Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #119: The Best Way To Future Proof Your Success with Billionaire Jay Samit

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Are you tired of working hard for someone else’s dream?! It’s time to STOP. If you are asking yourself if now is the right time to start a business, become an entrepreneur, and chase your passion, the answer is always YES. Today I have Jay Samit, international best-selling author and expert on disruption and innovation, to tell you how. Jay has developed the 12 Truths to creating opportunity, maximizing wealth, and controlling your destiny. And he put his theory to the test by empowering a young mentee to grow from welfare to self-made millionaire in less than a year. Join us to learn how you too can change your mindset, find your superpower, and Future Proof you.    About The Guest:   Described by Wired as having "the coolest job in the industry" and "a new media guru and Internet pioneer" by the Economic Times, author Jay Alan Samit is a dynamic entrepreneur and intrepreneur who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on disruption and innovation. He launches billion dollar businesses, transforms entire industries, revamps government institutions, and for over three decades continues to be at the forefront of global trends.   His first book "Disrupt Yourself: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation" is currently published in over 10 languages. He is a regular contributor to Fortune and the Wall Street Journal and host of its documentary series WSJ Startup of the Year. Samit frequently appears on ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC and tweets daily motivation to the over 100,000 business professionals who follow him on twitter @jaysamit. An expert on transformational corporate change, Samit has been quoted in The New York Times, The Economist, Businessweek, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Fast Company and TechCrunch.   A sought-after conference speaker and consultant, Samit provides disruptive solutions for such corporate clients as Adobe, American Express, AT&T, Best Buy, Coca Cola, Disney, Ford, Google, GE, IBM, Intel, McDonalds, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, and Visa and dozens more.   Finding Jay Samit: Website: https://jaysamit.com/  Read Future Proofing You: Twelve Truths for Creating Opportunity, Maximizing Wealth, and Controlling your Destiny in an Uncertain World  Contact for a free Future Proofing You Workbook Twitter & Instagram: @jaysamit   To inquire about my coaching program opportunity visit https://mentorship.heathermonahan.com/    Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you!    My book Confidence Creator is available now! get it right HERE   If you are looking for more tips you can download my free E-book at my website and thank you! https://heathermonahan.com    *If you'd like to ask a question and be featured during the wrap up segment of Creating Confidence, contact Heather Monahan directly through her website and don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list so you don’t skip a beat to all things Confidence Creating!     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What bugged me about so many of the autobiography business leader books is if you do what I did, if you came out of World War II and did this, you could run GE. I mean, well, I can't go back in time. I can't live your life. That window and that path was unique, just as you're unique. So what makes you unique? What's your superpower? What is the thing that friends come to you for advice about?

That's the core of what's going to take you where you are. People think superpowers have to be these amazingly strong things. I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals. We'll overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close up. Hi, and welcome back. I am so excited for this conversation. We have a true business heavyweight, the ultimate disruptor, international bestselling author, Jay Samet. Jay, thank you so much for being here today. And thank you for your new book and for paying it forward.

This is just mind-blowing. Oh, happy to be here and really excited about what this book can do for people. And that's why you write it. I love your backstory to your why in writing the book. And I was hoping you could share it with everybody listening. Sure. So my first book, Disrupt You, was probably the most meaningful thing for me that I've ever done. I did it as a way to teach people how to get out of the rut and how to, you know,

everybody thinks of changing the world. Nobody thinks of changing themselves and how to become an entrepreneur. And it took a life of its own. I've heard from people in 140 countries, which is like not a brag. It's like, how is that possible? It's in a whole bunch of languages and it's coming out in Urdu and Icelandic and Italian and Polish this year. It's just great.

And when I was a CEO of, you know, companies with hundreds of thousands of employees doing billions of dollars. Your inboxes, I hate you, you know, we're sewing you, here's a problem. Every day is misery. That's why CEOs get paid the big bucks. But when you write a book that changes people's lives, you hear what I call love letters. I wake up every day to an inbox of, you know, and I didn't do the work. I just hold up a mirror to people so that they can see what they have in themselves to achieve. And but occasionally I get an email, usually from a millennial or a younger person saying, this is motivational, but I could never do it. And that aided me. Why could I not reach certain people? What was I missing and disrupt you? And so I had this idea, crazy.

