The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Josh Kaufman: The Shocking Link Between MBA & Career Success! The Easy Hack To Making Money Whilst You Sleep!

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

WARNING: this episode will teach you everything you would learn in a business degree, saving you $200,000 and 10,000 hours  Josh Kaufman is a renowned business expert and the author of the international best-selling book, ‘The Personal MBA’ which has sold over 900,000 copies worldwide. He is also the author of books such as, ‘The First 20 Hours’, and ‘How to Fight a Hydra’. In this conversation, Josh and Steven discuss topics such as, the 5 laws of business, how to turn $100 into $10k, the psychological tactics of millionaires, and how to make money in your sleep.  00:00 Intro 02:00 Why Did You Write The Personal MBA 04:32 What Is An MBA? 10:30 Should You Do A MBA? 14:19 How Difficult Is Starting And Running A Business? 16:57 First Steps To Setting Up A Business 19:29 Loads Of Business Are Finding Problems To Solve 27:49 How To Give Value To The End Consumer 35:47 How Do You Find Out If Your Idea Is Good? 39:11 This Is The Wrong Approach When Starting A Business 40:49 Why Should You Start With Value? 42:35 How To Market 44:04 Psychology & Marketing 46:06 Creating A Drive In The Marketing Strategy 48:23 Think Different 50:52 Be Brave To Do Something Completely Different 58:39 How To Become A Good Marketer 01:00:31 The Sales Piece In Any Business 01:04:38 Customer Service Matters 01:06:09 The Sales Framework 01:13:06 How Important Is Hiring? 01:14:50 What Role Does Competition Play? 01:19:09 Let's Talk Money 01:24:17 What Numbers Should I Pay Attention To? 01:26:35 Experimenting 01:34:55 Every Complex System Starts In A Simple Way 01:39:06 Mastering A Job 01:43:54 Ten Major Principles To Learn Anything 01:55:24 Removing Any Friction In The Process 02:01:38 Last Guest Question  Follow Josh:  Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/SznbYyhi9Kb  YouTube: You can purchase Josh’s book, ‘How to Fight a Hydra’, here: https://amzn.to/4f1qJa4  Spotify: You can purchase Josh’s book, ‘How to Fight a Hydra’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/igsXEtci9Kb  Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes  My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook  You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb  Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb  Sponsors: Shopify: http://shopify.com/bartlett Colgate - https://www.colgate.com/en-gb/colgate-total Vodafone V-Hub: https://www.vodafone.co.uk/business/sme-business/steven-bartlett-digital-sos?cid=dsp-ent/nprod/Stevenbartlett01/eng/7.24/ntst

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. So every business from the smallest startup to the largest corporation in the world has five fundamental parts. If you want to create a business or interviewing for your first job or interviewing for your first big promotion, understanding this is a superpower. It's so exciting and fun. Josh Kaufman, the world famous business expert, entrepreneur and bestselling author.

Renowned for his practical approach to mastering business, productivity, and rapid skill acquisition. This is the foundation of every business plan that has or ever will exist. So step one is value creation. Find those important unmet needs and then focus on meeting those. Is this enough of a problem for you to pay money to solve it? How do you find out if there's a big enough market for your idea? and focus on meeting those. Is this enough of a problem for you to pay money to solve it? How do you find out if there's a big enough market for your idea?

The easiest, best thing to do is to... Step two then. Marketing, and humans have five drives. The drive to acquire, to bond, to learn, to feel, to defend. And the more drives that you hook into, the more attractive the business offer is going to be. What is step three?

The third part of every business is... The fourth part is particularly important, which is... And the fifth part is what a lot of people struggle with. But I'm here to help you. So the fifth part is... Josh, the narrative out in the market is you have to do 10,000 hours to learn anything. You're telling me it's actually 20 hours is the key? Yes, or 40 minutes a day for about a month.

So how do I do that then? The best way to approach this is to start with... That's the secret. Congratulations, Dario Vecchio gang. We've made some progress. 63% of you that listen to this podcast regularly don't subscribe, which is down from 69%. Our goal is 50%.

So if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted, if you like this channel, can you do me a quick favor and hit the subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you know, and the bigger the channel gets, as you've seen, the bigger the guests get. Thank you and enjoy this episode. Josh, why? Why did you write a book called The Personal MBA? It's a world-class business book that sold almost a million copies so far. It's a real iconic book in the category. But why? Why did you feel compelled to write that book? Because I can tell by the thickness of it, it took you a long time. So there must have been some sort of personal motivation that was pretty strong to write that book? Sure. A couple of things. Curiosity and persistence. And I was solving my own problem.

So one of the things that happened is right after school, I got a job at a big company. And I was working with a lot of people who had just graduated from top 15 business programs. I got this job straight out of undergrad. I had no idea what I was doing. And I really wanted to learn, like, what are we doing here? What is business? How does it work? What's important to know?

What's not important to know. And so one of the things that I tried to do with the personal MBA, and one of the reasons like how the project got started was I figured that there was, there was a book written by a business school professor in the 1950s or something. And I just needed to go out and find that book and read that book. And then I would understand the fundamentals. Then I would understand the basics of what it is that we're all doing here. And I looked and I looked and I read and I read and I couldn't find it. And so at a certain point that I had essentially spent months reading, just going through category after category, just trying to understand for myself what businesses are, how businesses work. And at a certain point, I realized like, this is important to me. And there's something that should exist in the world that for some

reason doesn't exist in the world. And I think I need to be the person to make that, to do that. And so that's when the personal MBA went from just this crazy side project that I did post undergrad into essentially a second full-time job reading and research and trying to decide for myself, what are the critical parts of business? How do businesses work? How do they function? And then I decided to put that in a form that other people could read and benefit from as well. What is an MBA?

Master's of Business Administration. It's a big degree. Actually, one of the most economically successful academic degrees that exists. Over the past several decades, growth in business master's programs worldwide has just exploded. And so for better or worse, when adults decide that they're interested in business, the first thing they do is go to Google or Amazon and they type in the letters MBA and they start looking for graduate business school programs. And I think that's a mistake. I think there's a reason that people want to learn business. There's a reason that people find this area of knowledge useful. And

I don't necessarily think academia is the place to start. I think there's an enormous amount of business knowledge and skill that you can develop on your own by understanding the most important concepts around what businesses are and how they work and using them in your day-to-day life, using it in the career that you already have, using it to start something new on your own. And just a few very simple, straightforward ideas go a very long way. And so my goal in writing The Personal MBA was to explain business to someone who has no knowledge, no experience, no idea what's going on. Start from absolute square zero and explain all of the different parts of a business, how they work, how they interrelate to each other. And so you can take that knowledge and do good work,

whatever it is that you do in your life or in your career. When you say do good work, we're talking about an outcome there. What kind of outcomes do you think, if someone's just clicked on this conversation now, and with the knowledge that we're going to talk about this as many, as well as other things, what do you think the outcome for them could be if they got access to the information that you put in this book, The Personal MBA, but also from listening to this conversation? Sure. So many of the readers of The Personal MBA over the years are early career professionals who are just getting started in their career in some way, shape, or form. And I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard from someone who's like, I'm interviewing for my first job, or I am interviewing for my first big promotion. I actually have a friend who is in this position

a couple of months ago. She's like, I'm a skilled professional. I've been working for a while. There's an opportunity to move into management here. And part of that interview is going to be, they're going to ask me like, how do we improve the business that we're in? She's like, I'm trained as an engineer. I don't know about any of this business stuff. And so there's a very simple way

of understanding what a business is, what a business does, the primary parts that every single business has and how those processes interrelate. And what that knowledge gets you is the ability to take a look at any existing business and understand it in a very deep and fundamental way. So you can take a complex organization, you can break it down into parts that are very simple, straightforward, easy to understand. And then you can take that knowledge to ask a series of very useful questions. How is this business creating value? How do they attract the attention of people who might want or need what this business money? How does the business deliver the value that it's promising to its paying customers? And then how is the business bringing in money? How's the business spending money? And A, is it bringing in more than it's spending?

If not, there's a problem. And more importantly, is it enough? Is it enough to make all of the time and energy and effort that's being put into the business by the owner and the employees worthwhile? And that's the essence of finance. And so understanding business in this very systematic way is a superpower. It allows you to take a look at anything, like the businesses that are happening in

the world all around us. It helps you understand them. If you want to create a business, this is the foundation of every business plan that has or ever will exist because each of these parts is universal, essential, and fundamental. You have to answer these questions. And so by having this framework in your head, going back to my friend earlier, her prep for the interview was very simple. We had a 15-minute conversation about what those things might look like. She went away and did her prep, and she went into the interview the next day, and she was offered the job. And one of the things that comes out of having this deep understanding of business, even for potentially very young or very junior people who are just getting started, understanding these things, being able to ask these questions, being able to know what's important and what's not, and think like an owner or an operator of the business is what the owners and operators

and executives and managers are looking for in terms of people to hire, people to recruit, or people to start companies. And so the more you understand how all of this works at a deeply fundamental level, the more opportunities you're going to have. I think it's a skill that's essential for every person to know and be conversant. I think from the stats you said about how the desire to sign up to a academic MBA have increased, most people would agree. Sure. Because that's a reflection of demand in the market. You're saying more and more people are going to university and trying to do a business course.

