My First Million - if you didn't make progress in 2025, listen to the first 10 minutes

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Get Sam's guide to turn ChatGPT into your life coach: https://clickhubspot.com/hdp Episode 773: Sam Parr ( ⁠https://x.com/theSamParr⁠ ) and Shaan Puri ( ⁠https://x.com/ShaanVP⁠ ) talk about the systems you need to hit your goals, Shaan’s new unpaid side hustle, and how to be a better communicator.  — Show Notes: (0:00) 5-year journaling (2:09) The power of a good system (8;21) The power of reminders (10:38) Shaan's new career path (16:27) the 3 things that matter (27:38) high-standards (32:45) How to craft an earworms (42:42) giving back better (46:11) The voice in your head (50:26) Shaan talks to a ChatGPT coach about money (1:00:01) “VIdeo is the native tongue of the internet” — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com  • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano //

I want to show you something that's honestly changed my life. Have I showed you this? Five-year diary. No. Okay, so let me explain how this works. I'm so jealous that I did not invent this journal. So basically, here's how my five-year journal works. On every single page, it says, like, you know, December 1st, and then it has the first year, the second year, the third year, the fourth year, the fourth year, the fifth year.

Oh. Yes. I'm interested. You took this journaling thing from like, oh, great. the most boring topic ever, journaling, to, oh, wait, that's pretty cool. I kind of want one. I started doing this in November, like the week of Thanksgiving, actually. And so your boy's getting to last year's entries. Like a week ago, you mean?

I started doing it a year ago last week. Oh, last year. Okay. I've talked about this three times now. This is the third time. This is the first time it's clicking. But the reason it's been very special this week, because I'm getting to my previous year's entries. And I purposely did not, like, look ahead to, like, see, to remind myself. Right. Do you want to know something, the biggest takeaway? I don't change.

Like, what do you mean? Like, your habits, what you're doing, or how you feel? I have complained about the same stuff for 10 or 15 years. And I have previous journals where I look back and I'm like, I've complained about the same things. Give me an example. What do you mean? So, like, is the way that I'm speaking? spending time right now, is it even worth it?

Is working on this business even worth it? Do I want to go all in on creating content? Or do I want to go all in on being behind the scenes? Right. Where should I live? Basically, I complain about the same things all the time. Why did I lose my temper today and make myself look stupid? Why didn't I pause for like 10 seconds and reflect before I'd like, you know,

snapped at like my wife or a kid or something? And I think I've concluded a few things. One, humans don't change. Actually, changes, let me rephrase that. I've concluded that change is unnatural. Change is not natural. Like, it's inertia is natural. Yeah, right.

inertia is the default. And so you can change. And I actually have changed a lot of big things in my life. And I was thinking about what causes change. And I think a good representation of what causes changes in business. Typically, this happens at the 10 million mark.

The difference between 10 million and 100 million year business oftentimes is systems. So I think it typically comes down to hiring great people and creating great stuff. systems. And the reason why I love business is because it kind of teaches you a little bit about life. And what I'm learning about my own life is that the moments that I've changed most in my life is when I've had a system. And this, a good system, what it does, it makes it more predictable by taking away how you feel at the moment. The way that you feel on any moment should have nothing

to do with the actions that you take to get you to the goals that you've set. So for example, the times that I've lost the most weight and gotten the most fit is when I had an accountability, a nutritionist, like holding me accountable, or I had a trainer who I had to see, or I was following a plan. The times that I've stagnated most of my life is when I've not had a plan, and I let my feelings on that day dictate what I do

during my schedule. When I have a good company, your salespeople have scripts that they follow. They have checklist for follow-ups. They spend the early morning doing outbound. The middle of the morning is doing follow-up emails, and it's like a system. And I just wanted to talk about like,

A, do you have this? And B, we should talk about some of the systems that we've implemented in our lives that have actually made real change. Because I think the key to living a successful life, not just money, but success defined as getting what you want, is creating a system. I mean, you brought up a pretty amazing topic.

I think you started with the journal, which again is just an incredible, the year-over-year journal, which I think is incredible. It's basically a time machine because you get to see where you were and so it like forces perspective, which you wouldn't normally get, the vulnerability of being like, dude, I don't change. I'm the same complaining, you know, mother effort that I've been for the last,

you know, 10 years. I think that's really funny and honest. And then you have this systems thing. Now, the best quote of this, I think, comes from James Clear, or whoever he got it from in his book Atomic Habits, which is, you know, we don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. You see this everywhere.

everywhere. I see it in my business. I see it when I'm coaching basketball. I see it in my fitness life. You see it everywhere, which is that you don't become what you want. You don't become your potential, that's for sure. You become what we regularly, you know, you become what you regularly do, the old, I think the Aristotle quote, you know, we are what we, what we do repeatedly. And so what do you do repeatedly. You do what's autopilot. You do what's defaulted. You do what you have on an automated basis and not what's based on how you're feeling in the moment, which is like, if it was a graph, it'd be up and down, up and down, up and down. And so I think you're, I mean, you're spot on that this is inside the company and outside,

outside of any of your work stuff. It's the same thing. Let me give an example. Here's what I wrote about on 12-5 of last year. I said, I'm one text message away from going Amish. I'm so sick of digital distractions. It's a drug. And then I wrote, I had this other section.

I'm like, when I hang out with all these, like, successful people, I have a, have to remember my roots. I'm just a punk rock skateboarding redneck from Missouri, and I shouldn't get caught up in this fancy stuff or wanting to achieve all this fancy stuff. That's an example. And the reason I'm bringing up the digital stuff and being distracted is I wrote about that three weeks ago and this same thing. Right. So there's one thing I think that goes underneath that comes before the system, right? Because you're basically saying like you need a plan, need a goal and then you need a system that's going to get you to the goal reliably, right? A system that if you just follow of that, you know, sort of the mechanics, the physics of the system leads you to a certain

outcome. And I think that's very true. But there does seem to be like a couple things underneath that. One is the blueprint. So figuring out what to want. Because if you set up your systems towards getting some to get a goal that wasn't the goal that actually would change the feeling that you want, you will be perpetually on the hamster wheel.

This happens a lot in business, right? We get a promotion. and then you immediately are like, I still feel kind of the same, stressed, anxious, you know, version of myself. So, you know, I just need a little more and that'll be the solution, right? So, like, figuring out the right thing to want.

Because then it says, cool, let me build my systems in that direction. And I think that's a very uncomfortable place to be is figuring out what you actually want in life. Because it sounds like it should be so simple. That's the hardest part, right? It's the hardest part. You can't optimize for a goal without a goal,

and we spend most of our time worrying about the optimization. Yeah, or like, you know, the goal, like, did you pick a goal that's actually going to get you, again, like, you never want the thing. You want the feeling you think the thing is going to get you. Right. You don't want to have the fancy watch or the car. You don't want to have the promotion. You don't want to have the relationship. You want the feeling you think you'll have if you were in a great relationship. You want the feeling you think you'll have if your team wins the game. You want the feeling you think you'll have if you are driving that car and so this piece of junk, right? And so it's the feeling that you're chasing. And if you're not very good at understanding the your own feelings and practicing having the feelings that you want, you're not just going to have them when the thing happens. We just adapt too quickly. And your base nature, your emotional home, is too strong. So when you say, I'm complaining about the same things, I would guess that it's not that you're literally complaining about the same things,

is that you're having the same feelings about some variety of problem, you know, some same genre of problem, but the feeling is almost identical. Yeah, exactly. So what do you think you should do about that? I think a few things. I think that the way that I'm feeling now, correct me if I'm wrong, do you feel this exact same way?

Or have you had the same issue? I've had the same issue. I don't know what you're feeling right now. Yeah, I mean like this, this, this, I don't change fast enough or I'm not coaching myself fast enough and I'm not adapting. I think more often than not, the listener and you and me, we don't need to be taught new stuff. We just need to be reminded of the same thing that we already know.

know. I think that we don't give enough credit to reminders. So let me give you an example. I read, or when I'm not, when I don't have a newborn, I read a book a week probably. I read a lot. I love reading. It's great. It's so, like, I get so much joy out of it. Now, there's been so many times that I've read a book and it'll be on like something, a president or something. And then you ask me a year later, I really just can't remember much about that president. I can't tell you about the thing. And I think that a lot of times we go too wide and we consume too much stuff versus the same thing over and over and over again to master and be reminded of the same thing over and over and over again.

