There’s 98 days until 2027...Do this and you’ll thank yourself on Jan 1st

there are ninety nine days left in the year ninety nine days i almost feel like this hundred day left in the year is more important than the new year's resolution i feel like i could rude to where to know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on roll i just encourage to anyone then is the end of the year use this last sprint i could treat it like an athlete does the fourth quarter of a game and really ask yourself like what do i want this year to be all about have i have i kinda made my mark on the year and ninety nine days might sound like a short amount of time but that's an eternity you can make so much happen in ninety nine days and i just encourage anyone to just hear that today and just ask yourself the question like have i made my mark on this year yet and if not let's you know there's one sprint right here and we can we can use i have two comments on that the first is i think the idea of quarters is so stupid quarters should be months don't make a q four make it like m six and then m seven like four weeks is a significantly better i have like the time that something takes is often dictated by like the increments that we measure them in yeah yeah i can't stand that like at google calendar is it defaults to thirty minute increments i'm like don't make a five minute increments right the second i i joke with a bunch of my jewish friends one of the reasons why they're so successful is the jewish new year is in september so russia russia hana i can't even say it correctly that was in september and so i'm like dude do you guys have like three months head start in terms of new year's resolution and like reflecting goodyear year year right so i was thinking about that where like i i actually liked that where you make new year's resolutions like two months in advance and so you got a two month i'd start on everyone well there's a yeah i think it's called parkinson's law which is like a work expands to fill the time you give it it's like it's like modeled after physics like a a a gas will expand to fill whatever container it's in if you shrink the container the gas will be more compact if you have a bigger container it'll spread out your projects take the it work the same way and so if you default to like you said google calendar if the default meeting is thirty minutes or an hour guess what you'll find a way to talk for thirty minutes if you had moved that same meeting the twenty two minutes you would've have got it all done in twenty two minutes so yeah i think take this ninety nine days and make it happen i i don't know what what where are you at with that do you do you think this way do you i know you're trying not to be the kind ad entrepreneur or the cortisol entrepreneur anymore that's like spiking and in stress yeah i'm trying to fight my natural instincts how's is that going so it's it's good i think my theory is that you can't change your weaknesses or it's really hard to make your weaknesses a strength you can potentially neutralize it but that's like the best case scenario and so instead you do something where you just create a system where your weakness like can't really show itself so like for example if you don't work out you're like well i'm never gonna be self motivated but if i prep for this trainer show at my home like i'm still gonna be lazy but like they're gonna i just have to do this like there's no choice so with me i've got a ceo my c founder joe and so we have set it up to where we only talk mostly about personal stuff throughout the day but there's only one day of the week where i can come and complain to him or suggest improvements for the business and that one day a week it's only forty five minutes and i have to write it out in advance and so because of that i'll like see something and get pissed off and i'll be like six days later when we talk about but i'm like yeah i'm not actually that angry right and so like i'm a big fan of creating system so it's worked for me do you have anything major that you wanna do over the next ninety yeah i wanna there's like one more event i wanna create i've realized that as the world is so online so digital i think it's just put premiums on everything that's ir so i wanna create one more ir irrelevant event we have hoop group which is our basketball event that we do once a year and i wanna create a second and had that thing's been like such a blessing right it's like super fun super fun to do unbelievable crew of people that come to that thing and it's built this awesome some network around something that i would just do for fun anyways and i wanna do another one of those the problem with that one is is so exclusive like not only is everybody there like kinda like the top of the top like you know in terms of the their careers but also you have to be like really into basketball which is fundamentally limiting for a lot of people they're just not that in the basketball so i wanna create a another event that is not limited in that same way launch it or host it yeah it's gonna happen before the end of the year k and i don't even have the concept yet so that's okay but you know how how long does an idea take like that's how long an idea takes right how long do the decision take decision takes that long too so you know i i kind of people would would normally say oh that's not enough time if yes any professional event planner they'd say that's not enough time thankfully i'm not a professional event planner and i will make it happen in that amount of time i think the best way to becomes successful is to see how other people did it whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible so starting at the age of twenty four i did this relentlessly and i was very methodical about it and i created a spreadsheet where i tracked roughly fifty people who are uber successful and i looked at the year that they were born the year that they started their apprenticeship and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful finally the year that they broke through and i aggregated all this data along with stories of what they did to be at apprentice and what they did to finally break through and i put it together in a database and hubspot went and found this thing that i frankly even forgot about but it did change my life and they resurfaced it they made it even better and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now so if you click the link in the description or click the qr code right here you can see this database that i made when i was twenty four and it changed my life and so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration check it out so for the listener or my last company was it was the hustle a newsletter but sir as an event and it was basically one event that i would host like basically when i needed money so like every nine months and like i would do it use the money and go hang out for like two months and then like do it again i did that for like three events in a row and then it became a newsletter but the first event that i hosted i'm gonna try and get the dates correctly the event happened i think on july first i started working on it on may fifteenth so it was roughly six weeks and so i sort of had first mover advantage and so i kinda be crappy and it'd still be kind of interesting and i think i charged three hundred dollars and i think roughly three hundred and fifty people came i i'll frame it differently i think what you did brilliantly was the name of