Extremely Valuable SUCCESS Lessons You Can Learn From Billionaires! | #BillionaireMindset

welcome to the billionaire mindset your 30-day journey to thinking like a billionaire now you can just watch this video or if you want to sign up for the entire series for free and get the bonus pdf companion calendar check the link in the description below today is day 21 and we're gonna learn the success lessons and advice from billionaires [Music] enjoy [Music] young people globally want to be like elon musk what's your advice to them i think that probably they shouldn't want to be you i think it sounds better than it is okay um yeah it's uh not as much fun being me as you'd think i don't know you don't think so there's definitely it could be worse for sure but it's um i i i'm not sure i would i'm not sure i want to be me okay but if you know i i think advice i mean if you want to make progress in things i think that um the best analytical framework for understanding the future is physics i'd recommend studying the uh the thinking process around physics like not just not not the equations i mean equations certainly they're helpful but the the the way of thinking in physics is the it's the best framework for understanding things that are counterintuitive [Music] and you know always taking the position that you are some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong over time the i think one of the biggest mistakes people generally make and i'm guilty of it too is wishful thinking you know like you want something to be true even if it isn't true um and so you ignore the things that you ignore the real truth because of what you want to be true this is a very difficult trap to avoid and like i said certainly one that i find myself in having problems with but if you just take that approach of you're always to some degree wrong and your goal is to be less wrong and and solicit critical feedback particularly from friends like friends particularly friends if somebody loves you they want the best for you they don't want to tell you the bad things um so you have to ask them okay you know and said really i really do want to know and then they'll tell you and the way i tend to view problems is from a from a physics standpoint and i think i think physics is a good analytical framework um and one of the key things in in physics is to reason from first principles um this is contrary to the way most human reasoning takes place which is by analogy um reason for first principles just means that you you figure out what are the fundamental what are the fundamental truths or or things that are pretty people are pretty sure of fundamental truths and and can you build up to a conclusion from from that uh or you know from those principles and and then certainly if you come up with some idea and it appears to violate one of those fundamental truths then you're probably wrong or you should get a really big prize or something like that um so this may seem like i don't know maybe it may seem sort of obvious when it's explained but it's actually not what people do reasoning my analogies is helpful because it's a shortcut yeah um and it's and it's mostly correct but but uh it tends to be most incorrect when you're dealing with new things because it's hard to analyze to something really new the physics training is a very good training where it's a good framework for reasoning where you're trained to think about first principles and reason from there and that means boiling things down to the most fundamental truths and then connecting those truths in a way to try to understand how a reality is because you know physics has this problem where they're trying to figure out things that are totally counter-intuitive and so they had to have a framework for for getting there like quantum mechanics is incredibly counter-intuitive but it's true um and so you had so physics developed a framework for for figuring out uh things that aren't obvious and that's why i think it's it's it's a lot of advice but it's it's the right framework you must find a way to serve martin luther king said that not everybody can be famous but everybody can be great because greatness is determined by service now we live in a world where everybody wants to be famous and where we admire people for just being famous we think being known brings us value the truth is all of that will fade in time in three years you won't be able to name the housewives of atlanta the real truth is that service and significance service and the significance that you bring to your service is that which is lasting so to be able to whatever your occupation or job or talent or gift is our honorees today getting doctor degrees to apparently opposite fields hiv and aids and the spoken word but what they have in common is service using the spoken word in service to community and the world using your knowledge and information about hiv and aids and medicine in service to the world and if you look at all the most successful people in the world whether they know it or not they have that paradigm of service everybody's talking about mark zuckerberg and ipo [Music] service jay-z rapid [Music] service through the word to people through song for many years i was really just happy to be on tv and people would stop and say oh you're on tv yeah i'm on tv i like being on tv it's a nice job and it was about the time that i received my honorary doctorate from spelman around 1993 so i don't know if that had something to do with it i thought of myself as dr winfrey that i went back and i took a long look at what it was i was doing on on tv and made a decision that i was no longer going to just be on tv but i was going to use tv as a platform as a force for good and not be used by tv and i will tell you my decision to make that significant change in the way i operated on television using television as a service changed my career exponentially service through medicine service through art using whatever it is you produce your product as a way of giving back to the world when you shift the paradigm of whatever it is you choose to do to service and you bring significance to that success will i promise you follow you service and significance equals success when i first started making money and it was you know my salary or my earnings were published all over the place i mean the first year i was like really did i make that much money oh my god um it was very difficult for me to figure out where my boundaries were because i'd grown up poor and didn't have anything so it's easy when you don't have anything and people ask you for money and they say i need 500 you say i don't have it because i'm just trying to get my rent paid it's harder when your multi-billion dollar salary is now in the paper and you get a lot of friends and cousins you didn't have before so how do you set boundaries for yourself i was having trouble setting boundaries myself for myself for even strangers people would just show up at my door in chicago and say oh bro i left my husband please help me and i would because she knows i haven't so don't try that now though okay don't try that now i figured it out so what i learned was is that oh the reason why people keep showing up is because my intention is to make them think that i'm such a nice person that you can ask me for anything you can get me to do anything i'm gonna say yes i'm gonna say yes so when stevie called me this time i thought i'd try out my first no on stevie let's start big he wanted me to donate some money to a charity and i didn't want to donate to the charity because i have my own charities and i