Are they being scammed? Because if you think about the promise they're signing up to, even through the lens that you've just described, they're being marketed something. Is that institution delivering the value that they're being marketed, i.e., I guess the promise is that you'll have a better career, you'll earn more money if I go to university and do a business degree. Is that being delivered? The answer to that is it depends. And the it depends is it depends on what

you want for yourself and your life. And so approximately two-thirds of business school graduates go into either management consulting or investment banking. The remainder of them, the vast majority, go into working for extremely large companies. to look like that, then the promise that is very often delivered, but with business school programs, is you're essentially buying yourself a very expensive interview to have an opportunity at a company or a firm or an industry where that is the primary mode of getting into it. Now, the price of that interview can be very, very steep. And so the top 10 business schools, as we're talking right now, charge anywhere between $240,000 and $250,000 for a two-year program. That's an enormous amount of money, and that's usually financed with debt. And so if you don't have a, for example, if you're not working for a company

that is willing to sponsor your way through and pay the tuition costs, most of these degrees are financed with debt. And that debt is going to be with you regardless of whether or not you like your career, regardless of the economic situation that you graduate into, regardless whether or not you get a job at the end of it. So you're taking on an enormous obligation, spending a lot of money, borrowing a lot of money with a very unsure outcome at the end.

Is there any correlation between getting an MBA and long-term career success? It's funny. This has been asked by very many people and the answer is always no. So my two favorite studies here, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong at Stanford University at the time, this was the early 2000s, business school professors did a study of do business school programs work? Because if they did, you would expect to see more successful executives, professionals having business school degrees. And what they found is no,

it makes absolutely no difference. And my favorite quote, um, was, was by the lead offer. Um, Jeffrey Pfeffer was like, if you are good enough to get in, you are good enough to do well, regardless. It's a credentialing system. It's a, it's a pre-selection. Um, but really like the people who make things happen in business are people, individuals with skills and abilities and the curiosity and the drive to make things happen. You don't necessarily get that from having three letters after the end of your name. that are listening that want to start their own businesses they're probably currently in a corporate job right now and they're thinking gosh i have this idea i'd love to give it a go but something is holding them in place and from reading your book it's it's the first thing that tends to hold people in place is just their belief that business is complicated yeah um from everything you've come to learn and all the testimonials you've had do you agree with that belief that

business is complicated and or how difficult do you think it is for the average person with an idea to go from working in a job to earning, I don't know, $10,000 a month running their own business? Do you think that's achievable for most people? I think it is achievable for most people. Yeah. And I think business is complex in the sense of there are many moving parts. It's not just one thing. There are interrelatednesses that you need to understand. It's not complicated in the sense of the most important ideas, principles, things to do, things to understand are not all that difficult when it gets down to it. I think in business in general, somewhat for status-related

reasons, but business people like to feel fancy and complicated. And sometimes you signal status or sophistication by making things sound really big or difficult or complex. I think that's fundamentally not the case for business. Most of the ideas that we deal with are common sense and simple arithmetic. And so we do need to grapple with the complexities of the world because, as we were talking earlier, every business has these five major interrelated parts. We need to understand how those work. Businesses are created by people for the benefit of other people. And so we need to understand human psychology, both our psychology and the psychology of the people we interact with, relate to, whether that's customers or employees, contractors, the other people in our world. And then there are certain parts about how the world works, system and process, how things tend to interact with each other. That's very valuable and important to know. But again, complex, not complicated. And I think there's a lot of, for the person who wants to start a new business,

a lot of it comes down to answering those fundamental questions. How are you going to create value that someone else in the world wants or needs? Okay, so let's start. So typically when I do these podcasts, I try and navigate the journey, right? I try and figure out where to start. But this is going to be the first time I actually ask you, if I am that person who has an idea in my head, or maybe I've got, you know, I'm off to the races with an idea. I've got a, I don't know, I'm going to launch a business that sells candles. Okay?

I think I can make candles that smell amazing. So what's the first of those sort of levers or principles I need to think about when I'm designing my business, thinking about my business, you know, thinking about making a business plan? What is step one in that journey? Yeah, step one is the value creation component, which is, it sounds like in this particular example, the candles are the type of value that would be created. And then the relevant question there is, why do people buy candles? What are they looking for? When somebody goes out and they say, you know what? I would really like to have a candle right now. What do they want? What do

they need? What are they looking for? They want them to smell nice. Exactly. Okay. So perfect. They want them to look nice. Yeah. They want them to not be a rip-off, so they want them to be cheap, as I'm guessing. They want them to last a long time, I guess. Sure. Yep. Last a long time. Okay. And so this is a really interesting thing. A lot of the things around value creation come down to making trade-offs between competing priorities. And so the perfect product or the perfect offering

would deliver every single thing that the customer would like and it would be free. Yeah. And so a lot of the early stage value creation process is like, okay, we've identified some areas, like things that people are looking for, things that people want. Can you understand each of those things in detail around, for example, what makes a really good candle scent? What makes a candle last longer?

What allows candle manufacturing at a relatively inexpensive rate? All of those things. And then most successful businesses pick one or two of those things. And then most successful businesses pick one or two of those things to focus on and then turn that dial all the way up to nine, 10, 11. And so, for example, you might be able to make the best smelling, longest lasting candle using some complex chemistry manufacturing process, whatever.

That might be very expensive to do. So the price of the candle might be higher than you, than you otherwise would like it to be. Or you could go the other direction. Let's make the cheapest, most ubiquitous candles ever, but then let's focus on the distribution end of things to have candles in more places. And so you start, um, this was something that, that I learned how to do very early in, in my career. I worked for a consumer goods manufacturer, big company called Procter and Gamble. Who make everything, by the way, if people don't know. Everything. They literally, there's probably 10 things in this room that Procter and Gamble made. Yeah. Toothpaste, laundry detergent, you know, all of that. I worked on the home side.

And one of the things that I took away was every once in a while you'll read in like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, whatever, about the crazy lengths that consumer goods researchers will go to to figure out how people use like paper towels or something like that. I got to be one of those people for a couple of years and it was fascinating. I've watched so many people clean their kitchens and there's a certain amount of like the value creation process that is psychology and anthropology

of just going out into the world with your eyes wide open, noticing what people do, asking questions, noticing subtle things that they might not even pick up on. And then if you do more formal research, you can start asking people to make explicit trade-offs between options. And so if you could have a candle that lasted a long time versus had the most amazing scent throw ever, which one would you pick? And you can start to kind of navigate the space of possible solutions in that particular category by talking to people who buy candles, because you don't want to ask a random person on the street. You want to talk to people who actually purchased the thing that you're creating. But by paying attention and by asking

questions and starting to get a feel for how the people who are making these buying decisions actually navigate the process of narrowing down options to make a decision, that's where you find sometimes the very tiny things that make an enormous difference. That's where you find the places to innovate, right? Yeah. But people don't know what they want, right? So you've got to be careful, because if you give people a survey on candles...

Exactly. ...they might tell you something, but they might buy... You know, there's this sort of detachment between what we think we want and how we spend our money totally which can cause people you know because i'm on dragon's den so people i'm halfway through filming at the moment so i've had 50 pictures so far and one of the most popular phrases i hear as a dragon on dragon's den which is the like shark tank in the

u.s and around the world is i have this idea my friends and my mom my mom have told me it's great and they're definitely buy one and here it is and i go that means fucking nothing it means absolutely nothing yeah and a lot of people pursue ideas they quit their career they spend years pursuing this thing but their seven best friends and their mom said they would buy and they you know they gave it to their their friend and their mom and their friend and mom used it and said they liked it. Yeah. The best way to get around that, ask for early pre-orders. Ask people to lay down money on the idea. So this, I mean, this is part of how Kickstarter started, right? Here's an idea. Here's a concept. Here's exactly what you're going to get. Please enter your credit card details because it's an idea. Here's a concept. Here's exactly what you're going to get.

Please enter your credit card details because it's that act. It's the raising your hand, wallet, checkbook, credit card, and saying, yes, I'll take one. That's the signal that you're looking for. And that can be everything from Kickstarter on the consumer side to letters of intent on the mid to large size company side. Yes, if you build this software system, we will sign up for an engagement at X price for X term. So finding that buying signal is really important. And then going back to your comment earlier about noticing the subtle things, people's behavior says a lot more than people's words. And so if there's a conflict between what people are saying and what people are doing, focus on what they're doing all the time.

One of my favorite stories coming out of the consumer research department at Procter & Gamble was there was a researcher in a lady's home one afternoon, and they were just watching her do her laundry. And this was back in the days of powdered laundry detergent. So, you know, you have the box of powder, you have the scoop, put it in. And so the lady turned on her washer and just stood there for like 15, 20 seconds doing nothing, just like waiting. And the researcher's just watching. And then at a certain point, she's like, what are you doing? She's like, oh, I'm waiting for the tub to fill up. Why are you doing that?