And so like another example could be when you're training an employee on like a sales process, I think the majority of the time you have to repeat yourself like seven, eight, nine, ten times in a sales meeting. So you have to do it. Like if you have like a daily sale stand up, you have to have phrases that people can remember constantly because I don't think they need to be taught what to do. I just think they need to be reminded constantly. So I think reminders are important. I also think that a system of accountability. So when you hire employees for your business, or at least when I do, I'm like,

I don't want to do that. I could just do this on my own. But I've noticed that when I hire employees for my company, I then feel like, well, now I have to keep feeding this system because now I'm held accountable. And it's very painful, but I get significantly better results. And so when I back myself into a corner where I must perform and otherwise I'm going to let others down. That's when I get the best results. If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGBT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals. And the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like how should I respond to this email? What's the

right decision, things like that, and it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode. Have I told you what I've been doing lately? I texted you something this morning. So it's 1215 at 1155 when I log in. I got this text from Sean. And it was this really good, like Instagram real, but it wasn't on Instagram. And it was Sean telling the story about about how he has quit being a business person, and is now fully focused on coaching a basketball team.

Is that right? So here's the story of how I step down as CEO in my companies, and I'm now an unpaid high school assistant basketball coach. This is a decision I've made. They were high school kids. These guys looked like they had beards. They're high school kids. So I love basketball, as you know.

What that you probably don't know is that growing up, I didn't watch cartoons. So you know how you're like, you'll mention like Dolly Parton, and I couldn't tell you who she is, or you'll be like, yeah, you know that Elvis song? I'm like, no, I don't really know. Well, that's also true if you asked me about Sesame Street or Rugrats.

As a kid, I'd never watch cartoons. What did you watch? World Series of Poker? I watched two movies on loop. Home Alone, a great movie. And I watched Mighty Ducks 2, specifically, D2. And, you know, these things you do as a kid, they sort of imprint on you, right?

And so this idea in the movie Mighty Ducks, Gordon Bombay. He's this hot shot lawyer who actually gets in like a DUI, but gets assigned this community service thing where he ends up coaching this hockey team. He pulls up and do his limo in New York City or some city and he's coaching, you know, like the street kids that somehow also play hockey. Exactly. The business guy who grew up playing hockey but has given it up now has to go back into the world of sport. And he ends up being the coach to this shitty rag tag group of kids, these underdogs, and then they go on a run and they sort of make it to the top. And he finds his love, his passion.

He realizes, like, oh, my God, like, this fills his cup. So I've watched that movie a lot of times. And I had always said, I don't know if I'd ever told you this, but I had said, like, bucket list item, my retirement plan was to go coach a high school basketball team, at least for a year. And I tried convincing my brother-in-law, I was like, hey, what if we got like an AAU team? Could we do that? And I've been kind of like poking around, like, is there a way to do this?

I think it would be really good for the soul. and the opportunity presented itself about a month ago where I hired a coach, I'm big on coaches, I hired a coach to train me in basketball just as like a workout. And so this guy used to train NBA players before the draft, things like that.

And so I worked with them for like, you know, over the summer. Did you get better? Yeah. I mean, of course you get better. You practice, you get better, right? Systems. So like I showed up two or three times a week. We practiced the same things every time,

the fundamentals, and guess what? Like, you get better. Was it good exercise? or did it hurt you? Oh, dude, it's great exercise. It was good. Like, you know, you're drenched with sweat, like, which I would never get in the weight room type of thing.

Same. I'm envious of that. It's like, you know, it's like your full body, right? Because you can't make them, like, a move without, like, rotation. And you're doing, like, lateral movements and stuff. Yeah, things you want to do in a stationary machine or barbell. So he tells me, he's like, hey, and I don't think I'll be able to coach you anymore.

I got this job. I'm now the, like, school starts in a week. I'm the head basketball coach at this high school. It's like small division five high school. I didn't know the divisions go to five, right? D1, D3, all the way D5. So five is small. Five is very small.

And so I was like, okay. And I was like, so you need an assistant? I just said it jokingly. And he's like, yeah, actually like I don't have anything. There's no staff. So yeah, I'm a first time coach. I would love assistant. So I told him I was like, dude, I'd love to show up maybe once a week.

And I just thought this would be something I would do just the way I do everything. half ass, baby. I thought that I would make a fun commitment in the moment and then sort of back away over time, things that I've done many times with many cool ideas in my life. But this year I'm trying to be a different guy, right? I said, I'm going to play the piano, and guess what?

I sit there and I practice scales, and I play the piano four times a week, and I'm getting good at it, and I'm doing the boring things, and I'm sticking with it. I'm not giving up. And so I did the same thing with this, and I was like, I'm going to show up. And, dude, when I tell you that this is the most fun thing I've ever done in my life, I am not lying.

This is incredible. So now I'm spending like 15 hours a week doing this. I'm basically going to practice four days a week. I commute, which I would, you know me, I would never commute. It's like a 30- I didn't even know you had a driver's license. It's a 30-40-minute drive. I'm basically coaching the kids from, you know, the beginning of the season,

tryouts. We just had our first game last night, first like official game. And the video I showed you was our first preseason game. We got smashed by 30. And then, you know, four days later, we had a first real game and we actually just won. We won by 30 last night. And we, like, did a Gatorade dump on the coach because it was his first win. And here I am, this assistant basketball coach.

You know, in the office when Dwight's like, I'm assistant regional managers. They're like, no, no, you're assistant to the regional manager. That's what I am. I'm assistant to the head coach is really the more accurate way of saying this. And I'm so emotionally invested in the entire process. You would not believe. Like me, I'm so invested at these kids. I'm so invested in getting them better day by day, system by system, habit by habit.

I'm breaking down game film of, like, you know, other high school teams that we're going to play. I'm sending clips. We have a kid who was struggling in school and got kicked off the team, and I'm helping him with his math homework, trying to get him back on the team. Like, I am so in. It's not even funny. So are you, I don't know much about sports, or at least basketball. I don't know much about basketball. can you tell a player to make minor changes and it actually impacts the game?

Or is it just like if you're seven foot tall, you're going to win? Well, this is why I brought this up. So you were talking about repetition, reminders, habits, systems. Well, sports are, of course, the great teacher of life. It's this little petri dish. It's like a simulation of life, right? You as an individual, you working with a team, you going up against competition, you facing defeat regularly, and you're getting to go to practice,

and then seeing if that translates into the real world, right? And there have been so many things where we would tell the kid something, and then the first scrimmage would happen, and we would just get our butt kicked. And it's like, we told them this. That's the exact thing we've been telling them. And then we had to be, take a step back as coaches and be like, oh, that's because the job is to drill this 50 times. Yeah. We did one of 50. And our perspective was wrong, which is that, oh, I'll tell them once and then they'll get it. And then they'll just do it live in action when the moment happens. Like, no, you won't. You will default inertia, baby. You will default to the. the thing that you already do, the old you. And so now we took, you know, as coaches, we're basically giving this mindset of like, all right, if this matters, there's only like, you can only tell them two or three things that matter. You can't give them 15 things to change

at once. So like, pick one to three things. And then let's be honest, we're going to need to say this 50 times with the same level of enthusiasm. And we're not going to get discouraged if it doesn't happen at number, you know, 42 because it takes 50. And that's like the mindset as a coach. but it's the same thing in your own life, which is like you seek progress, not perfection, and reminders matter a hell of a lot more than some new strategy, some new play, some new thing that nobody's ever done before.