care about a lot of people but the the problem is when you you have money everybody thinks you just want to give to everything so every letter i ever get starts with we know you love the children yes i do love the children but somebody else is going to have to help the children so i said to stevie uh i said to stevie no and um as a person who has that disease to please i was waiting for him then just to say i will never speak to you again i will never call you i will never sing a thong for you and he didn't he just said okay okay okay it's okay he said okay check you later and [Music] what i learned from that is many times you will have angst and worry about things and put yourself in a state like someone said this morning because their phone went off they were mortified over a phone i said really you will put yourself in a state when the other person really isn't even thinking about you so learning that i could specifically determine for myself what the boundaries were for me what i wanted to do give my money give my time give of my service to who i wanted to give it to when i did that i get to make that decision and just because you get a hundred requests a week doesn't mean you have to try to fulfill all of that just because you have all of these demands on your time and on you doesn't mean that you have to say yes you get to decide because you're the master of your fate the captain of your soul as william ernest hinley said in invictus and understanding that really changed the meaning of my life in that i was not no longer driven by what other people wanted me to do but took charge of my own destiny making choices based upon what do i feel is the next right move for me nobody's journey is seamless or smooth we all stumble we all have setbacks if things go wrong you hit a dead end as you will it's just life's way of saying time to change course so ask every failure this is what i do every failure every crisis every difficult time i say what is this here to teach me and as soon as you get the lesson you get to move on if you really get the lesson you pass and you don't have to repeat the class if you don't get the lesson it shows up wearing another pair of pants or skirt to give you some remedial work and what i found is that difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper because life always whispers to you first first and if you ignore the whisper sooner or later you'll get a scream whatever you resist persists but if you ask the right question not why is this happening but what is this here to teach me what is this here to teach me it puts you in the place and space to get the lesson you need my friend cartoli who's written this wonderful book uh called a new earth that's all about letting the awareness of who you are stimulate everything that you do he puts it like this he says don't react against a bad situation merge with that situation instead and the solution will arise from the challenge because surrendering yourself doesn't mean giving up it means acting with responsibility okay many of you know that as president hennessey said i started this school in africa and i founded the school where i'm trying to give south african girls a shot at a future like yours stanford and i spent five years making sure that school would be as beautiful as the students i wanted every girl to feel her worth reflected in her surroundings so i checked every blueprint i picked every pillow i was looking at the grout in between the bricks i knew every thread count of the sheets i chose every girl from the villages from nine provinces and yet last fall i was faced with a crisis i'd never anticipated i was told that one of the dorm matrons was suspected of sexual abuse well that was as you can imagine devastating news first i cried actually i sobbed for about a half an hour and then i said let's get to it that's all you get is a half an hour you need to focus on the now what you need to do now so i contacted a child trauma specialist i put together a team of investigators i made sure the girls had counseling and support and gail and i got on a plane and flew to south africa and the whole time i kept asking that question what is this here to teach me and as difficult as that experience has been i got a lot of lessons i understand now the mistakes i made because i had been paying attention to all of the wrong things i built that school from the outside in when what really mattered was the inside out so it's a lesson that applies to all of our lives as a whole what matters most is what's inside what matters most is the sense of integrity of quality and beauty i got that lesson and what i know is is that the girls came away with something too they've emerged from this more resilient and knowing that their voices have power 24 of us were interviewed for a kfc job 23 accepted i was the only guy rejected five six people went for looking for a police job five except i was the only one my cousin and i applied job as a as a as a server in a four-star hotel by city we weighed a long queue for two hours he was accepted i really rejected so my mother looked at me huh you know what because but i know this is a training course for me before my 30 years old i'm a failure people lose but i never give up i think there is an opportunity there and then i i was a teacher later i graduated from university i was teaching in the university for six years number five because number five year i was elected the best teacher of my university elected by students so i said everything i taught my students are the things i learned from books what if i go out spend the 10 years experience all the things whether fail or succeed i go back to teach again that was my original thing in doing alibaba so i never thought i could be rich i never thought it would be successful i never thought we could survive for 18 years and then we made it the only thing that today we should do is share the experience and know how especially share the mistakes suffers with others my thinking is that you guys remember if you want to be successful learn from the other people's mistakes don't learn from the successful stories successful stories they make don't listen to that there are a lot of reasons behind it just like um i remember the first time harvard business school came to us say jack we want to write a case study for you yes years 2001 or 2000 they came they spent one week and they write a report and i read no i said this is not me and this is this is you that's no this is not us he said this is you so the makeup is signed and the case study go up and they started teaching a lot of universities the next five years they invited me to go to the case study and they always find a competitor of my company and if after every case study alibaba will die that company will succeed all the students agree and actually every five years all the competitors die we still survive so how can you study this kind of a successful story learn from the mistakes the other people no matter how smart you are you will encounter these mistakes you learn from mistakes not because you will be able to avoid mistakes you were able to when these mistakes come this suffer comes you know how to deal with it how to face it i i the book i want to write if i if i want if i can is alibaba 1001 mistakes this is the most treasurable things that in my life in my life is not how much we achieved it's how much we go through the tough days and mistakes and this is what if you start to think now would be good people ask me why e-commerce so successful in china our company alone is much bigger than amazon why