We put a multimillionaire’s portfolio into Claude (the results shocked us)

and i was like what have you been he's like well actually i'm a public investor i'm a i'm a i invest in public sucks you're like oh you lose money for a living yeah i was like i'm pretty nosy do you have your laptop on you pull up your brokerage account right now and he did i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days on on a road travel never looked check us out so a few weeks ago i met this guy in hampton and basically the stories that a while back he sold this company and he made something like eight figures in in ink in money i sold the business in money in monies and i podcast i guess we done a thousand of these he told his company made some revenue some income some money some money and i was like what have you been doing he's like well actually i'm a public investor i'm a i'm a i invest in public sucks like oh you lose money for a living yeah i was like i'm pretty nosy do you have your laptop on you pull up your brokerage account right now and he did and we like i was looking through his whole brokerage account and i wanna show you his results but basically he's had a nearly a twenty two percent and or return for the last decade which is amazing but that's not the interesting part i i had this idea where we basically exported his brokerage account and we put it in claude and we asked it over the last twelve years how many decisions did you make a year a decision is defined as how many stocks you bought or sold in a year and if i remember correctly he's roughly owned around fifteen stocks over the last decade or so give or take five but what was interesting is that he only made two point nine decisions a year and we put together this cool graph and there were some years i believe three out of the last ten years he made zero decisions and at most he made six decisions in a year so let me let me let me just read the kind of because is a great it's is a great graphic by the way so if he had put a hundred dollars in when he started so this is twenty fourteen so twelve thirteen years he's averaged his annual return is twenty one point eight versus thirteen point five percent for the s and p five hundred for three years he did nothing that was the longest stretch of of no activity that was twenty twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five and it looks like he beat the market eleven out of twelve years was only one year where he didn't beat the market and that was twenty twenty and basically if you were to invest around ten million dollars when he started i think i think that math is something like sixty million dollars depending on what part of the year you started the reason why it was interesting to me is even though i preach patience i mean i preach all this shit i sound very smart when i preach this but you know you and i are very similar we we move a lot and we oftentimes mistake movement with progress and i thought it was really interesting thing to see this guy's numbers every single year because when you think about three decisions a year that's four months of just thinking planning plotting not doing anything zero action what by the way what was the owning is it like he basically bought the fang stocks or was he buying obscure things what was he doing they weren't obscure one was a very i don't wanna get reveal too much of his info but one was a very large travel stock so like imagine a popular airline or something like that another one was a was a popular clothing stock it wasn't lulu lemon but imagine like a lulu lemon things like that and and so he was to when you say you know he's got four months of thinking was it actually four months like was he just sitting every day and doing research basically was he is that his actual day to day task or he was more of a passive investor kinda set it and forget it and then sometimes would would hear something or learn something and decide to make a change so i texted them i go hey i wanna talk about this do i be your permission he said yeah and then i said how do you actually make decisions because i am curious you know two point nine decisions a year what are you actually doing he said i study a few things that i can understand and i study them very deeply i keep very detailed notes and then i just wait for an opportunity blank company for example i had studied them extensively for about six months prior to covid and i really liked it but i thought it was expensive and so i spent a lot of days writing notes about it documenting my research saying saying what i'm learned reading the annual reports and i keep an eye on it and then when the market presented itself and the opportunity presented itself and it i got cheap enough i bought it that day so he is eric he is doing the buffet thing right he's basically spending everyday learning and then when there's a a moment moment in time going ahead and making position were you what what surprised you the most was it the number of decisions what else what else surprised you a few things surprised me the first thing is you know we love having investors on here from howard marx ray dolly ray shit and we're not investors not exactly you know sometimes maybe it's like a side hobby but i'm interested in those people because i'm very curious because it's it's such a black and white way to figure out someone's decision framework because there's very clearly like i thought about this i executed this whereas what startups it's a little bit more iterative where you can like you can go back in time and like fix something because you can kinda build it on the fly a little bit and so i'm very fascinated about this and then there's a cool quote it says let's buy warren buffett he says his investment strategy is let border on sloth that's like the cornerstone of his investment thesis so which i thought was interesting and i was like that's so fascinating and we had kevin ryan on the podcast kevin ryan is a guy who owns sort of like an incubator a startup up lab i don't know how you describe it but they've launched a a handful of like tens of billions of dollar startups and he was like i basically get one good idea a year and i thought that that was interesting that a lot of the people who i admire they do tend to make very few decisions throughout the year the second thing is that they don't organize over very small decisions i know that this is something that i do often and i think the way that you fix this is you determine what