Brutally Honest Advice to My Younger Poorer Self

This is my most brutally honest advice to my younger self. You can beat 99% of people simply by continuing to work without needing your immediate reward.

This bit is advice to my younger self on how I'd work harder.

You're gonna lose sleep. You'll doubt whether it'll work. You'll stress to make ends meet. You won't finish your to-do list. You'll wonder if you made the right call and have no way to know for years. This is what 'hard' feels like.

And that's okay.

The other great reason for working harder is that the harder you work, the more you realize what you used to think was hard work, is not even close to what you're capable of.

Because if you want to know what the most dangerous money-making combo in the world, it's work ethic and time.

Because once you realize just how much more work it takes to go from good to great, you realize you can only be great at a few things and ignore the rest.

The amount of work it takes to be good negates the ability to be great at more than one or two things.

Because there's just only so much time.

It just takes work. Shit loads and shit loads of work. Every time I try and dress it up or cut a corner, I get brutally reminded by life that the work just needs doing.

So yes, this is your friendly reminder that it's okay to work on weekends.

I used to think that if I worked on something for a day, it was a lot. I was like, dude, I worked on this for a whole day. That was like a huge amount of work and I would say that to someone to show them how hard I worked. And then it became like I worked on this for a week and then a month. And I would say now that I can work on the same project for a year or two years and that's what like to the books, it's been huge projects for me. My quickest shorthand on the shift in work is that I started counting in hundreds. Hundreds of minutes, hundreds of hours, hundreds of days towards a specific goal. If you count in hundreds, it just automatically forces you to do a significantly larger amount of effort, just sheer volume of work.

I think one of my favorite parables about work is that there was an art class. They split the class into two groups. And one group they said, make the absolute best pot and turn in one pot.

And the other group they said, make as many pots as you possibly can. At the end of the semester, the team that had to make as many pots as humanly possible, not only made more pots, but also ended up making better pots than the one that spent all of their time trying to make one.

I think a lot of people need that permission to have a lot of shitty first drafts in order to start working harder on anything.

But that's not how I operate, because for me, I would rather spend a lot more time on my first drafts.

So I don't have to make so many more edits.

If you do it the right way, you realize how many hours you're gonna have to put into something and usually most people that I feel like haven't done that level of effort confront the work and then they get scared about it.

I have to find a different way. This can't actually be how people do this.

That is how you do it.

The work just needs doing and no one's gonna do it for you.

I started with a normal hourly job and I think a lot of people do.

A lot of early job thoughts or lessons are that when you show up to work, you are working because you're getting paid to be there.

When you start working for yourself, you're not getting paid to be there. You're only getting paid on what you do.

I've gone on vacations with other entrepreneurs, they're like, man, we had a crazy work. I was like, I was with you.

Homie, like that was not a work.

These are off days for me.

Like these aren't like real work days because work occurred. It to me is not a work day.

Unless I have a clear output for what I have done or move forward, work didn't happen.

The longer you can delay when you need to be rewarded for the work that you do, the greater the outcome is.

It's kind of like a plane taking off.

The longer the runway, the bigger the plane.

And so a lot of people can barely even get a bottle rocket off the ground because they have such a short attention span.

And such a need for immediate reward.

If you feel like you're behind where you should be by now, if you feel like you're losing, if you're not sure it's gonna work, there's nothing wrong with you.

That is entrepreneurship.

You're on the right path. You're doing the right things. You're seeing the milestones along the way, but the milestones aren't parades.

It's uncertainty, it's sleepless nights, it's not knowing if you can make payroll. It's not even being sure that the five years you put into this idea is actually gonna turn into something that you'll get credit for eventually.

The biggest shift that I had internally during those harder times was that I am the output of my work.

All of this effort is to create who I want to become. I get to use that as my reward every day rather than the approval of strangers.

Sitting in uncertainty is the feeling of entrepreneurship.

You're not doing it wrong.

Like that's what it feels like.

It's kind of this weird dichotomy of feeling like you never have enough time, but then you also have all the time in the world.

The biggest reason that a lot of entrepreneurs don't succeed is because they're in a rush.

The rush is what creates poor decisions and so they consistently hop from thing to thing to thing because they think this thing will get them there faster.

By hopping consistently, they guarantee that they'll never get there.

And I think we have a culture that rewards speed because everybody wants things fast and easy.

In $100 million offers, the book, I talk about value. You have a dream outcome and then you have basically everything that discounts or multiplies it.

A discount would be risk associated with it.