It's like, well, if there's not water in the bottom, when I put the powdered laundry detergent in, it's not going to dissolve properly. So you've got to wait for the tub to fill up a little bit. And then you put the powder in and you swish it around the bottom of the basin with your hand so it dissolves all the way. And then you put the powder in. And you swish it around the bottom of the basin with your hand so it dissolves all the way. And then you put the clothes in. And so the researcher took this back to the research department. And all the chemists are just like, this is dumb.

We have science. We have data that says, no, our detergent dissolves completely. This is a non-issue. And the consumer researchers are like, no, this is a psychological need. There's a bit of reassurance here that people don't have. How can we give that to them? And the answer to that was the invention of liquid laundry detergent, which is now a multi-billion dollar a year products category. And it didn't come from a physical need. It came from an unmet psychological need. And I just love that because I remember growing up watching my grandmother do laundry and she did the exact same thing for the exact same reasons.

And it's sometimes those subtle things. So for example, going back to our candles, one of the things that just by pure coincidence I was involved in when I worked at P&G was scent research. So the scent of a cleaning product, there's a lot of psychology, there's a lot of science that goes into that. And there's a difference in how something smells. For example, when you take a cap off a bottle of something and sniff it, it smells different than if you, for example, a cleaning product, you pour it into a bucket and dilute it with water and you mop your floor. And so those things make an enormous difference.

Like how is the product going to be used? And in the case of candles, one of the things that people pay very close attention to is the smell of a candle while it's burning is the smell of a candle while it's burning and the smell of a candle when it's not burning. And there's a whole category of candle purchasers who will buy a candle based on what's called cold throw. How much does it smell when it's just sitting on the middle of your table, not burning, not doing anything. And so those are the little bits, like if you pay close enough attention, if you focus on the right things, the subtle things that people are either saying or not saying, you can find those very important unmet needs and then focus on meeting those. And that's the making of a product or an offer that has legs to it. So interesting because we all walk around, that thing you were saying about the powder laundry detergent, that was 100% me. I was too young to be messing around with the

washing machine. But whenever I had like my shop, my parents were out, I'd pour all the powder in into the little tray. And then I would like squish it around with my finger. I'd get water from the sink above and pour it in there to try and dissolve the powder with my finger. So I was doing that as well. And I was thinking as you were saying that, you know, we all walk around with the same kind of set of psychological biases. So if we assume that we can truly understand how other people are behaving, when we are other people, when we are them as well, when we have the same sort of psychology, assuming that we can guess that is quite dumb. Because none of us would have ever guessed what you just said about the laundry detergent thing. None of us would have ever sat in a boardroom

and figured that out. We had to go out into the world and almost become like a fly on the wall or take a bird's eye view on how we as humans are behaving to spot that opportunity. And I was thinking, you know, there's so many people that maybe have business ideas now or are thinking of a business idea, but there's just gaping opportunity in observing the world objectively and seeing how people are doing what they're doing and why they're doing what they're doing. I always wonder that. I think, you know, if you're trying to think of a new business idea, should you sit down with a piece of paper and sketch out the problems that you've had in your life? Should you just start to become more aware of your day-to-day life and then make notes in your journal? Or is there another way to find that idea?

Yes. Start there, for sure. And then go out into the world with your eyes open, just looking for problems, annoyances, frictions, things that are just a little bit annoying or suboptimal in some way. I mean, I think kind of a general question, like we're not, humanity is not running out of problems to solve. There are millions of opportunities to make someone's life a little bit more pleasant, a little bit more secure, a little bit more interesting, a little bit more fun. And so I think there's a lot of magic to be had in just going out into the world and having experiences in the world with other people and just noticing in a way that you've never noticed before of, oh, there's something there that's a little bit higher friction than it otherwise could be. genesis of Amazon, Amazon Prime. How can we make it as easy as possible for someone to click a button and something magically arrives on your doorstep within 24 to 48 hours? How can we make just this opportunity a little bit more fun or different or interesting? This is where over the

past 20 years in consumer goods packaging design has come come a long way because if you can grab someone's attention and give them a little bit of a pleasant experience while they're they're walking around shopping that's a good thing it it moves an enormous amount of product and it's something that you have to plan for from the very beginning stages but it makes a huge difference it's so interesting because i was just thinking as you're saying that i was thinking what is an annoyance or a frustration that i've just i just live with that i've kind of just assumed is the way of the world and it's just the way it is and one sprung to mind that's very close to home in every sense of the word we've been doing this

podcast a long time a couple years now three four years now and every single time before we start the podcast jack will walk in and jack will say to the guests please don't bang on the table because if you bang on the table it comes through the mic we've been saying it for years we haven't figured out how to solve the problem yet so if there's anybody out there but i was thinking do you know what what an entrepreneur would do um if there was any in this fucking room we would make our own mic we would solve the problem we could probably we kind of just assume that someone else will solve it

or it's just the way of the world and I say this because we could have probably fixed this we've been very busy but we could have probably made a new mic with a new bass that suspends the mic so the vibrations don't go through

but I say this because everybody in their lives has those frustrations. Absolutely. Things they're just living with. And they're kind of assuming that someone else is going to solve it, or it's just the way the world is. Yeah. Sorry, Jack's defending himself from the corner. Sure. Yeah, it's difficult with SM7Bs. But no, there's a company called Rycote that makes some really amazing universal shock mount adapters for microphones. I think we should do it and we should sell it.

We'll have a meeting about that later. Are you going to go get it? Yeah, totally. Are you going to go get it? Oh, it's in there. Okay. No, I was thinking, God, why didn't we just make one? Okay, so Jack tried to make this contraption here. Oh, cool. Which would, I guess, suspend the microphone and limit the vibrations going through it?

Yeah. Okay, but we tried it and it didn't work. Now, we're very busy with lots of solving other issues, so this was kind of low on the list of priorities, but that as an example, and everybody listening to this now has day-to-day frustrations, things they observe and go, that could be better. Sure. And they go, I hope someone else figures that out. Yes. And that's the entrepreneur that's going to make the millions. Yeah. And the difference between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs is the entrepreneur says, and I'm going to be the one that solves that problem. And then what happens? It depends

on the idea. So for example, like a manufacturing idea, like this is where we start getting into the different types of businesses, whether you're building a product or building a service, some sort of shared resource membership. I talk about 12 different forms of value in the personal MBA. So the instantiation of the idea really depends on the form of which you're going to deliver it to the end result. But a lot of times the early stages are prototyping, finding people who might benefit from this thing, getting their input, advice, perspective. And that gives you the information that you need to either continue going down that path or sometimes the information is, yeah, this is something that could potentially be a really good idea but is not going to be a viable business for whatever reason. And so some of those early stages of entrepreneurship are very focused on what is this? How might it work? Can we sketch it out in enough detail to know what questions we

need to answer next in order to figure out like, what are the critical assumptions? Can we meet those critical assumptions to make a viable business? If so, yes, let's move on to the next step. If not, let's discard it and move on to the next step. If not, let's discard it and go on to the next. So when we think about this microphone challenge we've had, one of the critical assumptions we're making is that it can be solved. Sure. Is that there's some way to kind of insulate the microphone from the vibrations of the table at some point as those vibrations travel up. And I can see in this quite cool contraption, actually, we've used rubber here. Yeah. Assuming that if we suspend it with rubber there, I'm guessing this is Jack's invention,

I guess, or someone else's. Is it your invention? Yeah, I got someone else's maybe before this. It's a cool idea. Yeah, it is. That's an assumption we've made. Mm-hmm. I'm guessing it failed. It failed? Yeah, I think the rubber needs to be safety, it needs to be elastic.

Okay. And it might be too heavy to be elastic. Yes. Okay. And the mic can be heavier because it's elastic. Yes. Okay, so these are the assumptions you're talking about. Yes.

And there's also, in this specific example, it's something that will serve the need with this particular microphone. And so, for example, you might be able to solve the problem in a very

straightforward way by changing to a different microphone that has different options available. So a lot of it just depends on the constraints that you're dealing with. And this is the early stages of figuring out how to give value to the end consumer. This is the sort of iterative experimental failure-ridden process which everyone has to go through.

And I think this is important to highlight because what often will happen is people will take the first pop at it. I know we've been doing, we've been taking many pops, but just for the sake of this conversation, they'll take the first pop at it. It won't work. Then they'll concede. Uh-huh. Yep. When it's in a lot of it comes down to how big is this problem? How urgent is it? How many people need something like this? So this is where you get into the standard supply and demand sort of economic consideration. Is this a need that only you have? Or is this a need that many, many people have? And how big of a need is this? Is this something that, for example, high profile podcasters will pay thousands of dollars to solve? Or is this something that affects only a sub-segment of people and is

not valuable enough to bother with or to invest a lot of time and energy researching, finding a solution for? How do you find out if there's a big enough market for your idea? That's where you talk to people. And this is where value creation and marketing tend to intersect. And so it's, can you identify people out in the world who have a very similar

problem, set of things that they're thinking about, set of questions that they're trying to answer. And the more of those people you can identify and the more urgent and pressing the need is, that's the first thing that you need to look for in terms of identifying viable markets. So they tell me that they want it.