e-commerce in china one of the reasons why e-commerce in china is success successful because china had a terrible infrastructure of commerce right we don't have so many retail we don't have so many like walmart kmart everywhere it's it's just a terrible backward retail system in china when internet e-commerce come people love it so so efficient why china mobile phone you know grow much faster than america america and europe have such a great such a great system of telephone we don't have ten of them right amount like 100 family can only have one telephone that days where mobile come we love that we just go that so there is a leapfrog we don't have that rules or laws most of the government offices they don't know how to make rules laws for internet because nobody realizes what the internet look like so that leave us a chance to grow fast europe very interesting you have such a perfect rules or loss then everything you do let's follow the rules a lot and everything we think about the thing they do let's follow the rules a lot and everything we think about they start to worry when they worry they make a rules loss when we have a problems we start to solve the problems then think about rules or loss you have a problem like make rules a loss so i worry about europe i worry i worry about the worries of the europe if every africa does not worry asia does not worry why europe worry about right you don't have solutions for artificial intelligence oh you know they're going to destroy a lot of things in human life forget it let me tell you artificial intelligence i think we only by using artificial intelligence to arrest and catch a lot of thieves my theory i told my engineers i say now when you love somebody you may not have reasons but when you hate somebody you have logic and reasons we have logical reasons machine can always do better than that so we have a trillions of dollar transaction on alipay every day a lot of people want to steal the money how can you oversee when you have like a 1 billion users using that there are so many cheatings human being cannot do it so we teach machines to catch all the thieves machine never forget no matter how smart you are one person can create 10 ways of cheating you are the smartest person in the world but we teach the machine every way everything with this discover from other people the machine can remember over a hundred thousand ways of cheating when you start the cheating machine find you so one way bad guys using artificial intelligence doing bad things other thing we're using artificial intelligence to catch bad guys so there is always in any unbalance how you see the world if you see technology revolution is a problem i'm sorry to say the problem just started if you think it's an opportunity the opportunity just started the only thing is your mentality if the mentality is about a worry you'll worry all the time by the way all the entrepreneurs if everything's ready everything's perfect why they need you because there is worries because there's a problem because of there's no this know that that is your opportunity that is our opportunity and keep on that you believing you can do something little by little ten years later you'll be different that's that's that's who we are amazon one of the things we try to do is have multiple paths to yes and so here's here's a little thought experiment for you if you are a junior executive at amazon and that if amazon did this in the typical kind of corporate hierarchy way you had an idea you need to get your boss to greenlight that idea and then your boss's boss needs to greenlight that idea and then your boss's boss's boss needs to greenlight that idea they're probably five levels or more before that idea gets the go-ahead assume instead that you're an entrepreneur with a startup company idea and you need venture capital you go to sandhill road and you go to the first venture capitalist and they tell you no and you go to the second one and they tell you no you're maybe your 20th one tells you yes you've got 19 no's and one yes and you're still good to go so that that venture capital model is there's multiple paths to yes there were 20 people who could give you a yes and it didn't matter how many gave you a no so if you want innovative thinking you have to think about how can we get you want high a large number of high judgment people empowered to green light things you want multiple paths to yes you want a system where as a junior air force officer with a good idea the first five people tell me no and somehow i can still go pursue that idea so you gotta figure out that's an organizational um uh challenge that big organizations have to figure out a way to do and by the way i get you know this happens all the time i'll say i don't think that's a good idea but somebody else will greenlight it and i'm fine with that because usually the cost of the experiments is pretty small things only get expensive when they work right once something works you're like whoa we need to double down on that now and then the spending can get heavy and then those become big consequential decisions and that's where the hierarchy and the using the judgment of the most senior people to me this really helps now that you have about 600 000 employees i calculated you're adding about 250 people a day um you've mentioned that you're trying to fend off day two yeah and you've said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciatingly painful decline followed by death that is why it is always day one yeah yeah how's that work well so day one and this is a phrase that we use at amazon all the time i've been using it's in my first annual shareholder letter from 20 years ago and we say it's always day one and it needs to be day one for the reason that you just mentioned um and how do you so the real question for me is how do you go about maintaining a day one culture you know it's great to have the um the scale of amazon we have financial resources we have lots of brilliant people we can accomplish great things we have global scopes we have operations all over the world but the downside of that is that you can lose your nimbleness you can lose your entrepreneurial spirit you can lose your that kind of heart the the that that small companies often have and so if you could have the best of both worlds if you can have that entrepreneurial spirit and heart while at the same time having all the advantages that come with scale and scope i think think of the things that you could do and and so how the question is how do you achieve that um this the scale is good because it makes you robust you know a a big boxer can take a punch to the head the question is you also want to dodge those punches you'd like to be nimble you want to be big and nimble and i find there are a lot of things that are protective of the day one mentality i already spent some time on one of them which is customer obsession i think that's the most important thing if you can and it gets harder as you get bigger when you're a little tiny company so you're a 10-person startup company every single person in the company is focused on the customer when you get to be a bigger company you've got all the mil you've got middle managers and you've got all these layers and the those people aren't on the front lines they're not interacting with customers every day they're insulated from customers and they start to manage not the customer happiness directly but they start to manage through proxies like metrics and processes and some of those things can become bureaucratic so it's very challenging but one of the things that