I want this thing, but I want it to be guaranteed, I want it to be easy, and I want it to be fast.

And entrepreneurship is literally the opposite of that.

The dream outcome's there, but it is not guaranteed, incredibly hard, and takes forever.

The problem is that it's so compelling to sell people on that and there's so many more ad dollars that go into it's fast, it's easy, and it's guaranteed.

That it's really tough to shift the landscape of the language around entrepreneurship.

Because there's just so much money to be made by making that promise.

The concept of the the billionaire who like starts back over and they're like, could he do it again?

It's like, well, of course.

The problem with the show is is that they give you 90 days.

The premise is wrong.

And I get why they do it is because they have to cater to people who think that way, which is most people.

Can you build a million dollar business in 90 days?

But it's like, but he could build a much bigger business in two years and that billionaire would probably never build the business that he builds on the show.

So it actually reinforces the wrong perspective.

From a brand foundation perspective.

It's how can I build a reputation over a long period of time, not necessarily with the intent to transact.

But simply to build a reputation associating myself with these positive things.

That takes time.

For one, lots of people to find out about you and two, for a lot of people to develop a strong affinity.

And make multiple associations with you so that it's stronger.

The classic example of that is somebody who makes content for five years and then launches a product and the product is immediately a billion dollar thing.

Well, it's not that they made a billion dollars in a year, it's that they spent five years letting the roots go down for the bamboo tree and then eventually it shoots up, right?

On the other hand, you've got kind of product-based foundations.

Software, you might take a long time to code and like write a huge code base that could go after some big problem.

It can be regulatory stuff.

Because if you're wanting to get into like banking, for example, there's lots of barriers to entry.

Even if you're starting an e-commerce brand, you would be talking to different manufacturers.

You'd be going through prototypes, you'd be trying things out, you'd be testing it in beta groups to get feedback.

And then you'd probably have some sort of capital investment to capitalize your first inventory run.

All of those things are the foundations.

The reason I like service businesses for people who are starting out is that you don't have to do either of those things.

But if you had one or two or both of those things, then you can create something bigger, faster, on a longer time horizon.

It's actually the classic example of how long do you sharpen the axe?

If someone is doing a business that they have no leverage because they built no foundation, they basically just take whatever axe is given to them and they just start hacking away at the tree.

Except in the game of business, the tree might be a mile wide and the axe that you have could be a lightsaber.

If you spent enough time sharpening it, even if it took one guy a year of going from dull axe to lightsaber, he would still catch up at year two.

And then from year two to 10, doesn't even get close to the other guy.

But the problem is that everybody listens to everyone else who's judging them on their time horizon.

Like you quit your job on a employee time horizon, your family's like, have you started making money yet?

And you're like, it's been two weeks.

They're like, well, yeah, this is when you would normally get a paycheck.

Your measuring stick has to change when you get into a different game.

Sometimes the fastest way to get to $1 million a year isn't the fastest way to get to $10 million a year.

And to the same degree, the fastest way to get to 10 isn't the fastest way to go to 100.

If we're measuring effort in terms of stress and hours per day, running a local restaurant takes the same amount of work as building an application that could be a billion dollar application.

And it might take you a few years for a restaurant.

To build a reputation in the area, get locals coming in, hire and train good talent.

Like it takes a lot of work to do all that stuff.

And to the same degree, hiring really good development engineers and creating a prototype.

Like the actual work and stress is almost identical.

It's almost like you have three slot machines that you're going up to and they all cost the same cost.

But one of them has a billion dollar payout, one has a $10 million payout and one is a $100,000 payout and everyone just lines up for the $100,000 payout.

The third variable if we're gonna like make this into dimensions.

The next one is how long are we measuring the payout for the slot machine?

We assume that slot machines pay out immediately.

But if one slot machine pays out now, one pays out in a year and one pays out in five years, what if the odds were the same, but you only got one coin?

Which one would you do?

People say they would do the billion dollar one, but based on their behavior, they're just standing at the at the the fast token machine.

Not being able to break it.

The fact that you don't know if it's gonna work is exactly what makes it worth doing.

It's why entrepreneurship isn't for the faint of heart.

Embrace uncertainty.

What makes entrepreneurship hard isn't the work, it's not knowing whether it'll work.

We're afraid of wasted work.

But if it makes you better, no work is wasted.

And as long as you can make that connection, you're not going to burn out.

You're just doing what it takes.

The biggest metal lesson of my entire life was when I lost everything the first time.

