stolen yeah this is the great this is the beginning of every great story right i've had this many times where i get a cease desist letter and then we turn it into marketing for our company i've had it where you know google or facebook will launch a clone of our app and your investors will send you a link and be like hey did you see this again motherfucker i saw it like i saw that facebook has cloned our app you know pixel by pixel and that you know this you know five hundred billion dollar company is now competing with us yes i saw the news but you know you gotta sort of like in that moment it's like this is our chance this is our story of course they're gonna copies we're on to something right of course to get a copy s pixel for pixel because we have the right solution right and you have to decide what story you're gonna tell yourself and your team and your the people around you so that again you're gonna feel some kind of way would you rather feel bad or feel good that's all you gotta choose i tell ben this all the time what ben started this off time about the sun's winning and ben how do feel when the sun's win amazing ben how do you feel when the sun's lose pretty pretty down on myself pretty down everything so you ride the roller coaster and you let yourself feel bad and so y that's a choice you're making right now at some point you might decide to play the game differently which is i'm gonna feel is it possible to feel great when your team wins and not feel shady when your team loses yes that is possible sounds like it sounds like it's breaking the rules but like that's what you do when you're like a life hack like yeah you break the rules it's like i'm gonna play the game i'm gonna play the game on my terms and and so there is a version of that yeah and like when your businesses have issues i think when in the business have issues like you don't let it get you down at all and you're you were able to take the wins and stride really well do you have an example of that like something where we've we've taken we we've had a situation where other people would have felt down but we we spotted to you as anything come to mind i'm gonna i think we're in one right now right like we send the milk road and we've had some deliver ability issues recently where the open rates have dropped a little bit and we can't really tell you know we're trying to figure out why and i think there's one version where you freak out about that and you make it ruin your week or ruin your day and there's another version where you just take it and stride and know you're gonna figure it out this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better yeah like you know you fast forward a year from now this will be a a forgotten footnote on the the overall story and even when things are really crazy and you know something really bad happens like you know in my e commerce business our entire shipment for christmas got seized and flagged and then inspected and then we had to do a recall and like all this stuff and the people you know people in my team were all like oh my god like just for this you know one eighth of an inch you know this random random seizure for no reason just because of random inspection then on one item they found a a one eighth of an inch discrepancy oh my god this is so unfair this is so bad blah blah blah and it's like alright like dude look like you know we and i created a a a channel in our slack called highs and lows and i said let's put them here let's let's document the highs and lows and i think every startup should do this honestly is document the highs and lows because it'll just get you used to being like when you go in there when things feel really bad and you wanna go in there and write it down and you've it's like you see the last one six months ago and you're like oh yeah that felt pretty bad too but i've like i've totally forgotten that our business has grown two x since then and like oh you know just the way that that one turned out to be nothing this one's gonna be nothing too i'm gonna eat this and i'm gonna like use this as an opportunity to learn like oh shit we didn't even know these this one eighth of an inch rule we had to go like you know change the measurements of something like i'm glad we knew now versus when it's bigger right i'm glad this happened because that's gonna lead to all these good things and so you know there's we had an example like this where like i'll give you another one with our e commerce business the warehouse managers that we had hired turn it wasn't working out that we found out they were trying to like you know sort of like copy our business in a way like launch a competitor or something like that because you know they're in the warehouse they see businesses going great so they wanted a piece of the action and this is a moment where our team was sort of like you know immediately felt betrayed and then upset and was like well you know what should what should we do should we change you know should we we're gonna have to make a change it's gonna be so hard and that those are the moments where you need to show the most poised alright that's when that's when strength matters is when things get hard things are easy is not when strength matters so it's like oh dude i've been training for this i've been training for these times moment moments finally i got a reason to use these muscles and that are