decision is reversible and which isn't and for the ones that are reversible don't sweat over them don't organize over them i actually think you there's a world where you're quite good at this where you're good at like categorizing which decisions are important versus which aren't would you agree yeah i do think i i do think i do that pretty well but it's because on this show we have spent hours talking to some of the best investors alive well lucky for you the team at hubspot they have pulled out the principles that matter most and turned it into a very simple easy to read wealth guide it's thirty five principles from the top investors we're talking guys who have been on the pod like howard marx man p bra morgan household cathy wood and a ton others so these are all their frameworks their mental models their rules basically how to play the long game and how to avoid ruin you can get it in the link below my default state i don't care so it's pretty easy then everything is ruled out unless it has a real reason i need to care whereas i think if your natural wiring is the opposite where you really are anxious or you think about everything and you think about everything that it feels like everything matters by default if that's your default it's very hard to then pull down eighty nine different things and convince yourself that they don't matter to find the one that does i'm so i think it's a lot of just your kind of nature in that sense of my nature is to not really care about most things my nature is the opposite which is i tell myself well like the way you do one thing there's always like cute phrases we tell ourselves the way you do one thing is the way you do everything therefore if you have a typo in this sentence you're gonna make bad businesses decisions slack yeah you're you're just a mess and so that tends to like tell my like neuro v or my neuro voice is kinda like telling myself like oh well everything matters but the last two things i noticed that these people i trying to write down like trends i've i've i've noticed amongst these people is that they know their circle competence quite well and there was a time where i was telling my friend i was like hey have you thought about investing in this company and i made this argument i was like i'm not actually gonna it but i do like to study it and he was like yeah that all sounds really good i don't know anything about that industry though so no i would never do that and i've not ever thought of it and there was this like weird like they say no not because it's a bad opportunity just because it's not within their like realm of genius and then the last thing was they tend to write their ideas down where they will write it down oftentimes you'll notice people write prem mortem have you heard of a prem mortem where you write down everything that can go wrong like was i still happy i you don't wanna do this thing called resulting where you say like this was a bad decision because the result was bad it should be this was a bad decision because the input or the framework was bad and so the do things like prem mortem or they journal or they're make arguments to themselves and why this is or is not a good idea so those are some of the trends i've noticed but i thought this was really cool to see on paper how many decisions a year this guy's is making who is he's a retail investor who's outperformed the market have you heard of the jack do prem mortem he did before he started square no what did what did he do so jack do had helped create twitter yeah i supposedly he it was his idea for twitter and he was the ceo of twitter for a long time yeah his next company was gonna be square and it is very easy when you just were the guy who created twitter and all of silicon valley has purchased real estate on your balls and you know it's very easy to get out on your own supply and so what did jack do do he humbled himself with a prem mortem and so before he started square i think he created a list called a hundred and forty reasons why square will fail he wrote down a hundred and forty reasons why and he he gave it to can we put buying real estate on your balls into the hall fame you know sometimes it's like we're just come out of your mouth before you can think about it that one i had the idea and i made a decision and i said it's i'm gonna let this one fly yeah looks that that would that would just that what it's place in the hall of fame some farts were not meant to be silent let's put it back there but i decided to let that one rip okay so so yeah so jack do wrote this thing and he said it was very useful because it's kind of the charlie mu thing where tell me if you know i all i wanna know is where i'm gonna die so i know not to go there and if you know why the reasons your company might fail in advance you can then and and not avoid that not not avoid the elephant in the room well then you can actually design a company that's going to achieve despite those potential failure modes you also so you know while you were talking about this i was thinking about mark zuckerberg while you were talking about it because he recently has been doing a lot of press he's on a bit of a victory lap at the moment again which feels honestly a little premature because like ai changes every the leader changes every you know six months of of who seems like they're dead versus who seems like they're ahead and right now muse is doing really well and so he's really excited and he's going out and and talking a bunch and but the stock agrees that it was a good decision so far right sure so he's but he's doing all kinds of stuff he's dropping f bombs and interviews now which you he really yeah it doesn't seem natural look this is that there's two different ones we could play the clips but the the first one he's in the backyard he's he's he's barb and so there were it was some he was like facet facetime somebody and they were like oh mark you smoking it you smoking meats again because remember like many years ago when he was trying to be trying to be cool and casual and he out himself as a robot basically yeah and he was like i'm smoking some meat and the smoker and he tried to have like a chilled four hour bat barbecue stream that didn't go well so this time he was like smoking meat like what type of meat he goes whatever the we want oh i guess and then the second one he was talking about he did an interview with alexander wang who alexander wang i think the youngest billionaire in the world right