it was hustle con and the vibe of it was scrappy entrepreneurs of the real deal and the beauty of that was you didn't have to provide a polished luxurious thing because that was off brand i'm so thank god i don't have any of that because that would be off brand anyways it's like i have a friend who who created summit series the big like event they do on like the mountain they bought the end of the event that where they ended up buying the mountain where they they bought a summit yeah yeah and he said the best thing burning man ever did was create the ethos of like hey like it's a piece of dirt you create the town you clean up the town it's like we're there's no there's no there's no sign if we didn't have the right sign where the bathroom was people will get upset burning man they just changed the expectation where it's like of course we're not gonna baby you you you've set up your own tent you survive you bring your own supplies you clean up everything and they he's like he's like from an event planning perspective brilliant yeah it's great and so i'll be eager to see how you pull this off it's definitely pull off a it's just like a lot of pressure it is a very stressful period and it's sort of like running a marathon or leading up to it you're like this is kinda cool it gets closer and you're like i'm scared this sucks never doing this again the day happens you don't really remember a lot of it it was a lot of work a week later you're like i can do this again that i can make it better you know it's like giving birth and hosting in the hosting an event and running a marathon or an all mail tech conference yeah those are the two similar similar events yeah i also think you know constraints are very very important so time constraint is one constraint you just said money you know we do the events out of pocket we don't make any money off of them intentionally so well that's a little bit silly why why do you do that well because the constraint is what is an event that is so good that is so so fun so valuable so meaningful to us that we would be willing to spend you know hundred fifty to two hundred fifty grand to make it happen and that literally just eliminates like ninety nine options of what you might do if the goal was to try to make a hundred grand or try to make two hundred grand make three hundred grand or make a million dollars and so the cons constraint so using the constraint of what's in events so good i would pay i would pay to host it is what's led us to creating you know some very unique event so far and that's that's kind of what i wanna do again i wanna give you a little anecdote that i thought was pretty interesting so there's this guy joel green black do you know who that is that's he writes books on stock picking right yeah he's like one of the one of the best investors you know of all time so like like warren buffett he outperformed the market for decades using a different strategy but but you know nonetheless outperformed and did really well so he goes to give a talk and he puts in the front in this like in the front of a of the auditor he's got this jar of jelly beating inside and so he says hey i'm gonna anybody can come on up come on up to the front take a look at the jar and i want you to write down an estimate don't show your friend don't don't show your neighbor write down an estimate for how many how many beans are in this jar on this piece of paper and he say you could you know you can't open it but you could do whatever you want come up here and let take a look everyone goes they take a look some people are counting the the beans in the row and then the height then kinda try to estimate it and so he cali up he gets all the the results and the guesses are one thousand seven hundred and seventy one beans that's the average of the that's the average of all the guesses now guess what that's only five off from the actual there's one thousand seven hundred seventy six beans in there the average of this group of a hundred people was incredibly close but he doesn't tell them how close they were then goes around the room and he says actually you know what let's make this a a little little faster a lot of just tell me how many you think are in this think say it out loud so the first person says eight hundred fifty for the next person who might have been thinking two thousand was like oh shit maybe two thousand maybe that's way off thirteen hundred and then the person who was thinking seventeen hundred like eight fifty and thirteen hundred and they so they they all say their guesses out loud when they all said their guesses out loud they went from being off by five to being fifty percent off together the the average i think came down to like nine hundred or something like that so they were off by a mile now same people same jar the only thing that changed was hearing what other people thought and he gave this example he goes this is the stock market for most of you if you if you were able to independently think and analyze a business and try to come up with what you think the true value of that business is your smart people you do pretty well but the reason smart people don't do well in the stock market is because they're listening to the news and jim kramer and the analyst reports and then they look at the ticker and it's going down i guess it's bad and then gets going up i gotta get in and so yeah it's gonna go higher right and and they let everybody else influence their thinking as to what the business is actually worth and goes if i took if you remember one thing about how to be a great investor it would be to look at the jar and write down the piece of the number on the piece of paper and know that on average will be much closer to the true value than if you just listen to what everybody saying and he goes now this is so difficult that there's a reason warren buffett says you should buy low cost index funds even though he doesn't and i say you should buy low cost index funds even though i don't because it is so hard to do what i just told you so we had joe hudson on the other day mh so i consider myself to be a fairly easily influenced person like i'll hear about sam new house and i'm like that's awesome i love that i'm easily ex maybe is is a good word and so he said something that was interesting where he was like i figured exactly how he's phrase it but whatever the way he phrase it i went and started reading this book called un soul which is kind of a fine book it's only fine but there was like one concept that i found was interesting so have you heard a transcend dental meditation you basically sit down and instead of being quiet with your thoughts you're chanting and you're chanting something it doesn't even matter what you're saying but it's sort the rhythm auditor auditory thing almost drown out the other thoughts in your head i've done this before the is a buddhist practice that's like this that i was once taken it i thought it was really pretty awesome but i don't do it regularly yeah and and i've done it as well and i don't do it regularly anymore but like there was one line from ent un unintended soul talks about the guy who created t transit implementation his name was his last name was yogi but he like tells the story where he's like basically like the most important key to have like a happy life is when you have these thoughts in your brain you you should treat that that thing in your brain as a roommate and so if you were to have a roommate that said you totally screw that up you suck like that