that are in my body to be able to be strong here and so it was all about po it was all about basically coming up with alright let's first be still not over react second let's decide how we're gonna approach this and re respond to this situation not react and then in that response it turned out where actually we ended up finding this amazing manager and we ended up saving all this money now we couldn't have seen that up upfront in the moment it felt bad now three months later or two months later or whatever it's like oh dude we found this thing that's saving us you know two dollars per order which is gonna add up to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra profit saved because we found this new manager who found this new process who found this new thing and we would have never done that had that disaster not struck and so once you go through life enough you have enough experience you realize oh it's all working for me not against me and once you decide it's all working for me not against me then the next time the disaster destruction like alright cool what's this how is this working for me and you don't panic and the people around you're like man how does this person never panic they never freak out about this stuff that and then that becomes the culture of the company that's where you wanna be ironically i'm good at that everything except when it comes to phoenix suns basketball yeah well that's because you're fit you're mentally fit it's like you know you're mentally fit with your upper body it's you'd never do leg day right so it's like everybody's got something in the gym where they're really strong at it it's easy for them it's hard for others and then they have something that's easy for others hard for them and that might be calf raises that might be whatever and so like you know you could take a body builder but you go put them in a pilates class and they're struggling because they don't have the flexibility or the maybe the core strength of coordination to be able to do some some movements and so everybody's got these moments that are these situations that are harder for them like ben wilson i'm curious for you what's the thing give me yours what's the adversity disaster strike situation where you're pretty good and then what's the adversity or disaster or strike situation where you're pretty weak what's your version of leg day i'm actually like because i'm pretty relaxed person i tend to do pretty well with adversity but like personal attacks really get to me like like bad things happening in the world don't don't bother me bad things thanks for other people don't care that for me really care well but it can like if it hurts my bank account even or like whatever like i i just kinda i i move on with life but if someone says something bad about my character or or yeah insult me or something like that the the one i think of i think i dealt with pretty well was i was in barcelona and it relates to what this guy was talking about and i'm sitting there at like like a cafe so i'm imagine cafe i'm on la which is like a a walking street and so i'm facing this this big street with a lot of people and i'm eating dinner and i've i've got my phone on the table and i'm reading my phone as i eat dinner and this old woman comes up to me and sticks a sign in my face and starts asking for money but the weird thing is i speak spanish and she's not speaking spanish and i cool i don't know what saying she's gotta sign right in my face and she's she's speaking and clearly asking for money but i can't tell what she's saying and i was like what i i don't understand you and she keeps saying so like go go away i try and kinda chew off she leaves i'm kinda shaken up and after like a a couple seconds re orient myself i'll go back to my dinner realized dog on yeah someone that stuck the the sign in my face and underneath that had taken my phone from off the table and i run off and go search for her and of course even if i found her she'd probably handed it off to someone else and the phone was gone and and that is the kind of thing that i actually like deal with okay like obviously i freaked out for a couple minutes was was really mad was doing but eventually i was i just kinda like was like okay i'm okay and was is how it was hard to explain like i was speaking because i didn't have a phone in a foreign and it was like scary but i was like i'm okay i've got all my fingers and toes and it was like actually a a good opportunity to kinda like reevaluate of like alright this is gonna mess a lot of stuff but all the things that actually matter in my life are not affected by this stomp being gun right i'm gonna also give a technique because one one part of the philosophy another is a simple technique you could do so how do you actually be still how do you actually get to the response not the thing and it's really annoying when bad things happen and then the advice you're getting is like it's okay don't worry about it you shake it off you know because it's like no in the moment i feel i feel bad i feel some sense of loss you know and so you know it's very hard and so the actual technique here is a tony robbins technique that he calls the ninety seconds of suffering and the story is tony goes to india and he's like he's taking he's taking his platinum partners and these are the dudes who it's like you go to the beginner tony rob you're like oh my