now so alex wang was a kind of math olympia ad kid who then went on to start scale ai which was like the one of the first big data companies for these or ai labs meaning the ai labs need data to train their models where do you get that data it's you know takes a lot of it's a grind kind of operational business to go collect have clean data for the labs so scale was doing that ultimately meta bought it for i think fifteen billion dollars or bought like a huge chunk of it and acquired they they basically a big part of it was just getting alex and so they asked up they go in the interview they were like why you know why alex and he's like yeah it's kinda weird right like what is this data guy gonna do with the social media guy and that's gonna be like the leading ai lab how does that work do they think this is why just kissed him on the mouth and he's like this is my golden child basically verbally verbally kiss him on the so they're sitting there this on cheeky pint and he's he says i tried to meet as many of the great founders of his kind of age group is generation as i could and i you know i would try to meet as many of them as i could and he he said i just realized alex is the guy he's the guy and that's it he's the guy and is complimenting like in this in this like just more absolute not overly intellectual thing but he's the guy and they were you know they're talking about how you know meta was getting tran for when they were doing vr and he was calling you know talking about the med and then it was just kind of like it wasn't really working he had made a big bet i think he'd put like sixty billion dollars just so you put a absurd amount of money into developing this like ten times the amount that they they spent developing the iphone was spent on oc wow and the vr program and it had produced nothing on par with the iphone so in terms of popularity and and users actually wanting it and so he was wrong in that but when ai came around he correctly pivoted to it and he said out loud he goes yeah this is a type of game where you're not like it doesn't he goes you don't get judged by your mistakes you're only judged by the things you got right and how right you got them when you got them right and so he kind of has given himself permission to make mistakes but make the type of mistakes where if i'm right i'm gonna be writing such a major way that it wipes out the history of all the battles i lost because i won the war and if he know z he like loves the roman empire he loves war he loves his favorite game was civilization and if you see even his shirts are like like latin for you know it's always like latin phrases for like give me z or give me nothing you know like stuff like stuff that used to be like about caesar and so i i think it's an interesting idea that's very different than investing of what you you were talking about we're investing warren buffett you know famously is like you know rule number one is investing is don't lose money rule them two don't forget rule number one where it's about having not making mistakes whereas entrepreneurship is the opposite you can make tons of mistakes as long as when you do get something right you have enough chips on the table you actually get them right in a big enough way bezos talks about this like with in baseball the the most you can get from a great hits four runs but in business you can get a thousand runs with one correct swing of the bat and so you just have to focus on getting those it corrects swings of the bat because when you do it's a thousand x it's a ten thousand x can i see a question about this i wanna ask about the z up but for alex wang he's twenty nine so scale was a fourteen billion dollar company so one of the largest private companies maybe top two hundred or something whenever it was bought or top one hundred when i hear what you're describing it's sort of like you're saying z was saying this guy is technical and knows what he's talking about and i've interviewed all these people and you almost sounded like you're describing him as an individual contributor are you saying that this guy led a fourteen billion dollar company and typically if you're the ceo of a company that big you're not the smartest in the room you're just pretty good at a bunch of the important stuff but when you described him it was like oh he's a great leader he's good at everything and also he knows ai better than all these other people so he was saying what he said about him specifically was his strategic mind so figuring out what should we be doing his declarative communication so his ability to communicate that effectively and then his like strong beliefs on execution so for example that for meta to win an ai they needed to have an extremely small team working on it not a big team so talent density how talent density was one of the most important care factors in the in the in victory and ai meaning what you don't want is two thousand pretty smart people on this you want twenty or max two hundred extremely smart people who can all hold the problem in their head the whole problem project in their head and they all know each other and they're talking to each other and it's tight and there's not too many voices in the room and that it should be extremely flat and the the way it's organized so he had these very strong opinions z believe was the correct answer and that because of that they should go ahead and and and try to pull it off so that's what he he kind of described this his his attributes of what what meant when he said he's the guy so a leader kinda he for sure like leadership ability not not he's not doing all the work another interesting part of this was is they were asked yeah i think it was on sen podcast and sen was asking i'm like so how did he know that you were good at those did you even meet the guy had you even meet mark zuckerberg why do you mean well you know meta was one of our big customers at scale but he goes yeah kinda just like does this every once in a while like every few months you know he would like he just hit you up and he's he's like he'll send he's like if i ever sent him a question in whatsapp like hey what do you think we should do about this i would get this extremely thorough extremely crisp whatsapp message that's almost like a blog post length delivered back to me goes can he goes that's just one of sucks like superpower it he's extremely good writer he's extremely clear in his thinking and he's able to the way most people send short quick