There's a gazillion self-help guru type books out there. But never heard anybody said, I'm going to put my reputation on the line. I'm going to take an immigrant, grew up on welfare, give them no money, introduce them to no contacts, and not tell them what business to start. They have to start something, take zero capital, and mentor them one day a week for a year. Spoiler alert for the ending, he becomes a self-made millionaire month 11. So I distilled those mentoring sessions down to what I call the 12 truths. And you follow the 12 truth through the book. It gives you a roadmap of how to do this.

And at the same time in each chapter, Bin was the young man's name, you see Bin's progress and a monthly accounting. You know, how much did he make? And the goal was to show that you're starting off at least on equal footing with Bin, And if not, you have a degree, you have a job experience, you know, in a country that you have family and support network. I mean, if he can do what you can do it, if I could do, if you would have told me when I grew up in, you know, a dad was a school teacher living in Philadelphia in a row house that dozens of friends would become self-made billionaires with a B.

I didn't know what a millionaire was. I would have told you you're crazy. What are you smoking? Give me some. I mean, farthest thing from my mind. But I knew, and I've worked with all these names that are household names nowadays, before they had the money. Some of them were bright. Some of them aren't.

Some went to good schools. Most of them didn't. They didn't come from money. A couple of them did. But they saw the world differently. Can that be taught? Yes. Every 48 hours, there's a new self-made billionaire.

Let that sink in. What do you do for the weekend, you slacker? And so once I've done the business stuff, I was trying to figure out how can I share. this knowledge and pay it forward. And I started by working with university students and teaching students how to do this. And I had students do over $100 million and drop out of school. But they'll donate to the university, I'm sure. So I realize this can be taught. And the fact that my book is in so many languages, it's pretty universal. And post-pandemic, you don't have to be in a major city to achieve. You don't have to be in a first world country. Remote workers or

remote businesses is now the norm. So you're one-click away from your phone from seven billion customers. You'll have to be right once to make it happen. So how do you do it? And if I want to sum it up into one sentence, you only need two things to be successful. Insight and perseverance. Everything else can be hired. Steve Jobs built the first trillion-dollar company. How much code did Steve write? He's not an engineer. It's a college dropout, you know, took a calligraphy course. You can always hire the people to do the things, but so much is already out there, so much of the infrastructure is there. And one of the 12 truths, which I missed in my first book, which is so important for people

and understand, don't fly solo. You can find mentors that want to help you succeed. The world isn't against you. The world actually has abundance that you can tap into. And you're going to need a series of mentors because the world's changing so fast. No one has all the knowledge for all the citizens. situations you're going to hit. And why wouldn't you want to get help? So I teach you how to find those mentors, how to use LinkedIn to get it. It's not, you know, and I just got a dozen this morning,

will you be my mentor? No, that doesn't work. That's like walking into bar. If I walked up to you in bar and said, hey, will you have my baby? I don't think that works. But if you start a dialogue, if you look through their backgrounds, if you can see the things that I outline, you may have a lifelong mentor without ever using the M word. And why do people want to do it? Well, they've gained knowledge. They'd like to share that knowledge. They like to have that validation. We're not all competing for the same dollars. And that's probably where people get it wrong. Entrepreneurs don't sell things. They solve things. Solve a problem for a few people. You have friends sell for a million. You make money. Sell for a billion. You change the world. And I've watched it. You know,

really the everything you own, anything you've ever bought, anything that you've seen as a movie or your favorite song was made by a stubborn person. You know, they had the perseverance to continue. And in future proofing you, I show you how to take that perseverance and turn it into passion, how to really take it to that next level, because it's not easy. This young man, Vin, he worked harder for one year than most people were willing to, but now he can live the rest of his life in a matter that most people can't. I think it's a fair trade. But for one year, There was no watching TV, no watching funny videos on YouTube, no, no dating. I mean, he put in the effort.