was not good what you did you are never gonna make up for like everyone has these like native thinking you have to be like dude you are not me you are my roommate and with this guy who created t he was like you just have to ask yourself all the time for every thought you have to ask why am i thinking this and like i'll just i'll i'll hear it but i'm not gonna listen to it but i to ask myself on a consistent basis who am i and why am i thinking about this and what does this mean for me as opposed to just listening and just the act of asking yourself at is actually really important and that simple question oftentimes gonna have breakthroughs for self enlightenment and so because i'm a very influenced person i have to like read something gonna be like why does this excite me okay but is this the is this actually who i am and like this constant like who am i is this who i am it's okay to like this person's story that doesn't mean i'm gonna copy it like this this like constant in her dialogue because i've been asking myself how do you become less influenced by people who aren't aligned with what you your life's calling or like your mission is and so when it comes to like this meme discussion of like how do you not let this person influence you i'm just i'm trying to look for exercises on how to actually combat that because it is incredibly hard and yeah although you're talking about the you're saying you're taking it to the extreme you're like even the voice in my head don't let that don't let that necessarily influence because that thing is a you know monkey through throwing feces all over the room you know it's like it's not necessarily the most reliable aligned source for me like it is not you it is just a roommate i love the roommate thing i love the roommate thing that's great told you about my five five voices in the head theory no it's one of them i'm telling you to kill because we should talk about that so i i i believe that people is not one roommate i think there's this five voices in the head and once you know that that these these parts of you exist you'll start to recognize them because they'll pop up it's kind of like the movie inside out if you've ever seen it and inside the girl's head there's like she they they do it with emotions there's like the red angry guy there's the blue sad girl there's the fearful one and then there's the grossed out one so the inside out showed this in a movie with emotions but think there's a similar thing going on with voices in your head who are the five the first one is the critic and the critic is like david go in your head you're never enough for him you you did you did a hundred push ups should've done two hundred you could done more pussy it is there for the reason he serves you keeps you honest prevents you from getting high on your own supply there's a reason that he gets to have a room the god and if you listen to that guy too often you know life life doesn't end up very well for you that you have another voice and i call this the voice of the mother and the voice voice of the mother is a more caring voice but it's also the one that's protective it's trying to you know it's slicing your grapes for you even when you're nineteen years old it just doesn't want you to get hurt and wants you to live a nice safe life and be protected and wants everything to go well for you and that's great too because it's nice to be protected it's nice to to beat to play it safe you don't wanna take too much risk but at the same time the dose makes the poison too much of that can also ruin your life because you'll play it too safe if you go on and you go you go forth and so there's these different voices i could go through all of but like that that's the idea that there's these five different voices and then at the end of it if you're able to hush up all these voices and get them to go back to their room for a little bit the thing that's left that's you the the last voice is you that's the self and the problem is we're so it's so noisy in there because these other voices are constantly chirping that it's hard to hear what you truly what you truly think what you truly want because it sounds so easy well you should just do what you want most of people don't even know so why do we do things like meditation buy to sleep help why do we do therapy he's just trying to get these other voices to just shut the up for a minute so you can actually just figure out what you want and then go do that it's pretty easy once you get there have you ever described anything to ai and you're like described this like really like interesting thought you're like i think i just came up with this cool idea and they're like yeah dude that's called the theory of relativity and you're like so i'm as smart as albert dot both we invented this concurrently is it is this a thing is this a thing that exists yeah well there's this great book called the six thinking hats i found this to be a very productive book edward devon bon i believe is that i'm looking it up who i think that might be him yeah yeah you're a lateral thinking guy yeah and it's like basically like oftentimes at work or like when you're working on a project like typically there's always the guy who like defaults like that can't work because right and i remember reading that and i'm like or i thinking about that like how do i change this guy or change myself and so there's a six hats of thinking and one of them like the guy the the white hat is focused on fact the yellow hat is be optimistic the black hat b devil's advocate whatever and there's like six hats and like when you're having a discussion you're like okay i hear you what you're saying can you go ahead and like tell me like if you were an opt what would you say about this idea and like you it just it creates a significantly better conversation where you're like okay right listen to this vault care i hear you are you you're being this person that might be who you are i need you to pretend that you're an optimus person and like tell me like or like okay you're this creative like we just have creative people at the hustle and like okay you're saying this crazy idea i need you to be a manager right now think do a manager's perspective and tell me how this makes profit so i can continue paying everyone's salary and it's like okay let's take through that lens and it starts like actually changing the conversation meaningfully so what you've have described is a little bit similar to what one of my favorite business authors of all time has described so congratulations you are now my favorite business author yeah alright sweet well that's a win for me by the way i like doing this the the physical version of this so i actually have like two two hats that i use so what i was i told was studying the literally put your head on yeah so i i i was studying the creative process and and one of the biggest things in the creative process is that you need what jury seinfeld calls two mines the two minds of a creator and the first mind is this child like mine so you know when you wanna sit down and create you're sitting in front of a blank page the reason people have writer's block the reason people struggle to to to create daily it's because you're afraid you're afraid of failure you're afraid of looking bad you're afraid of you want so badly to be great that you're not willing to do something bad to not put something bad down on the page so you put nothing down at all it has a self protective mechanism so he talks about how you need