text messages he's able to send long thorough text messages in the same amount of brain like in the same like time that it takes a normal person and then the exact opposite was true was he goes he also is quite you know humble for stuff for a guy who basically runs one of the you know the most valuable companies in the world he would always just text me hey what do think would should do about x he's like it wasn't just me he's sending that to you know twenty people that are not on the official board of advisors he's not waiting for the quarterly board meeting to discuss this with these like you know five star generals he were just anybody who we thought was smart he'll just say hey what do you think we're getting wrong here hey do think what do think we should be doing about this and you know he's not necessarily gonna just do what we say but he's constantly seeking from very smart people their take and then he's also using that to assess the talent of those people of who he thinks is consistently giving him back high signal on those things so i guess there's like two sides of the spectrum but basically like there are people where it's a dictatorship and they like for example cornelius van belt was like basically sort of like the elon musk of the eighteen hundreds he was the rich richest man in america and he was known for just like he would make decisions with very little transparency people wouldn't know why he was doing it he was described as shrewd where he would make a decision and people be like we have no idea why you're doing that and six months later it would reveal itself like oh he was right he predicted this like he was doing all the stuff in secrecy but then there's so many other leaders that tend to make the decisions almost in a consensus way which is very different from the popular belief on how leaders are and i have noticed that when i have when you and i or i have hung out with like people that are a hundred times more successful than i am oftentimes they'll ask my opinion and in my head i'm like i'm wade dumb with than you why are you asking my opinion like and i could tell that they're gathering information and i have found that to be like a super superpower amongst a lot of leaders yeah there's a what's that thing called dunn kruger the dun kruger effect where if you know nothing about a subject you have very little confidence if you know a little bit about the subject you have this false sense of too much confidence on it and then as you actually learn more about it you realize how little you really knew and and you your confidence on the subject dips right and this is why black belts and j who've been doing for twenty years are the ones who talk about how like i'm still at the beginner i'm a beginner at this i'm still just figuring this stuff out there are so there's so much more that i don't know than what i do know and then you have jonah hill who becomes a blue belt like i'll murder anybody who fights me know like it's like you get that blue belt confidence the blue belts feel like black belts and the black belts feel like blue belt it's like this this weird thing that happens with how much you know about a subject and it does seem like you know some of the smartest people are the ones who are the quickest to a admit how little they know b understand how big of a factor luck is in their success and see constantly be searching for insight from people who on paper should be you know are less accomplished less intelligent about the subject than they are because they they know they're were kinda always hunting for anything that resonates anything that has some signal to it and they know it can come from different places and they're they're humble enough to do it the should be part about doing this podcast is i i signed up for an executive coach and i've like done three or four sessions with them plus this like assessment and he was like you're really self critical of yourself i'm like dude it really sucks my job is i hang out with the people who are the best in the world that's what everything they do and he was like you described yourself as lazy you said that you're not ambitious he's like you seem very ambitious i'm like i hanging out with literally the t richest person on earth with you compare like whatever it is i am doing compared to that it is actually quite challenging because i realize what the levels are and how high they go and every once in a while i will definitely like shit on myself for feeling that way do feel that way sometimes i mean i try not to but i don't definitely feel that way you know what comparison thief for joy bullshit know like yeah that that's definitely true the only way to cope with it is to do two things one get comfortable in the game you're playing that i'm not playing the game that those guys are playing those guys are trying to change the world or they're trying to be the richest guy in the world or they're trying to have the most power they wanna run for president i don't wanna do any of those things and you know so that's that's the first thing because i get really comfortable in what game are you actually playing i don't think most people even are aware of what game they're playing in life like if i ask you it if you ask a normal person or even you ask one of your smart friends do you think they know what game they play no and in fact i've been doing this exercise where i've been asking people like before they ask me advice or whatever if they're wanting to brainstorm with me on their problem i'm like well where are you trying to be in five years and they'll be like i don't know i've never thought about that like there is a even amongst really successful people driven people there is a lack of like the end state looks something like this so i want you to i want you to imagine close your eyes and imagine a friend who is somebody respect smart accomplished let's say you somebody you think is smarter than you and more successful than you alright yeah alright if you ask that person what game are you playing what do you think that would be the words that come out of their mouth there'd be like what are you talking about like it be like shock okay so first they're confused what do you what are you mean really asking me and then you sort of explain well we're all playing some sort of game and maybe lebron james is playing right now lebron james age forty two is playing a game of i'm trying to defeat father the time and catch michael jordan that's really