I go out there, I speak to people, they all tell me that they want it. But that's not enough, right? Ask them to place a pre-order. That's the step two. Okay. So it's not,, right? Ask them to place a pre-order. That's the step two. Okay. So it's not, the question isn't, do you want it? It's, is this enough of a problem for you to pay money to solve it?

There's a guy, Des Trainer, who founded Intercom, has a saying I just love. He's like, show me a credit card that has been swiped to solve this problem, and I will concede that the problem is real. And so you're really looking for like, is this big enough, important enough? Are people spending money to solve this particular need? If so, that's a really great sign you're on the right track. Okay. So what I'm going to do then is we're going to, before we spend a lot of money in building out this new microphone system, we're going to put up a waiting list for other podcasters. We're going to see how many of them swipe to pre-order it. And then if we get,

I don't know, a couple of hundred, a couple of thousands, probably a couple of hundred, couple of hundred swipes with their credit cards to pre-order this thing, even though we haven't built it yet, then we're going to invest in building it. Yep. Does that make sense? It does. And then you do a short run to mitigate your risk first. Okay. You get your initial feedback from your first run of customers.

They will have opinions about what works and what doesn't. And then if that is enough, that's when you start small and then you work up to larger and larger batches of production. Because what's happening a lot out there with aspiring entrepreneurs is they're spending two to three years building their company

and it's all leading up to this launch day where everything's riding on this big launch day. They've raised, I don't know, $70,000 for that, whatever. Sure. Why is that the wrong approach to take? I think there's a difference between doing business and playing business. It's like people who get really, really excited if I'm going to start a company. And so the first thing I need to do is pick a logo and buy my business cards. Like that's the signaling parts of business. It's playing a role where the actual doing of the business is the value creation, marketing, figure that out as quickly as possible and then get on with it. Then you're going to have more than enough time and money to have fancy business cards and like do that bit. But yeah, it really is like at the idea of validation stage, it's how can you ask

enough people who might be in the market to spend money to solve this particular problem? How can you get something valuable in front of them as quickly as possible? What would that look like? And how can you do that, particularly early on, if you don't have a lot of funding, in a way that minimizes time and finance? Because the worst possible way to go about things is raise millions of dollars of venture capital and build up this whole thing only to have no one buy it at the end. You started with this point of value, giving value to other people. Why? Why is that the frame to think through when you're thinking about the idea? Yeah. I think if you are not providing value to other people in a fundamental way, you have no business. A venture that markets and sells something

that does not deliver value to other people is a scam. And so really, I think there's a way of thinking about business. This is one of the things I find fascinating about it. Business to me is a generative act. You are going out into the world, you're finding a problem, you're finding a solution to that problem. You're creating something that makes the world better in some fundamental way. And then you're bringing it to the attention of people who care.

And you're convincing them that they need to try this to actually solve their problem. And then it works. And then they give you money for it. It's great. So you can just keep that process going for as long as it makes sense to everyone involved. I think to me, a well-running working business system is a thing of beauty.

You're solving people's problems. You're being rewarded for it. You're doing it in a way that allows you to keep solving people's problems and it makes your life better in the process. I think that's a wonderful way to live your life. And if you don't start by asking the question, what is the valuable thing that I am going to deliver to people who care? The whole thing pulls apart. What's step two then? Yeah. Marketing. Marketing. Okay. Marketing is fun. Yeah. Marketing is, is just who might be interested in this thing um and a lot of it is the the fundamental thing is if no one knows you exist no one's going to be able to buy your thing and and

so marketing is is the process of attracting the attention of people who might be interested in the value that you're creating. And in an ideal world, making them curious, wanting to learn more, asking for additional information, engaging with what it is that you have. A lot of people conflate marketing and sales. To me, they're distinct processes. So marketing is the attracting attention and generating interest. And then sales is the process of convincing someone to buy and then getting them set up as a customer. And a lot of marketing comes down to what is it exactly that you're trying to gather attention for and where do those people generally hang out? What are they curious about? What are they already paying attention to? What can you take advantage of or dovetail into in

order to attract someone's attention at the right moment, at the right time, and make them aware that you have something that could benefit their life? Here's what it is. Here's how you can benefit from it. To be great at marketing, do you think we need to understand the underlying psychological sort of core motivations of humans? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And do you know what those are? Yeah. There was a really great book about this published years ago called Drive by Paul Lawrence and Noria, who I think at the time was the dean of Harvard Business School. And they argued that humans have four fundamental drives. And if I can remember off the top of my head, the drive to acquire, the drive to bond, the drive to learn, and

the drive to defend. Is there a fifth? The drive to feel? The drive to feel is my addition to this. Oh, your addition. Okay. So yeah. And to me, like, so the drive to acquire, you know, let's go out and buy products, enhance my career, things like that. The drive to learn, gather knowledge, understand the world. The drive to bond, relationships, experiences. The drive to defend, let's protect myself, home security systems, you know, all that thing. And for me, like entertainment is very much a drive to feel. We don't go to the movies to do any of those previous four things. We go to the movies to have an experience, to feel emotions.

And so to me, the vast majority of offers in the market are designed to hook into or to take advantage of one of those five core human drives. And the more drives that you hook into generally, the more attractive the business offer is going to be. And so you could make a pretty straightforward argument that one of the reasons that social media has become so popular over the last decade is because it hooks into at least four out of five of these drives, potentially all five. So give me an example of a business and the drives that it's kind of playing to in its marketing strategy. So if we think about Nike maybe?

Sure. Yeah. So the drive to acquire is straightforward. I need to put things on my feet. Shoes are great. But it's also status. It is status. So I would say there can be the acquiring status drive. There can also be very much in-group, out-group dynamics or a form of bonding. I'm the type of person who identify or who will wear this sort of thing. I form relationships with people who care about these sneakers, these special editions, these athletes, these whatever. Less learning, less defending. Feeling can very much be a part of a product experience. Like people who strongly identify with certain brands,

certain lifestyles, certain ways of being in the world. Like when you put on something that makes you feel good, there can be an emotional component to that experience that's very, very strong. It's interesting because I was thinking about Apple as well through that lens. Apple's a great example, obviously. So if we think about the drive to acquire,

very much a status product and it always has been. To bond, again, much of their advertising is about connecting people and connection. Learn, again, you know, much of their marketing is about the fact that you can learn on these devices, like the iPad, for example. Defend, they talk about how encryption, a lot in safety. Huge focus on security and privacy right now for that reason. The drive to feel. I guess most of their marketing when i think about the vision pro where they weirdly show like the dad and his kids and he's got this massive headset on i guess that was an attempt to arouse them the vision pro now has this sort of spatial video where you can you know one of my

team members when they first put it on for the first time remarked that they wish they had got spatial videos of their grandmother that's passed away. But that's the kind of narrative that they show with the products as well, is that it's going to, they really put the heart in the marketing initiatives they do. So they really do a really good job at hitting all of these. Yeah, I would say, do you remember the early iPod advertisements with like the white silhouette person dancing on a color? Those advertisements were straightforward feeling. A thousand songs in your pocket. advertisements with like the white silhouette person dancing on a color those advertisements were straightforward feeling a thousand songs in your pocket it's how the songs make you feel

this is a way that you can feel that more often or more strongly it's pure emotion and they specifically you know so a more like straightforward drive to acquire on a technology product is like, how many gigabytes of storage does this thing have? And they made a deliberate decision not to talk about that at all, because it didn't matter. People didn't care. It was all about, here's how you can feel through the experience of using this product to have an experience you wouldn't otherwise have. I mean, this highlights a really important point about marketing, but building products and deciding what to build, which is how important is it to make something

that is logically better versus something that is emotionally more compelling? Yeah. In an ideal world, you do both. You can go a long, long way with emotion, even when you don't have straightforward, superior product benefits. Going back to our discussion of candles earlier, candles have been around for what, hundreds of years? You're probably not going to make, barring material science advancements, you're probably not

going to make a technical contribution to candle science in the process of making something. Speak for yourself. I mean, it's possible. It's my next business idea, I told you. Yeah. But like things like the packaging and the marketing and the scent and the unboxing experience and the anticipation of putting it out as the centerpiece

when all your friends come and all of that. There are so many emotional hooks to that sort of experience that you could argue that candles are sold almost all on emotion. And that's great. That's the value that's being delivered. Do you know a better example of that I've came across recently is liquid death? Oh yeah. It's just water. What? They built a billion dollar business selling water in a fancy can.

Totally. And affiliation. Like there's a little bit of a bonding or I'm the type of person who wants to present to the world in this particular way. So I don't buy Fiji. I buy liquid death. Sure. It's just water. It's just water. Sometimes it's carbonated or flavored. Yeah, come on. It's just water.