the child like mine at the beginning who's just gonna grab a crayon and just scribble and and then you and you almost wanna have this attitude towards that that version of you that's like i'm my sweetie that's amazing could i hang that up on the fridge and like you need to nurture that like that energy because it's what's gonna get you going right it's gonna get you to put things on the page and then you'll you'll eventually figure out how to make it good good comes later don't worry about that so you need this child like mine he's like and then what happens is about four hours later when you come back and you're you now have a bunch of scribble on the page you have to completely change into a ruthless asshole and now this is the editor and the editor is basically saying no no no less of this trimmed the fat too many words too many syllables cut down rearrange this and you you gotta be able to do both you know somebody who can only do the free play and never edits never has any kind of like discernment or taste or judgment does work but if you bring the judgment into the room early on in the brainstorm you're not gonna have a very good brainstorm and so we created these two hats literally like diego who got a made for us which is like it it says rick mode which is like rick rubin so it's like rick mode when it's like dude we're just messing around we're playing we're just we trust ourselves in hero rick mode and then we have prick mode and you put on the prick mode hat it goes the other way it's a different color and if you were if we wearing in brick mode then it's like well that's who i'm supposed to be right now so let me go ahead and do that and i i at first i felt kinda silly then i started noticing there's a lot of examples of great people who do this so warren buffett has a a actual thing on his desk called the two hard pile because his investing philosophy is that look you can't have a great opinion on a hundred straight stocks or investment opportunities is like you should be able to pretty quickly figure out the five that are very interesting probably like you know good good no brainer things to do the five that are absolutely terrible does stay away red red flags everywhere but then ninety percent too hard to judge it's too close to call can't tell and so he literally creates the two hard pile on his desk so that he can put things in there just mentally say look i i don't have to come to an answer it's just in the too hard i don't need to worry about it there was a guy zach dell so the son of michael dell from dell computers and zach dell got this really interesting company called base power now and he was on a a podcast that he was saying he's like i have two notebooks like so i got the i forgot like the red notebook and the blue notebook and i think you like this because this is every business like ceo business owner has this it goes the red notebook is working in the business so if i have an idea of what we should you know what we should do what we should change this you know this customer thing and then the blue is working on the business which is oh you know this person is not in the right role or we need to hire somebody for this or you know we need to we need to get an office we need to rearrange your office space so these two groups are sitting closer to each other so that they're gonna have better chemistry and so in the business and on the business and he's like i have two separate notebooks so i know which one i'm doing when and i know if i'm spending too much time in the business it's like i'm all over the red notebook oops that is that it do you have the same thing two notebooks baby so we just buy championship shift can just do that again instant replay same picks up the notebook shows it like that or it looks like one thick notebook turns fans it out two notebook yeah i have got two notebooks i actually have a third hang on but wait there's more than the ultimate show hey zach suck on this in the basement on the business and out of business well the one is like this is like like it's like the five day or five year journal that are right where it's like here's how i feel to stay like right now the next one is like content ideas like just random up ideas and then the next one is like here here's what i actually have to do i'd like i need like work through the actual problem hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when strategy is done the brief is written everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down in create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses what's your system for this so this one i i do almost religiously every day so this is the fire journal so every day i write like here's what i here's what i did today here's something to be grateful for so this is like five ten minutes in the morning what do you do no three minutes so it could be like today i i read about aristotle and i loved it for these reasons and i need to be reminded to do x like aristotle or it could be like to today i went to san francisco it was amazing we brought help with us and it made the trip so much easier so it could be like just like just it just like i'll look back at a year like that's a good reminder the next one this one will be more like like you know like let's say i'm reading a book and like have like an interesting idea related to that book so i just need to get on paper and then the next one is like here's what i have to do today and like it's mostly checklist but like kinda brainstorm solutions to the problem so you boys got books and by the way that's like a a consistent thing i've noticed amongst creators that i like is that they i think the easiest way to say it is they write drunk at its sober yeah so i've noticed that consistently but then you have stories like eminem and m his the famous story where he walked in with doctor dr and like dr plays the first beat and then within five seconds he goes hi my name is like you're like okay so like it definitely could just happen but typically the people who are systematically great including eminem and m like people i've seen i think anderson cooper did the thing a story on eminem and m where they're like dude he writes like crazy like i've never seen someone write down so much stuff and another thing that they would say about him in eminem and when he was younger came off as just like party guy maybe he was but they're like he's at the studio at nine am and he goes home at four like it's a it's a workday and like i noticed that there's way more systematic ways to being creative than there is examples of epi right well the the the analogy i would use because i i think it's yeah both like i think yeah you have those moments where the song comes on the b comes on and he starts doing hi my name is or that you you hear this a lot where somebody it's like add twenty four hours they wrote both of the hit songs that define their careers in one day all it took with one day and it's like no all it took was every day for their whole life yeah and then they had that day and and the analogy i use is you know the two percent conversion rate and the conversions came like a number ninety eight ninety nine yeah well the the the the analogy aj is imagine your brain as this like old mansion old mansion on a hill and you go to you inherited it you find out you inherited this gift from your you know your a great grandfather you didn't even know you had it but it was yours and so you go you walk in and like wow this thing's is amazing it's a terrible