what he's doing so he's trying to defy the laws of aging to keep playing basketball at age forty two and then he goes and joins philly because he wants to win a championship and he wants to you know really cement himself as the greatest of all time right now is him and jordan who are comparing that's the game lebron is playing in the nba now another player on his same team might be playing a different game jail brown who just left the celtic or you know got traded away from the celtic and he was always the number two there and i think he wants to show what he's really capable of and he wants to show that you know i would say this year he's playing a game of proving himself it's approved myself game i wanna prove him one of the best players and that they made a mistake trading me away and most of the nba players that probably if you talk to i've talked to a couple of these guys they're like i'm just trying to have fun and make a good living yeah exactly i'm trying to trying to you know get this bread while the bread is there for to get you know i'm trying to i'm trying to make my first all star team i'm trying to get that next contract try to do something and so if you break it down into the aaron and so way of thinking about things the hero has something that they want and there's something that stands in their way that's a story intention and obstacle and so you know for example when we were in our twenties what was the game we were trying to play if we're honest it was trying to make it and then i think make it meant be a successful person make money you know become a multimillion millionaire was i think both of our goals hence you know part of the spirit of this podcast why it works because we kinda shared that chase that's when we met and we were both chasing that same thing we were both playing that same game now we played it different ways but we were both fundamentally playing that game and then when we got into our thirties it was like we started playing a different game it was this family i'm gonna start a family while still being successful but not in the sweaty grinding way i played in my twenties and i didn't know what that meant but i knew that's what i was trying to do and figured out how to do that through some combination of investing and having kids and doing doing all this good good stuff and you know then you might play a different game in a different phase and so what do you that person you were thinking about what game do you think they're actually playing probably just trying to do the same thing they were before which is they're already successful but they wanna go a level a a level above and be more successful and more powerful and more prominent and what's the why on that they don't they don't feel like they have enough they don't feel they feel like they won their game and they need to win another game in order to feel whole right okay so so i think it's you know but if if that person said that out loud they'd probably feel a little bit silly saying it feels feel stupid you i don't know i've never thought dude it i'm just trying to like built something great you know what i mean that's really like the answer somewhat defensive there's a great book called the score and it talks about how it games are this incredibly powerful thing so you let's take a game like he the way he says it is the game like if you if you decide to play a game the game decides what you want and who you need to be to get it so for example he's like let's say you play a game like char sc well to to play a game much char trades what do you want it's like i want my team to guess what i'm doing and so who do i need to be it's like i need to be really expressive i need to be really collaborative i need to be of a great communicator that's what i need to be to win this game if that same person goes in place mafia it's like i need to be a lying cheating bastard i need to be a sc in order to win this game and it's like it will change your whole personality depending on the game that you play it'll tell you what matters you play a certain game and then all of a sudden mobility and flexibility matters because you're playing twister versus another game that where you're playing you know body builder and you're trying to be as strong as possible and who cares about flexibility it'll completely changed the shape of your body yeah depending on what game you play and so i think it's pretty wild that most people put zero effort into this i just had to my good reads i'm reading it good suggestion normally would you say you read a book you don't really read the book so if you've read this whole thing then i just never read the whole thing i got i got like a voting majority i got over fifty one percent 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 should 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 i wanna give you one more little well because we are kris k right now and it's just a full glaze of silicon valley ceos i want to read you one more one more little story here about elon musk can i do that could we just finish the glaze yeah i don't think you glazed z by the way i think you made did you see him there was a meme of him trying to enjoy so basically the thing you're talking about is it was zach and alex wang and they were drinking guinness in an interview with the strike founder and there was a funny meme of him drinking guinness beer and there were like check out zach tried to act like he like drinking and get a spear and you could tell he had a little bit of a sc when he tasted it and it was sort of like a seventeen year old going to the first college party like okay here's the take everyone's making fun of him to me most relatable things zuckerberg is done in in decades anybody who's at of their first sip of guinness is like what the hell is yeah i remember the first time i jake get is i literally had the same reaction yeah tracy babe he's like to the decide like and that he's dude like the there's no music but but he no it's good savory just i honest i like my beer creamy but he said okay what about a lot so there's a he wants story that i don't even know if it's true but it's kind of like who cares it's a good myth it's good fable if if nothing else so it says elon musk was asked at a private dinner what he would do if spacex and tesla both failed simultaneously and he lost every dollar he had i believe this was back in like according to the story this is like back in o eight zero nine some when when tesla