You want that. You want some new answer because you're like, maybe I was just missing the thing. And actually, no, it's because I didn't internalize the thing. The answer that was already on my plate, right? And that reminders, like you said, are extremely undervalued. To the point where not only a reminder is undervalued,

they're sort of discriminated against. Reminders are like, you know, the minority class of self-help, right? Because when you tell somebody something that they already know, what's their reaction? It's not like, oh, I roll. That's helpful. I know. I know that. Right.

It's defensive. It's like, that clearly can't be important because I already know it. And it's like, no, no, no. It's coming back up again because it's that important. Dude, this is, A, this is hilarious. This has happened. I don't know if the listener can tell this. This has happened so many times where you and I come with the same exact thing,

not even realizing it. If you're an entrepreneur listening to this, you are going to be nodding your head. But how many times have you come up with a brilliant idea and gone to your company? And in all hands, it says, this is what we are doing now. And it is new and it is different. So many times, right? Yeah. And I've come to the conclusion that a company can basically only do one new project maybe per quarter, but definitely, but it could be every six months.

And when I say project, I mean something relatively small. Like for us, we had never advertised before. Now we're starting to advertise. It's like, just do meta. Just do meta and get really good at that. And you think, well, we should advertise a meta on LinkedIn. We should advertise. We should buy podcast ads.

We should do this. We should do that. It's like, no, no, no. Just that one thing. And let's really master it. And it's going to take six months. And so it's kind of funny that you're hearing that like, I don't know about basketball, but what are you telling them to do just that one thing?

Or you said three things. What are those three things? Okay, these are a little bit nerdy basketball things. But here's one. Something called playing off two feet. So the way that, how do I explain this? If it's not like, okay, when you play basketball normally and you go, you're just playing by yourself, there's no defense.

You're like, oh, I'll go do a layup. So you run in and you jump usually off one foot and you go shoot a layup. And that's great when there's nobody there. When there's defense, that's a lot harder to do because there's not only other people in the way, but when you jump off one, when you just run and jump off one foot, you commit to like that path being the only thing you can go do. And so what we have is a lot of undersized guys, right?

Like our point guard is like, I don't know, five, seven or something like that, right? We don't have like six, four athletes that are just going to be dunking and finishing at the rim across the board on our team. We have like, I think, one guy who can dunk pretty much. And so we had to teach them that there's this other way of playing,

looks a little less sexy, but is really effective, which is when you get into the paint and you're amongst the giants and the crowd, you come to what's called a jumpstop. So you just land on both feet. And now you have options. You can pass.

You can pivot. You could shoot. You can step through. You can do a bunch of things, but you're more under control. It's almost like a slower way to play. And it's not what you practice when, it's not what you do when there's no defense there.

When there's no defense there, you just kind of naturally will go do this. But guess what? In the real game, there's always defense there. So we're going to do things. We're going to practice like what happens in the game. and we're going to do things that match our athleticism.

And this is a habit that you guys don't have. And so we're going to drill this, not once, not twice, but every single day. You're going to get reps at doing this. And you're going to hear us say the same phrase, playoff two, play off two, play off two. You're going to hear that until you hear it in your dreams. Right. So that'll be like, let's say one of the core principles that it's like, that's a change we need to make. Right.

Because change requires that level of like repetition to do a new behavior. You're going to say it until someone hears it in their dreams. That's exactly what I'm meaning about reminders. You have to, that's so funny. Number two is what? And by the way, the actual test is you say it until you hear them saying it to each other. Once they're saying it to each other, your job as the coach has like, you know, you have successfully incepted the idea into them.

This happens also as a CEO, right? Like whether it's habits and how we do meetings or whatever, or it's like, what matters, what are the priorities? You know you've done it well when they're saying it to each other. I used to do this test with companies like if I would invest in them or they were running out of trouble. And they'd be like, yeah, we're trying to do X. And almost always in there, the little magic trick you can always pull is you take, you know, let's say they have a, it doesn't matter how many people. It could be like just their top five executives or it could be, you know, 15 people at their company.

You say, hey, everybody, I would like you to write down the top three priorities of the company. What actually matters right now? And then you look at the CEO and you see the CEO start to realize like, oh shit. we are not on the same page. Like, I have not done a good job. They don't even forget doing it. They don't even know what we're supposed to be doing. I have not even successfully communicated the priorities

because everybody, what they'll do is basically they will focus on their problems, my little problems and my part of the world. Or recency. What's the most recent fire that somebody put on my plate? And like, that's just the thing I'm thinking about. I kind of forgot about all the other shit we talked about at that all hands or at that meeting or at that offside or whatever the thing was where we made our plans.

And so this is the same thing and whether it's a team or whether it's a sports team or it's a company. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages. Point is, you miss a lot.

And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it,

visit HubSpot.com. I heard this story about NASA in the 1960s before we went to the moon. They had this amazing leader, and they were telling this story about how they knew he was amazing. And this one reporter sees a janitor mopping the floor at the NASA center. And he goes, sir, what are you doing here? And he goes, I'm helping us get to the moon. And that was like the best story ever because, like, they all knew the mission. Like, we all are playing a part in getting us to the moon. Right. By the way, this is like such funny things that happen. Like one kid like came to practice

like 10 minutes late and we're like, dude, you can't be late. And he was like he's like, sorry, I was at work. And then we look at his hands. His hands were covered in Greece. Like he's a mechanic, I guess. He's like, our point card's like a mechanic. And then he comes to practice. And like this other guy. Wait, in high school?

He's a, is he... Yeah, they have like jobs. Is it named Vini? Does he like... Dude, our best player's named Vinny, yes. Fuck it. Hey, man. Vinnie's amazing. Like Vinny. Yeah. So anyways, there's all these little things where you're like, oh, you forgot what it's like to be,

first of all, like a teenager. But secondly, you forgot like how much of the basic habits have to be installed in somebody that will serve them not just here, but also like whatever they do. Right? Because most of our guys are not going to be in the NBA, right? None of them. So it's how do I teach you something that's useful today for you on this team? So we win and have fun.

but that's like a master skill that's going to serve you in the future. I'm not doing my Gordon-Mau-Bah if I don't actually do both for them. Do you think how much percentage of a difference will, so let's just say your hypothetically, let's say your team is a five out of ten, just average. Yeah. Good coaching, what do you think that would change? I think good coaching can take a five out of ten team to an eight.

Which is great. Which is dramatic. Yeah. I think in my leadership, position in my career, I think I've only been average and I've seen great. And I've particularly love reading military books like about Navy SEALs and stuff like that. And I think I get good examples of what a good leader looks like. And I think the difference with all else being equal, like I've read, like I think Jock has this story about, he's got this book. I forget what it's called

something in leadership. And he talks about the story about how they would, during buds or like, you know, the week where you become a seal, they have. have like six different groups of like eight guys carrying the rafts on their back, and they have to race, and they assign leaders. And all they do is they change the leaders after each race. And what they notice is that the leader is determined, determines whether the boat wins or not, not the other seven guys lifting the boat. Right. And when I heard that example, I was like, I'm not that leader at this moment, and I have to become one. Because I think the difference is not, I think it's more than from a five to an eight.

I think it's potentially like almost a 10. I just, I just, that leadership is so important. And it's just so challenging because it's one of these things where if you're like you and I, you think, oh,

I'm charismatic. I'm probably already good. I don't need to learn. Like, I can convince people to do stuff. Or I'm an idea guy. My ideas are good. That's just not the case.

Just like basketball, it's a skill. Learning how to get teams to operate effectively, it's a skill. And I'm learning all of this, like in real time, and it's been very challenging. I'll give you an example that I took from the pod. So I think you were on here, you were talking about company values.

You're like, oh, at Hampton, we're trying to come up with our values. And you were saying, like, here's what I think they're going to be. And then I was kind of pushing back, like, you know, I kind of expected it to be like this. And you were like, yes, okay, let me. And you were working through it. So right after I got off the pod, I drive over to, I grab my whistle and my clipboard. And I drive over to basketball practice. And when we get there, I was like, hey, it's the start of our season.