happens is the decision-making velocity slows down and i think the reason one of the reasons that that happens is that people all the junior executives inside the big company start to model all decisions as if they are heavyweight irreversible highly consequential decisions and so even two-way doors you could make you make a decision it's the wrong decision you can just back up back through the door and try again even those reversible decisions start to be made with heavyweight processes and so you can teach people that these pitfalls and and traps and then teach them to avoid those traps and that's what we're trying to do at amazon so that we can maintain our inventiveness and our heart and our kind of small company's spirit even as we have the scale and scope of a larger company i advise students as much as possible look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job i mean you know don't sleepwalk through life and don't don't say it's all going to be great you know i'll do this and i'll do that and you know i'm just marking time to get to be older that i've told people that's like saving up sex for your old age i mean it just is not it is not a good idea what are you urging them to do i'll explain it guess what i'm talking about that now it it you just yeah you really want to be doing what you love doing and you can't necessarily find it on your first job right but don't give up before you find it mr buffett in the past you invested in china south korea and israel um and recently you partnered with 3g capital and joshua lemon from brazil over for the heinz deal uh does this mean are you tempted to venture into the brazil market next i didn't get the question question you did the heinz deal the question is are you gonna invest in brazil next oh uh i don't know where i'm gonna invest next that's what that's what makes my job interesting i mean i'm i'm i'm not kidding i mean if you went out and played golf and every drive went in the hole you'd give up the game wouldn't be interesting i mean what's interesting is when you get in the rough and you have to come out and a few things like that so i i love the fact that i don't know what i'm going to do next you mentioned the israel investment in 2006 in the fall i got a letter from a fellow and i never heard of him and i never heard of the company he was talking about but he said my name is eton wardheimer and i want to tell you a little about my company ishkar the letter was a page and a half long and he said if he sold the company the family sold the company the only company they wanted to sell it to was berkshire hathaway and if i was interested they'd be glad to come over from israel and explain it to me and it was a it just jumped off the page that this was an interesting idea so i emailed them and they came over very shortly and and we bought the business we we handed them four billion dollars for 80 percent of a company where i'd never seen it or anything etan kept saying you got to come over to israel and see the plants and everything you won't believe how wonderful they are and i said hey tom i don't go to council bluffs iowa you know i mean i am doing fine in omaha and uh he said no you know you got to see it i said no no i don't i said we can make a deal without seeing it he said well if you buy if you buy the company will you come and see it i said if we buy the company i'll come so we bought the company and i went over there and it's true i've never seen plants like this it was the greatest operation i've ever seen and etan said to me he said you know that's why i want you to come over to see these things i said listen if i'd come and see them i'd pay more money so so it uh we we have a wonderful partnership with the people in israel but i don't know tomorrow uh our partnership with the people in brazil with george apollo lemon and his associates they are sensational people i i got to know george apollo when i was on the port of gillette with him and the opportunity to buy into a wonderful business like heinz and to be partners and they do they'll do all the heavy lifting they run the place uh with georgie pollon associates i mean it's just it's a it's a great opportunity for us and i don't know what the opportunity will be tomorrow with george apollo is last december uh i was going out to boulder colorado where he had a group that met and he said i think i've got an idea might interest you when i get out there so i went out there and uh and as we came back on the plane he explained what he was thinking about in terms of heinz and i said count me in and uh and i will tell you one other thing which is quite impressive about him after i said that and went a little a little further on the thing he sent me a one-page governance description of how it would work between the two of us and he sent me a very brief description of what he thought would be a fair deal for both of us i didn't have to change a word i mean those are the kind of people you like to associate with all of you in this room have the brains to do extremely well in life you've all got the energy to do extremely well on life and then the question is how do you apply it if you've got a 200 horsepower motor you get 200 horsepower out of it you get your full potential or do you get 100 horsepower or 50 horsepower now there's two things that can hold you back in getting the full horsepower out of your your engine whatever it may be all of you have big enough engines and one of those is a lack of education but that probably isn't going to happen to very many people in this room if you did have a lack of education if you didn't have a chance to get a decent education in life it wouldn't make any difference what that potential was because you'd never unlock it but the second most important thing and equally as important is in terms of the habits that you develop in terms of what you do with yourself when we hire people we look for three qualities we look for integrity we look for intelligence and we look for energy but if they don't have the first one integrity the other two will kill you because if you're hiring somebody without integrity you really want to be dumb and lazy don't you i mean you know last thing in the world you want forms to be smart and energetic so smart and energetic only goes with integrity but the nice thing about you know you make your own decision on that you can't change your iq or how far you can throw a football or how high you can jump or the color of your hair very easily but you can elect to have integrity that matches anybody else's and if you match that with intelligence which you have and energy which you have uh you will get an extraordinary result and you'd be very foolish to sell me 10 of yourself for 50 000. on the other hand if you don't match it with that your potential will in a significant part go unused well in 1973 uh the washington post company gone public in 1971 right about the pentagon papers type time but in 73 uh the nixon administration uh was through bibi rebozo who was a palo nixon's they were challenging uh the licenses of two of the florida television stations the post owned so the stock went from 37 down to 16. now at 16 there were about 5 million shares outstanding so the whole washington post company was selling for 80 million dollars and that included the newspaper four big tv stations newsweek you know and some other assets and no debt to speak of so the washington post company which was intrinsically worth four or five hundred million dollars was selling for about 80 million in the market we bought most of our stock at about the