was on the brink of failure and so was spacex after three rockets failed the question was intended as a simple hypothetical ice breaker but his his answer lasted eight minutes and the table went silent here's what he said he would do he said he would move to the cheapest apartment he could find by a computer and start building the next thing within twenty four hours not a week later not after processing the loss within twenty four hours he said the loss of money would not bother him but the loss of the companies would devastate him but he would only let the devastation last one night the build the building would have to start the next day did somebody ask what would the next thing be he said he doesn't know and that not knowing would not slow him down the thing finds you you just have to be building when it arrives i think it's a pretty powerful idea and i wanted to share it here because that advice has really helped me in life my dad told me a very similar thing he goes you know yeah you wanna know which direction to go but if you don't you just gotta get moving it's it's about motion not direction and once you're in motion it's a lot easier to figure out direction and it's not that hard to change direction once you're in motion but it's pretty hard to do anything from a standstill and so this idea of of you know you just gotta get moving and and kinda be in a state of action when you're in a when you're in a a world of uncertainty didn't you just perhaps about something like that in your newsletter was that your newsletter that said something about actually plan and action there was a napoleon quote that was very yeah that's napoleon sir what is your next plan he replied i act in the plan of emerges from my action i really like this scott gallo had a good one that was said on the podcast and i remember writing down where he goes you gotta keep your sales up and we asked if we go what do you mean keep your sales up and he goes like look when shit's not good it's pretty easy to just get down on yourself and like droop but like if you're a boat just keep your sales up because you not you wanna be ready when that win comes and it'll give you that boost but it won't it won't work if you if you put your sales down when you're down and i just thought that's there's just like a great piece of motivation for people as like look alright you might be getting your your shit cake right now but keep your sales up because that win will come and when it does you know it'll help your boat so this is like a little bit of you've talked about this like motivation corner you motivation is cheesy thing that you're supposed to be too smart for but i don't know kinda kinda love me a good quote i do too when i we've said basically like motivation is good when you're like not successful but you wanna be successful not particularly good when you're in the thick of it and then it's also good again when you are become successful and you're like what do i make of all this right but when have you applied this to your life you i remember when we were doing our first company and things were not going well we like lab era no this was like in the sushi i just remember it was living an apartment we're were sleeping on air mattress we had like i remember we didn't even have like little we didn't have a trash can we would just take the garbage bag and we had a nail that we nailed into the wall and we would just nailed the garbage back to the wall and i remember like we would go out and like you if a if if any friend or a girl came over to our apartment she was just like what it what do what are you guys this is terrible and it was like kinda unnecessarily bad meaning we were letting the bad of our company see into the bad of our life that was a mistake and i remember one day who we lived in boulder you're like deserve this i'm filth i don't even deserve a trash hand yeah exactly we we treated ourselves poorly we we let kind of like the last play effect affect the next play if you ever play sports it was have like an next play mentality we didn't have an next play mentality we had a last play mentality things were bad yesterday probably gonna be pretty bad today we weren't saying that but we were acting that way and our level of productivity was going down and actually to switch it didn't require anything to change in our business it didn't even require a new strategy we just changed our routine and so we we kinda got our sales up a little bit meaning we i remember we went for a hike we just like it one morning we're were like forget work we're going for a hike and we lived in bolder and we we hike the flat arms and we were just on such a high from physically doing something hard and having like a win even though it was a win unrelated to the business it was a win to ourselves and then when we came back in we like had a better attitude therefore had better ideas and we had better ideas we actually kinda believed in them a little more because we just had to win this morning and this is all sounds very basic to anybody who like lives a good life and has like healthy routines and what whatnot but we were in a a bit of a downward spiral and needed to like reverse it and reversing it like what we thought needed to reverse was that our situation needed to change or our outcomes needed to change or our like success needed to change and in actuality we just needed to like do some basic shit to get our sales back up it's like get the trash can go for the go for the hike clean up the room you know where your good outfit today like let's go let's go like start stacking some small wife wins and and then operate from that place 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 how 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 applying and go through this vetting 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 sorta of like when people listen to 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 success then check it out the url is join hampton dot com again the url join hampton dot com i think that these things that you're talking about like we can make fun of them because they're small and it seems silly to like tell your tell your bros like about these small little motivational things but they make huge impact for example i hate flying every time i've flown for the last fifteen years i've been on xanax i take i have xanax are flying i hate it i read this book about a month ago it's called dare d a r e and it's drug the drug program it's