But the reason it's called future-proofing you is when you got to the month 11 or 12 and he knew he was going to hit the million dollars. And, I mean, amazing accomplishment. The only thing that got him through that marathon grind was he knew was going to take the next year off. And he could take the next year off, not because you can live the rest of your life on a million dollars, but because he knew whenever he wanted to start again, he had the tools. He was future-proof. Whatever pandemic, whatever changes, whatever happens, he can find the opportunities because all the obstacles in your life are actually the opportunities in disguise.

That's it. It sounds so simplistic, which is frustrating. However, knowing your backstory and knowing what you've been able to disrupt and achieve, and as we were talking about in the business that I was in, in the radio business, and the disruption that you brought to it was massive. amazing. But now you describe it so simplistically. And as a startup entrepreneur and for everyone listening right now, I know that it just feels out of your grasp. You know, the whole world is such a noisy place. And it's so challenging to be the one that breaks through. And, you know,

maybe Jay was lucky. And that's why he was able to break through. What do you say to those people? It's amazing. The harder I work, the luckier I get. Here's the way I viewed the world from the beginning. I remember getting out of school and wanting to get a job. And I realized any job I apply for, that job exists, which means somebody has already done it, which means there's a ton of people that have more experience, a better resume, they're going to get that job. So even at that young age, I said, well, what I need is data. I need information.

And we live in a world now with much easier to get data. And so I took an ad in a Hollywood reporter describing the entry-level job I wanted in special effects. I saw Star Wars. Oh, I want to make special effects. And nothing about Hollywood, nothing about anything. And that gave me two pieces of data. It was a blind ad as if it came from a studio. Here's the job description, an entry-level job. We got a bunch of resumes in. First, I now saw what would I need on my resume to get that type of job? And number two, here's a whole bunch of people with one foot out of the door of their current company. So I knew who would be having openings. So now I had a plan. In Disrupt You, I talk about the 21st century version. A young man gets out of college and he wants to be a madman, wants to go into advertise, wants to be creative. Oh, my God. And he lands a job with one of the big multinational ad agencies, only to discover that he's down in the basement of a high rise in a careless cubicle moving numbers around. And he literally wants to just hang himself. And then he notices online that the most famous creative directors, no one's ever bought their names as keywords.

So for $9, he bought the names of the five big creative directors, whenever they Googled themselves to see if there's anything written and says, hey, I want to work for you, click here to see my portfolio. Three of the five called him in, all offered him jobs. He made five times this hour and probably accelerated his career by a decade or two. It is that simple if you start understanding the process of how things work, what motivates people to make decisions. I mean, you know, one of the 12 truths in future-proofing you is about how you can harness fear. So many of these guru motivational hocksters are like fear isn't real fears in your head, get past your fear, forget your fear. B.S. We are biologically hardwired to be fearful. The oldest part of our brain, the central part of our brain, the thing that goes before rational thought, is the fight or flight response.

Somebody walks in a room where they're going to eat me or they're going to kill me, you know, before you can get to anything, you cannot put fear in a box. Athletes take that fear and use it to make adrenaline flow in their body, and that gives them more energy than all the exercise and workup getting into it. So for the entrepreneur that's just starting out, I've been there. Here are your fears. You're afraid of failing. you're afraid of losing your money.

You're afraid of losing friends money, strangers' money, embarrassment. Real fears, absolutely. But if you're walking down the sidewalk and a truck comes barreling towards you, it's screeching, the brakes aren't going to do it. It is going to run you over.

Do you think about I'm embarrassed or I might lose money? No. I think, I want to save my life. I am going to die. Well, that proves that you you can prioritize fears. So those other fears are all valid. But if you're a job that just pays you enough to show up, but not enough to care where you're not growing, you're not learning,

you're not living the life that you want. You're just basically paying bills until you die. You're trading a week, a month, a year. You're going to wake up one year and you've given up your whole life for what? You've wasted your life. That's the fear you should be afraid of. You only got one chance on this planet. Why not live a life of purpose? Why not it something, why not make a better life for you and your family? So if you can keep that fear top of mind, what other people think? What do I care? And talk to anybody out there. I've never met a hater that's doing better than me, okay? The haters are people that don't go after their dreams. And let's say you do fail, because you will fail. When you fail, you don't end up where you started.

You either earn or you learn. That's why as an investor who's raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, I'd rather invest in somebody that's failed before. Bill Gates' first company, a failure, Henry Ford's first company of failure, Walt Disney's first company, a failure. But they learn. And there's nothing wrong with failing. Failing is just finding out what doesn't work.

Look at a toddler. They don't stand there one day, I shall now walk across the room. They take a step, they fall down, they figure it out, and they get it eventually. When you play a video game, you hit that obstacle, man, it kills you every time and you finally get past it. Guess what? There's another obstacle. And that explains how Jeff Bezos could lose money year after year after year with Amazon and come out the backside is the richest man in history. So learn from failing. Learn that when you have those things, there are learning opportunities. And it goes to that growth mindset, which is really where I started

with this young man. When some people fail to go, I'm not good enough. I'll never be a realtor. I couldn't pass that test. I'm not smart enough. I'm not this amount. You may have been that yesterday, but you don't have to be that tomorrow. You think you're bad at math because in third grade, you didn't know seven times seven. I'll put you in any third grade class now. You'll be the star. So that little voice in your head is what you have to start changing. If your anxiety, depression or ADHD or more than a rough patch, you don't need just another meditation app. Takayatry makes it easy to see a psychiatrist online using your insurance in days. Takayatry is 100% online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations,

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organically build that growth mindset. So, and Vin didn't find this out until the book was typeset and let him read future proofing you. But in our very first meeting, our very first time sitting down, I lied to him. There's a psychological effect called the Pygmalion effect. A professor went to school, interviewed all the kids, tested them, and said, these three students would be super achievers, super learners, though outshine. At the end of the year, when the whole school took a test, guess what, those three students killed it. What the professor did was, he just picked three names out of a hat. But if you treat people special and you tell them that they're special, they'll respond to be special. So I told Vin that I interviewed over 100 people. He was the only one with all the

attributes to be a self-made millionaire. When, in fact, I only interviewed him because if I cherry picked the right guy, it's not a fair experiment. And once he saw that this old dude believed, even if it wasn't internalized, he went along with it. And once by the end of the first month, he made $60,000, it was his soul. I mean, he had a growth mindset. He believed he could achieve anything. And not part of my plan in doing this. Midway through the year, he's about a half a million dollars that he's made, his business gets just sucker punched. Google and Facebook change our room, change the rules, nothing to have to do with him, but it's over. And I'm saying myself, well, it's not as catchy of a book, but a guy makes it half a million, you know, whatever. And for that

month, his goal was $100,000. And we have our end of the month sit down. And I can see that he's bummed. I know what's happened. And he goes, I didn't hit my target. I only made $96,000. And I was laughing inside. I'm like, if he could go back six months and say, you were going to be depressed that you only made $96,000. And when he explained what he did is one of the things that I teach is to have multiple revenue streams. So when his main revenue stream just vanished, he didn't say, what was me? He said, okay, got to focus my energies over here. How can I use this to help those clients? What can I do? And he didn't miss a beat. I was so impressed because what happened his business would have knocked me over, but he was invincible

by that point. And I've seen this again and again. The smartest people with the highest IQs don't end up wealthy. Studies will show that. College graduates no longer end up wealthier than those that didn't go to college, but they do get to start off life with a mortgage without a house. You don't have to come from a first world country. It all starts with that growth mindset. you just have to find the insight and I walk you through how to find the insight to start something and fill a void. Why have competition? Why compete for something that everybody else does? If you're the only one doing something by definition, you're the best in the world. And that's literally what I did with Ben. What he wanted to do for business, 40 million people were

already doing. He says, oh, I grew up with social media. I want to do social media for people. Yeah. I'll tell you, though, so many people will say, and I can just use myself as an example, when I first went out on my own, everyone said, lean into sales, develop course, product, you know, sales, sales, sales, that's what you're great at. That's what you should do. There's so much competition in that marketplace, yet everyone that's advanced and ahead of me is steering me to do what's already successful for someone else. I end up writing a book about confidence and there's really not a lot of people in the quote unquote confidence space. And people thought I was crazy. They were saying why you're going and trying to create your own lane.

You can't do that. You know, no one's hiring keynote speakers for confidence keynotes. You can't create that. And it's been an interesting journey for me personally to sometimes have to tune out the noise of what these so-called experts tell you. What bug me about so many of the autobiography business leader books is if you do what I did, right? If you came out of World War II and did this, you could run GE. I mean, well, I can't go back in time. I can't live your life.

That window and that path was unique, just as you're unique. So what makes you unique? What's your superpower? What is the thing that friends come to you for advice about? That's the core of what's going to take you where you are. Obviously, you have great confidence. And you have turned that into something that can sustain you and make you thrive. People think superpowers have to be these amazingly strong things.

in the chapter about finding your superpower. I talked about this young man who had ADD, couldn't focus, couldn't concentrate. Brain's gone a mile a minute. And so his parents and doctors have him, you know, doped up basically, you know, they have him on medication. And he hates it.

And the only time he can calm is when he's swimming in the backyard. He says, Mom, if I promise to swim every day, will you take me off these drugs? And the doctor and his mother agree. And he kept his word. By the end of his teenage years, he had 17 Olympic medals, and you know him was Michael Phelps. His superpower isn't swimming. His superpower was his ADD. So what makes you unique?

You know, when people are giving that advice to be somebody else, all those other people were already taken, right? So of course you want to be what you want to be. But what the question would be, how did you validate your idea before you pursued it? Where was the built-in business from day one? So that you don't have to take the risk of if I'd be. build it, will they come? And that's probably where I would have steered you a little bit differently. That is what I did. I built it and then hope that they would come and they don't come as fast as

you're hoping them to arrive. Yeah. So what you want to iterate is all your businesses before you start burning capital. Because once you start burning capital, you're going to learn the same lessons that you would have learned before your money ran out. I hear all the time, oh, my business ran out of money. You know, we couldn't raise the next round. No, that's not true. Your business failed. You That's why I know what he was giving you money. There's tons of money out there, tons of money for lots of businesses. So what is it that you should have learned earlier on to give it? So in Vin's case, he wants to do social media.

How many people are doing it? As a guy couch surfing on somebody's couch, he's not going to suddenly get, you know, AT&T to hire him to do their social media. He's going to get other broke people that'll give him $100, right? So I said, look at what's happening in the world. what's big in the zeitgeist of business? What's the new thing? What's everybody talking about?

Where's all the focus? Where's somebody that absolutely has to nail their social media today? And make yourself the expert, not of social media, but social media for that one thing. And the second he did that, the same customers that were paying them $200 a week, we're now paying them $30,000 a week for the same amount of time, same effort. But he was giving them results. And even if you have to get your first customer free, when you have that first client, you now have what the MBA folks call a case study.

So he nailed it for the first client, and then they all just lined up around the block. I took over an advertising platform, an online ad platform a few years ago. BCs had put $8 million into it. They were going out of business. They had lifetime sales of $30,000. Okay?

Yeah. And they said, we're pulling the plug. We're not putting any more money in. And I looked at it, and I love what they did. And so I had to get it noticed. So if you can't get a paying client, I instantly went and I gave Vin the same advice. Go to a charity.

Go to a nonprofit. You know, in the ad world, do a public service announcement. Because who volunteers, who sits on the board of these charities? These aren't people that live in a cave and they come to charity meeting. They're CMOs of major corporations and other people, you know, and they're going to say, wow, you know, how did this guy with no budget suddenly get 50 million people to see this thing? Come on down. And, you know, 18 months later, the company,

was sold for $200 million. I often say it's that easy and people like don't believe it. But, you know, I'm a dyslexic kid. I mean, go watch, watch my TED talk on dyslexia. You know, Richard Branson's dyslexia. I've worked with Richard. Richard can't read a spreadsheet. He doesn't have to. He can hire people to do that. People get caught up on this like, I'm not an engineer. I can't be in technology. Really? You spend five and a half hours a day on your phone. Do you know how to build one? Do you know how to build one? Do you know how to how to code it? Do you know how the satellite? No. But do you understand there's somebody on the other end that could be a customer? Yeah. Do you have an idea of what they need? Yeah. So solve a problem.

That's all comes down to. They'll avoid and execute. It sounds so simple. You've had a lot of success with technology. Obviously, mobile's been a huge piece, but looking out beyond mobile and what that next opportunity is. So one of the chapters I talk about is a new trillion. opportunity. So you couldn't live without your smartphone. Agreed? Agreed. You couldn't run your business. You couldn't run your social life. You can't imagine what life was like 10 years ago when it didn't exist. I couldn't track my child. Yeah, that would be a real problem. So 10 years ago, when the iPhone came out, let me tell you two of the top 10 apps. The fart app made an assortment of fart sounds and a game with cats, which is another way of saying, no one saw Robin Hood open table.

Bull, Uber, all the endless businesses that have created billion dollar fortunes because this new technology was made by somebody else. Nobody that came out with an app that became a billion dollar company knew how to make the smartphone. They just took advantage of the infrastructure that was put out. So now 5Gs out there, over the next three years, we're no longer going to be taking our phone out of our pockets. We're going to have heads up glasses that gives us heads up display. And if you don't believe you're going to wear glasses, 80 million pairs were sold last year that came with one app, focus. You want to read, you get glasses that focus. Another 50 million pairs were sold in the U.S. But the app called Sun. You want to see when you're out at the beach,

you get sunglasses, okay? So now if you can have glasses that can translate any menu into any language so you don't accidentally eat dog, if you can walk into supermarket and say, show me all the products that don't have sugar or that don't have GMOs or that are halal or kosher and everything else disappears. So the glasses are being made by the big guys. The infrastructure is made by the telcos and you just have to say, what can I solve with this that I couldn't solve with the phone? You're getting at the ground level of a trillion dollar opportunity. And there are tons of great things that people are doing, but you probably have problems in your life that no one else sought to address how can an app for these glasses solve it? And it's literally that simple. Every business,

including yours, is a high-tech startup. Every business. If we're living so much of our lives with technology, how can your business not be core and centric there? It does make sense. However, one of the things, I think a lot of people, number one, get caught up in, again, easy for Jay to say, even if you can't identify the problem that you solve, which that, again, is the center of everything. People stop there with just being afraid to take that leap to go for it. How do you go beyond that concept? Well, let's go to the first thing. How do you find the insight, right?

In future-proofing you and disrupt you, I have a technique called three problems a day for 30 days. I'm going to tell you something that will guarantee you that a month from now, you will have more deal-flow, more opportunities to choose from than the biggest venture capital firms. Today, write down three problems in your life. It's that easy. But do that every day for a month. Maybe you can do it for two days. By day three, you're going, I have no more problems.

You do, but you don't see them as problems because you walk around with blinders. You're on automatic, doing so much of, here's how I always do it. You don't see the moment by moment of what you're doing to solve things. You know, at the macro level, you know, and you're going to write down, I'm in traffic. somebody thought that. And then they realized the phone company knows where their phone is, if they tell me to go left and the other driver go to right, that's ways. I sold it for a billion dollars with no revenue.

Okay. But problems don't have to be that giant. A reader who I've become friends with him, Larry, was taking his medicine one morning when the phone rang. Gets off the call and he goes, did I take my pill? If I took it and I take it again, an overdose. If I don't take it, I don't get better. I have a problem.

And so he realized when he thought about it, he could take it. a happy meal watch, put it on the lid. Every time you close it, it sets it to zero. Oh, I opened it three minutes ago or I opened it eight hours ago. Then I said, what if Bluetooth was added to it? Now you know whether grandma took her medicine and you can call it a reminder, got those out all over the place, you know, made locking ones that could be controlled by others to to limit access to opioids and basically solved a giant $20 billion problem. It's really that moment by moment. It's nothing more complicated in that. Starting the year with a wardrobe refresh,

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Jay, you talk about this virtual world that we're in now, and I'm personally super interested in this because speaking is a big part of my business. And I just gave my first in-person keynote last week. And when I tell you, it was amazing and I'm so interested to hear what you think about this, going from doing Zoom speeches, which are fine, but, you know, it's just not the same. And then fast forward to this event I had last week, it was truly pure magic. The engagement was off the charts. I've never seen anything like it. Do you forecast live events coming back, or do you forecast people staying in this?

If anything, now's a great opportunity because people have been so locked in for so long. They want that human connection. They want to feel it. Again, the augmented glasses I'm talking about is not virtual reality. This isn't sitting and seeing something. This is you're walking around all day long with glasses that bring you information from your environment. You know, where did I park my car? there's a line and you can find it.

You know, all those types of uses. What virtual has done is you no longer are required or confined to hire the best employees within 10 miles or 20 miles. You now can hire the best people in the world. Remote employees are your new secret weapon. They have less turnover. They actually work more. That 80 minutes a day that they're not commuting,

they can have a better work-like balance by spending more time with their loved ones. And conversely, you don't have to pay high rent, live in a densely populated little place. You can run your business from anywhere. So this month, you want to surf in Phuket. Next month, you want to run with the Bulls in Spain. You don't have to wait to your old and gray to see this beautiful planet. So it's really about what are the tools. And in future-proofing you, I list 20 pieces off for basically free to start with, to run a virtual company.

So you can have a company tomorrow. I mean, for next to nothing. So to go back to my starting out, I went to get into special effects, didn't know anything about them. I thought it was cool. I know that the big guys were going to hire George Lucas and ILM, but there had to be other stuff. So my original company, I started with an investment of $1. I printed business cards, made up a company.

My name's Jay Allen Sammon. It was called Jasmine. Jayon Salmon, it's mine. But I didn't make myself head of the company. What major studio, filmmaker, producer, director is going to put their film in the hands? of a 21-year-old kid. I just gave myself a sales title. Then I went out and hustled.

And the second I got stuff, then you hire people to know how to do it, right? Did Steve Jobs ever invent or make anything? No, he hired people that did. So you have the vision, you have the insight, then you just find and hire the people that can execute. Gosh, yet again, it sounds incredibly simple. But to your point about now that we have this,

virtual workforce. I just hired an assistant who's actually not anywhere near me. And it's the first time I never would have thought, you know, because I was definitely in that old mindset that you want somebody that you would be able to meet with in person occasionally. And we're so far beyond that, which changes the talent pool, changes the comp pool what's out there for, I mean, accessible to you. So I'm, it also makes you more productive depending what you're having people do. But you can have somebody halfway around the world, before you go to bed, here's what the tasks are. Here's what has to be written, created, proposal, whatever it is. And when you wake up, it's in your inbox. So people are working when you're sleeping. And that's really the process of start thinking, you know,

most people think too small. When I teach how to build a high tech startup at university, every semester guaranteed somebody comes up with the deliver food to the dorms business, valid business, but for the same effort instead of a business that has a total 200 customers, same steps, same effort you could create Uber Eats. So don't limit your reach. If you're building confidence as a brand and you're speaking, my question is, are you focusing all of your marketing just on the U.S.? Are there not businesses, conferences, industries around the world that may have less people reaching out to them, but have the same needs. Disrupt you became number one in Vietnam, number one in Australia. It came out. The last place I went before I locked down a year ago

was Lithuania, you know, came out of Lithuania. So it's really about having a plan and executing on that plan. Not something's going to happen. I'll figure it out, you know, I'll throw out a bunch of stuff and hope the phone rings. That's, that's not a plan. That's luck. And sure, you can get lucky. But is it something that you can then replicate? You can't replicate luck. No. And one thing we've seen for sure in the past year is that we have to have a plan for whatever that next wave of change is going to be. And that's why future proofing you is so the book for right now. And just to get on my soapbox, I love living in a free democratic society. And the only way you have democracy is by having a strong middle class.