shit cob webs everywhere but this thing could be amazing and you decide you go to the restroom you go to the bathroom and you see this like wonderful this old tub this amazing tub and you're like man this is this is great i've never had a bath like this i i'm gonna turn it on you turn the water on and of course right when you turn the water on it's cr takes a second it's sp and then out comes brown muddy water like the most disgusting and you're you flinch you're like horrified you're like oh disgusting you turn it off this is this is you know the the first day you write when you sit down to right the first thing you you say if i said hey freestyle right now it's what would come out you'd be horrified at your own disgust it's your own like your own output is gonna be it's gonna discuss you but you you know what do you do so most people just turn the water off and say oh never again that bathtub has is nasty don't go in there but a few people are like they leave the water running and sure enough know if it's browns browns browns browns brown and then eventually it starts little spurt of clear come out and eventually the water starts running clear and i think what happens in that example where m and m goes in and freestyle styles is that he's had the water running and he's running clear and so you know when the when the moment comes he's able to perform he's able to come up with an idea he's able to have a good idea because that it's warmed up the whole system is warmed up the muddy water has gone because he's got putting in the daily reps you know along the way and so i think that's a lot of how this works and you know i feel that way about this podcast i get let's say we didn't do this podcast for three months one might think that oh we're gonna be we're gonna so much saved up material we're gonna be awesome it's gonna be so much better and then as you it would be way worse it would be terrible this podcast gets better the more often we do it obviously there's some limits to that like if i did it again in two hours like maybe i'd be out of i mean little fresh feed stocks a little a little fresh air and before they gotta get warmed up but by and large the more you keep the water running the better your the you know the clearer it eventually starts to run and it's when you stop using it for a while that you know it's like this is flywheel where the more it generates the better it generates and the less is the worst it generates there's this story about tu decor who died when he was only twenty five and so he was very prolific for a very short amount of time and there's a store he goes to he went to prison for doing some bad stuff and he's there for like nine months and someone was like well it must have been like you know let's find the icing of the cake like at least you had like a lot of solid attitudes you could like write he goes i hit right in here it's the worst like a there's like very little inspiration and b like i can't get it out he would write way better when he was like a machine gun in the studio like just go go go alright we did that one alright let's try another one can i tell you an interesting story and this is sort of related to like someone who followed none of the rules that people default too and i think it's really interesting and i think it's gonna interest you because a it's an obscure billionaire who i'm sure you've never heard of but you know their work and b it's a family dynasty business which i think you're tip toe into like your interest tan okay have you ever heard of advanced publishing no but you said i know their product what's the product well they're most popular ones but not necessarily the most profitable are iron ironman g q magazine reddit charter communications warner bros discovery some smaller ones that you probably like is the or that you've heard of american city business journals turnitin dot com they just bought a mountain biking event vanity fair g q v reddit reddit reddit it's a public stock what do what you mean they owned reddit they owned reddit before it was public so i can i'll tell you and and they still own i think they own thirty percent of still but i'll tell you the story so there's this guy named sam new house sam new house was born i think in like eighteen ninety five he's born in this like jewish family he's like five foot two he's like a little guy he's tiny and he his father gets sick gets really bad asthma and so his can't work and so he's got like four other siblings and he's like at the age of thirteen and fourteen the mom is like hey dude you you're the man of the house you gotta you gotta drop out of school and help me pay the bills and so he does like a male in order course basically the equivalent of an online course in bookkeeping and he convince this local business person to give him a job he's like under know your bookkeeping so he does his bookkeeping starting at the age of fifteen by sixteen a year later the business guy who owns a very small local newspaper and he's like hey i have this newspaper that i own it doesn't really make a lot of money and it made like the equivalent of like eight hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue today he's like can you just like keep an eye on this you've seem very trustworthy that you know numbers figure out how to make this work within six or seven months he turns it around and start making money and he's at this point seventeen and the guy's like dude good job here i'll give you a percentage of the profits now and i'll also give you a little bit of ownership and sam new house is like i like this i think i'm pretty good at it so he does it for a couple more years and then after about three years he convince a bunch of family members to all pitch in and loan of money and he buys his first newspaper it was called staten island advance which is why the company today is still called advanced publishing and so his whole s is basically he bought this newspaper and he goes into it with a few things in mind the first thing he's like look we're just here to sell ads let's let's keep it real the the the content that we create it we'll we can make it as good as we possibly can within our constraints but like we need to make a profit and so he's very very very good at selling ads and he's very good at keeping cost controls down and for the next i think sixty years he buys a new newspaper every three years and it slowly accumulates roughly fifteen to twenty percent per year revenue growth and he grows and he grows and he grows and he grows and by the time it's like nineteen he has one of the largest privately owned companies in america and he's doing like well today advanced publishing does like eight billion year in revenue back then it was doing like a billion in revenue but what's interesting is this little guy named sam new house he never had an office he worked out of a briefcase all he had was a briefcase most of the deals that he did was hand handshake agreements he had zero partners he had zero executive management team and by the time the company was doing a billion in revenue it was literally just him like just him making these decisions and and he would in he would hire a publisher of which is basically a gm or like a ceo of a newspaper and he would go to each twenty each week can hey what's going on man how's everything going he was very polite though he was he was headquarters just drive it out he and he would drive from thing to thing to thing and he kept doing this and doing this and doing this and