So I'm telling Danny, our coach. I was like, hey, I think we should install like the kind of two or three things that we hang our hat on. What are we all about? And in sport, they called us like your team's identity. Right. So there was like all these famous teams that had a real identity. So it would be like the bad boy pistons. It was in the name.

You already knew. They were tough. They were mean. They had a nasty streak. And you could not push them around. Right? They would push you around. They were the bad boy pistons.

in the modern day, there's like heat culture is a big one. So the Miami Heat are known to be this team where they do, they have old the standard almost like military. So for example, they're the only, I think they're the only NBA team that does this where you get tested on weight and body fat every single week. And you're either fined or you don't get to play if you are not keeping your body.

It doesn't matter who you are. If you're the star player, like you can't, you know, can't just coast by on your talent. And so they demand. and they demand it from day one. So it's like by the time you show up to training camp, you need to already be in shape. You don't come to training camp to get in shape.

And that's just a known thing that that's their standard. And so it doesn't matter what it was like where you played before. When you go there, you already know what they're all about. You've heard the stories. And so you've got to buy in or you're going to be out. It's one way or the other. And so we go there in our first day, we do it all wrong. We're like, okay, what do we?

You know, it's all about playing hard. So effort. Effort is going to be one of our things. So we tell them that at the beginning. We tell them three values. Effort's the first one. Then we had two others. All right.

So you get to the end of practice. Coach had to leave like the athletic director wanted to talk to him. So he's like, Coach Sean will, we'll finish up the practice. And I'm like, me? That's me. Wait, I'm coach on. I don't know what it's to do here. Okay, let me go ahead and help these guys out.

So as we're finishing up, I just huddle them up. And I'm like, all right, how did we do today on those? we started the practice saying we're going to be, this is our team identity, these three words. And I was like, who can give them to me? They couldn't even remember, right? They got one of the three. So they got effort as the only one of the three that they remembered. And they were like, they wanted to remember.

They just couldn't remember. So it's like to your thing about repetition and a reminder, right? Like, it's super important. So then I was like, so how did we do on effort? And they were like, you know, some guy was like, you know, kind of like a nod with a shrug, like a pretty good. another guy just took us no with no explanation another guy was like

yeah it was good effort and then I was like oh remember what I was telling Sam which is like Facebook's value was move fast and break things it wasn't just like it wasn't just like speed which everybody could be like yeah we're moving fast

it's like no no no are you moving fast and are you moving so fast you're breaking things because if you're not then you're not even playing at our speed so what's yours so I was like

oh if we just said the word is effort, then like some effort's fine, I guess. Pretty good efforts fine. Like, wait, guys, what is it? Is it pretty good effort? Whatever? And there's one kid on the team who always beats everybody in the sprints. He's not the most talented kid, but he plays the hardest. And whenever we make them run, he always finishes first. His name's Max. And I was like, oh, perfect. I go, all right, we have a new standard. It's called Max effort. And I was like, if you're not playing as hard, but like, it's like a pun, right? But I was like, if you're not playing as hard as max, it's not effort. That's not, that's not what we do. We play with max effort.

And so that's the only one of the three that stuck because it was like a campaign slogan and it worked, you know, it's like, it is actually a bar you could pass fail. Whereas most of the other values were like, yeah, like we want to be really competitive. It's like, all right, we were kind of. There's no pass fail. You can't test it versus everybody knows, did I actually go at max effort today or not? It's like a very simple pass fail. And so taking these things from one, you know, business and trying to apply it here has been very, very interesting. Yeah, I think that we, I think that we too often think about marketing to customers when we should be marketing to ourselves and our teams and our families.

So like, you know, this sounds eye-roly, but my wife and I are like, should we have values for our family? Like what should we, because we're at the age now where our children are just now old enough where we're able to form traditions. Yeah. And we're like, what traditions should we have? You know, what do we like want to teach them? And so I joke with my daughter, where we do daily affirmations.

I say, repeat after me. I'm bold, I'm tough and I won't conform to anyone. That's like her daily affirmations because clearly I care about like, you know, that type of stuff. But we had to sit down and we're like, all right, well, what collectively should we care about so we can teach our kids? And also like what traditions can we have. And I was thinking, I was like, well, I have these things. I have what I call my four Fs, family fitness, finance, fun. And that's like the categories that I, like, the categories that I,

value or I weigh myself on, I need to have that for my family and I need to have that for other parts of myself. So if I'm being a weak leader, I need to come up with a cool phrase that I can remind myself in times of like I want to revert back to, you know, old me in order to create change. This whole episode is about change. And I think that something, these cute phrases, I'm telling you, I just dismissed them by calling them cute phrases. I'm trying to make myself feel better here. But they work. They work so much. much. At Hampton, we have this thing called the three Cs, commitment, candor, and confidentiality. And so we have to repeat it. We have found roughly six times to our customer for them to

understand and remember the three Cs. And so it all has to be in a memorable format. So I was kind of studying this last night. So I was like, how do you actually do it? Because you said that, right? They need to be memorable. All right, Sam, tell me how you make them memorable. Right. So it's like, uh, you kind of like, it should be, well, there's a couple frameworks. Right. Like, but like I'm not an expert on that. I don't think you're an expert on that. And we actually care about this. And we should be good at this. We're like actually pretty good at writing and pretty good at talking. It's kind of what we do for a living. And even we aren't like that far ahead. Okay. So who is great at this? Who's who's in what group of people is amazing at this? I don't know. Marketers. Marketers. So the people who come up specifically slogans. Right.

another one that's like where is it life or death? Where do you have to be great at this? The military or police. Military and politics. You got to get elected, right? And so make America great again. Right? Okay, okay, that's a thing that he repeated it a thousand times, but it was enough to stick.

It was polarizing. It was interesting. It was repeatable. It was like something you could get behind. So I was studying this last night and there's this phrase called a, I don't even know how you pronounce this. chasmus C-H-I-A-M-U-S All right

so here's an example of one Sam, if I said the following phrase, if I said, ask not what your country can do for you, what would you say next? Ask what you could do for your country. Exactly. And that's a chiasis.

It's basically a sentence structure that is an earworm. I don't even know when was that said. When was that phrase said? It was said like, you know, 50 years ago or something like that. JFK said it in like 1963, I think. Yeah, exactly. So this is, you know, more than 50 years ago.

And yet off the tip of our tongue, me and you can say this phrase that was said before, like 20 years before we were alive. That's how powerful that phrase is. Okay. And so what is that structure? And it's basically this like, if you break down the sentence, it's the, this is a, B, B, A structure. So the first part is about. asking, right? So ask not what your, and then it's your country can do for you. That's the B. Then the B, you know, then you switch the order. Basically is ask what you can do for your country,

right? So you're going to switch the center structure. And there's these two like overall structures. There's like a, you know, ABBA and then there's like a A, sorry, there's an ABBA and then there's like an ABAB, right, or ABBA. And so it's like there's two structures that you could use. And so what you start to do is you start to find two phrases that individually are valid. Okay? So, for example, I don't know if you've seen that podcast clip that goes viral where people, where it's just people are like, oh my God, podcast. I hate podcasts.

Where there's that girl trying to be motivational. And she says, don't, she's like, don't love your job. Job your love. Oh, yeah. And the blonde hair lady. And everyone's just like, ah, it's like the ultimate girl. And the reason why that chaosmas doesn't work is because job your love doesn't make any sense. Right?

And so you have to find two individual statements that make sense, like asking what your country can do for you and what you could do for your country. Both are individually valid. Then you structure it this way and it becomes incredibly memorable. And if you go look at that JFK speech, there's like three of them that he does, have that same structure in that one speech. If you go break that speech down. Yeah, here's another one. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to. negotiate. Exactly.

Ciasmas. And these sound beautiful. They're very satisfying to the mind. And when you understand how the mind works, you see that the mind loves order. It loves structure. If you look at how, why is a face a beautiful face? Cemetery. The more perfect the symmetry of the face,

the more beautiful to face to people. Another example of this, the game Tetris. Why is the game Tetris so addictive? Why are games like Candy Crush and Tetra so addictive? Because they actually like tap into this part of your brain that's almost this cleaning instinct. There's a mess and then you put one block in the right place and it evaporates the mess. It creates order out of disorder and the brain loves that.