the same name but it stands for it's a book on how to deal with panic attacks and the d stands for dismiss and so what that means is yeah i'm gonna get panic so what who cares whatever a stands for a allow and be like yeah let's go i'm ready i'm open to it let's get panic r stands for run towards which is now i want it i want this panic attack to come faster let's go baby and then e stands for engage once the panic attack has reached its climax so you think okay it's passed let's engage in a new activity let's read let's listen to whatever music i'm listening to let's engage in this conversation and i read that book and i had a flight coming up i had to go to jackson hold the day other day and i went sober it was the first time that i've done that in fifteen years and it was because of that one like i i read i i read half the book because i i just needed to for it to tell me what da met and i was like i'm good i'm gonna try that and so i found myself like putting myself in situations where i would get walk me through your where did you start the d is it at the airport is way before that walk me through step by i step there was two one was it was the first time that we had left both of our kids for like a a four night trip so i was like nervous not because my i was gonna miss them but my little girl was showing a little bit signs of separation so i was starting to get nervous and so i found that it was like compounding i was like getting her worked up and i was getting when and i like oh my gosh so i started at the night before but then when i got to the airport i found myself like okay and about forty minutes i'm getting on that plane the door is gonna shut and i'm gonna get panic let's go let's see how powerful this thing is i'm so excited to put this into place i'm pumped i'm gonna get panicked i'm gonna freak out for a minute and i'm gonna see how wonderful this new exercise is i'm so excited and there is like some science behind us which is basically like when you wanna get panic it's kind of impossible to get panic it's like do you know cray do you know are you actually crazy if you tell yourself that you're crazy and you're aware you're crazy it's like one of these things where it's like heart you know it's like a some weird logic like that but and so like forty minutes before i was alright i'm gonna feel it and then when i actually sit to see i'm like in two minutes there about to close of that door and it's go time there's no git now i'm trapped here baby like it was as if like instead of like being like i'm trapped in here with you it was like you're trapped in here with me now like like yeah i remember like it was as if i'm at the octagon with this is like you hear the door closed it's like you're stuck baby like and i and it totally worked this exercise which was totally a woo woo mine thing was like night and day meaning nice different experience or it was just a lessened version of what you usually have you know it's messed up i've flown a my whole life it landed it's on the tar after we land jacksonville it land lamb lamb it takes right off again and my wife my wife touched me she goes why are we taking you off again and i've looking around and it took eight minutes and i was like what is going on i put my shoes on i'm like there's a attack like we're gonna get ready i was like getting i'm starting to get really nervous just board the israel playing thing had just happened and i'm like we gotta get ready i don't know what's happening and then the guy's like okay so our brakes went out and i had to make the last minute decision to take off again we have to go to salt lake city now now don't freak out because planes have multiple types of breaks i'm gonna do like a reverse thruster and when we land there's gonna be a lot of fire trucks there don't worry it's probably gonna be fine and that was my next forty five minutes and i still did a drug free but that was lid lymphoma ladies it's and gentlemen we heard sam thinks that hospital just gonna quickly tessa us yeah who's locked it with who bitch exactly dare this bitch dare to reverse land so i freaked out a little bit but it totally worked i feel like that method works for many more things in panic attacks right yeah i think that i saw this great i've been really i was i've been trying to work with little panic thing for claustrophobic it's been a huge issue with me but your panic is about being locked in that it's claustrophobic or that it's a airplane that could it's cost so like for years i wouldn't take the new york subway and then i started like doing like exposure therapy where i was like alright i used claude and i found the shortest destination on subway i'm gonna go on it just that day and like i worked on it and like the idea of going on like a cruise ship and being on me in the middle of the ocean i that is like the worst thing on earth to me i wanna hear about that and so i've been working on this and so i was like studying like fear and panic and how to get used to it and i saw this really cool video with the coach of do i tell you about this george saint pierre i know i don't think you told me about this video so a lot of sort of like investors a lot of mma coaches who you'd expect to be these like big meat heads and many of them are they're really philosophers they're like philosophers a little bit they're like really into this stuff and the reason they're into this is because getting in your underwear and going to like kinda fight to the death in front of a million people that's a very traumatic scary thing so how do you prepare yourself to do that and so they start to study this stuff about fear and this guy i forget his name but he's he wants a hobby or yes yes is is that the arab guy from canada yeah he's cool he's very thoughtful he's he's he he comes off like a a philosophy guy but he's a coach for mma and george s pierre one of the greatest u fc fighters as all time also a very academic sounding person and he was like you know george doesn't like to fight like he doesn't like to hurt people but he loves training and you know he got good and so he kinda came to his career but he didn't like to fight and frankly he was very fearful he was not the guy that was like conor mcgregor that's like i cannot wait to get into combat that wasn't george and so what we did to make him less fearful is months leading up to the fight we would start training the actual day of so he would eat the meal before training that he was gonna eat that morning