I saw some stats. I thought these stats might be out of date, but it was maybe last year or the year before I saw that they were selling half a billion dollars of water. And they're like a fairly new market entrant in the grand scheme of things. And from what I can observe, it's just a different can. Yeah. water. And they're like a fairly new market entrant in the grand scheme of things. And from what I can observe, it's just a different can. Yeah. And the packaging matters. The

affiliation matters. The story matters. Why do you think they won? I think they were first. So that's also, you talk about in your book, the value of doing something big and crazy for the value of doing something big and crazy. I mean, they were the first to do something crazy on the marketing side for water. It, the way we package it, the way we present it matters. And there's a certain subsegment of customers that would not buy a straightforward bottle of water because they don't care. But if they can signal something about themselves or a group affiliation in some way, shape or form through the packaging of the product, then to a certain subset of customers, that's valuable. I've been thinking about this theory for a while, last couple of months, maybe six months now, that brands need to, especially new market entrants in saturated, busy markets, like if you're coming out with an energy drink right now, or you're coming out with a can of water, the easiest way to market in terms of marketing is

if you you do a really good job of making it clear that you are the antithesis of the incumbents yes so you are a or not an and in your customers decision framework and what i mean by that is to be very specific um i've invested in a company called Perfect Ted. It's actually the drink in my cup right now. And in one of my first meetings with them, when we sat down, I said, you know, this brand I think will win if the consumer walks down that supermarket aisle

and thinks to themselves, I can be a insert incumbent energy drink brand or a Perfect Ted person. I can't possibly be both. And we all know that, well, I think a liquid death customer doesn't believe they can be a Evian water customer. Sure. Because it's so clearly, they've stood for something so much so that in doing so, they stand against something. And this is what breakout brands have done. BrewDog is a good example in the UK. BrewDog came into the market, indie punk beer. They literally took Carling beers and stuff

like that to fields as part of their marketing and blew it up with dynamite to say, we are not commoditized beer. We are the antithesis. We are an ore. You're either with them or you're with us. But that takes guts. It does. It takes balls like Liquid Death had balls. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a whole, like on the psychological side of things, the studies about signaling and counter signaling, like this is how fashion in the broad scale works. So all the cool people, high status, fashionable people start wearing a thing to signal group affiliation of like, we are the type of people who wear this. And then very quickly you have follow on folks who are like, oh, the cool

people are wearing this. I should start wearing this too. And that happens a couple of generations until that thing is at Marks and Spencer, Target, Choose Your Retailer. And then the people who want to distinguish themselves from all of the things that are being sold at the mass retailers will change fashions specifically to signal that we are not that. And so the cycle begins again. And so that's just like social signaling is a rabbit hole that you could spend decades going down and not get to the end of it. But it's all about who am I presenting myself

to be in the world? Who do I affiliate with? Who do I not affiliate with? And counter signaling is noticing a signal that's happening out there in the world and making a deliberate decision to be the opposite of that or the antithesis of that in some ways. And that is such a fascinating part of human psychology that generally speaking, if you can, so you could say like Apple did a lot of countersignaling because Microsoft, you know, some of the incumbent manufacturers was their, their famous 1984 advertisement was almost pure countersignaling. It was almost pure emotion and it set them up as the polar opposite to faceless beige computer box corporation. And so, yeah, like if there's something that is the prevailing trend in a certain industry, it can often pay to, you know, in the anthropological

sense, take a step back, notice what's going on. Here's the signal that's being sent and then make a deliberate decision to be the polar opposite of that. It takes guts though, because there's no blueprint for the opposite. Yeah. And you stand out, which is great. You get attacked. Yeah. I mean, that's the benefit of controversy too. So controversy can be a wonderful marketing tactic if you use it responsibly. And so, you know, you don't necessarily want to turn your business into a soap opera, but by deliberately courting a certain amount of controversy focused on the benefits or the features, you can attract a lot of attention that way. And that's what I mean by the Brewdog example where they took their competitor's beer to a field

and blew it up with dynamite and said, we are not commoditized beer. They got destroyed. They got attacked so, so much. But the controversy is energy and it's making people make a decision. Exactly. And that results in what became

a multi-billion dollar indie beer brand with a fraction of the marketing budget, but also that had been around a fraction of the time versus the incumbents. It's really interesting. Jane Warring was on the podcast. She's the founder of Dermalogica and she said the same thing to me.

She said, you know, she's built this global beauty brand. She goes, we need to piss off the 80% to get to the 20%. She goes, we don't need everybody to like us. That's not a brand. A brand makes you feel something. Yep. but most people that are struggling right now with marketing but i think much of the reason they are struggling is because they are vanilla wallpaper yeah i mean it's going back to our new product development conversation that's what a lot of people struggle with too because they have their first conversation with somebody who's like oh i hate that it doesn't work for me yeah it's like, oh no, what am I doing wrong? How can I fix this? It's like,

no, no, no, no. You don't need all the people. You need the tiny fraction who care more than everyone else. And a certain amount of polarization is a very, very good thing because it means that the thing that you're doing is distinctive enough. Like the people who care, really care. They really love it. They're going to buy it consistently, buy it often. The people who don't care might be completely apathetic to the category. You might not ever spend a million dollars in 10 years. You might not ever be able to get them to care. And so your job as a marketer is to attract the attention of all of the hyper responders, the people who care a lot, care often, and like are really into it. And then all of the people who

don't care and are never going to care, they can go away and that's fine. If I wanted to be an exceptional marketeer, if I wanted to, you know, I've got a product, an idea, and I want to make sure that it penetrates a very noisy online market but even an irl market what would you um what kind of skills and principles or first principles should i really be thinking about to become a great marketeer because you know we can get carried away with the fish and what i mean by the fish is tactics and strategies, but what is the fishing rod? What is the mindset, the principles that are going to make me a great marketeer for the next 30, 40 years, regardless of change? Yes. Fundamentals of human attention.

It comes down to psychology. So the vast majority of people moving through their lives are busy, stressed, overwhelmed, already have too much information bombarding them from all points at all times. And so figuring out, I think this is a story you tell in your book, actually. So Jenny on the side of the road who's broken down having the worst day of her entire life. It's a little bit hyperbole, but it's true. Most of us are just wildly oversubscribed in terms of attention and time and energy. And so figuring out the little bits of being able to highlight the thing that's most important, most interesting, most valuable upfront quickly in a way that cuts through, that is the primary skill of marketing. And a lot of the other particulars, the tactics,

the strategies are very dependent on what market are you operating in? What scale are you operating at? Like all of that stuff. But fundamentally understanding that people are busy and starved for time and attention. How can you grab it and what can you do to keep it? That's the primary skill of marketing by far. So if I'm, if I'm running that, if I'm thinking about starting my candle business, what is step three in your sort of, I think you said five-step framework of what really matters. Sure. Yeah. This is sales. Okay. And so for a candle business, this might look like direct sales online. It could also look like intermediary sales, like through a distributor. And so it's funny, like value creation, marketing, value delivery, and finance, all of those are the processes where money's flowing out of the business.

You're spending money to do all of this analysis. Sales is the part where money comes in, which makes it particularly important. And so some of the early decisions around sales are how are you going to ask for the sale? What does the sales process look like? And are you dealing directly with the customer who is purchasing from you?

Or are you dealing with some sort of independent third party or sometimes multiple third parties in the process? Like a retailer or a distributor. Exactly. Okay. And in order to be exceptional at selling my candles, is there anything that I should bear in mind? Maybe when I'm making the candles, how I'm packaging the candles, the way that I'm, you know, going to those retailers or. Yeah. So I think, um, there's a part of, because sales is kind of in the middle of the process, there's a part of sales that intersects with marketing in the sense of you're trying to make this maximally appealing to get someone to give you money for it.

And so the customer understanding how can we be persuasive in getting someone to say, yes, this is for me, here's my money, I would like one, please. There's also a part of sales which is somewhat neglected, which intersects with the value delivery part of the process, which is the point of a sale is not just to get a customer. In an ideal way, it's to get a happy, satisfied customer, someone who not only purchased the thing that you bought, but is happy with the thing that they bought and is thrilled that they did business with you and is planning on doing business with you again. Why is that so important?

Well, it's relatively straightforward to make a sale once. Usually the first sale is the most expensive. And so generally, repeat customers are the best customers you will ever have. They already know you exist. They already know your stuff is great. You don't have to attract their attention again, necessarily. And depending on what you're selling, like those repeat customers can, the lifetime value of a repeat customer can be extraordinary. And so if you've already done

the work to get a customer once, then you should want to keep them happy and keep them around for as long as humanly possible. What's lifetime value? Oh, lifetime value. This is a fun one. So lifetime value is the sum total of all sales of a customer with a business. And so imagine... Jack, I sell Jack a candle. Yes. Now, Jack, how many candles do you burn a year? Seven. Seven? Okay. So take the profit that you make per candle.