equivalent of 100 million in the market and and it was it was ridiculous i mean you had a business that unquestionably was worth four or five times what it was selling for and nixon wasn't going to put them out of business when you're doing these analyses then and now do you have computers that help you or how did you actually read all what do you guys get written materials or how did you in those days get the materials to read about the washington post and how do you do it today well same pretty much the same way except there's fewer opportunities now but uh i met bob woodward back and and and he just come out with all the president savannah and all of a sudden as a below 30 years of age he was getting quite wealthy and we had we had breakfast or lunch over at the madison hotel he said what do i do with this money and i said i said investing is just about assigning yourself the right story i said imagine ben bradley this morning said to you what is the washington post company worth what would you do if you have to write the story in a month you'd go out and interview tv brokers and newspaper brokers and the owners and you'd try and value each asset i said that's what i do i assign myself the right story and it's it's nothing more than that now there's some stories i can't write if you ask me to write a story on you know what is some glamorous but non-profit making business worth i don't know how to write that story but if you ask me to write a story on what is potomac electric power worth or something like that i can write the story and that's what i'm doing every day i'm assigning myself a story and then i go out and so you get why should someone like myself or a business owner get a lot of credit get cash out even if they're already thriving and doing well they've got cash in the bank what's the importance of that well everybody does different things and you got to do with what you're comfortable with and and and i've always been comfortable with borrowing money but but but i talk but that's also my success because the way you look at every unless you're a tech baby again the world was created because of leverage finance okay there's the reason that you had you know all the tech companies and the media companies and and the great big casinos in vegas the things that cost billions of dollars a lot of money you did it with leverage finance with my good friend in california michael milken really came up with but that's why there was such an explosiveness in the 80s because of leverage finance i've always been scared of debt but i haven't been scared of debt i never had a problem with using it but i talked in my book is this is the problem that we all do is say you you have a small business and you want to go out and and borrow some money and you do a performa for the bank a budget you know to keep it simple for people people always give a budget that is the best case scenario and they start to drink their own kool-aid and think that's what they're going to do well one of the things that objections yeah or even next year and what i've always done is i've done that for the bank but even today in a deal that i bought last week i want a worst-case scenario the world's coming apart okay and all of a sudden all your expensive counts are gone and are people still gonna eat steaks yeah and i run a budget in a performa based on that wow so best case scenario worst case scenario because you know what happens 80 percent of the time the worst case scenario really yes that's just life right and and and and that's a tool that i've always used because you what happens is they give that to the bank or to whoever and all of a sudden you start drinking your own kool-aid like that's easy to do it's not easy to do being successful in business is not easy yeah but that's why i talk about just simple tools in here when harper collins came to me they didn't say we want a life story we see you on your show we see you on these business talk shows we read these articles we want you to write about your tools why you've never failed and you've made it through all these recessions rather you're a corporate person or or you're an entrepreneur why did you get to go like this it never really went like this when you have a good idea right you ask your friends you ask for feedback around you say oh i'm all excited it's a great idea right my friends like it i can't find it what do you do next you go to google right and you put it in there and you say it's this this this this you find 50 different keyword searches and you say there's nothing there right wow there must be it must be a great idea no one else is doing it wrong the reason there's nothing there is the 15 people who did it before you are out of business their web servers are down and they're not indexed anymore and there's no sense of history and a lot of the things that are happening you know because and particularly with mobile apps because there's no real web there there's like a one-page website up that directs you to the mobile app there's nothing indexing the app and so a lot of 50 different people are doing the same app and you know and because you can't get a url it's you know the xx app right and it's xxx app and it's hard to find the comparables and it's hard to learn from the history of it and so it's whether it's google whether it's facebook the real challenge right now in starting a company is you can't learn from history because all the history is gone and that's all at least to have that maybe it holds us back and maybe you know it's the worst thing that can happen is you know being you know ignorant of what happened might you know is probably better in a lot of cases and but sometimes it's not and so um i think that's one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face today that there's no history to to really go back to look at i went to dallas after college because a bunch of my buddies were down there and i got a job working as a bartender at night and was looking for a job during the day and got a job working for a retail software company and this was in the early days of pcs and was doing okay there and then about nine months in i made um let me add i was living six guys in a three-bedroom apartment and i was sleeping on the floor it was the rattiest nastiest hole you've ever seen in your life i mean and i literally didn't have a closet didn't have a drawer all my was in a pile on the floor i had my one towel that i stole from motel 6 that had a hole in it that was mine um and so i was trying to grind it out and learn tech which i really realized that i loved and i made the one day i called up my boss a guy named michael humecki h-u-m-e-c-k-i and i said michael i've got this deal i'm going to close now it's 1500 commissioned to me which meant i can move out of the show and and so i said one of my responsibilities was to open up the retail store you know make sure the door was open the floors were clean and all that kind of stuff i said look i've got this big deal i want to close it and he said no you need to be at the store i'm like i got someone to watch goes no you need to be at the store so i made the executive decision that if i went and picked up a fifteen thousand dollar check for this company um your business software he would see the light and all would be good and i'd have my 1500 commission fired my ass um seriously michael humecki and i'm not going to assuming you've spoken to him since then one time one time literally after broadcast.com went public he sent me a letter asking if i would invest in his company you should bring him on shark tank anyway