then after a while when he's like close to sixty and seventy and eighty years old he starts getting his sons involved and they've now created this like dynasty and it was his sons who was like okay our dad bought all these like kinda low prestige local newspapers where like they pretty much just exist buy ads basically the way that he thought about it he was like his whole thing was like how much profit can i make in ten years off of this particular newspaper that's how he would value things so he was like okay i could make eight million dollars in profit over the next ten years off this newspaper i have no problem buying it for four million dollars which is like i think at the time that like he would buy him for six to eight times annual earnings because he was like i'm looking for ten years at a time that's why i measure it and he kept going and then eventually his kids were like okay dad built like a cool company but like it's not like well regarded we wouldn't do something great and so they buy the new yorker which was at the time very prominent magazine they buy this little thing called ko nas and ko nas was a series of magazines including van fair v and all this other stuff like g q and they were like we're gonna make this like we're gonna make our family great and so they come up with this idea of vanity fair which is hard to describe now because it's not as relevant but they were like we're gonna hire these amazing editors and that's where they get this woman named anna win who if you've seen like the devil wears prada that's her and their whole stick was we're gonna give the hire these amazing editors and we're gonna give them like do whatever you want as long as it like make some profit do whatever you want we don't care and that's what they're are famous for and so they've had a bunch of editors of these really awesome magazines for like three or four decades i think she's been doing for like thirty years and then come the dot com era they're like okay we gotta figure this out what do we do and so they buy reddit for ten million dollars and they hold on to it and it grows and it grows and it grows and eventually they spit it out and do its own thing and so they're ten million dollar investment into reddit is worth i think now like between two and three billion dollars yeah wow they've like done this over and over and over again they're still a privately health company i believe his name is steven new house who must be the great the grandson of the founder he recently bought iron ironman the triathlon on series they've bought they just bought a mountain biking event they own turnitin dot com but i think they recently bought that for like over a billion dollars they own four percent of warner brothers which owns hbo cnn discovery channel all this other stuff they own fourteen percent of charter communications and so it's just this big like playground where they like buy these really cool things and they own them forever this is fascinating what you what's something you're gonna you know you're like i can steal from this playbook so something that he did that i believe warren buffett did when you buying multiple businesses something that you tell yourself that's cool is to consolidate the back end the back office it's counterintuitive that is not the way to do it every entity should be its own thing that's can run itself and is completely independent that is the best way to make sure that they can move fast and act on what's good for their local business as opposed to having like some hr or sorry some hq that's helping make decisions another thing is i need to be reminded of this all the time i think everyone does is how if you know what business you're in even if it's not sexy and you're able to stick with it for a long time and you are what you are and you know what you are it can really work a lot better than pretending to be something else for example he knew he was like guys ads are first okay so if we hire journalist that's fine that a great journalist but you have to like stick within this playbook we aren't going to like appeal to like be sexy it was his kids who got into that because they wanted to be that but he was like no this is what we're doing this is the mission and we're gonna do it over and over and over and over again like you and i will like talk about this podcast oftentimes and we're like this is a fake example but we're like should we talk about politics and like one could say like yeah we should it'll get more popular we'll get it's like or we just stick to what we know and like enjoy our niche and just be kings of that small niche do you know what i mean yeah so that's very takeaway very tempting to and i i wouldn't even say tempting i think it does interesting when people don't really understand the business that they're in and that can be from a a customer point of view like why like you know for example why do people listen to this podcast just just to use a personal example right it's like if you can't really understand why somebody's listening what are the odds you're gonna be fulfilling that you know at the highest level that you're gonna be delivering to the person the the reason they came the job to be done for why they're here right because on one level you could say for this podcast well they're listening for business ideas because you would say well often we talk about different different business ideas or opportunities and certainly it's for somebody who's looking for their next business so then we should go market this as a great podcast for somebody who's looking for their next business and if you did that it would be a shockingly small number of people and a small percentage of our actual audience because what our actual audience likes to do is be entertained by the talk of business right like i like to hear about business ideas and i have no plan on ever going and doing it sounds irrational why would you do that why waste the mind space there and it's like well because it tickle some part of my brain to hear people brainstorming about an idea or teaching me about an idea that i never i'm gonna do or i hear about a business that's completely different than mine but i'm fascinated by it and i take inspiration from it and i for some reason hearing about this dude's old newspaper business and how he was a traveling you know traveling in his car checking on each each hq and how he took a simple idea seriously and he stuck with it for you know a hundred years it made me reinforce what i'm doing over here in the restaurant business what i'm doing over here in the oil business or whatever other business you're in and so we have to understand that for us it's inspiring stories so stories of people doing bad things to make it so they you go do bad things in your business and secondly people who are just business junkie they just like to know they like to hear they like to the fantasy football of the whole thing they don't have to go plan to actually go do that thing and once you understand that you might like run your product or run your business a little bit differently so a lot of times people at the podcast they'll reach out to me and they're wondering hey same sean how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs do you find all these stories well i have a hack you see i actually have a community called hampton it's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least three million revenue although we do on average something like twenty five million dollars in revenue we have