So I'm selling the candles at $10 and I make $1 profit on them. Yep. Times seven. Okay. So the lifetime value, well, let's say we're just over the course of a year, $7 profit. Okay. Let's take someone like Jill who burns a candle every week. Wow. And not just this year, she burns a candle every week, than Jack is by a lot. And so if you had to, to, to make a choice between Jack and Jill, like you should choose Jill every single time. Customer service matters, right? It does. Yeah. Because people, many companies see it as like an

annoyance. Like I've sold you the fucking thing. Why are you emailing me? Stop bothering me. And they treat you like you're a nuisance. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a shame. Because really like those happy repeat customers are not just like your high lifetime value customers, the customers that will stick with you, keep spending money with you.

They're also a primary source of marketing. Like word of mouth marketing is all happy customers telling other people who might benefit from your product that, hey, here's this wonderful thing, you should probably check it out. And so, yeah, like things like post-sale support, sometimes customer reactivation. So like to your point earlier,

it's a very straightforward marketing technique called reactivation. So like to your point earlier, it's a very straightforward marketing technique called reactivation. If you can contact Jack and say, hey, you bought candles from us last year. Would you like to buy candles from us this year? And get him to pick up just a couple more candles. Like the cost of that promotion is potentially very small. You already know he exists. You already know that he's purchased. Can you just get him to do that again? Those are some of the most effective marketing sales campaigns that you could possibly run. But it also requires that they had a good experience with whatever it is that you're offering in the first place. Is there like a sales equation of sorts?

Is there like a, you know, when I'm thinking about how to close a deal, how to sell that candle, is there a skill set or a framework or a model that I should be thinking through when I'm trying to sell it to Jack or Jill? There are many, many frameworks. I think the biggest, most popular one, which a lot of people get stuck on, is the whole features versus benefits conversation. And so in the context of candles, a features conversation would be, this candle is made from 100% soy wax. People don't necessarily care. It's not relevant to the reason that people purchase candles. Benefits are the things that people that get to those core human drives, the things

that motivate the purchase to begin with. And so one very useful way of thinking about this is whenever you're doing any sort of marketing or sales, you're focusing on the benefits, the things that you're delivering to people, the things that are enticing. And if you talk about features at all, you use them as reasons to believe that you're going to be able to deliver the benefits that are promised. And so if, for example, you're taking an ecologically friendly approach to your candle business, the fact that 100% soy is very clean burning and environmentally friendly might be a reason to believe that this benefit is true, but it's not the primary reason that people are going to purchase. Interesting. And a lot of people, I guess, are making the mistake of focusing on the features

of their product. Yeah, this is the difference between an iPod has a one gigabyte hard drive and a thousand songs in your pocket. A thousand songs in your pocket is a benefit. The size of the hard drive is the feature that enables that. And why, why is it more powerful and compelling to the customer to focus on the benefit versus the feature? Is there something in our neurology? Is that a word neurology? It is a word. Is that the right context in our brain? Yeah. Well, I think this, this gets into some buyer psychology things, which is people generally before making a purchase decision, imagine what their life is going to look like if they go down this particular route. this club or gym or whatever, there's a mental simulation process that very often happens of like,

maybe buying a new car is a good tangible example of this. Like before you buy the car, you do the test drive. And you imagine like, what would my life be like if I was driving this every day? If I pull this into my driveway, where are the neighbors gonna, are they gonna look at me? Are they going to think I'm cool? You know, like there's this like, with a little bit of information, our brains can kind of extrapolate or start to predict what is likely to happen out into the future to a certain extent. And this is, you know, to some of

the things you talk about in your book about storytelling, this is why stories work for marketing and sales. It helps people engage that part of their brain that can, that can simulate a potential future that looks and feels really great and start to anticipate it, get excited about it. And like when you're selling a car on the sales side of the spectrum, rule number one is get the potential customer in the driver's seat of that car as quickly as possible. Nothing else matters. You want them to engage in the process of driving and imagining as quickly as possible because that's when they start to convince themselves that this is something that they might want to have in their life. So anything that you can do

to engage those kind of simulation prediction sort of processes, the better. If you were to try and pin down the very core parts of what makes a company successful, What are the core components of that? What are the fundamental games at play in business in your view? Yeah. So I think there are a bunch of different ways to answer that. We've talked a lot about the five parts of every business. Those are the fundamentals of what the employees are actually doing. In general, you want to hire people who are curious, engaged, excellent communicators, and are signing up for whatever it is, the long-term objective mission, vision of the company. Here's what we're doing. Here's why it matters. Here's exactly who we're serving. Here's why that matters. Here's how we're going to go about doing that.

And from there, everything that happens within the company, each of the employees are going to be focused on one or more of these five essential parts of the business. In an ideal world, they understand all five and how they interrelate to each other and how something that is done in one, like say the marketing end of things might really make a huge difference on the value delivery or customer service end of things. If you have all of those pieces in place, then the question becomes,

how large does this business need to be in order to serve its customers to the maximum possible extent in a long-term sustainable way? And then what level of internal organization makes the most sense so people can spend most of their time doing work related to the five parts of every business and as little time as possible managing the rest. And so this is kind of the flip side of some of the common failure cases of bureaucracy, paperwork, busy work, all of these things. What level of management do you need? How can you minimize that? How can you make sure that...

To me, good management is helping remove barriers to people who are doing skilled work. How can you remove as many things from their plate as possible so they can focus on the parts of the business that are generating the most value? And so there's a lot. I think this was the founder of Southwest Airlines, Herb Keller.

It's like hire for attitude, train for skill. I think there's a lot to be said for that. Because I'm thinking a lot about that person who is, you know, again, they're starting their candle business and they're trying to figure out what this game of business fundamentally comes down to in 10 years from now. Is it how smart I am? Is it how good I am at assembling a group of smart people? Is it culture? Is it the vision I set? Is it the product I build? Is it how good I am at assembling a group of smart people? Is it culture? Is it the vision I set? Is it the product I build? Is it all of these things? But if we just start with hiring then, because this is in my experience where people often succeed and fail and often where

a lot of their biases show up that they don't even know about. How important is hiring to building a great business and becoming a successful entrepreneur? Complicated answer to that. Okay. So it can be more or less important depending on exactly what you're offering. I'm offering candles. You're offering candles. You're offering candles. Yeah. So to me, like making some assumptions, if you're handling, if you're selling candles direct on the internet with a small distribution center and mostly online advertising, your team is probably going to be relatively small.

And that can be a really good thing. If you're selling candles in distribution and tooling up a manufacturing line and going off and calling on all these large customers and potentially producing mass market candles, it's a very different business operation. And so there's a lot of like understanding the necessities of the game that you're playing and then matching your hiring exactly to what those needs are, but not more. I think about, when I was thinking about this candle business that I'm hypothetically going to launch, one of the things that might stop me from launching a candle business, as it does for many people, is that there are already lots of fucking candles. And in every industry, you know, when I hear entrepreneurs, or I hear sofa-preneurs entrepreneurs which is someone who's got an idea on the sofa one of the reasons they'll give as to why they've not started the business is because they've just they've done some market

research and they've discovered there is already someone solving that problem uh-huh and then they go no there's no there's no money to be made there. What role does competition play in this whole picture? Is competition a bad thing, a good thing, a signal that I shouldn't? Yeah. There's something really fun here. I talk about it in the book. I call it the iron law of the market, which is a way of saying that markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are. There's a Marc Andreessen quote from way back in his Netscape days. And it's the whole idea like it's actually a really good thing that there are a bunch of people selling candles in the market because that means that there's a large market of people

who are willing and able to buy candles. It validates the need. It validates the need. It validates the existence of the market in the first place. The markets you need to be really careful about are the brand new to the... Nobody has ever seen anything like this on the face of the earth because not only do you need to educate and convince people,

you have no idea whether people will purchase this thing that you've made. There's a story that I tell in the book, Dean Kamen, prolific inventor. This was the development of the Segway, the balancing scooter thing. Yeah. I remember, I think this was a Time Magazine article, something like that was like, this is the mystery invention.

We're not going to talk about it yet. The mystery invention that is going to change the way that cities are planned. The hype for it was absolutely extreme. And when it came out, it turned out that people didn't want to buy a $10,000 alternative to walking or riding a bike. And so it's like those like nobody's ever done this before can actually be in a weird way a bad sign.

You want something that like the market exists. The need is there. People are excited about it. People are looking for solutions. And then, like liquid death, if you can come in and do it in a fundamentally different way that grabs a lot of attention, that's a really, really great promising sign. But if it's completely brand new, that's more of a warning sign than many of the sophopreneurs would chalk it up to be. So how should we treat competitors then? If I've got a competitor, should I attack them? Should I block them?

What should I do? First, learn from them. Buy from them. Become their customer. Learn as much as you can about what they do, how they do it. Customers can be a wonderful source of market research around what's happening in a category, what's important, what's not, what was your experience. Competitors.

Yeah, totally. If you're starting a candle company, go out and buy all the candles. Smell them all, burn them all, buy a bookshelf and fill it with candles. Why? Because you can learn so much about how people do things. Look at their labeling, deconstruct their packaging, look at their price points, where are they selling? How are they doing their online advertising? And the wonderful thing is, aside from your time and maybe a little bit of budget, all the market research is free.

You just get to go out and learn from what people are doing and then combine that with your own research, going out and talking to customers on your own, having your own experiences, your own ideas. And that's where you get your unique take, your taste, your twist on that particular way of doing things. What else do I need to be thinking about? So I've done my market research in the candle business. We've got the marketing done. I understand the sort of sales framework that I should be thinking through. I've bought every candle in the market now. Is there anything else that is really important

to be thinking about as I go forward and launch this company? Oh yeah, we haven't talked about dollars and cents at all yet. Dollars and cents? Yeah, finance. Okay. So, you know, as you're doing all of this,

so development takes money, making products requires money, customer service requires money, manufacturing, like all of these, you're spending a bunch of money making this product. You have, at this point, since this is a startup,

you have a price that you think is supportable. Hopefully you're collecting pre-orders. You're getting some market information about how much you'd potentially be able to make here. Financial analysis is the part where you're taking a look at all of these decisions and trade-offs that you've been making. Where am I spending how much? If I have to make a choice

between A or B, which one am I going to make? And then finance is basically just a systematic way of making decisions around monetary considerations. In the case of a manufacturing business, you might have raised some early capital, friends, family, loans, investors, credit cards, whatever. How much do you have at your disposal? How much runway do you have? If you've hired people, how many months do you have left before you really need to be bringing in more than your outflows or else you're going to be in trouble very quickly? I've got a corporate job and I've got $2,000 of savings. Yeah. Okay. So relatively small. So then like the financial decision making might be

how many candles, if I make a small batch, like maybe of that $2,000, how much am I going to allocate to making the actual physical product, packaging, shipping, distribution? How much am I going to set aside for marketing and sales sort of thing? That's an allocation decision. And so your early decision making is how much do I have at my disposal? What are the critical things that need to be met? I have to have product to sell. I have to get people's attention somehow. I have to be able to deliver this when people buy it. And then you start making lots of decisions, lots of trade-offs about we're going to put this here, this here, this here, this here.

What if you're bad at math? Because a lot of people, I think they're put off business because they hear about gross margin and net profit and revenue and they go, oh God, I was bad at math in school. So I'm never going to be good at business. And, or I meet a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the den, but just in life generally, who basically avoid the finances of their own business because it's just not their strong area. So I think they think they can just, and maybe they're right, because I did meet Richard Branson and he told me that, you know, he's not very astute with finances.

And he said to me, you just basically need to know three numbers in business. And he also said to me that he was sort of 50 odd years old when he was in a meeting where his directors were talking about net profit and he had no idea what they were talking about. So one of them pulled him out of the room and drew a picture of a ocean and put a net in it and said the fish is in the net your net profit and at the

time he was running one of the biggest groups in europe sure you just go so what how important is this thing called finance and money and accounting yeah i mean most of it is common sense and simple arithmetic really like we're talking addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Some of the definitions, when you really get down to it, are relatively straightforward. So how much you're going to sell it for minus how much does it cost to make, how much does it cost to market, how much does it cost to deliver as your profit? And then, you know, how much on the things that you have to spend every month. So in the case of an online business, your website, your shopping cart, credit card processing, all the way up to if you have a physical business, how much are you spending on salaried employees, office space, electricity, utilities?

There's some very straightforward concepts like amortization. Can you take something that would be a larger pool of money? How much does that cost you per month as an equivalent? Can you build that into your budget? How do I learn this stuff if I didn't go to school? That's why I wrote the personal MBA. Okay. So yeah. Can you, will you tell me about all of this stuff if I get this book? Yes. So the, the whole idea behind personal MBA was to take all of these concepts like amortization, like net profit, all of this. And explain it in the clearest, most direct, most straightforward plain language that I possibly could. And is it easy? It's very straightforward. Yeah. Is there a most important number or a most important set of numbers in business when it comes to running my candle business? If I was to really stay focused on a particular number or metric, is there one in particular?

Yeah, I think so early on, the things that you're going to want to pay very close attention to, like early stage entrepreneurship is all about, are we to the point of keeping this business sustainable? Can we keep the lights on? Can we keep going? And is it worth it to me or not? And so your monthly fixed overhead, like how much am I spending every month just to keep the lights on? Everything. Cleaning. Yep. Everything. My, my Gmail account, everything. Yep. Okay. Yep yep okay yep so what is what are my monthly outflows what are my monthly sales numbers and it's monthly because usually our modern expenses happen monthly rent payments happen monthly all that how much is coming in

product service offer sales how much does it cost to deliver that in total? What is my monthly overhead? Everything required to keep the lights on. And at the end of that is net profit, which is how much do I get to keep? And is that enough? So for example, if you're working 80 hours a week, keeping this candle business open and you have $5 to your name at the end of that month, you might be able to sustain that

for a little bit. But at a certain point, there are going to be some very difficult decisions around. Technically, we're making money, but it's just not, it's not enough to make this sustainable. And so some of that early number, like as, as an early stage entrepreneur is like, what is that for you? Like based on your life, based on your lifestyle, what you hope and dream for yourself, what's the number that makes a venture long-term sustainable? Like I can keep doing this. It makes sense for right now to keep going. You focus on getting to that number first. And then from there, you have a lot of different options. One of the mental models that I think we share

is around this idea of experimentation. Yes, absolutely. And it's one of my favorite subjects because it's been a real revelation for me over the last couple of years in business, which is really this idea that increasing my rate of experimentation increases my rate of success. And I think, you know, the podcast is an example of that for me, where we've really tried to experiment as much as we can. And that's led us to the growth of the podcast. But when I look across the greatest entrepreneurs in the world, they all seem to eventually arrive at this conclusion that experimentation really is the path to finding the right answers in a world where the right answer is changing so much. What is, for an entrepreneur that's at the very beginning, for someone that's at the very

beginning or someone that's in the corporate world, what is it about experimentation that you think is so important to understand? Yeah, I think experimentation removes the pressure to know or feel like you know what you should be doing every moment of every day. I think there's a sense of like, we kind of conflate certainty or over-certainty with competence in a way that's not necessarily functional. Whereas we're all very imperfect oracles. We have anticipations based on our knowledge, our experiences,

the information that we're collecting about the world around us. And we're all using that all the time to try to predict what's going to happen next, just how our brains work. It's what our brains are for. And I think there's a sense of we can do that to a certain extent to eliminate some of the more obvious errors that we might make. But when it comes down to making a decision about something we've never done before,

the honest answer to will this work is, I don't know. Let's find out. And so there's a certain amount of, if that's the case, if we can't be 100% certain what's going to happen if we try plan A or plan B or plan C, then there are a couple of ways of approaching that. One is by working through scenarios of like, let's just imagine what would it look like if we chose plan A? Let's play that

out a little bit. Let's try to make anticipations about what might work or what might not. And let's compare our different alternatives and see what looks the best, feels the best based on our anticipations right now. That's valuable, but it can only go so far because it relies on all the knowledge and experience that we've collected to date. It it relies on all the knowledge and experience that we've collected to date. It doesn't account for the knowledge and experience that we're going to gain through the process of making a choice and learning from the choice.

And so one of my very favorite mental models, this comes from computer science and decision making, is called the explore-exploit trade-off. And this might be entertaining. It comes from decision research, actually about gambling, of all things. Imagine you walk into a casino and there are 100 slot machines that you get to play for free. Each of the machines has a different payoff, but you don't know which one. Your job is to find the very best one. How do you go about figuring that out?

You try them all? Yeah, you try them all. So you start collecting information, right? Like the thing to do when you walk into the room, you try them all. So you start collecting information, right? Like the thing to do when you walk into the room, you have no information. And so the first phase of solving this problem is to explore. You just try a whole bunch of things and you collect information every time you pull the slot machine. Does it pay out or not? The longer you do this, the more information you collect. And after a certain period of time, you start to get a feel for patterns of some things seem to be

more obviously good and other things seem to be more obviously bad. And so over time, you shift into the second phase, which is called the exploitation phase. So you take the knowledge and experience that you have and you use it to do the best performing thing that you're aware of at the time more often. So you're playing the higher winning slots more. The key is though, the exploration phase never stops. It just gets smaller over time. So if you're going to play this game optimally, there's always a certain subsegment of your time that's dedicated to exploring, to collecting information, to trying new things. And I think this kind of general way of going about this, like, this is what early career-ness, early

entrepreneurship looks like. You're trying a whole bunch of very different things sometimes and collecting information about what works and what doesn't. So in the context of my candle business, I'm going to, I'm going to try a bunch of different candles. I'm going to, I'm going to try a bunch of different candles. I'm going to try... I think the key part is we all get like, try other stuff. But the part that I often see people overlook is what you actually said after that, which was collect information. Which is, you know, people will listen to this and they'll go, right, guys,

they'll come to the corporate office. They'll go, right, we're going to try a bunch of new stuff. But that is just wasted time if you're not accurately collecting the feedback feedback yes because that's the power the feedback is the power right failure is nothing without feedback yeah exactly and that's like so trying the new thing and then paying very close attention to what happens is the valuable part so again in the context of the candle business like maybe you try different scents at the very beginning and you do small batches of each one. And how do I test that in the context of a candle business?