so that was the only time i talked to michael humecki and so there's a shark king tank company from last season called mush right cool stuff it's like this um oatmeal that they packaged it's fresh dried oatmeal that they packaged with a little spoon and you it has to be refrigerated but you just grab it and go and the the response was great from the show and now like i just saw their numbers they went from 50 000 in sales to 100 000 to 125 000 in three straight months it's not scale but they're growing right and they're all of a sudden like okay we got to go raise money and we got to do yada yada scale is hard not just because of the economic cost but also because of the people cost and the mind share cost it's hard when you're dealing with a major company and in particular if you're dealing with a big company like a walmart or costco or whatever because you only get one shot of those guys and so like i told mush with whole foods they're interested i'm like you're not ready you're not ready you have got to you got to crawl before you ball you know and and and and so i told him it's going to be painful not to go after that big customer but think about what happens if you go after it and a it's going to take capital you don't have and you're going to borrow it or b it doesn't work out and they return it all then all of a sudden you're out of business and so you're you're right that you need capital to scale but you also need the confidence that you can scale and that you can keep your customers happy and so i always tell people get to the point where you have you you've taken care of the customers that you can take care of once you can demonstrate that then you can get smart money and you're talking from a position of power and then you can go to the walmarts of the world the costco's and you may not even have to raise money they may even provide po leverage or po support or connect you with a bank that does and so i guess i guess what i'm saying is don't get too far ahead of yourself because sometimes sales can be a lot more expensive than you think they are and you've got to be careful i've seen several my shark tank companies try to get too big too fast and it almost put them out of business nice is way undervalued you know particularly in this day and age you know if you turn on the news everything seems like it's going to get blown up right being nice just makes life so much easier and look i learned the hard way i had to have my partner todd came to me one day and he goes i like to curse he goes i don't care about cursing but you curse too much not everybody's as accepting as cursing as you are calm the down and i took that to heart not so much the cursing part but but i just i it became apparent to me that the nicer i got the more effective people around me got the more productive they got the more sales we had i was undervaluing nice you know i started my my first company after i got fired from a job and i was 24 just turned 24 my first real company if you will and i was always go go go go all consumed right live it eat it sleep and breathe and i knew people couldn't keep up or work as hard as many hours as me but i wanted them to and we were successful and we didn't have much turnover but i could have done a better job if i were nicer and broadcast.com i got a little bit nicer right as things but then once i got to the mavs and and some of these other companies and todd reminded me you know and really told me you know just nice nice works and so when you find yourself going to work when you're finding yourself dealing with customers when you're finding yourself making decisions we all get that object right that feeling in her stomach that tenseness that stress at various points and times that we all have to go through but sometimes you just need to calm the down right take a deep breath and be nice because you'll find out that people will do much more if you reduce the stress of people and you're nice you're going to have such a huge advantage no matter what your technology is no matter how it compares even if it's a download for an app people will still have to deal with you your culture will come through being nice being being supportive reducing stress that all comes through even in and out what advice would you have for managers or companies that are really working through change and struggling let let me uh define creative destruction or i will use schumpeter's definition here's the way he put it it is not price and output competition which counts but the competition from the new product the new technology the new source of supply the new type of organization which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs but at their foundations and their very lives so that's what we're talking about here this is not life or death for us individually but life and death for our businesses and our jobs and so what we do to communicate this is get all our employees to understand that change is a risk for all of us but not changing isn't a risk it's suicide it is a certainty that you are going out of business and you are going to if you individual employee if you're not changing and improving and working on that every day you're not going to have your job whereas if you take what you think are risks and you find a way to eliminate most of your job because there's a way to do this more efficiently or to bypass do it a completely different way here at coke you're not going to lose your job you're going to be a hero we started um you know there's like a cpa yeah chartered you know uh accountant and there's the cfa chartered financial analyst there was nothing for financial risk managers you couldn't get certified so i was talking to my my boss and became a friend and was like you know why don't we just kind of create an exam for risk managers because it doesn't exist and he was kind of like yeah well you created an industry yeah craig how do you how do you create an exam and so we started talking to people and um basically they're like well you can't just create a certification like who are you you're like 24 years old you can't just start an exam like who's gonna like accredit it or who's gonna and i said no no we're just gonna start an association wow and a not-for-profit association and that association will credit it you know and then we'll we'll kind of do the exam and so i was like you know that's crazy you can't do it so i said you know forget it i'm jumping in what we're going to do is we're going to set up a website we're going to put up a date for the exam the first thing we did was date we just picked a date like it's may you know whatever i don't remember the year 1998. here's the day it's new york city actual date and here's the outline of all the things that are going to be on the exam send a check for 500 bucks and you got your seat and then that's it and so we just put it up there and all of a sudden we started getting checks people started sending checks and it was like so we looked at each other like i think we need to write this exam now oh my gosh there was no exam at the time no it was just we just started with the date and the and the agenda for you know the the topics yes we started getting all these checks and we got 34 checks 17 000 and 34 people and so we decided so me and lev sat down and we spent weekend after weekend nights and things writing this entire exam on every topic and we gave also recommended readings as well and then we we went to new york city we rented our place and we administered this exam to 34 people and then we went home and corrected it we decided where the pass