god this guy's is the messiah and so you're like oh if i pay twenty five k year i get to go on a trip with tony and like i get to be a platinum partner and so you pay maybe it's even more than them i was hundred care or something like that you pay some crazy amount of money and you become a platinum partner so he took his platinum partners to india to some like os in the mountains and he's like you know just giving them a unique experience and he goes and this like kind of grew guy in the mountains is like oh mister tony robbins you know blah blah he's like he's like how are you like fantastic you know life is amazing i feel so grateful saying all the tony robbins things and he's like monster voice and then they're like the guy was like you know said something like you know but how you know he said so how are you dealing with your suffering and he's like he's like suffering like the hell are you talking about bro like i'm tony robbins i'm not suffering i'm mister positivity i got my platinum partners here we're in india i'm i'm teaching i'm i'm not suffering they they might be suffering i'm not suffering and he's like but i just saw you a moment ago you know you're whatever your employee was saying about the thing they forgotten and you got so upset you were telling them how they should do it differently you you totally changed your face and he's like oh well you know that was just we have this i want this trip to be great for our partners and you know this person dropped the ball and yeah i guess i kinda lost my cool but you know i i really care about bubba he's like he called himself he's like oh okay i'm just justifying hey he's like he's like that's not suffering though suffering is like you know look around in india you see people suffering on the streets and he's like he's like it's the same thing they they have a deep they different cause but they're they feel the same thing they feel suffering in a moment right and he goes he goes you know you he's like you are tony robbins i see you now and you're you're you're you're bright and you're happy you're lit up you're you're energetic you got the you have your charisma all the stuff he's like don't make your happiness so cheap tony robbins and he told him and he was like happiness but you mean he goes that and he's like that guy just did this small thing and your happiness he took your happiness so your happiness had a very low price it only took a very small thing to acquire your happiness he took it away from you and so what you wanna do and that's a my takeaway from this was like you wanna have this like you wanna be the louis vuitton of happiness you want your happiness to be very expensive that it takes a very very big event even bigger than all your entities get stolen for for somebody that's something to take it away so you have to decide the price of your happiness is your happiness is gonna go away if someone gives you a wrong look or cuts you off from traffic or you know your delivery gets your pizza delivery you know door gets delayed are you gonna get upset and it not upset in a big way but like you lose that joyful state of mind you could otherwise be in and so he gave himself this thing tony came up this technique called ninety seconds of suffering he goes okay so i started to notice these little moments where i would lose my state i lose my state of mind where i wasn't i was no longer in that kinda happy grateful you know optimistic enthusiastic state of mind he's like i would just decide alright i can't prevent feeling that feeling like it's very hard to just prevent it but i can contain it and so he's like i'm gonna give myself ninety seconds to suffer and after the ninety seconds i gotta let it go but i get ninety seconds to till the to do it and of course what happens is like you know if you don't give if you don't time box it it's very easy to like have something ruin your day or even kinda get you down for a week or a month or a year and you depressed all of a sudden so time boxing is valuable but but the funny thing is if you do the ninety seconds of suffering where you're like alright this shit happened gonna give myself ninety seconds within like twenty four seconds you'll be like alright whatever i don't even need to do the whole ninety like i it's like i know it's gonna end anyways in ninety seconds do i really need to sit here and wait the ninety to feel bad if it's gonna end into ninety seconds anyway so you don't even you end up not even doing thirty and so that technique of like giving yourself ninety seconds of suffering whenever whatever happens has been like pretty game changing for me and so you know i'd encourage you do that alright and if he's got so on alright have at it ninety seconds to suffer suffer fully and as much as you want for ninety seconds but the agreement is at the end of that ninety you you no longer get to get to suffer about this at the end of the ninety you can take a deep breath and you're gonna change the story in your head about what's making you feel bad because it's not that your entities got stolen it's some story about that it's how much money you've lost how you're not gonna get them back how you spent so long collecting them how that was your favorite one that story is what's making you feel bad and that after ninety seconds you gotta change that story so that's my advice for one question for friday that's it peace out