And the people that create those jobs that create the middle class are the entrepreneurs. The pandemic wiped out the middle class, wiped out lots of mom and pop businesses. A lot of people got laid off of them. The bottom 140 million Americans are feeling pretty bad. They're collectively owned less than 1%. And when I saw what happened in our nation's capital in January, what I saw was people feeling left out, left behind, fighting over leftovers. the promise of go to school, get a factory job, get a pension and retirement, doesn't exist. Life expectancy for those people is actually shorter than the generation before for the first time in history.

But yet at the same time, the 150 wealthiest Americans doubled their net worth in the past year. Not doubled what they made, doubled their entire lifetime's worth in one year. So why not do what they're doing? working hard will not make you wealthy. The Warren Buffett hit his target of $100 billion. I'll admit it, Warren's worth more than me. But he made 99% of that after he was 50. Kylie Jenner became a billionaire at 22.

And I can tell you, you can have a lot more fun in your life if you're a billionaire at 22 than at 50. So what did she do different? And you're going to say, well, she's a Kardashian. Well, there's no billionaires in the Kardashian family. So what is it that she did? Can you do to canopy, replicated. And that's why I wrote Disrupt You in Future Proving Me to take the step by

step to show people because that's not what we're taught in school. We're not taught to be successful. We're taught to be an employee. We're taught to work on someone else's dreams instead of our own. If you believe in reincarnation, that's probably a really good plan. Eventually, you'll get there. But if you want to enjoy this life, if you want to take care of your family, what is stopping you? And how insignificant is it? So many people ask me, is now a good time to start a business. My answer is always the same. Last year was a good time. Now is the second best time. I mean, the sooner you start, the more time you'll have to fail and recover and live. So why wouldn't you want to work on the life you want? We have the time. If you weren't,

you know, made physically ill by the horrible disease, if you didn't have to deal with the death and suffering, it was a gift of free time. Did you put it to use? Did you build your future with that time. And if not, ask yourself, why not? Because if you, if you really want to, there's no gatekeeper stopping you. There's no special club, you know, and I just want to show I'm a regular dude. If I can do it, if all these other people can do it, it can be taught, it can be replicated, and it can make the world better because if we're just solving problems, who will we solve them for? We live in an imperfect world with full of injustices and problems. You know, anybody can make a shoe. But when Tom's shoes says when you buy one of

their shoes, somebody that's never had a pair gets a pair, do you think that makes it easier for them to get employees that want to have a purpose with what they do? Do you think it makes more loyal customers? Sustainable capitalism is a huge opportunity. It's where I end future proofing you because you can't have endless growth on a finite planet. Defies the laws of physics. So if regulations are going to be coming and forcing these things, why not get ahead of them? Why not I go where there's nobody else and then just try to hold on for that as long as you can. That's where wealth is created. Where can everyone find future-proofing you?

So you can get the book in audio and Kindle, you know, hard copy, Amazon, wherever you get your books. I also have free workbooks. So I'm not selling anything. There's no upsell here. There's no mastermind, no seminar, no t-shirt with Jay's mug on it. No mug with the mug on it. go to jay samet.com. It's my name J-A-Y-S-M-R-I-T.com.

And there's free workbooks. And so so often when you're reading a book, you go, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, got to do that. Then you get to the next chapter. It goes in one ear or out the other. So this is exercises and things to help you write your plan, figure out where you want to get to and how to get there. And I did it for both the books and they're free.

Just click on it. So you can find me anywhere on social media. Love to hear people's success stories. He's loved to hear people's challenges. And Tom Bill You wrote the forward to the book, and he said something brilliant in it that I'm paraphrasing. He says, if no one's ever told you this before, I believe in you. I don't have to know you.

I know that you're human. I know humans are adaptable. And you can change. You know, if you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. So give it a try. There will be stumbling blocks. There will be setbacks. But, you know, the darkness makes that sunrise so much more beautiful.

And that's what lets you appreciate. Just keep one foot after the other and you will make it happen. Jay, thank you so much. Thank you for all the work that you're doing. Thank you for your time. Thank you for the book. I will have all of the links in the show notes. Check out this book.

Check out Jay's site. He's giving you so much access. It's unbelievable, unprecedented. And future proving you is the book you need now. Jay, thank you so much. Hey, Carrie. Thank you. Come on this journey with me.

Thank you.