the founders of door a fig of blue shoe all these amazing companies are part of hampton and what's interesting is because of the environment in hampton which frankly is very similar to my first million we have a very unique high trust environment when people apply and go through this bedding process they're putting in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business and sorta like when people listen to m mfa they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business that's what happens in real life in hampton it's life changing and so if you're a founder of a start that does at least three million in revenue and you just wanna go ahead and pull forward five or ten years worth of six us then check it out the url is join hampton dot com again the url join hampton dot com yeah like a good example of what not to do is do you remember jaguar had like a re brand like two years ago oh yeah everyone hated it right what were they doing yeah so basically like jaguar they're they're historically i think they were like it's a british company and it was like a cool guy car like james bomb would drive a jet yeah it was like a cool guy like a like a man's man kind of thing and i think they drifted a little bit away from that but that's like the heart of it and so they they they were trying to figure out like look we kinda been like this middle man car company for the last fifteen twenty years we gotta get back to our roots and if they go and do this ray brand and somehow when they did it they had like their spokesperson was like an endogenous woman which isn't exactly in line with a some a manly man who loves to smell gasoline it sort of seemed like like a little like it was like related to the lgbtq thing which is like fine but that's not exactly the jaguar customer or like the reason why people turn to jaguar and when they did that all the customers were like what is this this doesn't speak to us and so it was like the exact opposite of what you should do well right now nike is in the news for the same thing nike stock is down ninety what was it down eighty percent ninety percent something like that from its peak i don't know if you've been following this but yeah what's the what's the gist of i know it's down peak was a hundred seventy and it's currently at thirty six so nike stock has fallen dramatically it's now a fifty three billion dollar market cap and just to put that in perspective they do forty six billion in revenue so they're trading almost at one time like a shitty d brand right yeah and there's lots of reasons people can attribute to this one of the popular reasons i don't know if this is the full reason right i think there were some business model things they did but one of the popular kind complaints eric things that people say is like look nike the brand the premium you were getting was because you had this incredible brand and was worldwide recognized and respected brand athletes wanted to be part of and it used to nike used to celebrate greatness you know famously they would never show the shoe they would talk about the athlete and the athlete being great the athlete pushing through the athlete achieving what others said was impossible and they just so happened to boot be wearing nike and the implication is if you wanna be great nike stood for greatness stood for for excellence and if you wanted to be great if you wanted to be truly excellent and you should wear nike and mh they drift it and so like they started having like all these like body positive so it's was like alright there's a fat person wearing nike great like you know there's a there there's a this person who's not not great wearing of wearing that yeah not great at for sport and it's like well nobody wants to buy the brand of of non excellent athletic performance for an athletic shoe and you could see how a large corporation could drift and could lose lose that and then they're gonna have now they're gonna have they're back to their roots moment where they're gonna trim the product lines and they're gonna go back to their roots they're gonna over pay some athlete to to go back and they're gonna have this new campaign they're gonna fire their ad agency and hire a new ad agency they're gonna get back to their roots and i to think about the athletes they're like i could be nike next mistake let's like i have to get it i have to get it before they realize how dumb this is and so yeah like i shouldn't have a chance the nike billboard right like that should be impossible can i wrap up here with us a segment that i wanna call i created a monster slash how to turn shit into gold bro which is brought to you but jiffy lube yeah i feel like every needs a sponsor even if fiction yeah this is our this is called the i created a monster slash how to turn shit to gold so and it's we're this is like a positive episode so this is perfect so a few months ago i i kind of alluded to it but i didn't wanna like say it my sister law got breast cancer recently and what sucks because she's pregnant she's due in october and she got cancer like the same so the same day ben called me she called me she called my wife and she was like okay this is horrible i'm pregnant and i have cancer how can i make this awesome and so she got inspired and i guess got inspired by me because everything i that was taking way too much credit but but it rides in the family of for speeding violation there on that sentence but ahead you get citation back on the road yeah i'm the pregnant with cancer but you are the hero sam but i guess what i'm saying like you know as you know being a creator you get a lot of free stuff and i think everyone's like i want that i won't i want a free mattress and so she started making tiktok about being pregnant and having cancer and she's like doing amazing where like i the video i don't like watching is like when she finally shaves her head it always makes cry but then there's like her working out and doing stuff and like she's like basically starts off of video i'm thirty years old i'm pregnant and i've have cancer and like here's my workout today right and she now is on take tiktok she's getting like tens of thousands of views on a bunch of videos i think she's doing like a video a day but i just thought this was really awesome i thought this was really really really cool and admirable what she's doing because getting cancer and being pregnant that's literally like one of the worst lots that can be drawn ever but she and and i like to tease her because i'm like the shitty thing about both of those things your stick is that ideally they're gonna end you're gonna have a baby and the cancer is gonna go away so you better get everything out out of this you know while you can but i think it's pretty cool and i thought you'd get a kick out of this is what she's doing i do i i am getting kick out of i think this is awesome i'm gonna watch some of these videos after this i do have a suggestion now that she's taking suggestions have the suggestion she's in the arena now well kinda like you said like you know the the the that initial hook is like obviously like a pat as a shock right like i'm thirty years old i'm pregnant and i have cancer by the way let me let me give her a shout out it's sid gl her first name is sydney yeah first name sydney last name gland g l a n d e r okay go ahead yeah everyone let's go follow her i think she should tweak a little bit maybe try i'm thirty years old i'm you know i'm a expecting mom and future cancer survivor because i think the