I had sold all the gyms and then that was my nest egg for my five years of work, even though it was not as much as I had hoped, but it was still something.

And then I put that all into the next thing and then lost it all.

But after losing it all, I was able to immediately go out and make $100,000 the next month.

With nothing, maxing out a credit card to do it.

That moment was when I was like, oh, like I thought that the gyms were the thing that I had built.

But it was my skills.

Is the thing that I had built.

I consider skills income insurance.

You just know that you will be able to make money.

People want to invest in the stock market because they want to have a retirement. If you invest in skills, that is your retirement.

Because you will always be able to trade them for money.

And whether the money is in Bitcoin, seashells or dollars, you'll always be able to trade something of value.

I'm sure this is gonna piss off the exact same people that we think it's going to piss off.

You don't need a weekend. The concept is barely 100 years old. It's a modern invention.

What you really need is work you don't need a weekend from.

And instead of thinking about work-life balance as like a seven-day work week, think about work-life balance as like on a like a seven-year time horizon.

And so like there are seasons of work and there are seasons of less work.

My goal would always be that I just never have something I want to retire from.

In some ways you could say I retired from owning gyms for a while.

But I haven't retired from work.

I don't think anyone who wants to live a long life should retire from work.

All the people that I know who are really old, they pretty much die when they stop working.

I have seen the people who stay alive the longest have reasons to stay alive and work is a good one.

The problem is that everyone's idea, like the masses who are listening to this, their idea of what work is, is not what I'm talking about.

Theirs is like the soul-sucking work at a job you hate for a boss that doesn't appreciate you for a company that doesn't do good in the world.

I completely understand why you would not be motivated to do that.

And you would want to get away from that as soon as possible.

You'd be amazed at how much faster you get to your goals when you don't go backwards 104 days per year.

Contrary to what the mediocre masses will tell you.

Weekends can also be for work.

We had a contractor once who said, I quit my job so that I wouldn't have to work weekends.

And he was upset that he had worked a weekend.

You do not have an accurate estimation of reality if you think that starting a business is going to mean that the first business you ever start, you're not gonna work weekends.

Right now, if I started a business, I could take weekends if I wanted to.

But I think that's because there's a level of skill you have to get to.

My buddy of mine was talked to me about how he had an employee.

Who was asking for like six weeks of paid vacation.

They had like not a lot of experience.

He's like, I need this time.

He's like, well, I tell you what, he's like, what if I give you 110 days a year off?

Paid.

Would that work?

They were like, yeah.

And he's like, cool, that's weekends and federal holidays.

If you just don't go backwards on weekends, you can move ahead so much faster.

If you go out drinking or you do your cheat days on the weekend, then you can undo all of the work that you're doing in the rest of the days of the year.

And be neutral or even negative then the year.

Depending on how bad off track you go during those 104 days.

From a business perspective, you might get inquiries over the weekend.

If you don't work your leads over the weekend, you start in a deficit and you might lose those sales.

If you generate income during the week and then you don't on weekends, it's 104 days a year that you're not generating income out of 365.

You're also going into a deficit that you have to then make up for in the first two days.

So let's say that the two-day negative has to get offset by two days of positive.

Then you're really only working three days.

Now you compare that to somebody who's either not losing steam on the weekends or actually getting ahead on the weekends.

That person isn't moving ahead like twice as fast, they're moving ahead like seven times as fast.

And so I think that's the piece that a lot of people are missing is to look at somebody who's further ahead.

Be like, well, this person works like this.

It's like, well,

If you work the same amount as them, they're actually gonna keep getting further ahead.

So you have to work as much as them to match, probably a little bit more because they're more skilled at working than you are.

And then even more to get ahead.

Success is the only revenge. As you expand, they shrink into irrelevance.

As you get louder, no one can hear them.

You don't beat them, you cast a shadow so big, no one can see them to begin with.

Because at the end of the day, there's no greater waste of time.

Than justifying your actions to people who have a life you don't want.

And there's no amount of pain you can inflict on a hater.

That will be more painful than their own life.

Last part was from Leila.

Like there is no retaliation, there's no retribution, there's no actual revenge.

So I have beaten a lot of business people in the field.

People that I saw as competitors, like where it was very clear, we're going head-to-head for a market.

What's really weird is that when you actually win, when someone actually goes out of business,

It's like not cool.

You don't like spit on their corpse.

You're just like, oh.

There is a tipping point at some point where you start to gain an advantage.

You start to separate from them, but then like they start flailing.