It just wants to do it again and again and again. This is the basis of the game design of Candy Crush and Tetris. And so the brain likes what it likes. And so if you want to use, you know, deciding to change your brain, which is this like, you know, multi thousand years of evolution is very hard. But just changing the structure of how you speak so that you tap into what the brain likes and give it what it wants so that it does become memorable, it does become sticky, and it has an effect is obviously the much better way to go. This is pretty profound. This is very fascinating. What did you read to learn this? You said last night. You said last night. You said you were curious about this. Well, I started asking different questions. So I started asking, you know, I think I even said

it earlier, which was like, whose life depends on this? So anytime I want to get good at something, I try to figure out who, who, this is a nice to have for me. Who is it a must have for? So let's say you want to lose weight. You would go look at the bodybuilders training for a bodybuilding competition. If you want to know the logical extremes of how you get the maximum muscle and the lowest body fat, go watch what they do. Yeah. Whose next meal is dependent on getting this right?

Exactly. So for example, right now I'm writing the book. And I told Diego yesterday, who's helping me, I go, you know, I, we're doing this process. where I write in the morning and then I do a bit of a show and tell with them and I kind of show them what I'm doing and then I get feedback. But I'm like, the problem with our feedback is I want you to like it. So I want to show it to you. But I also want your honest feedback because I want to make this better. You're trying to be polite and not my feelings because you see that I tried very hard this morning, but you're also trying to help me make it better. And those two things

are at odds with each other. And I was like, so I was like, we don't even know how to give feedback in this way. That's like, look, I need to do. be able to share so that I can get this better. But I don't need my emotions to swing based on, yay, they liked it. I did a good job. Oh, they didn't like it. I did a bad job. It's like, that's so lame and a waste of energy. And on your end, you don't, I don't need you having one part of your head saying, how do I say this the right way? Because I'm going to be nice and supportive versus like, hey, how can I tell you what I'm feeling? Or, you know, for giving feedback. So it's like this art of giving feedback on art, on something that's subjective, I was like, I don't know

how to do this. And you don't know how to do this. Who, who definitely has already solved this problem because it's a must have for them? So I was like, oh, let's text like a couple of people who are comedians because I was like, I think comedians have to figure out like, oh, is this funny or not? And once I've heard the joke, once I've written the joke and looked at it 20 times, it's not funny to be anymore. I can't even tell. I'm too lost in the sauce. And so I was like, how do they do it? How do musicians do this? How do they play a song? And I was like, is this a good song? I can't tell. I kind of liked it, but now I've heard it tons times, and I can't tell anymore if this is any good. How do they get

feedback? And so now we're going to go find the people. Well, this is a new thing. I've got to go find the people to like go learn from the people for whom this is a must have. That's actually, first of all, I keep talking to the listener today, but there's two or three takeaways, the question of whose life depends on this. That's a great question. And I'm very curious, actually. I want to know the answer because I create a little bit for a living. I want to know how you know if something's hitting.

If I had a guess for a comedian, they would probably just say I perform it in small audiences and I suffer the pain of bombing. Right. Yeah. Then that might be it for them. And it's like, oh, cool. So what's my version of open mic

with 20 people and testing if it bombs? Can I do that in my world? Is there a way I could set that up? Okay, maybe if it's not that, how do musicians do this? And you sort of start to figure out, well, how do they do that? How do they get feedback?

What's the language there? Pixar, I think, wrote this book, Creativity, Inc., which is very, they talk about the brain trust that they have of how they show raw, kind of like, not even the movie, but like a single scene and how they created a dynamic of trust. There's actually a great story of when Disney bought Pixar. Pixar had been making hit after hit after hit, and Disney animation had been just bombing for years. And so they put the Pixar guys in charge that. They were like, great, like, we'll merge these two companies and then we'll just start making. making hits like Pixar. Didn't they just want to fire all the Disney people, though? No, no, no. I think what he did at the beginning of the main guy, Ed Catmold, they were like, oh, what

a perfect A-B test. What a perfect, like, randomized control test here. So what they did was they didn't blend the teams together. They didn't move them together. So what they did was they kept the team separate. And then what he did was he basically took the Pixar method and he went and he taught it to the Disney folks. And he's basically like, if we just took our process but not our people, could we make those

same people who have been failing succeed. Kind of to your question earlier of like, how big of a lever is leadership, is coaching? Like, can it take a five and turn it into a 10? And they actually started creating hits once he taught them the process of doing this. And for them, I think trust was like the underlying thing, which is like, if you don't have trust, you're not going to share your work at the right times. You're not going to give real candid feedback. You're not going to receive candid feedback in the right way because you distrust what's going

on, you think your project's going to get killed if it's bad? Or you think this guy's going to come steal your thunder if you let him and collaborate on it, right? You have all these fears that are basically a lack of trust. And once they installed their sort of like trust process, Disney animation started making hits too. Well, and I think one of the, um, the other points from that book was he was like, we have hitmakers. It was like, we got like these two or three people who are just typically more, they're more right more often than other people. We listen to them. He did like a pretty fun funny thing about that. We should,

okay, so for MFM, we've done like a handful of challenges, like the MFM fitness thing. We should do like a give back thing because tell me about, I haven't like really given my time to give to others, which I don't know if you consider coaching.

Is it like a, you rescued a dog, but you say the dog rescued you? Is it that type of like? That's exactly. That's so funny. Like, you know, You thought that you were going to go and do it for these kids.

To be perfectly clear, my choice was selfish. I wanted to do it. I thought it would be fun, and it is very fun, and I do want to do it. So it's not like this burden. I'm caring. At the same time, I had recently, like at the last two years, I'd given some money to charity and felt nothing. Like, so maybe I did some good in the world.

It's hard to know. You give the money and it just goes in a black box mostly. And then, you know, hopefully something good. Hopefully someone's life got changed from that and some positive. direction, but I don't know, and I didn't feel anything. So I didn't want to, like, triple down on that. And my trainer has this great thing he says, basically, he always talks about he's like, oh, man, he's like, our economy, our economy. And I was like, why do you talk so much about about the economy, like Jim Kramer? Like, what are you talking about over here with, okay,

you know, Powell? You know, what are you talking about? The interest rates of the economy. What are you talking about? And he's like, no, he's like us. He's like me and you and my other clients and which because he trains my mom and then my mom then they refer to another person he's like it's all like a web right and so he was like I'm just talking about like our local economy like he's like I want that little economy to thrive local not like I don't care what's going on in the macro I want the local to thrive that's what I can affect and if that's thriving like that actually like improves the lives of these people that I can see feel touch and if everybody was just doing that in their local little bubble then the big picture would take care of itself right I was like okay fair enough

And he even like went further like again like the sort of cute thing like he was like I was like so if the normal economy measures GDP gross domestic product I was like what's how do you know if your economy is doing well he's like he's like baby smiles per hour baby smiles per hour he's like he's like I just want everybody to be smiling he's like if I made you laugh and then you carry that vibe into the house with your wife next and with your kids and then they carried that into school he's like that's how it works like if you're making people smile by whether it's your mood it's doing something for them, it's thinking of them, it's having an experience together. That has this carry-on effect. They take that smile into the next interaction. That's how it spreads.

So I started actually like buying into this. I was like, it is about your local economy. It is about smiles per hour. And so I was like, what do I do that is a kind of give back, but not the way I did it last year. I put money in some black box into some multinational nonprofit and then it just disappeared. And I don't know what happened. I didn't feel anything. I don't know what happened. And so this. idea of like going to a local high school taking an unpaid job and just going contributing my time, my talent, my effort, and affecting like a group of 12 guys. Like that sounds small, but it feels very big. The other thing, solving world hunger sounded very big, but felt very small. Like there was no feeling.