fail was we sent certificates to the people that passed and now today it's still in like 50 countries around the world there's like thousands of people taking this example you're a trip man like like no but but it's just a great and i'm just i'm just saying that only because people think that when you start something yes it has to be like buttoned up or you need to have a plan you need to know your next step or whatever and what i always say is you know just take the biggest step you can with your next move i worked at mcdonald's i got fired i worked at a furniture store i got fired i worked in a car dealership i was fired six times from the same guy i just quit leaving and i've been fired so many times i finally figured out how to get fired and keep my job i mean really so talent uh i'm i'm a sales guy because not because i wanted to that was not something i wanted to do my dad my dad was a sales guy my dad told my mom before he died tell those boys to learn how to sell he knew he was going to die and he's like tell those boys to learn how to sell and they can go anywhere uh i i didn't know that my mom didn't tell me that until i was like uh 25 26 years old and i had to take a sales job she she wanted me to be a more a professional uh so i went and got an accounting degree got out of college there was 25 unemployment i didn't know it i you know i didn't i didn't know anything about sales i didn't i didn't go to college and become a salesman but it was the only job i could get when i was 25 years old it was be unemployed or take this job selling toyotas i didn't even know what a toyota was to th this is this is years ago toyota wasn't even uh a thing yet and um so i took this job that i did i thought it was just gonna be a temporary job i said okay i'm gonna do this for until i can get a real job and that ended up becoming my career i actually hated sales because all the jobs i had outside of mcdonald's were part-time sales jobs i sold clothes you know i remember selling clothes i'd sell i'd sell an outfit i'd make six bucks on it so kind of hard to get excited about six dollars but it was six dollars more than i had and i was trying to put myself through college and and pay for all kind of ridiculous things i was doing at the time and um i i i leaned into the sales thing and started learning it i was just shooting some material today for cardone university we we have probably without me over over promoting my own product we probably have the most viewed sales training system in the world today and i'm saying that not to brag but to tell the viewer this came out of a job i didn't want and didn't like but when i leaned into it and said hey i need to commit to this thing because i'm just gonna i have to learn how to do this i have to learn how to bring revenue in and whether i liked it or not i needed to learn i needed to learn the money game the money game starts with in accounting and it might have been the thing i learned in accounting as i sit here and tell you the story because in accounting the top i remember studying financial statements in accounting classes uh it was uh counting um the principles of accounting i thought i was gonna learn how to make money that's not what they're teaching there but i remember there was on a page in the accounting book the blue accounting book that i tested and hated there was a page about an income statement and then they would compare income statements to these companies well the top thing of every page was income revenue or gross sales and later looking back didn't know it then but looking back later i'm like oh that's the most important part of a company if it wasn't the most important part of a company they wouldn't put it at the top of the income statement yeah on every income statement everywhere in the world it doesn't matter whether you're in china or chicago the top three lines they might be different words there it is all describing gross sales revenue revenue by department uh gross demand domestic product how much revenue is coming through a country that is what determines whether or not a household a department or a company is viable and i have been fighting the top three lines of my personal financial statement which everybody has won and it's called sales so once i leaned into it boom i started making money man it was it was literally that simple i'm going to learn how to bring revenue into my household i was 25 years old had no money lived in a lived in an apartment and my rent was 275 a month i was late on it four times a year every three months i was late because i'd go up and down and when i leaned into it i was saying hey i made an extra thousand dollars when i was 25 years old i'm like wow that was the most important money i've ever made in my whole life because it gave me an idea that i could control my income what were the lessons you learned uh you know starting from essentially zero having no money no context no uh relationships no uh opportunities in a town that you went to for this show what did you realize were the keys to actually making money even if you didn't have any well as you see the show you see that i actually never make any money right so uh the two girls they they actually they follow three of us and the two girls went out and got a job in the first week and and i'm not saying that's right or wrong or my ways more better or worse but but they are strategies okay they're different strategies i was not there to get a job or to earn money i was there looking for one thing opportunity i never spent time looking for money ever the entire uh 90 days okay i'm not looking for money i was actually looking for contracts through the contacts i wasn't looking for money because i knew the evaluation of the company in the last um segment an evaluator will come in and determine what my company's worth my new company right that i created and at that point i just need to validate to him dude my company's worth this based on that the entire 90 days i never touched the first hundred they gave me and this was to prove to people do you do not need money like it's just it's not true you need money you do need contacts you need people you need people you need people you need the right people though the right people that are already in play okay just because a guy's got money i remember a a billionaire friend of mine uh you know he could buy a jet and i said hey bob should i buy a jet he said you should i shouldn't meaning grant should because and he's way wealthier than i am he could have bought 40 of them he's like i don't have a place to go in mine you have a you can use yours every day so you got to find somebody that's in place somebody that not just has money but somebody that wants to do more with their money so you'll notice in the first uh 10 days i don't spend a hun any money i don't spend money on shelter not on food and not on water nothing then what i do is i end up accumulating assets and it's unfortunate that the viewer doesn't see this within five days i have two vehicles one was given to me by discovery and the other one was a forty thousand dollar jeep that i basically used uh from ryan this guy i met and told him i'm gonna sell your jeep i'm gonna drive it around town and put 10 miles a day on it and i'm gonna sell it well that's a forty three thousand dollar asset uh my truck was worth four grand i still had my hundred dollars i lived in a forty six thousand dollar rv that i was trying to sell so yeah uh and then what what's the other thing i did and i picked up ten thousand dollars to do in a 15 partnership in the equity of the upside of this