before the fight but then we would take it a step further we would we got u gloves so not like practice gloves wear the exact ones that we thought he was aware he would dress in his u outfit and then also before he would train we would have the competitors walk up music play and then we also went and got these huge lights that we put around the octagon so it felt the same heat and the same brightness and so he could start getting used to these jitter and i was thinking i was like it's kind of interesting that they do this for like the scariest thing on earth but when i have a hard conversation like i have to fire or someone or something oftentimes i'm going through that motion unprepared meaning in my head i've sort of thought about it and i was like next time i'm like gonna actually do like a y corporate thing that i'm fearful of a negotiation a firing having a tough conversation i'm like the next day i'm going into that conference room and i'm literally gonna do like the walk through exactly how i feel and i should do that for everything i feel and so in preparation for this flight stuff i found myself like occasionally i would like actually pack my suitcase or i would like go through the same motion and i'm like this feels silly but like it does feel nice because this does make me nervous when i'm packing for a flight to get and so it was really useful to hear his perspective on how they would get down to the very granular details of the the fight and replicate it so your nervous system was used to it that's really interesting there's also probably a sometimes you really anticipate events like let's say you're something you're excited about i think something's gonna happen and often the anticipation is is more than the actual and it kinda leads to disappointment for she see this off founders to sell their company or you know achieving something and the yeah you know and then you kind of almost the anticipation was more more exciting this in science study this that actually the peak of enjoyment comes in the anticipation lead up to the event not the event itself or the aftermath of the event i feel that way whenever i buy anything like when i'm the three months that i'm researching buying a new car or buying like right a winter coat i love it and then i like get the coat and i'm like oh okay like you know what i mean like just buying even the smallest things i anticipate it so much what happens is rarely the in on a high anticipation event rarely does reality match the high so this leads to disappointment when it's something you're excited about now when it's something you're dread but it sounds like you're allowing the anticipation to happen in a big way beforehand well then when the real thing happens it's kinda dull compared to what you anticipated and it almost blunt the effect just it's kinda like using the thing that disappoint you on something of you're excited about what was something you're scared of you use it to your advantage because the real thing is actually less scary less less novel less has less stimulation because you've spent the time in the state i mean my guess is that that has something to do with it yeah because all the things leading up to anything that you're fearful of contribute oftentimes just more you know as much as the actual nervous thing so like when you're laying in bed the night before you have to have difficult conversation oftentimes that part is more miserable than when you're actually in the middle of it well i used to run track and field and and we run these races and it's not like that seen and that you get beat up but it's the same thing where you're like even if i do good during this race i'm about to go through pain all my friends and family are here i don't wanna be nervous i don't wanna embarrass myself and oftentimes in the middle of the race you you're not fearful at all but leading up to it you freak out and the weird thing is if i think about like the scariest thing ever did probably probably this the the scariest thing i ever kind of signed up to do was with skydiving i wasn't really scared going into it again mostly because i didn't really i didn't really care i everything think too much about it but once you start going up and you realized oh ten thousand feet is we're over the clouds i literally can't even see the earth like i and then you know my friend went before i just saw him go he just jumps and disappears i don't know what my friend is gone it's i'm like actually you know i'm feeling it when i was up there and the weird thing is that the antidote to the fear was not really like bravery or getting over it are convincing myself that it's not scary like that was hard to impossible for me it was just acceptance i was like i'm like you know when you sky for the first time he don't do it by yourself you're i'll hook to an instructor and i was you're not getting out plan up for the guy he's someone out he's going on i'm hooked to him it's happening and just the acceptance of like well it's happening so that so that part is like the kind of like do i don't die should i shouldn't i i don't want to i'm gonna have to i don't have to do it it's going to happen once i accepted that it is already going to happen that already like neutralized i don't know fifty percent of the fear and then it was kinda more of what you were talking about i was like well if it's gonna happen then alright bring it let's feel the rush let's see what this is let's go i wanna i want this to go i let's go for it then if we're gonna do this i don't i wanna go skydiving in half to do this or be scared the whole time while i'm doing this panic let me let me enjoy this because it's happening anyways and the acceptance was pretty key to like moving past that first emotion to the next emotion which was not like not like still still had fear in it and and in that cocktail but wasn't like pure fear well maybe daryl will change your life too it's my life once dismiss allow run towards engage it was a great little other great little you just film the commercial with the egg crack the egg bag this is your this is my brain on a plane alright alright that's it that's a odd i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal less travel never looking back alright let's take a quick i wanna tell you about marketing school it is 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 were actually out there in the field doing it this is the podcast for you check it out wherever you get your podcast