Motivation Daily by Motiversity - BILLIONAIRE MINDSET | 50 Minutes for the NEXT 50 Years of Your LIFE

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

The world's richest people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and Robert Kiyosaki share their advice to become billionaires. These 50 minutes will change the next 50 YEARS of your life. Special thanks to: ValuetainmentLondon RealSpeakers:Jeff BezosElon MuskBrian BullockJaspreet SinghPete CohenMark CubanRobert KiyosakiMarcus TaylorJon FisherMusicEpidemic SoundBorrtex“You either master money, or, on some level, money masters you.” ― Tony Robbins Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners. Motivosity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcast. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week.

The link is in the description. No matter how good we are, we can still be better. You can always be better. You have enough right now to change your life. You have enough right now to flip this world upside down. You have enough. You got enough power. You got enough anointing.

You got enough grace. You got enough patience. You got enough gifty to make your money, get out of debt, get yourself together, and change everything about your world. If somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company. We know that a great life doesn't happen by chance. It happens by design. If you outwork everybody, if you try to be a little smarter than everybody, if you try to be a better salesperson than everybody, if you try to be better prepared than everybody, you've got your best chance. I need you to fight. I see you sitting at your desk and you're doing work and you really want to go home.

But no, you got to fight. Come on, I see you trying to build the business and trying to get those clients and you're trying to promote this thing. You're trying to get it up the ground. Keep fighting. I had the whole world telling me that I could never be an entrepreneur. I had everybody telling me that I was dumb for trying to leave the comfort of trying to be a doctor. I had the whole world telling me that I was throwing every sacrifice my parents made for me away. So I had to work.

One of the hard truths about life is that success takes time. And this is what the greatest entrepreneurs have done, a drive to do more, to create, to bring something in to this world. Entrepreneurship is hard. You got to work a lot. And in the early days, I mean, I was working around the clock, seven days a week, never took a vacation, never spent money. I mean, you got to be willing to work. So why don't we learn about money in school? And he looked at him, he said, because the government doesn't, he said, because the government doesn't. doesn't let us teach that subject. If you're going to win, fight for your future, you're going to have to prepare your mindset for the workload.

Do you want to go down the entrepreneurial journey? Take the risk and do that. I love that risk. I love the whole journey with that. And I don't mind working hard and doing that. If that's not for you, fine. This is the differences an entrepreneur must know about money. Or then they're no longer entrepreneurs.

And it says an employee doesn't have to know anything about money. There's a difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The psychology of a champion is just different. Hustlers are just wired differently. The hustlers mentality is, how can this challenge be my opportunity and what can I learn? And when you find your passion, it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction, it gives you purpose. You can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a career or you can have

calling and the best thing is to have a calling. You can't skip steps, you have to put one foot in front of the other, things take time. There are no shortcuts, but you want to do those steps with, you know, passion and ferocity. In order to do a lot of these things, you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how the economy works. And you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something. Most people don't consider that. They don't do the work. They don't learn. It's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets. Now is the time to take risk.

I would encourage you to take risks now to do something bold. You are regretted. You guys will find that you have passions. And having a passion is a gift. I think we all have passions. And you don't get to choose them. They pick you. But you have to be alert to them.

You have to be looking for them. And when you find your passion, it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you direction, it gives you purpose. You can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling. And the best thing is to have a calling. And if you find your passion, you'll have that and all your work won't feel like work to you. Many, many kids and many grown-ups do figure out over time what their passions are. And sometimes we let our, I don't think it's that hard.

I think what happens, though, sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions. And so that's what needs to be guarded against. My job, one of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold. And people love to focus on things that aren't yet working. And that's good. It's human nature. That kind of divine discontent can be very helpful. But you really, you know, it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets. And you need to encourage that. And if you're going to take bold bets, they're going to be experiments. And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time whether they're going to work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure.

But big successes, a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work. So, you know, bold bets, AWS, Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business, all of those things are examples of bold bets that, that, did work and they pay for a lot of experiments. I've made billions of dollars of failures at amazon.com literally billions of dollars of failures and you know you might remember pets.com or cosmo or you know you give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily. None of those things are fun but but they also they don't matter what really matters is companies that don't don't continue to experiment.

Companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in the desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are, you know, making bets all along, even, you know, big bets,

but not bet the company bets. I don't believe in bet the company bets. That's when you're desperate. That's the last thing you can do. Do you need to be nimble and robust. So you need to be able to take a punch, and you also need to be quick and innovative and doing new things at a high speed. That's the best defense against the future. And you have to always be leaning into the future.

If you're leaning away from the future, the future is going to win every time. Never, ever, ever lean away from the future. We all have adversity in our lives. I would I doubt if you really, you know, if you know somebody, any friend or anybody that you talk to, there's no lack of adversity. And the, and by the way, that's good because it's what teaches us how to get back up. You fall down, you get back up. It always happens. And, you know, you get certain gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those. But you, I guess my advice on, adversity and success would be to be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices. So, you know, you may be the kinds of gifts you get in light, you know, you might be really good at math. It might be really easy for you. That's a kind of gift.

But practicing that math and taking it to the next step, that could be very challenging and hard and take a lot of sweat. That's a choice. You can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you. You can be grateful for them and thankful for them. But your choices, you choose to work hard. You choose to do hard things. Those are choices that you can be proud of. Being an inventor requires, because the world is so complicated, you have to be a domain expert. I mean, in a way, even if you're not at the beginning, you have to learn, learn, learn, learn enough. so that you become a domain expert. But the danger is once you become a domain expert,

you can be trapped by that knowledge. And so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind. Have that look at it freshly, even though they know so much about the domain. And that's the key to inventing.

You have to have both. And I think that is intentional. I think all of us have that inside of us, and we can all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. You have to say, yeah, I am going to become an expert and I'm going to keep my beginner's mind. You can't skip steps. You have to put one foot in front of the other.

Things take time. There are no shortcuts. But you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity. It's easy to have ideas. It's very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are a lot of steps in between, and it takes persistence, relentlessness. So I always tell people who think they want to be entrepreneurs, you need a combination of stubborn, relentlessness and flexibility.

And you have to know when to be which. And basically, you need to be stubborn on your vision, because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up. But you need to be very flexible on the details. Because as you go along pursuing your vision, you'll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong. And you're going to need to be able to change those things. So I think taking an idea successfully all the way to the market

and turning it into a real product that people care about and that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work. Don't try to chase what is the way. kind of the hot passion of the day. I think we actually saw this, I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts, but I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit, where at the sort of peak of the sort of internet mania in say 1999, you found people who were, you know, very passionate of something that kind of left that job and decided I'm going to, you know, do something in the internet because it's, you know, it was almost like that.

the, you know, the 1849 gold rush in a way. I mean, you find that people, if you go back and study the history of the 1849 gold rush, you find that, you know, at that time, everybody who was in within the shouting distance of California was, you know, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor, and they started panning for gold. And that almost never works. And even if it does work, you know, according to some metric financial success or whatever might be, I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. So you really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80, looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of

regrets you have. That works for career decisions. It works for family decisions. You know, do you want, I have a 14-month-old son, and it's very easy for me to, if I think about myself when I'm 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up. And so I don't want to be 80 and think, shoot, you know, I miss that whole thing, and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had and so on and so on. So if you think about that, so I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view. And I think this is something about which there's a lot of controversy.

You know, there's a, you know, a lot of people, and I'm just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is you think about the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to leave you ultimately satisfied. So this is just my, this is the way it works for me. And I mean, this is, everybody needs to find that for themselves. So I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction, and you need to find one that works for you.

Do the rich people cringe and say, don't tell them that, Robert? Yes, yes, yes. Don't tell people what you know. Keep them poor. My father was the head of education, PhD, all that stuff. I go home and ask him, and say, why don't we learn about money in school? And he looked at me and says, because the government doesn't let us teach that subject. The government tells us what we can teach and what we can't teach.

And I thought that was strange. And I said, but aren't we going to school to learn about money? He says, no, your job is to get a job. I said, but you get a job to earn money. He goes, no, you're supposed to just get a job. I went, no, no, no, no, no. Isn't the purpose of a job to earn money? He goes, you're correct.

I said, so why don't I just learn about money? I can skip the job part, you know? And he got flustered and he said, if I want to learn about money, why don't you ask your best friend's father about money? And I said, why? That's Mike. So why ask him? He says, because Mike's father is an entrepreneur. And I said, what are you?

He says, I'm an employee. I'm a government employee. I went, oh, what's the difference? He says the differences an entrepreneur must know about money or they're no longer entrepreneurs. And he says an employee doesn't have to know anything about money because the government will take care of and the company will take care of.

So I'm kidding, I'm all confused. But I took my dad's advice and I trundled over to Mike's father's office and knocked on his door and I said, hey, I'm here, nine years old, teach me about money. He says, beat it, kid, you know. But that's where this story of which Ted poured started and finally through persistence, my rich dad started teaching me about money

on one condition. And that condition was he would never pay me. He says, the moment I pay you, you think like an employee. He says, that's the trap. Entrepreneurs work for free. And now I'm nine years old, my head's going cracking in half. He says, you never want a paycheck. You understand that kid.

He said, okay, I got it. And he says, well, how do I make this? And he says, well, how do I make money? He says, that's what entrepreneurs figure out. He was like, so how do I learn about money? So he would just break out a monopoly game board. So I would work for free, I'd pick up cigarette butts, and he had hotels and restaurants,

and I would clean and do menial tasks. And as I got older, I started getting into office work and marketing and accounting. I was an apprentice, basically. But I always worked for free. And he would teach me about money. But the way he taught me about money was playing Monopoly. And I said, finally, one day.

I got upset and I said, well, when are you going to teach me about money? He says, what do you think we're doing? We're playing Monopoly. He goes, no, no, no, no. What do you think we're doing? We're playing Monopoly. He says, what do you think we're doing? So I don't know.

I'm teaching about money. And then that's where, you know, you have one green house. You know, he says, there's many formulas for great success in money. There's thousands of them. But one of the best ones found in the game of Monopoly. It still is today. Four green houses, one red hotel. He said, what?

He says, one of the greatest ways to acquire great wealth is playing monopoly in real life, four greenhouses, one red hotel. Is that all there is? He goes, that's it. And he says, what do you think I'm doing? And I went, I don't know. So then he took me out and he showed me his greenhouses. And ten years later, when I was 19, I was now in school in New York, and I come back to Hawaii

and Rich Dad had bought the biggest piece of the world. The biggest piece of land, smack dab in the middle of Waikiki Beach. And when you go to Waikiki Beach today, you'll see the Hyatt Regency Hotel. That was his hotel. Just like the game of Monopoly. Just like the game of Monopoly. Acquired assets and they became bigger assets. He just kept what's called an assemblage because that property wasn't that big at that time.

So you had to buy out all the small guys. Because Waikiki K was a little dirt water little town. So he'd buy out this shop owner and buy that shop. shop owner, and it took him a while, but he finally assembled this large piece of property, and then he and Hyatt put up this giant hotel. And it just sold for $800 million. So that's how I learned about money. I've had financial crashes.

I've had people stab them in the back, but they're all good because I grow from it. That's spirituality. You know, people who are afraid of making mistakes like they teach in school, they don't ever grow. Because spirituality is there's good and there's bad, there's right and there's wrong, there's up and there's down. Most people only want to be right, they only want to be positive. Well, you can't have that. That's not reality. Well, I wasn't poor by most people's standards, but I came from a family with a poor attitude, if you know what I mean, because rich, poor, middle class, poverty starts with a fundamental attitude.

Poverty is passed on. It's taught in your families. And middle class is taught in families. And so the people right now who are sitting at home who are struggling financially or worried about money or unhappy, they may be making a lot of money, but unhappy with what they're doing, it was probably taught to you. You know, your super ego was always about money.

your super ego was taught get a job, work hard, or you'll never be rich, or the rich or evil, or whatever. The school system will never teach you about money. The school system was designed to teach you to be an employee, which is important, or a doctor or a lawyer, a specialist. But never about money. And what most people lack is real business knowledge, like accounting, like debt, like taxes. You gotta know that stuff, but they don't teach it in school to anybody.

So, and then when people ask me, how did your rich dad learn this when your poor dad, a PhD didn't? And the answer is very simply. My rich dad, and my best friend's father, his father died when he was 13. So his rich dad had this family business at 13 to run. So he had to drop out of school, which was his blessing.

You know, there's blessings and, you know, sometimes a blessing doesn't look like a blessing, but it turned out to be a blessing. And then his teachers became his bookkeeper, his accountant, his attorney, his banker, his real estate agents. So he has what I call real teachers. Not these fake teachers in school. You see, most teachers in school, they're out of ethics. They teach subjects. They themselves don't practice.

I asked the teacher, I said, you know, I'm in my third year of calculus now. It was called Strength of Materials. I said, am I ever going to use this stuff? He goes, no. You know, said, why do you teach it? I was like I get paid. He said, do you ever use it? He goes, no.

And that's why, you know, you have to, in life, one of the things I suggested people, you're going to find a real teacher versus a fake teacher. And a fake teacher is somebody doesn't do what they teach. And a real teacher is doing what they teach every day. So my accountants, my attorneys, they're in it every single day. That's how I learn, because every day I'm solving problems in my business. So I have accountants and attorneys and bankers and all these people on speed dial because I'm solving problems with my team.

I see you giving this knowledge out and do the rich people cringe and say, don't tell them that, Robert. Yes, yes, yes. Don't tell people what you know. Keep them poor. But, you know, unfortunately, the poor was in the Bible. I'm not real religious. The poor will always be amongst us because it starts up here. Right. It's that fear mentality. It's in their words, you know, and the words become flesh. I'm not really religious. I flunked out of Sunday school also. But when they say I can't afford it. it or I can't do that, they go down. They become what they say. My PhD dad says, what do you think I am? Made of money?

I can't afford that. And my rich dad would say, that's why he's poor. Poor people say, I can't afford it, I can't do that, I don't have time. Because this is an escape. It's an escape. You know what I mean? It's easy to say I can't afford it. And your rich dad used to say what instead of, I can't afford it?

How can I afford it? How can I do that? You know, what would it take for? Or why should I do that? He says, a question opens a mind, a statement closes the mind. So when you say, I can't afford it, your mind shuts down. And you become what you say. Rugby is a team sport, but so is soccer.

The rules are different. And other people are golfers. They play by themselves. And so everybody's different. So my game financially is business, number one. Second is real estate. So what I say to young people is you find your game. Out of all the reasons in the world,

now I've read your book, you have the 10, you know, all these keys to success, et cetera, what would you say is the number one reason why people fail? Not necessarily why they make it, the complete opposite. Right, lack of brains, lack of effort. Lack of brains, lack of effort. Yeah, they don't do the work, they don't learn, you know. When you walk in the room, when you start a business

and you start to talk about somebody, you're never in a vacuum with no competition, you know, unless you're just extremely lucky. And if there's going to be competition, that means somebody else knows your business as well as you do when you get started. And if you walk into a competitive environment and they still know more about the business than you do and more about your customers, you're going to lose. But most people don't consider that. They don't do the work. They don't learn more about their industry.

They don't know even about their business. I mean, and so you've got to put in the effort to know more about your industry than anybody else. And that's the brains part and that's the effort part as well. because look, if you're competing with me, you better know what you're doing, otherwise I'm going to kick your ass, you know, and you're not going to out work me. And so, you know, the combination is usually what kills businesses early on more than anything. You know, alluded to it earlier about entrepreneurs being born or built, you know, and I think there, I knew I was wired to be excited about business. How or why? I don't know. But, you know, and there's certain guys that have the genetics to jump out of the gym, right?

There are certain guys that when they golf, they have the muscle memory and the discipline. You know, Dirk, the Vizki may not be the most talented guy in the NBA, but his discipline and his focus to do what's necessary to be successful. He's willing to do and combine it with being seven feet tall and being skilled, you know, it makes him an amazing basketball player. So it's understanding what your skill set is, finding the right place to use those skills and then going for it. You know, will that make you $250,000?

It depends if you pick the right industry. But whatever industry you pick, if you outwork everybody, if you try to be a little smarter than everybody, if you try to be a better salesperson than everybody, if you try to be better prepared than everybody, you've got your best chance. Because if you don't do it and somebody else does, you know, I have the same work like someone's trying to take it all away from you.

You know, I actually work like someone's spending 24 hours, working 24 hours to take it all away from you. And that's kind of the way I look at it. You know, I started my first business when I was, I was 12. I was buying and selling baseball cards, buying and selling stamps. Anything I could do to make money, I was hustling and trying to do. So I was into business, but not so much where it was, all my friends were into it with me, so they wouldn't know. Baseball cards. Yeah, baseball cards, you name it. I mean, I grew up in Pittsburgh. And so I would probably even less than 12 years old.

I would go out and buy a bunch of baseball cards that I collected and I would package, I would say, okay, you're guaranteed to have a Pittsburgh pirate in this package. And I would charge three times as much. I'd set up on this park bench down in the park down in Scott Township where I grew up. And I'd have these little sales. And it was great. I made money. And I mean, it was, you know, and I learned as much about business when I was 9, 10, and 12 as I learned any other time. Let's transition to a different subject with college.

You went to IU. Yep. Right. Now, you've got a lot of people that say, forget about school. They're out of school. They're a idiot. So you think they're idiots. Tell me why.

If you're going to have and run a business, if you don't understand accounting, you're already behind the eight ball. Can't you hire a guy that knows that I don't have to communicate to you. Your accountant might tell you, you're profitable, but your cash is going down, you know, not understanding a breakdown. And when you don't... Do you think you need college to learn that? Yeah, I think you do, right?

Because it may not, for some people, look, if you're so self-motivated that you can take an online course in accounting and teach yourself everything, you're way ahead of the game anyways. But most people aren't. I don't care if you go to a community college and take accounting. and spend $99 for the class. Just, you know, spending the money forces you to be more obligated to do it.

But accounting, finance, lesser extent marketing, sales that the school offers that. These are all the, that's the language of business. And so while it's possible to teach yourself these things and while it's possible to hire them, when you're starting your own company, you don't want to have to spend money hiring an accountant. Well, let me take that.

If you've gone through all these classes, if I don't have to hire a lawyer to incorporate, Right. You can probably figure out yourself. And so your cost of opening up a business drops, but even more important in all that. That's the blocking of tackling. That's the language of business. You know, the thing I learned at Indiana that was more important than anything else, I learned how to learn. And learning became far more important to me. Because the one certainty in business is that it's always going to be changing. If you're not always learning, if I'm not continuously learning, if I'm not just absorbing as much as I can absorb, someone else is always learning. If you're not always learning, if I'm not just absorbing as much as I can absorb, someone else, is going to kick my ass. Right? So you talk about paranoia. The greatest source of your paranoia should be knowledge. If someone else knows more than you do.

And if you're not learning, if you don't know how to learn, if you don't have a thirst for learning and acquiring information, you're SOL. So do you think like, let's just say if we put 10 guys here, you interview them, okay? You could within a 5, 10 minute interview say, this dude's not going to make it as an entrepreneur. Yeah, I mean, I can typically tell, right? I can tell by their passion.

I can tell by their focus. I can tell by their preparation. You know, there's a whole realm of things in any business. Here, you know, here's the business you're in, and here's a thousand things that influence whether or not you're going to be successful. You know, through my experience in businesses, I can put myself in his position and say, okay, here are 900 of the thousand things he has to be aware of,

and then go through and ask. And by how many of those or her issues, they've been able to address already, that kind of gives me a sense of how hard they're willing to work. You know, and I can tell by the questions they ask me, so all I have to do is say, okay, what do you want to know? And, you know, when they start saying, what should I do? They ask you. Yeah, and that's fine, right? And I want them to ask questions, but, you know, people like to say, you know, the only stupid questions are the ones you don't ask.

And that's not right, right? Because the questions you ask, tell me, tell whoever, more about you than anything else you do. because in particular tells me about your preparation. If you ask me questions about just basic things that you should have known and you should have down to a science, that's going to disqualify here almost more than anything. Do you think there needs to be a healthy level of paranoia? Absolutely.

There needs to be. Oh, yeah. I mean, I always say, you know, for every one of my businesses, I said, what would I do to kick my own ass? You write? So whatever business you have, there's somebody trying to put you out of business. There's somebody trying to take a bite out of your business. and it's better for you to figure out how they're going to do it rather than they do it.

And so, yeah, that's being paranoid. And so you have to be paranoid. You have to anticipate other people's next moves. And you can't ever downplay the competition. I was at a business plan competition this morning at a college. And they were kind of being dismissive of the competition. And so you can't ever do that. You know, they're out there trying to take you down and they're not just going to sit still.

And if you're good, really, really good, you're going to inspire them to work even harder, faster, better. And so you have to be, you know, very self-aware of what you're good at and what other people are good at. And, you know, a healthy dose of paranoia makes a bit different. I mean, it's very helpful. How does one entrepreneur increase the speed and areas that they can increase? There's certain things you can't control. Speed in one way. Speed of growing your business. All right. So how fast can I grow? Yeah, I mean, it just depends. You've got to know your own skill set, right? And you've got to know how that fits within your company's life cycle.

You know, some companies are slow grind, and you just have to understand that, and you've just got to bide your time until it starts to click and then grow with it quickly. You know, if you're trying to release a product that needs to be ubiquitous, you've got to go as fast as you can and then, you know, release a product. Yeah, and there's a lot of people that will say, you know, perfection is the enemy of profitability, right? And that doesn't mean you have to wait to us a perfect product. It really just depends on what the product is that, you know, a barbershop, right? Is it an app? Is it a service? Is it a product?

But, you know, the key is looking for the low-hanging fruit. What are the, what customers are willing to write you a check or commit to it, you know, so that they're willing to integrate it into their daily lives or integrated into their daily business? And so getting a commitment either through time or revenue is typically what I look for. And so if I can get a commitment, then I'm going to be able to learn. I'm going to see how they use it. Do they sustain usage? And then once I get the next one, you know, hopefully it came a little bit faster than the first one.

Then I can ask for referrals. And then the next one, then the next one. And I just try to ramp it up. You know, when I bought the MAVs, we had no season ticket holder base. And so literally it was a matter of just putting a list. of former season ticket holders and a white pages back then, you know, on my desk next to my phone and making phone calls. You?

Yeah, me. Yeah, because if I'm not going to do it, I expect someone else to do it, right? So just get on the phone, hey, this is Mark Kuhna, I'm the new owner of the Dallas Mavericks. You know, I like to invite you back for again. It's not though, this is my business. But you can't get regular sales gets or something to make those calls once they get to a quarter. You're a guy that's a billion, you're making those calls.

But that's all, you know, and that's fine and good, right? Because everybody's got their own goals, right? But still, I don't want anybody at the MAVs to be able to say, well, he's not willing to do the work, right? There's, you know, if I walk around, I'm picking up all the papers. I'm not saying, go get that picked up. I'm like, okay, that's trash. I'm picking it up. So, but in terms of speed of growth, it's really, you've got to get that first customer first.

And then when you get that first, what did you learn, reiterate, get that next customer. And then hopefully, as you learn more and more through the process, then the next one, the next one, the next one becomes, come by even faster. Here's what we do know. Life doesn't get any easier. It doesn't get more forgiving. We just get stronger and we get more resilient. One thing I've noticed is that enthusiasm is common, but endurance is rare.

The race is not given to the strong, no the swift, but it is given to he that endureth until the end. One thing I know is that we've all been hit with a measure of adversity as some, point in our life. Everybody listening to me has been hit with a measure of trauma. Everybody wants destiny. Everybody wants manifestation.

Everybody wants fulfillment. Everybody wants the next level and the relationship and a higher quality of living. But nobody wants to eliminate distractions. Nobody wants to disappear for three months, four months, six months, and eliminate all distractions and get into a place where you can focus on. just you? What if you could just shut out every distraction? What if you can just shut out the world for just a season and focus on you? A man is rewarded in public for what he does in private. The reason why you don't see it, the reason why it has not manifested, the reason why you are so

frustrated is because you have not been willing to forsake all that you've been called to forsake and to follow through behind closed doors. Sure, you can talk about it. Sure, you can plan it. Sure, you can write it down. Sure, you can go to the conference and hear about it. You can read about it. But at some juncture, you have to disappear and put the work in and come back and shock everybody that doubt in you. Some of you don't even realize you have unfinished business. You need to go back When you left off with a new perspective, go back to the gym, go back to the drawing board, go back to the business, go back to the relationship, go back to the burning building. You have unfinished business.

All you got to do and show up with a new game plan and a new perspective, you got a finished business. You have an unfinished business. You got what to do. What happens when your perspective, your perception diametrically opposes your reality? If you are going to give and grow and evolve and attain and become, everything rises and falls on your viewpoint. Perspective is everything. Let's go. I need you to hear me loud and clear.

How you see this thing is everything. You can. not change the past, but you can't change your perspective about it. Your viewpoint is your advantage. Your viewpoint is what changes the game. Everybody wants increase and in abundance and lifestyle change and new zip codes and new area codes, but you only read once a week and you only work out once or twice a month. And so the reason why you don't have what it is that you see, The reason why what's in your head is not in your hands, it's not your reality, is because your perspective opposes your potential.

You don't have it because you don't see the value in it. If you believe you've been called to be the difference maker, the game changer, the disruptor, the person that comes into a room and commands the atmosphere, if you believe you've been called to be necessary and not grossly, irrelevant, then everything you do, everything you see, everything rises and falls on your perspective, your perception, your viewpoint. How do you see this thing? I see, when we get into the prison of fear, because we have fallen in an area, fear has

friends. One of the chief friends of fear is doubt. And doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will. There are people who have failed in their head before they even reach the field. So I want to invite you to renounce the spirit of fear. Failure is the only opportunity to begin again. And if I'm talking to anybody that's hungry for the future, all you need is an opportunity to try again. Failing doesn't make you a failure.

It's something you did. It's not who you are. And so one thing we are going to have to get a crystal clear belt is that if I failed, then I can wear. I'm talking to that football team. I'm talking to that baseball team, that basketball team. I'm talking to that fighter. I'm talking to that track star. I'm talking to that athlete.

I'm talking to that student. I'm talking to the person who failed the exam over and over and over again. I'm talking to that individual who feels as though all hope is lost. who feels as though they gave it their all. If you are still alive, you've got something left. Thomas Edison, he was fired from his first two jobs. His teachers coined him. Stupid.

That he couldn't learn anything. This is the man who invented the light bulb the first thousand times he failed. But he was never a failure. He just found a thousand ways that don't work. You're no time that's sadist. You didn't try a thousand times.

Try a thousand times. And then come talk to me and tell me you're not enough. Tell me you don't have what it takes. Tell me you're stupid. Tell me you're dumb. Tell me you're slow. Tell me you don't have enough. Whatever pushed you to the ground,

whatever knocked you to the floor. From that place, I want you to look it in the eye. And tell it. Tell that person, tell that circumstance, tell that place, tell whatever it is that knocked you to the floor. You can't keep me here. If you're going to understand the program of resiliency, we are going to have to stop running from difficult times. Stop praying that the storm will pass over you and pray to grow through the storm. Stop going around it.

go through it's what you go through you will grow through some fights are not one in the first round flat out in the moment that you get that and you get crystal clear and you accept the fact that there are some giants that you will not defeat in the first round you need endurance you need stamina to reach some goals you're not going to hit the million with the first investment you're not going to hit the home run always at first wing. But resiliency says, I belong here, and I deserve another shock.

I want my opportunity. Give me my opportunity. SpaceX's lack of experience $1.6 billion could compromise safety. Testified against commercial spaceflight. I wish they would come and visit and see the hardware that would during can.

And I think that would change their life. Those guys are heroes of mine. There are many more ways to fail than to succeed. For a rocket, there's like a thousand ways that thing can fail and like one way it can work. You can have a lot of rocket failures. What I'm trying to do is to make a significant difference in spaceflight and help make spaceflight accessible to almost anyone. There need to be reasons to get up in the morning.

the morning. You know, life can't just be about solving problems. Otherwise, what's the point? There's got to be things that people find inspiring and make life worth living. If somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society, I think that's a good thing. Like, it doesn't have to change the world. Like, if you're doing something that has high value to people, that's, I mean, I think that's fine. Like, stuff doesn't need to be changed the world just to be good. Depending on how well you want to do, particularly if you're starting a company, you need to work super hard. And I mean if you do simple math, say like, okay, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100, you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other

company. I am somewhat impulsive and I don't really want to try to adhere to some CEO template. A natural human tendency is wishful thinking. A challenge for entrepreneurs is to say, well, what's the difference between really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream, that is a really difficult thing to tell you. Can you tell the difference between those two things? I think certainly being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else and just being really rigorous in making that assessment. I think certainly extremely tenacious and then just work like hell.

I mean, you just have to put in 80-hour, 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. I mean, I think it's quite painful and difficult. All those things improve the odds of success. I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened, and that's really the only way forward. That's unreal.

Space is hard, and rockets tend to fail, unfortunately. And even when you've got a lot of really smart people working super hard, to minimize the probability of failure, it's still there and it's, you know, it's quite significant. You know, people have asked me like, well, why a rocket's, you know, especially hard? And, you know, part of it's like, everything has to work the first time. Like, there's no, you can't do a recall, you can't patch it, it's got, it's like nine minutes to orbit or it's over. You can never test the rocket completely in the environment that it's actually going to experience. You can't fully recreate something that's moving super fast.

in a vacuum on the surface of Earth. Like you can only really recreate that in space. I mean, I think it's quite painful and difficult, honestly. And it feels terrible. But, yeah, I mean, the company is sort of looking to, you know, me to rally them. And so I do. But I honestly feel super bad.