And acting erratic and trying to get ahead and then that further, you know, they go down that vicious cycle.

Because you are their hater.

Never mind.

Their competition.

The biggest mistake of my career I made because of a competitor.

That mistake cost me somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million, actual money.

Not like, like, oh, this is an opportunity that I did.

Like I actually lost like $25 million on this.

And I just swore to myself that I would never let somebody else dictate my behavior.

Winners focus on winning, losers focus on winners.

So the same thing goes with competitors. Winners focus on customers, competitors focus on winners.

They're always trying to copy you, but because they're trying to copy you, they're not looking at their customers, they're looking at you.

And so they're completely distracted.

They're not looking at the data source that matters most.

First off, if anyone ever copies you, you've already won.

Because they need you, you don't need them.

You should be afraid when people stop copying you.

Because it means that you've got nothing.

And so I see people copying what I'm doing as a positive sign that I'm on the right path.

Rather than a distraction that merits all of my attention getting redirected to trying to destroy someone.

If you walk like downtown in any city, well, that building is a $400 million building.

And that building is $400 million.

That's how much money a billionaire has.

Everything else that's there is still up for grabs.

There's so much out there.

It's super hard to comprehend.

When we had 5,000 plus gyms in Gym Launch, I think we had 45 gyms in Atlanta.

They would be like, well, there's another gym down the street and I'm like, there's also 1500 gyms in Atlanta.

So the 45 that are all Gym Launch gyms are just gonna do better than the other 1,455.

The pie is so much bigger than people think it is.

If you feel like you are the output of your life, at the end of your life, who you are is the thing that is the thing that you became.

Then competition is good for you.

Like if you look back at that that person, would you want that person to have no challenges?

Like if you were at the end of your life and you looked back, would you be like, I'm glad I overcame no adversity.

I'm glad no one ever put me to the test.

I'm glad I never got to see what I was truly capable of.

I'm glad I never had to risk it all when the chips were down.

You would never say that.

We just don't like going through it in the short term.

But we do want the outcome of it.

If you accept that's the price tag for the person you want to be.

Then you just pay it willingly.

My two simple lenses for friendship.

Number one, do they genuinely root for you when you win?

Number two, do they make you better?

Finding people who do even one of those things is rare.

Both is even rarer.

Which is why they get the highest title of friend.

One of the highest ROI trades in life that you can make is all the fake friends that you have for one real friend that has your back even when all seems lost.

Bonus points if it's your spouse.

The rare people in your life who root for you to hit your goals are more valuable than the goals themselves.

Consider yourself lucky if you find even one human who believes in you more than you do.

And never let them go.

When you start out, people are happy for you that you're doing something.

But I this is gonna be really fucked up.

But I actually think that people are happy that you quit your job because it counts you out of the race.

Because the likelihood that you win is so low.

And so they're happy because you're actually taking a step back.

You literally take a step back in income, take a step back in status because you're not doing as well.

Like I went from a white collar job to being a personal trainer.

Like it was a big step back.

So any of my peer group were like, oh yeah, so good that you're doing that.

If I had immediately jumped and started a tech startup and raised $100 million, they probably immediately wouldn't have been happy for me.

I think the reason that you get that underdog rooting in the beginning is because you actually take a step down in status.

And so their relative standing actually increases.

So they encourage you.

But then as you come up, your success reminds them of the dreams that they didn't pursue to begin with.

It also reminds them that you started with probably the same resources.

And that's why it's so hard to go home for a lot of people.

Because everyone you grew up with in middle school and high school, you become a glaring example of what they could have done but didn't.

It's what you make them think about themselves.

Astonishingly more people know what they should do than claim to know what they should do.

Because usually a voice on some level acting as a hypothetical punishment.

They haven't actually experienced yet.

For taking an action that they haven't done yet.

Because we fear hypothetical punishment, we don't take the real action.

A lot of people just stay stuck there.

There was one specific voice that I was like really afraid of for selling Gym Launch because I thought $46 million wasn't enough.

That that person would be impressed.

And then when I thought about it, I was like, this person is gonna prevent me from doing.

Like this person's opinion.

I was like, what do I care?

He can do his own life.

What if he does sell his company for more money than me?

Does that mean I suck?

No.

It just means that like I decided to do something.

He decided to do something.

I'm only ascribing value to this person's opinion just because I know who they are.

There's 100,000 times more people who I don't know who are beating me than the ones that I do.

So why would I listen to this one person?

Unless someone is ahead of you, take their hate as envy.

And then disregard it.

Envy is when you want something that someone else has.

Jealousy is when you fear losing something that you have.

So if you've got your girl and some guy comes up, you get jealous.

If someone has a girl that you wish you had, you experience envy.

So envy is about something you don't have.

Jealousy about fear of losing something you do.

If people are further behind you, then they're envious of you.

If someone's ahead of you, then they're afraid that you're gonna take what they have.

Mind you, in either of those scenarios, it doesn't matter.

I see hate as feedback, nothing more, nothing less.

And I think feedback is worth taking into consideration.

And what level of validity there is.

So if someone says, hey, you copied my entire business and you've never met them.

You know that that's not true.

I had this guy come up to me.

Saw me on the street, randomly.

He was like, hey man, I need to apologize to you.

For what?

I've like really, really hated you for a long time.

Why?

He's like, because you stole the closer framework from me.

And I was like, dude, I don't know who the fuck you are.

He was like, let's be honest, like what's the likelihood that we both came up with the same acronym?

And I was like, high.

You take an acronym that's for closer and then you fit the words.

I actually went back, I found my first document that had closer on it and I screenshotted the date and it was before he had started selling.

He squashed it.

And I was like, you're copying me, motherfucker.

I said it joking.

Because I don't give a shit.

The hate's feedback.

If I'm getting data from the environment, it's data.

It's not good or bad.

It just is.

If everybody ahead of you is afraid that you're gonna beat them, that's probably decent data.

Everybody behind you is envious of where you're at.

That's probably decent data to know.

If people are all trying to sue you at the same time for something.

Then maybe there's something there that you shouldn't have done that you did.

It's the second layer of judgment is the one that everyone gets in trouble with.

This thing happened.

Now I'm gonna ascribe meaning to it.

What does the hate mean?

It doesn't mean anything.

It's just feedback.

And then you take the data and do whatever you want with it.

Sadness comes from a lack of options.

Which is why it feels like hopelessness.

Anxiety comes from many options, but a lack of priorities.

Which is why it feels like paralysis.

Looking everywhere, but moving nowhere.

Solve sadness with knowledge and anxiety with a decision.

Understanding this changed my life.

Let's say someone gets really depressed because they get laid off.

Why are they sad?

Because they have a perceived lack of options.

If I have five job offers on my table, am I sad that I got laid off because my job offers are better than the one that I just left?

No.

Now if I had 100 options on the table, I might have anxiety.

Because I have too many options and I don't know which one to do.

It's a perceived lack of options.

With sadness, you don't know what to do.

Because you don't know anything to do.

With anxiety, you don't know which to do.

Disappointment is when an expectation was unmet.

You either change your expectations or change reality.

The stoic frame for that is that you imagine all the things that could have gone worse.

I mean, there's a lot of frames.

But that's one of them. The other one is that you imagine that that thing happens 1000 times in a row.

What would you feel in the thousandth time?

Probably nothing.

Why? Because you'd already adjusted your expectations.

And if you'd already adjusted your expectations, then you can adjust them now.

Buddhist monks fundamentally basically do that.

They just change nothing externally and only change internally.

Which is fine, but to a certain degree, like I want to benefit humanity.

And I don't know how beneficial that is.

And to be fair, me saying that I want to do that also creates an expectation of myself, which I could be let down for.

So like I do create a possibility that I am let down by saying I want to help people.

And if I don't help them, then I would be disappointed.

You can shoot big as long as you don't make missing mean that you suck.

I think that being has been the best goal for me to pursue.

Because it's the one that's 100% under my control.

If I have something that is disappointing that occurs, what type of person do I want to be in this instance?

And then what would that man do?

And as closely as I can map my actual behavior to that person's, the more joy I will experience.

Because I'm present and doing the things that I think I should be doing.

And I can still give myself kudos for how well I handled a shitty situation.

And then end up deriving joy from something that otherwise might have been bad.

I remember seeing this quote once that was like, if you follow your own advice.

You'd already be way further than you currently are.

And I thought about that and I was like, yeah, I don't think I need to follow anyone else's advice.

I think I should be doing the things I already know I should be doing.

Then you just have like kind of the emotional component of feeling like you want to maybe release something or whatever.

And me being able to talk to my future version of myself in a dialogue format allows me to get grace from a future version of self.

And also get approval from a future version of self.

So somebody that I esteem higher than myself is future me, who's hopefully better.

And his judgment on my current situation and his advice.

It tends to be really good advice.

The best advice I've gotten has been from future me.