And so I don't know. I don't know if this is the right direction or wrong, but that's the one I've gone. I don't, I'm not charitable. I want to be, but I'm like a little bit. I'm like, I don't know how to be. I don't want to just write a check to someone and not feel anything. I want to be selfish. I want to get value out of this, just like a feeling. And so I talked to, do you know who Mike Beckham is? He started Simple Modern. Yeah, the hugely successful water bottle company.

So he told me all the numbers and he told me I could share it. So he's worth $200 million because the company does something like $200 million a year in revenue and does $50 million a year in profit. His net worth because he owns half of it. And then with the multiple, he goes, I'm probably worth, this was last year I talked to him. So he said, I'm worth probably $200 million. And he said, 190. And he said, I have about, I think he said three or four million dollars to my name,

but I pull $5 million out of the business every year and I take one million of it and I give away four. If you guys Google Mike, Mike Beckham, Sam Parr, you'll like see a post I wrote about it. So I think there's a chance I got the number slightly wrong. But basically he said, I take something like $5 million and I give the rest away. My family spends $25,000 a month, so we take enough for us to spend minus taxes, and I give $4 million or $4.5 million. I give it away. And I was like, that's insane, man. Why do you do that?

He's like, well, it's not generous to do this when I die because that's not hard for me. Like, it should be like some type of like challenge. Like this should feel, like I should feel a little bit of pain. But then he said something really great. He said, the more that I give, the less loud, the greedy voice in my head becomes. So he's like, I feel this like greediness in my, this voice in my head that says, make more money, buy more stuff, do this. But the more that I give, that becomes a whisper. Because I feel what it's like to give away this money. And it feels significantly better than acquire a bigger home or another car. He was like, I drive a $30,000 CRV because I know that if I bought a $90,000 car, that's $60,000 less that I can give to people. And it makes me feel good to do that. And so his whole, the whole point of him telling me this was he wanted to to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to get me to like give now versus when you're old or debt. And I thought that that was very inspirational.

It wasn't that inspirational because I haven't done it yet. But. More admirable. Yeah. Yeah. It inspired to be like a, you know, like the Rocky movie. Like, you know, I should get into boxing one day. Totally.

But I did think it was really awesome. This is for the folks out there who have a business. that does at least $3 million a year in revenue. Because around this point, that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things. One, you've done something great, but you're still a long way from your final destination.

And two, you look around and you realize, I am all alone. I've outrun my peers, which means you're now making $10 million decisions alone by yourself. And that is when mediocrity can creep in. My company, Hampton, we solved this problem by giving a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are going to hold you accountable,

call you out on your nonsense, and help show you the way. Because the fact is, is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there. And they're hard to find. The biggest risk is not failing.

You have a company and it's working. You're going to be fine. But the biggest risk is waking up 10 years from now and saying, shit, I barely grew in business and in life. And for people like you who are ambitious, wasted potential, threat is what we want to help you to avoid. We have made so many of these groups and we have

a thousand plus members and I know this stuff actually works. It can change your life. It changed mine and I know it will change yours. So check it out, joinhampton.com. You know, I've read this a few times on Twitter where somebody will say, oh, I started either microdosing or I started taking like, you know, Ozambic or whatever. Hey, I've done all those things. You can just ask me. Okay, so maybe you had this too, but they talk about food noise. Which was not a phrase I'd ever heard before. I don't know if that was, is that common? But like, they basically said, the biggest change is not the weight loss. It's the, I don't have food noise. Basically, this like, part of my brain, this, this chatter in my brain about the next

meal or about should I have this or wanting this or. Let me give you an example. Is this real? Yes. So, like, I have an addictive personality and I had addiction stuff before. And tell me if you've ever experienced this. You get a piece of dessert, like a cake or something. You eat half of it. You put the rest in the refrigerator. You go lay in bed and you're like, but it's still there. And it's uneaten. I think the fork that I use might still be the sink. I could probably just use that. I'll just go off and get a little bit of bite. So you go, you get it in bed and you eat my little bite and you put it back. And then I will do this seven times until it's gone. And then it goes away And I say to myself this, I say, shit, well, I already did this.

I might as well eat this entire sleeve of Oreo cookies. Right. And before you notice, you've done 1,000 or 1,500 calories of, like, binge eating, but it's all based on one urge. That is the food voice. And when you take GLP-1s, not only does that voice get dimmed, other addictions get dimmed. I notice I bit my nails less. I noticed that I wasn't craving. Like, it used to be where I would smell, like, beer.

If I walked by, like, a brewery, I'd be like, let's go, like, see what's up. Not anymore. What is up when you go see what's up in that situation? The secret is you should not go see what's up. But like you smell the hops and you're like, oh, that's nice. Right. But yeah, so yeah, it definitely turns it down. So I wanted to ask you about this on the loudness of the money voice,

of the more voice in your head. Because a few podcasts ago, we did an episode, I think the front half of it was about something sort of silly, but the back half of it was us talking like we kind of mostly did today. It's just like what's hard for us in life? What's some of the wisdom that kind of helps? And just sort of like, I don't know, trying to figure shit out, out loud, right, in front of a bunch of other people, a bunch of other strangers, which is a little bit

uncomfortable, but you do it. And in that, I mentioned this thing that had come up. And I had a lot of friends who were basically like, they have all the success and then they go start another company. And it's like, did they stress out, lose some hair? gain some weight and try to build another company. Well, you said the best phrase ever, too. Yeah, this is the phrase that a lot of people DM me afterwards,

which is like, you've already earned the last dollar you will ever spend. So why are you trading good hours for bad dollars now? And that's something that I had, you know, thought of for myself and when I saw others, but like, you know, that doesn't mean I'm like immune to it either, right? Like I still am in the same boat. I think I have it to a lesser degree in the same way that, like, that food chatter you were talking about. Like, I got that, that guy's got a megaphone in my head.

Whereas I think for other people, it's, you know, a little bit more like a whisper. And so I want to do two things. I want to ask you about the voice in your head. And then I want to tell you about a Chad GPT coaching conversation I had about money. I kind of want to just read you what it said to me a little bit. But first I want to ask you, you know, you are also in that boat where I believe you have earned the last dollar you'll ever spend. You're a pretty frugal guy. in general, like you're not like Mike Tyson buying tigers.

You had a great exit with the hustle. And you have earned the last dollar you'll ever spend. But here you are, starting more companies, maybe making some investments. And, you know, every day you wake up and you take your life energy and you go to an office with other people and you do this. And you can always talk about how like, you know, you like working and the mission. I'm not saying it's bad. That's not what I mean. I guess what I mean is how do you think about.

money and wanting more. Are you honest with yourself that you do want more? And then how do you square that circle of like, but I don't actually need more because I have already earned the last dollar or do you not think that's true? So I just want to hear how you, what's that chatter in your head? How loud is it? And what is it, what does it say? I think the, okay, so nothing is all or nothing there's a priority of lists. So the number one priority for me is like, I just don't know what to do. Like, I don't know how to spend time. And when I spend time sitting around, I feel like I'm missing out or I feel like I'm not contributing and that I that feels bad and yet when I spend all the time working some days I have bad days and I'm like what am I doing I should be doing this other thing

so that exists but then the the one right below that is I'm not good enough and I have to and my my self-worth is directly correlated to the success of the thing that I'm working on my self-worth is my net worth basically right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you could say that um and so So like that, that's probably through like years of trauma and like believing something, but it's hard to break. And then the last thing is like more money does feel good. Yeah, it definitely feels good. And what I have to do, I do math all the time where I'm like, I don't need more.

Everything that I want, I have. But I can't break that. I guess if you wanted to be like a therapist or a psychologist, you would say like the reason you don't want to change is, or the reason you don't change is because you don't want to. You know, you like how it feels. Do you like how it feels? I love, when things go well at my company, I do feel on top of the world. The problem with building companies is you typically only feel like that 10% of the time.

You know, like things are bad most of the time. An ineffective way to get that feeling. Yeah. So I say I don't gamble. I don't do drugs and alcohol. And instead, this is like a dopamine slot machine. Yeah. Okay.