words matter the label you put on yourself the identity especially as a content creator you this weird thing where the more public you are about an identity the harder it is to ever switch it and this is one you would wanna switch not having if it's surviving you know like conquer here you beating it and so that's my that's my my only suggestion is is considered considered that yeah i actually got created by it she's been texting she's was like cattle and fire reached out to me they're offering to send me free bone broth and it's like i made it like every influencer has this moment it's sort of like making your first dollar the first time a brand reaches out to you and offers like product you're like i did it and so like it's really cool that he's she's got i got a huge box of chomp from pete from jumps at my door and like all the kids on my my son's soccer team just thought like they don't know what a podcast is they actively don't wanna watch this but the fact that chop sends me free chops they were like this is unbelievable because i know you know this but kids kids freaking love chops and chopsticks dude pete from chops dm yeah i want some chops that sounds like one of the few things i would gladly expect like a lifetime supply of chops that i have at the front door is it really can i tell you can i tell you a fun a funny just like this is the the tales from the house episode so yeah i don't i don't know about use sponsored by well yeah this this is no i need like a like a like a insurance home insurance company maybe like yeah geico or something like that for this one so was unrelated to the to to business or anything like that but i don't know if you if you're if you guys like this but does sarah like panic when guess are coming over she seems cool as a cucumber anyways cool as cute literally cool as a maybe you're the one who would be who be panicking but by wife she's pretty pretty stoic but i do i do empathize with that like when you clean before the cleaning lady comes yeah so this is like the extreme version of that where by my wife like we have the tesla model x which is awesome but the she hates the door and i like oh i look it's so convenient to get it out she's was like no everyone can see in our car at school drop off like i open up the kim camino every time everyone sees every goldfish that's on the ground like they don't see your cares she's like no like park over there farther away so nobody will see what we open our trunk so anyways we're cleaning out the house we're getting rid of some toys and so by she doesn't wanna want you she doesn't wanna waste it so she posts on her ig like hey does anyone wanna take these toys i pick up these toys and her friend who's a kindergarten teacher she's like oh perfect i'll take them for the classroom and she's like oh great okay great i'm so glad this go into a good place awesome she puts it like as like up front like right by the door just come grab him and go and so five minutes four she picks up she's picking up she's like hey we're on our way and then my side who's we oh no who's coming and she's like it's me husband all the kids we're just gonna get over for real quick we're just gonna do this in this so we're in emergency clean mode she's cleaning downstairs she starts going upstairs and i'm like like nobody's gonna go upstairs like don't worry like this is like comic nobody's gonna go nobody's gonna see that room don't even worry about it yeah if you wanna pick up some stuff here that's fine but like don't those videos where like people get pulled over by a police and they wanna prove a point and they barely roll their window down and they like i don't answer questions that's like basically that's what she was trying to do yeah she wanted to like crack the thing open and like do like an exchange through the like yeah want like a prisoner in like a like solitary confinement anyways they come over kids are playing around the house it's time to go and and they're like oh and they're because they're like calling his name they leave the kid their kid's name and they're like oh he's doing that thing again and they're like what and they hit they're like he always does this we go to someone's house but he just goes and finds a random room in their house that just hides there and we're like oh that's funny he's so silly and they're like no it's not funny because he won't come out like he'll go an hour or two hours like you you won't find him and then that we're like oh and then my wife starts to she's like let me go upstairs and just see real quick and then they're like no you don't know this kid i know how he thinks we will go send the search party up and find them so they go upstairs dude your wife like belly and by the way exactly by the boy the husband is a real estate agent so he's like you know just finally a att to to sit paying attention home scope in the city he scope to join out and so he he's going room to room and my wife's just following him making excuses in each room like we we haven't had a chance yet to clean it up we're actually removing that's why this is like this and like i don't know who did that somebody came here and did that so she's just making excuses while he's real opening up every closet every drawer looking under the beds like everywhere you would never think anyone would go linen closet what's in there and so because you might be anywhere and finally in the last room find them inside of a closet and like they're coming downstairs stairs and like i i could feel like my wife just saw a dead body and like i think it might be hers and that that she saw on the way out and she we didn't talk for like fifteen minutes after they left there's six silence she just processed like her worst nightmare like playing out but you know like the met the the stella thing where you like visualize your worse fear yeah she lived it and i feel like she came out a better person now that like she survived her her worst nightmare now i thought i'd shared that does she know that you're gonna talk about it no no no so she gets to relive it now thankfully felicia she's never listened to an episode of the podcast so we're we're safe this is safe space we used to have this email that would get sent to on the hustle it was called the zombie email so emails who have never opened the email ever before to like re engage them and i was hey i'm sending this email because according to our records you've never opened the email which gives me an opportunity right now to explain some of my deepest darkest sig because no one's reading this so when i was twelve i open mouth kissed a cousin wants not only not only can i not see why george clooney is attractive to women i too think he's incredibly attractive and i would like we would like say all these like crazy stuff and it was like a huge hit like the few people that would actually open it we'd totally get back on the hook just someone out you want them back yeah dude that's such you're so funny this is your zombie newsletter this was a pod full of laughs full of goodness congratulations we did it and that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a go less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna tell you about marketing school it has a podcast that's is part of the hubspot podcast network and it is run by neil patel and eric sue and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses and so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who we're actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast