You Don’t Need A Mentor -> Focus On THIS Instead

thing that i think anybody really talks about it's kinda touchy feely but every single successful person i know has a story like this i feel like i could rule world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a roll less travel sam i wanna do a short episode that is about one specific topic of levers so a lot of founders i know are interested in getting investors getting advisors i'm sure you get hit up a lot in your email for either hey will you invest in this what you advising in this so i think everybody needs somebody in their career usually in your early twenties that believes in you more than you believe in yourself at the time they they just have an irrational belief you're a penny stock but they see you as a blue chip and they wanna buy up all your stock and they do that by spending time with you by spending effort with you sometimes investing you sometimes advise you but it's not the advice it's not the money that actually now in hindsight when you look back is what mattered the thing that really mattered was this person believed in you more than you believed in yourself at the time and that they were they almost tricked you into believing in yourself or to just going for it and overcoming that initial like hesitation or doubts to just get going to where finally your evidence will start to catch and eventually you're fueled by your evidence and you're fueled by you know your your own self belief but it's like jumping jump starting a car that there's people in your life who do that i i you know i've never talked you about this i i know a couple of people want my wife i did this i hear did did you have this i had this with a couple people first of all my wife i felt like she was like doing the same thing when i met her she was like picket stocks and she paid a go when i i hope yeah i had two the first one was scott be so scott be currently is the chief product officer of adobe soon to be ceo i think and he's probably a billionaire because he's has started to and sold a bunch of companies and i called emailed him when i first started my company the hustle asking him to invest and he said no and then about six or eight weeks later i he was on our daily email and i got an email from him in particular when i was having a horrible day and he goes these emails are just so good i have to join and he gave me like fifteen thousand dollars or something like that and i only met with scott in person one time and like because scott has always been he was a big deal back then he's an even bigger deal now and he had one meeting with me where he taught me i had never heard the word steward you know steward like you were a steward of this capital you were a steward of the brand and he gave me this pump up talk and he's like you are so like i could tell you were gonna be a steward of of the hustle and a steward of my money and everyone else's money your customers you have this and and i remember thinking it changed my life the fact that scott fucking be believed it be and he used this word stuart i was so into it the second person was tim ferris so i have told the story before but basically i met tim ferris because he lived near me in san francisco and we would walk our dogs the same time and just talk about neighborhood stuff well a few weeks after we first started talking i get an email from tim saying hey i know what the hustle is it looks really cool could we meet and get dinner and i can ask you a little bit about email because i wanna start a newsletter and i was yeah sure let's do it man and so we go out to dinner in in our neighborhood and i get down to sit at dinner and he goes oh you are the dog owners guy like you are the same guy and i was yeah man what's going on because i never told him what i did for work when we would walk our dogs together because i wanted him to think didn't wanna bother them because he was like a celebrity to me and i didn't wanna ruin that relationship and it was awesome the fact that this guy like wanted to meet with me and i he was like what you guys are doing is so smart so innovative and i was like it's not that interesting he's like no it and he like bought into me and he believed in me and that was such a big deal to me that he gave me the time of day just even just a dinner it was like game changing where i was like i'm the man i'm the man i'm the best like there is no one better than me and i had that like energy because of those two meetings and did you use that as i guess like did was it just like a temporary high that that fades you know thirty minutes later or do you feel like that planted some kind of seed in you it planted a seed because then i would look at scott and tim's other endeavors you know they did some amazing stuff and it felt good you know how when you go to a website and you see someone who puts your logo on their website to brag that they use you you go to like hubspot dot com and like nike it says like nike use it and i felt so much i felt so much gratitude that i was one of the logos on their websites do you what i mean and i remember like thinking that i'm like look like best person picks a bunch of winners and i happened to be part of this basket i feel i feel honored and so i would use that for a long time of like go to his crunch based profile he lists the hustle as an investment and i remember thinking like i was so special and i used that for fuel for a long time dude that's a that's a great story have you done that for anyone else do you think yeah look you and i you and i have done it together on this podcast when we call people out and i think like for example michael from our future this kid who was probably twenty years old but he called emailed the you and to make videos for us and we loved his energy but i think that like you and i both bought into him a little bit where like your energy is so good or same with dylan and henry like yeah i think you and i have done it together who bought in who bought yours so i'll give you three quick quick examples the first one is a woman named lisa ke lisa ke is a professor i do she was at the time i have no idea what she's doing now it's a good reminder to look her up and drop in a note i took a class my last year at dude i was a pre bed student i taken the mca i ready to go to med school and my my last semester i said i should take a class of my two best friends it's crazy we're friends through college we lived together we'd never taken a class together we decided let's take the easiest class we can i was so burned out from take from studying for the mca i just wanted something that was like the easiest class we looked it up on right by professor dot com and it was like easiest class is a class called getting rich sounds good good good title and she was just clickbait bait us like it was a personal finance and entrepreneurship class but getting rich sounds a lot better and she was a woman who she had a crazy story she graduated from duke with a degree and mandarin because that's what she was interested in she just followed what she was interested in and she remembers she told her us she's like i remember at the time feeling completely clueless what the hell i'm supposed to do with my life because all my friends were going to lost school banking whatever i didn't wanna do those but it just felt like school was just giant like pipe they'll just dumped you out in new york or la or san francisco and one of these tracks and i wasn't on one of the tracks and i felt bad about myself and i realized like you know people are like what the hell you can do with this mandarin degree and they're like good luck with that and she's like i bet i can figure something out in china but so she just moves to china one way to take it ends up building a great business there connecting chinese companies with american companies because she spoke both languages hey anyway she got super rich in the process retire by thirty comes back to duke to teach and so the reason she bet on me or believed in me early well she was not an investor she really wasn't even an advisor she was a believer we had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain we were like why isn't there a chipotle for sushi and we were like we'll do it even though we had no restaurant experience though sushi experience or nothing and everybody i talked to every adult every grown up that i looked up to was basically like restaurants equal fail doing a startup up versus going to med school like i don't know man like are you sure like you just you just got you just got got accepted in like you should just go and she was the only one who was like this sounds awesome you guys should that you could totally do this and at the time i took that as she believes in our idea we have a good idea and i wish i could say that she believed in us but she never even really know us that well she was actually just such a good believer that like if you just do the most interesting thing and like the most exciting thing an ambitious thing for you in your life at the moment shit works out she was just a believer in the path more than even us but at the time i interpreted as she thinks we can we're gonna wait she thinks this is a good idea and that this is gonna work and so even false belief will work it'll it'll fuel your engine for a while not only false belief but just her one conversation with you which she does not remember and at the time she was like but like what i'm saying is that important this is no big deal and conversations like that make such a big impact every once in a while you don't like when your kid draws something and then they show it to you and it looks horrible but you're like this is awesome oh my god did you how did you think of this or like whatever like are those two colors does that because of this and you make them feel like they're a fucking artist she did that for me except i was eighteen years old i was twenty two years old or something like twenty one years old and seemed looked at my shitty business plan and she was like that's awesome you could totally do this and i it fueled me and so lisa case was the first one and she it was genuine by the way there was no like bs in it i think she genuinely had that level of enthusiasm and excitement about it and it was contagious it cannot be fixed when somebody's genuinely excited for you the second person was this guy named john pre so we got into some accelerator you're supposed to get assigned with a mentor which is like the most fake way you can get him mentor like it gets assigned to you and this guy put in a request he goes because i want these guys and it was because he himself although now he was doing some fintech company his first business was he was a franchise of boston market and he was like oh if these guys did do a restaurant thing i can help them out and he helped us out in two ways the first was he gave us real talk so he took us into we came his office and he was like so what's the plan and we told him the whole business i give him the pitch we had practiced a million times then he goes is this she gonna work or or not and just him asking us that way like jar and i was like i have no idea which is like not what you're supposed to say when you're pitching or investors or employees or anyone really supposed to just say of course it's gonna work here's the research here's the studies here's why just the plan i was like dude i have no idea and he goes so you probably shouldn't sign a lease the you know a personal guarantee at a ten year lease right if you don't know if this concept is gonna work is said y so how can you figure out if the concept gonna work you just asked a better question like instead of where should we launch like what what what location should we go for he's like how do you figure out if this is even worth doing people want this and he gotta think and he gotta say eventually do like a cloud kitchen and so he helped us that way but the thing he did afterwards was much more valuable after we so he he talked to us for about an hour and you know the bad news was we were dumb the good news is we knew we were dumb whereas there was a lot of twenty one year olds who were dumb but they think they're smart we had the one asset which was we thought we were pretty dumb and so when somebody told us a good idea or somebody seemed smarter than us we actually like took them up on it and so he told us to do these three things or think about these three things so we just immediately went and did those three things and then four days later we like hey john we did those four things here's what we learned here's what we're gonna do next and so he was like this is are great which is now that i'm in the position where sometimes i give people advice that never happens like it seems like the obvious thing to do but actually that rarely ever happens rarely do people ask your question genuinely want the answer then take take good advice and and act on it and come back and say here's what happened they closed the loop and say here's what happened here's what we're gonna do next and so he wrote his blog post and what he said in the blog post i don't believe was true at all at the time but dude that was like a gust of wind in our sales he goes i met these founders and i've met a lot of founders probably a hundred founders and i've i've given a lot of advice he goes these guys i took what i said they acted on it immediately violently he goes one of the most important things for an entrepreneur is a high bias for action he goes and these guys named us and he goes they have the highest bias for action of anyone i've met in the last ten years i didn't even know that phrase it's kinda you like you're talking steward like i didn't even her bias for action that i was not a phrase i'd ever heard but i was like fucking put that label on my back that's me now i you know i a blank canvas before that i was an empty vessel and him giving