So it's like, do you like being addicted to gambling? You say, no, but when you win, it's so amazing that it makes you... But at least it's not heroin is what you kind of just said. Yeah, and then I also justify it by saying, and this is a bad justification, and I'll prove it to you. But you say, I want to... I'll go ahead and do the work for you. You say to yourself, you say, well, I don't want my kids to just see me sitting around, and I want them to see me working really hard.

And I want to set a good example. But then they probably would rather be with you. Yeah, they want to see me. Yeah. And I think I do good. Like I go to the office from 9 to 4, 9 to 5. But then I also say, I'm doing this for them. And it's like, what is this?

What is this for them? How does that make sense? You know, they don't need anything physical. They don't, you know, what do they need that I can't give them already? Right. Yeah. is 50-hour weeks, the most effective way to just give them the general principle that you should work hard at things. Yeah, like that might not be the most efficient route to that, to that answer.

Okay, so I wrote down three things. I wrote down imagination, which I think is the first part. The first one you said, which is, I don't know what else. I kind of don't know what else to do. I want to do something. And like, I don't want to do nothing. Therefore, I do this thing. And I think about that a lot.

I think that Suli came on the podcast a while back, and he said something. where he goes. Sully being your good buddy who is presumably worth hundreds of millions of dollars is one of the more successful entrepreneurs we know. Correct. He's my, he's my great friend, but he's also the guy who I respect and trust the most when it comes to entrepreneurship and like kind of business. Like strategy. Yeah. And I've met a lot of people wealthier than him, but he consistently is the highest signal, best judgment person. And like, you know, just the way he, way he approaches in a tax business, he's just like such a winner.

Okay, so he came on the pod and he goes, I used to think I was limited by some lack of resource. Like maybe I didn't have a skill I needed. I needed to learn how to code. Maybe I didn't have enough money. Maybe I didn't have enough time. Like, basically he's like, I always just thought, you know,

I didn't have the network. I didn't know people. Like, I just assumed I lacked some resource. And he goes, now I realized that all I ever lacked was basically imagination. He's like, I, the thing I lacked the most, was even figuring out what to want, what the possibilities were of what I could do, and how I might be able to go do those things.

That sounds kind of like hand wavy, I guess, but the more smart people I meet, and it's almost like the bigger that side of your brain gets where it's like, I am analytical. I am good at making plans and then executing them and operating. The better you are at that, the less I've noticed they're disproportionately bad. ad at imagination.

And so, for example, it's like, you know, kind of don't know what else to do with my hands. That's kind of what you said. There's a lot of things. There's actually a ton of things, right? Like the stupid example I gave earlier, and this wouldn't be the right thing for you, but it was the right thing for me, which is like, well, what if you, instead of going and chasing down the next investment or starting another company and I got a bunch of deals and I got a bunch of ideas, like the right thing, the thing that was fulfilling was,

hey, what if you took four months, one season and you just coached to high school basketball, That was actually the right answer for me, which totally out of left field doesn't even make sense. It wouldn't be the right answer for other people, but it's the thing that like totally fills my cup in a way that another business that was successful would never do. Yeah, but I think that you're not, or maybe you are, but it's way harder than you think, or not than you think, but you figureative view. I think like that imagination game is quite challenging. Like, for example, if you said you have a billion dollars today, what do you want to do?

I'm like, I don't have an answer. We might get flaring to the comments here. All we're talking about is like this, I call it second mountain problems, but whatever. I was thinking about the, I was like, why do I want all these employees? So we're moving to a new office down the street and we just signed this lease.

It's a million dollar lease. So over three years, it's going to be a million dollars. And we're building out this office, whatever. It's a lot of money. I've never done this before. And I was like, why am I doing this? And I was like, I just, I think, maybe I'm lying to myself again.

I was like, I care about capabilities. So what I hate is that you have an idea. So like, how often do you have an idea for like a small project? And you're like, now I've got to go get the people. And then I got to like train the people. And I don't think they're going to be any good. All the time. Yeah.

And I was listening to Ari Emanuel talk. And he was like, we have this thing and this thing and this thing. And I was like, how cool is it that your company and you have all these capabilities? You have an idea. You'd like, wouldn't it be cool if this existed in the world? And it's not just a business idea. For him, I think he cares about, like, the show. It's like, wouldn't it feel awesome if, like, at the UFC, we did blank or we bought all these tennis tournaments and we offered food at a discount?

I don't know. And I love the idea of having lots and lots of capabilities. And I think that's why business building is fun. Yeah, I have that right now. Actually, I forgot to say this. But one of the things I've been talking about for a while on here but have not executed, right? like the walk hasn't matched the talk is, I had this realization that video is the language of the internet.

It's like if the internet was a country, and it would be the most important country in the world, it would be more powerful of a country than America. So it's like a place where you live and you spend time. I think the internet is that people live and spend a lot of time online. And then you say, all right, well, do you speak the native tongue? Because if you don't, you know, if you come to America but you don't speak English, you're putting yourself at a pretty massive disadvantage.

And I believe that video, is the language of the internet. It's how people communicate online. Whether it's long form like this on YouTube, or it's short form, which is growing, growing more and more popular across YouTube shorts, reels, TikToks, etc. It is the way people communicate information. And if you don't have the capability to communicate and tell your story or connect with others that way, you know, you're just not speaking the important language of the important country. In fact, like, it doesn't really matter where you were born or what you were doing or how hard you worked, pretty much if you were born anywhere in the world,

the best decision you could make for your life quality and upward mobility was to move to America and learn English. Even if that meant starting at the bottom, even if that meant being uncomfortable, like in the long term, it was short-term pain, but in the long term, that was the best thing you could do. There was no amount of hard work you could do in Somalia

that was going to make up for that one decision. Dude, is this the most charismatic and epic way just to say you're going to start posting on Instagram. Yeah. I'm going to start posting on Instagram. Did I not just sell your ass on the fact that I'm posting on Instagram? Dude, imagine. Imagine your wife at the dinner table.

They're just like telling this story. Like, listen, years ago, our grandparents lived in India. The best thing they could have done is learning English. Now, here we are today. The year 2025. Sean, are you going to start posting on it soon? Yeah, exactly. In fact, I'm going to start specifically just posting a story series about the coaching thing I'm doing.

So basically like day one, you know, basically like every week, I'm just going to post like a thing that I sent you. Dude, that was a good video. Do you get inspired by Marshall? No, not Marshall. There's actually these young guys who are doing this. There's this format where... Airbnb? The Airbnb guy.

Fire and the bar guy. His name, I think is Rajan. I don't know exactly what his first name is. His handle is something. But they're building like a luxury Airbnb in Virginia. There's a guy who's bought an old bowling alley and he's rehabbing it. It's basically like, yo, I'm doing a project for shits and giggles. And like, I want to make it happen and I'm kind of new to this.

I don't have it all figured out. I'm going to share as I go. And I just like the format and I think it's fun. And I want to do it specifically on something that's not business. Like it's very hard for me to get motivated to be like, and now I'm going to give you business guru content. And even if I like business, it's just very hard for me to sit in front of the camera

and do talking head content about business or about myself or about some new SaaS company. But I was like, this one I would want to follow. So I'm going to make this content. And so I'm going to make like a coach account. It's going to be like Coach Sean or Coach P or so. I'll put the link in the Instagram, or in the comments of this or I'll put it on the screen. But I won't be able to follow it because I'm going to post videos on here.

I think they'll be great. That's so funny. I've been doing the Instagram thing. It's pretty fun because you start like trying to, it's basically because we're the old guys now. It's sort of like when people wanted to start newsletters or something and it was like, dude, you're writing way too like tight. You've got to be a little loosey-goosey. Right.

I've done the same thing. on Instagram where I start talking to the camera and I like it official. You're going to have fun. It's very intimidating. Pop those two buttons down. Dude, it's so intimidating. We have, if you go to my thing,

I do all of our videos now when I'm holding a spatula as a microphone because we had to like have fun and like listen up. Yeah. And it totally has worked. In your million dollar Manhattan office. Hey, fellow kids.