So what does super hard mean? Well, when my brother and I was starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch. And we showered at the YMCA, and we're so hot up, we had just one computer. So the website was up during the day, and I was coding at night.

Seven days a week, all the time. If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you're putting in 100-hour work weeks, then even if you're doing the same thing, you know that you will achieve in four months what it takes them a year to achieve. When I was young, I didn't really know what I was going to do when I got older.

People kept asking me, but then eventually I thought the idea of inventing things would be really cool. And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark, which said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And that's really true. If you go back, say, 300 years, the things that we take for granted today would be, you'd be burned at the stake for.

You know, being able to fly. That's crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate, having effectively with the internet a group mind of sorts and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere in the earth this is this is stuff that that really would be magic or be considered magic in times past in fact I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today that weren't even imagined in times past they weren't even in the realm of magic so that it actually

actually goes beyond that. So I thought, well, if I can do some of those things, basically if I can advance technology, then that's like magic and that would be really cool. And the, I always had sort of a slight existential crisis because I was trying to figure out what does it all mean, like what's the purpose of things. And I came to the conclusion that if we can advance the knowledge of the world, if we can do things that expand the scope of the and scale of consciousness, then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened, and that's really the only way forward. If we're for any given company, just can keep thinking about, are these efforts that people

are expanding? Are they resulting in a better product or service? And if they're not, stop those efforts. And then the final thing is, is don't just follow the trend. You may have heard me say that it's good to think in terms of the physics approach of first principles, which is rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there. And this is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing. It's hard to think that way. You can't think that way about everything. It takes a lot of effort. But if you're trying to do something new, it's the best way to think. And that framework was developed by

physicists to figure out counterintuitive things like quantum mechanics. So it's really a powerful method. I think the final thing I would encourage you to do is now is the time to take risk. You don't have, yeah, you don't have, you don't have kids, your obligation, well, Simon, Probably not because. But as you get older, your obligations increase. And once you have a family, you start taking risk not just for yourself but for your family as well. It gets much harder to do things that might not work out. So now is the time to do that.

Before you have those obligations. So I would encourage you to take risks now, do something bold. You are regretted. Thank you. Not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter. Need be portrayed as home runs or strikeouts, success or failure. It's so ridiculous that it's portrayed that way, but it's what sells newspapers. So it's what you read about. You can have an idea that doesn't yield a better way to do your job or your career,

but it changes your life. And what's that worth? Marry the right person. The most successful people I know are divorced and they tell me it wasn't worth it. Don't do it. Don't sacrifice your families. Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are. I invented something that many of you use every day.

You don't know it. It's buried in the enterprise. But I know it and I know how it feels. And I'll tell you it doesn't compare to every day holding that one's happy and healthy little hand. And by the way, don't step on anyone's neck to advance your cause. Don't sue anyone and try not to get sued. You'll sleep better at night. I've never been a party to a lawsuit in my technology career.

And amen to that. My wife and I don't put work before our daughter or each other. Engineers in my company with similar families and I have been together for most of our careers. We don't waste time commuting to offices. have each other over for dinner, we don't have holiday parties, we get it done, and then we see our families. I believe you can hear the siren call in your lives without it leading to you crashing against the rocks, and I think that's worth sharing. I agreed to join a non-profit board, my primary school board, and it changed my life. I learned about parenting and education

and philanthropy and what motivates people. The union of concerns. scientists just forecasted that nearly 4,400 homes in Marin County alone are going to be completely underwater in less than 30 years due to sea level rise. So my generation, your generation, we're going to have to do something. We're going to have to do something. For now I keep searching for ideas like taking our daughter to school on an electric tandem bicycle. We count the idling cars as we pass in traffic. We wave to them. They used to wave to us, but we're getting a little annoying now, so they kind of just, eh. But it's something.

It's something that we can do. Maybe you'll have an idea about attacking global warming. Or maybe you'll have an idea about attacking poverty. Or maybe you'll have an idea about attacking truth and news reporting. And maybe you'll do none of those things. But maybe you'll speak from your heart authentically in front of the person that you're going to marry. Mary, and maybe you'll be inspiring. In an increasingly unrecognizable world, my career trajectory should be recognizable to you.

This means you can do what I've done. You can have this life. You can be happy in your career and your family. And if you want the world to know your name, well, then I applaud you. I really do. The world needs you. And I'll wish you every success. if you're willing to sacrifice it all, bet it all, blow out the curve.

Just remember my name as your backup plan. Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.