guy's company so literally in 10 days i was accumulating contacts that could get me equity and the important part of that story is man go get you some equity you know jay-z talks about this you're getting you know so many of you young brothers are getting in advance while i'm picking up the equity now i've got some special bonus clips that i think you're gonna enjoy but before that it's time for the billionaire mindset question of the day i wanna know what was your single biggest takeaway from this video and your plan of action for the next week also if you've already got your billionaire mindset companion pdf calendar get ready for another amazing video tomorrow or if you don't have it yet you can get it for free in the first line of the description below and if you're enjoying this billionaire mindset series give me a hashtag billionairemindset in the comments below so i can celebrate you what do you say when you see yourself in the mirror when it's just you when you're all alone it's just you you see yourself in the mirror what do you say do you say great things or do you beat yourself up most people they might act confident and seem like they have it all put together but secretly they're fighting their own battles and at home in private the comfort of their own home they're their own worst enemies the secret is to be your own biggest critic as well as your biggest fan the push you give yourself has to be from a place of love and potential not lack and despair so i recently posted on instagram a little cartoon of me passing by a mirror and you see my reflection in the mirror and the caption says i love you and then i challenge people to say hey what do you what do you say to yourself when you look in the mirror and giving them an 18-day challenge to say every time you see a reflection of yourself to say something positive whether it's i love you or give yourself a compliment something positive because i think most people live in the land of negativity all we see is all the negative things that we're doing and all the things that didn't work out and things that could have been better and that can actually be very healthy i think you need to be your own biggest critic i think you need to have higher standards for yourself than what you're currently doing but it only works being your own biggest critic only works when it's based off a foundation of love when it's based on a foundation of i am an amazing human being and i love myself and i suck at all of these skills the problem that most people have is you see that you suck at a scale that you didn't get the result that you're not good on camera the first time you go out you didn't get the result you didn't land the sale you didn't make the deal you didn't get the date you know whatever it is you didn't get the result and then you think that you suck as a human because you don't have the skills it's the opposite you're you're amazing as a human it has to be from a foundation of love that you love yourself and that you suck at the skills and then you can beat yourself up over how do i get better how do i improve how do i acquire the skills how do i move forward towards my goals most people are their own biggest critic but they're not the biggest fan and i'm going to give you a three-step process on how to change it step number one is take the 18-day flexi-x challenge so if you want to go to every chemical.com flex the x dot pdf you can get the same calendar that i use it's not here it's somewhere it's in my bedroom so where i usually keep it and every day for the next 18 days you challenge yourself that whenever i see myself reflective surface a mirror the cell phone whatever i'm going to say something positive to myself in fact just make that your cell phone background and that when you see your your login screen or your home screen on your cell phone background on your desktop it says something positive about you and it's a reminder i have to say something positive about myself just for 18 days try it flex the ex challenge why 18 days because it takes at least 18 days to build a habit science says that it takes 18 to 254 days to build a habit it's why i have my 254 series because i'm there with you every step of the way and the average is actually 66 days of consecutive action means no time off no days off to build a habit but the minimum is 18 days so just try it for 18 days just try it what's going to happen in 18 days the worst is you're saying something you don't believe about yourself for 18 you can handle it you'll be okay the best case scenario is you actually start to love yourself a little bit more and the things that you can do when you believe in yourself and you love yourself are tremendous so step number one is take the 18 day flex dx i love you challenge step number two is being your own biggest critic as well as your biggest fan you need to do both and so ask yourself the criticism that i'm giving myself when i look at my videos when i look at my content when i look at how i'm handling my team when when you look at all the things that you're supposed to be doing that you are doing on a daily basis and you beat yourself up identify the parts that are just a skill set that you rock that you're amazing that you're the best but you just don't have the skill set yet and how do you fix it how do you acquire the skill set do more practice through more research through model and success that you can get there so split it up having that cognitive ability to say i'm being hard on myself but really it's just a skill set that i'm lacking and i'm awesome makes a big difference so start doing it today and step number three is kick yourself forward not down this often comes when you're comparing yourself to others you're comparing yourself to somebody else who's in your field who's ahead of you or somebody who you went to high school with or university with and and they have a bigger job than you are making more money and have more kids or whatever it is that you're jealous of you kick yourself down you say i suck well they they're off doing this and they acquired this by the time that they were your age and you suck you're not doing anything you're nowhere close right that's kicking yourself down that's not helpful what you need to do is kick yourself forward what you need to do is look at that and say that's what's possible that's the potential that's what that's what you can be capable of doing but here's the thing i think you actually need the kick i think the comparison is good i think it's healthy i think the problem with the comparison is you're only looking at it from the negative because you actually don't love yourself yet you have to build that up right do the 18 day flex challenge it's based out of love to say that this is what's possible because without the kick without the comparison you stay where you are the key though is you're kicking yourself forward to say that's what's possible that's what i want to create somebody else has done it i can do it too i've got michael jordan level talent i'm going to go off and crutch it instead of kicking yourself down and saying that you suck and you're never going to get there if you want to sign up for the entire billionaire mindset series for free and get the companion bonus pdf calendar check the link right there next to me i think you'll love it continue to believe and i'll see you there

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 11,073

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael

Id: SJzr7va8cr4

Length: 67min 19sec (4039 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021