Yeah, exactly. It's so funny that you say that. your content is pretty good though. The problem with it though, you know, the problem with all social media, like being like, I'm going to try to like post good short form content is it's basically saying

I'm going to go to the bar and not get drunk because it's so easy for your mind to get wrapped up in the vortex of like, how many likes to that game? How many views the decade? Is that good? Is that bad? So easy. I don't even know physically if,

even knowing that like, you know, I don't know if it's physically possible to go in and not want that. So I could easily see myself aborting that, you know, that process six months from now, even though in this case, it's like I'm doing it for just this basketball season, which is just three months, and it's only content about this random side quest that I'm on. It's not like, you know, here's my personal IG. I'm going to create

short-form content every day. But let me tell you something I've been telling myself when it's been helping so much. So a few things. One, the algorithm is so good right now on meta that the right people see the right stuff. Like, I'm pretty sure that the camera knows, like, what I'm wearing and what my background looks like, what I look like. Like, I posted a skateboarding video. It knows that I'm, like, doing a skateboarding thing. It shows it to the right people somehow. I don't know how it does it. And the second thing is that I have noticed, I've only been doing this for a handful of weeks now, and I'm going to be doing a lot more. But people text me when something hits. And I, That is so much more cool than the number of likes or the comments on the thing.

It's just those texts. And the cool thing is once you have a business, which in this case, you're actually probably not going to be doing it for a business. You don't need that many people to watch it. Like I'm seeing, it's changing our company. We're getting customers. I've made a lot of money off of it already in a very short amount of time with a very few views.

I think my most popular thing is getting like 70 or 80,000 views. It's not a lot for Instagram. And the right people are shown the right stuff. and you don't need that much to make it cool. There is something weird about, like, Instagram right now. And I know that like any 21-year-old listening to this is like, yeah, duh. Duh.

But as like if you are above 30 or whatever and you grew up with this stuff, I've never posted on Instagram up until recently. The algorithm is way different than what I used to think it was. That's cool. Yeah, it makes it not a sense. I think you're doing a good job. I think the spatula trick is a good trick. I like that.

Everybody's got to have a schick. That's yours. You're the spatula guy. Great. That's where we thought we'd land in life. I mean, write that in my diary. Have you ever had the thought? What did your grandfather do?

Dude, what I think about my grandfather, I think if I was him right now, I'd have like, you know, 18 confirmed kills under my belt in World War II. Here I am with a fucking spatula. In an ammunition's factory in India. Yeah. Okay, so that's my grandfather. His idea of what work is. And you're talking to a microphone with a sheep on it that says,

sorry I'm late. My shirt literally so sorry. I was dilly dallying. That's what I wore to work today. Dude, and your grandpa lost three fingers before the age of 28. I was like, are, is this shirt too wrinkly right before the butt?

And she's like, I think it fits what it says. It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. So, but just this, it's a kind of mind-bending thing, right? My grandpa was a sheriff, he was a cop. Okay, so a job that, like,

you can buy an action figure for. Yeah. right? Like soldiers, policemen, like, you know, a factory worker,

construction, doing a real thing that, like, the world critically needs that's hard and completely unglamorous. And then I think about, okay,

his son, what did his son do? My dad. And it's like, he sat in a cubicle, like an office, like not a factory. It's like,

well, what does he do? It's like, well, he types on this computer, mostly. And he, like, wears a suit,

not like a construction for me, wears this, like, fancy suit for some reason. And he, he will sometimes fly on an airplane to go meet with somebody, shake their hand, talk to them for a while, come back home and do them. So he does these business meetings, okay? That's what I grew up,

and that's my, so to my grandfather, what my dad did kind of looked and seemed like a little bit of a joke. And now my dad looks at me. And he's like, you're wearing a shirt with a sheep on it says, I'm dilly dally daling. You're talking to your friend on this tiny screen. You're podcasting to who? What? What is a podcast? Do you make, you can make, like, I'll still go to family gatherings and they'll be like, so how do you earn money though? And I'm like, I don't know, how do I explain this? Ads? And they're like, but where and how?

I'm like, have I told you about HubSpot? So my uncle has a CRM. I don't know why. But to them, what we do, which is like, yeah, you're talking with a spatula to a cell phone, to strangers, so that they can join, so that that will, so that, 0.1% of them will go spend 10 grand joining your membership community. You know, like, it's like, what is this? And then you think about, like, what your kids are going to do.

It's going to be completely unrecognizable. Work is going to be unrecognizable from one generation to the next is what I'm realizing. And I feel like such a fucking pussy doing it. Like, you know, our kids are just going to be like live streamers, right? Like, you know those, like, you know that girl who was like, as comments were coming in? She'd be like, woohoo, cowboy. Every time W. Yeah.

gift. It's like that's what our kids are going to do. Something that seems even worse. It's going to be like, you know, yeah, I'm an AI therapist. It's like, what do you mean? It's like, well, I sort of, I talk to AIs to make them feel better. It's like, what? What is that? That's a job? I think about your mom all the time. Well, inappropriate. Well, it could go either way. I think about your mom coming to an America all the time because I think about how, because the way you told the story was really good. And I like, I saw myself in her situation of like, not having a lot, being on a plane for the first time, coming to America, we didn't speak anything. You just dropped off in Berkeley, I think it was. And you're like, what do I do? And like,

I felt a little, not even close, but sort of like that when I moved to San Francisco, but on a much smaller scale. And I think, I think about her all the time. And I think about, like, immigrants and stuff like that who, like, come here with nothing. And I'm like, and I'm complaining about this. I'm complaining that my apartment that's already huge. Is it big enough? And I want more. And I'm sad about it. And I'm going to pay a therapist money where they can hear me complain about this? What? The idea of a therapist? It's like someone you pay money to.

It's a complaint to. It's so funny. Like, I just think about that. I'm like, how ridiculous is this? Yeah. Saco Jua carried her three-month-old kid across America for two years. For two years, she carried that kid and a piece of leather. Yeah, but the car into place only had four.

forward-facing car seat. And I need four strollers? She carried him in a leather sack without diapers. I think about that all the time. I think about this stuff like on a regular basis. How soft are we? It's so funny because, you know, what's that famous like Ernst Schaufford? Like, you know, the journey will be hard.

People will die. Like that job posting. What's that famous thing? Yeah, so Ernest Shackleton, honestly, the greatest book I've ever read. I think I said his first name, like he's. He's just like Ernie from Sesame Street, and then I called him Shackleford. What's his name? Shackleton is his name, right?

Or Shackleford. But whatever. He's just like the hardest dude of all time. The book, Endurance, probably honestly might be top three books I've read of all time. The story is basically in the early 1900s when he was just in like a ship without, you know, power, sails around to the bottom of the Arctic or Antarctica. I forget which one. The ship gets like so deep into the cold that the first.

lake or the water, the ocean, freezes around it and he walks for three months to get to like the tip of Brazil. So here's the job at. No one died. Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter

cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return, doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success. Ernest Shackleton for Burlington Street. That's the job. That's the job posting. Dude. such a good book.

Our job is such a good ad. Wanted. Cardboard box cutter. Lots of Amazon packages. It's getting a little bit unwieldy. In the laundry room. Take off your shoes when you enter, please. Bring own box cutter.

Don't have tools. Softer than cream cheese, man. I'm so soft. I pride myself in trying to be hard and it is, there is no pride there. Why do I smell like chimes? Oh, soft of the cream cheese, maybe that's odd. This is ridiculous.

All right, so we started off talking about Dear Diary. Dude, the softest entrance, the softest. Softest exit you'll find in podcasting history. That's the episode. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, everyone, if you're listening to MFN, you probably want to make more money. Well, I want to tell you about a podcast you might want to check out. It's called The Sales Evangelist and it's hosted by Donald Kelly. Each week, Donald interviews the world's best sales experts who share their strategies to succeed in sales. They share actionable insights and stories that will encourage, challenge, and motivate you to hustle your way to the top. If you're someone looking to raise your income level, check out the sales evangelist. You can find it

wherever you get your podcasts.