me that label became kind of like calling cards ago y i don't don't know what the right actor but i the right answer is but i know that how i do things is i have a high bias for actions i'm just gonna take a shit ton of action and i'll figure things out that way and so he gave us like a real gift in that moment which was again not really true but it didn't matter it was like true in my mind and therefore he gave me something to strive towards which reminds me of your your be story so check this out so john is an entrepreneur i guess he i think as a podcast too i found i won't say too much i don't know if you want people to see this i found an old sean website that is basically your resume and on your website and on this website it has references and you've got one from john i would bet on these guys in almost anything they have the highest bias to action of any entrepreneurs i've met in the past few years and then it links off to this blog post that he wrote about you which is insane in the blog post he has a conversation that you guys had together and it's pretty funny exactly so he is so that was the second one and the third one is michael birch michael birch he was the guy who was what i wanted to be he was silicon valley billionaire built multiple successful companies was living the life had a cool office in san francisco and i came i moved to san francisco to work with him and so i i worked with him and eventually he ended up promoting me he was the ceo at the time i was junior guy and the company i was twenty four years old probably youngest guy in the company and he actually promoted me to ceo which was insane this is you know to like a eighteen person company at the time and it wasn't that he promoted me is it was the speech he gave he goes it it took me off sight and i thought i was getting fired because that's what i had seen in movies as they take you like out to coffee because they wanna like shoot you their head out there and not cause the scene in the office so i texted my mom i was like oh no he wants to be off like i'll be home for lunch you know it's over had a good run it was fun but like yeah whatever i was doing there making it up as i went i did something wrong he sat me down and was him his wife and he goes you know when you meet somebody sometimes you just know and i think he's talking about his wife and he goes i bet a lot of people silicon valley i know now i win somebody special and they're gonna do something special in their career because you're either gonna do it here or elsewhere so i wanna give you the keys have you do it here and i was blown away you know know it was like a astrology reading like it didn't mean anything no evidence there was no logic there was no explanation no rationale but him just saying you know you're gonna do something special you know that fucking fueled me i i i then like failed for like six years straight right after that which felt horrible because this guy believed in me and i just felt like i couldn't deliver this you know a billion dollar company that i was supposed to but that fueled me for a very long time dude this more than anything inspires me to give these speeches to other people yeah i'm just gonna be a willy nilly baby everybody's getting the fortune cookie from me from now can i just tell you one of the fun things that i've seen this week so on sean's this looks like sean is like a year out of college on or he's twenty four years old on your website which i assume is your resume basically you have your height and weight listed so it says sean per twenty four years old six foot hundred and sixty five's a hundred and sixty seven pounds of pure hustle yeah dude i i didn't know like twisted twisted steel and sex appeal like you you're just like you've listed you you're height and weight on your resume and he said i live on a stage run on fumes and i'm willing to take big risk my god that is so funny we're you're the greatest founder in the world they don't call you the greatest founder they call you show poor it's a unit right yeah i said i didn't know how to make a resume i didn't know what you're supposed to do so i just like thought from for friends like would i do it i it was it's like half nba draft scouting report like my height my weight think i did it you could see it on there i did a thing that was like you'll probably see this i did like skills bar like an nba two k where it's like this person was like good at three point shooting bad at dunking like out and i i remember i did this and the guy in the interview was like so i looked at your resume if we're call that and he goes hard work is only like halfway full like why why would you why would you say that you don't work hard i was like well true that's why dude not a lot of your sup is accurate by the way he does have that twenty four that so over ten years ago negotiations was high design medium programming nothing public speaking almost a hundred out of a hundred you had attributes son you you you knew exactly be you're on point right high this is such a funny website this is so funny yeah organization under fifty like like on the scale of zero to hundred my organization's a forty that's true you know that where's my hard work my hard work ethic i okay yeah i gave myself like a seventy whereas like you know improvisation i give myself a ninety this is fucking i an accurate at least i i told more lies this is so funny and then you have like a collage of all the stuff where that says hot off the press and has it's a collage of all the times that you've been mentioned in media this is awesome it's actually cool to see i bet you're a lot of people listen to this so she chicago when did when i did that my final interview with the with the billionaire he scrolled down to the bottom i had this little like motivational poster looking i mean it's all cringe now dude like i let's let's get a cringe it's this is all very cringe but i'm like it's like proud cringe like when you look back and you're like oh i was a geek in high school but like you know this kid's places that's it but felt like i was going and i had one thing on here that they got reference i she was like you know why i like to resume the very last line on your things said don't believe you're own bullshit i like that and that like resonated with the you know the billionaire and i was like oh man i was just throwing shit at the wall this whole thing was like a hundred possible things that might resonate you're like i actually did believe my own bullshit and it works like i from all this shit and it got me here that's awesome i like looking this website by the way yeah believers versus advisors i'm on board you'd be a believer for somebody and if somebody leaving in you it's a good reminder today to hit him up and thankful for it that's what it that's that's the takeaway here that's it i feel like i could rule to word i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's on on a road travel never looking back