How do I test which is the best scent? Yeah. So you could do all sorts of different things. Like early on, you can get direct feedback. So follow up with people. So this is where the like quantitative and qualitative research studies can be very, very valuable. So your first source of information is what do people buy? What's most appealing? Where does that kind of initial spark go? You'll probably see a distribution if you try 10 different scents. You'll probably see a couple very clearly stand out. And then contacting customers directly to follow up. What did you like?

What did you not like? Asking quite like we were talking earlier about how did it smell when it was lit? How did it smell when it was not lit? Like all of those things, spending a little bit of time digging into it in a deliberate, systematic way is how you get that information. Could I do this before I even start selling these candles? Could I get 10 flavors, put blank labels on all of them, and also try and create a situation where you can't see it? Oh yeah, totally. Because again, I'm trying to limit the variable, so I don't want you to make your decision based on color. Put you in a pitch black room.

This is actually what a lot of companies do. Oh yeah, totally. Companies I've invested in called Huel does this. They have these pitch black rooms at their HQ, which they invite people into. And these are like sensory deprivation rooms, I guess, because there's no light. There's no nothing.

You can't see anything. And in the context of candles, get 10 strangers off the street to smell them all, maybe 100. Yep. And just to leave some scores. Yeah. And then get them to smell them when they're lit

and take that data as well. You can absolutely do that. That's crazy. It seems so obvious, but people don't do this stuff. Yeah. And it doesn't take that much more work. You're actually limiting your risk because you're not committing to one big batch

of something that you think will work. You're just experimenting a little bit more broadly, collecting some information and allowing that information to guide your future decisions. You talk about this thing in your book called Gaul's Law. Yeah. What's Gaul's Law? Gaul's Law is the idea that any complex system essentially evolved from a simpler system that worked. So if you want to create a complex system that works, the easiest, best thing to do

is to start with a simple system and then build it up from there. And so this is like when we're talking about this hypothetical candle business, we're not talking about the multinational distribution version of the candle business quite yet. There's a simpler version of that business that must exist in order for it to ever reach the level of complexity and success that would allow that to actually operate in the world. And so one of the reminders of Gall's law is that it's actually okay to start simple, straightforward, strip it down, focus on the essentials, start there. Because every additional bit of complexity needs to serve some sort of purpose to justify its costs, either direct cost or time, attention, opportunity, cost. And so I think to our earlier conversation, sometimes complexity can be seen as a bit of a weird status signal.

Like I'm fancy, I'm sophisticated. I think the more sophisticated thing to do is to start simple and keep it simple on purpose and then make every additional bit of complexity earn its way. Because complexity isn't value. This is, I guess, the thing we get wrong. We think if we take a candle and we add some neon lights to it and we add some, I don't know, like a metal lid to the top of it and then we add, you can charge your phone using the candle. Sure. We think because we've added more stuff, people are going to value it more, therefore they're going to pay for it more.

Yeah. But that's not necessarily how the world works. Exactly. but that's not necessarily how the world works exactly you're going to screw up so many things by adding those features you know the best example i can give is this we put my wrist which i'm an investor in and uh ambassador for so i'm not shilling it here but it's just a something that always comes to mind where you ask the founder of why you didn't add a watch to it why you didn't add the time because you could simply just put the time on sure but he said adding an additional feature changes the frame and that really made me understand this idea that more isn't more in as it relates to value of products because the minute you add the time to a whoop it becomes a watch and then people have these whole new set of expectations of the watch

it's a fashion item etc etc interesting i've never heard that that term before gould's law yeah we're like it's instructive that we're talking about candles and not about some complex mechanical device that you would bolt onto a building's HVAC system to deliver scent to the entire space. Don't start there. Maybe start with a candle. And then at a certain point, if it makes sense to move in a direction based on what your customers are telling you, that's fantastic. But keeping it simple from the beginning is the way to go. Once upon a time, if you had a business idea, it was exceptionally difficult to get going. But now, in the age of Shopify, it is exceptionally easy. As many of you will know, Shopify are a sponsor of this podcast. If you don't know Shopify, it's an exceptionally simple web platform for anybody that's got an idea that

wants to transact on a global scale. So things like these conversation cards, which we sell, we've sold using Shopify and it only took us a couple of clicks to get going. So why did we choose Shopify? For a number of reasons, but I think one of the big ones, which goes unappreciated, is their checkout system converts 36% better compared to other platforms. And here's what I'm going to do to remove the cost for you. If you go to shopify.com slash Bartlett, you'll be able to try Shopify for $1 a month. I've seen Shopify completely change people's lives. And for many of you, I think it could change yours. We haven't spoken about this book though. The first 20 hours, yeah.

The first 20 hours, How to Learn Anything. And you have a TED Talk, don't you? I do. Which was crazy. Yeah. Crazy, crazy. I don't know if it's hit 40 million views yet, but pretty close, if not.

40 million views on a TED Talk about the first 20 hours, how to learn anything. Yeah. Why? Why did it do so well? I think for a couple of different reasons. Because that's one of the best-viewed TED Talks of all time.

Yes. That's crazy. Yes. I did a TED Talk. Nobody watched it. I did it like 10 years ago. TED Talks are fun. They're very fun.

Yeah, so the TED Talk for the first 20 hours did very well. And I think part of it has to do with it's something we all have in common, right? Like wanting or needing to learn something necessary, useful, fun, cool, not really having a whole lot of time. Like we're busy people, we're busy culturally. And so there's a bit of a conflicting desire there of like, yeah, I want to learn this, but I don't have a whole lot of capacity to spare here. And then the genesis of the book was digging into some of the psychology research that I uncovered in the process of working on personal MBA, which was all about learning new things. and learning that the first few hours of acquiring or learning any particular skill are validated by research to be both the most effective and the most efficient so like your

rate of improvement per time of of uh or per unit of time and energy invested, at the very beginning of learning something new, it's extremely high. And so the question that sparked the research for the first 20 hours is, is there a way that we can take advantage of that consciously? Is there a way that we can be very conscious and deliberate about how we approach

the process of learning something new to make, to, to, to reap the maximum rewards from that early stage of learning something that you're not familiar with and how good can we get in that early window. And in my research, you can go from knowing absolutely nothing about something to being reasonably good in much less time than you would expect. So in my experience, that's about 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice. So call it 40 minutes a day for about a month. But the narrative out in the market is that you have to do 10,000 hours.

I mean, this is, everyone uses this phrase in society. They say, have you done your 10,000 hours? So you're telling me it's actually 20 hours is the key? I'm saying different goals based on different objectives. 10,000 hours. So you're telling me it's actually 20 hours is the key. I'm saying different goals based on different objectives. So K. Andrews Erickson was the researcher behind the 10,000 hour rule. And I think what's important to understand about about that as a general guideline is those studies were focused on mastery of very competitive performance-oriented activities. So the original studies were done with correlating practice hours to how high a position do you have in the first violin in an orchestra sort of thing. And there was a correlation between like,

how much do you practice? How good do you get? That's all well and good. And yeah, generally speaking, the more deliberate practice that you have on a certain thing, the better you are. That is a true thing. To me,

I think it's valuable to shift the spotlight from mastery, which is very flashy, very high status. People who are extremely skilled at things have a lot of energy and attention around them. That's great. The type of skill acquisition that most of us do most often throughout our entire lifespan is figure out how to do something new for the first time. Like DJing for me. Exactly. Yeah. So how do I do that then? You know, you talk about these 10 major principles of rapid skill acquisition.

Sure. Where I can learn anything in 20 hours. What are the most important elements of this that I need to know about if I'm someone who maybe, let's say in the context of business, has never started a business in my life, has never run one before, but I do want to learn how to do it? Yeah.

The best way to approach this is, um... there's a set of five recommendations that go in order. And the first is like deciding exactly what it is that you're trying to do. So in my experience, like a lot of people, when they, at the beginning of the process of learning how to do something,

the goal is way too big. Like it's way too much, way too soon. Whereas something specific, concrete, and approachable is a way better place to start. So DJing an entire set at a crazy music festival is not the place to set the goal right at the very beginning. It's, I want to do my first song for myself for me it was like i want to mix that song into that song without it sounding shit totally exactly and that's a great place to start because then it's like okay this is a

concrete specific thing i know exactly what it looks like. You probably had some experience listening to music of this type, knowing when things go well and when they, when they don't go well. So you had a little bit of like taste context perspective. And so deciding like, okay, my early goal is to do this one specific thing. It's the first failure mode because most people don't decide on that concrete specific thing. It's way too nebulous. There's not enough to work with. So deciding is the first part. From there, most of the things that we talk about as skills aren't single skills. They're actually bundles of smaller sub skills that are all important and you use in combination. And so I'm not familiar with DJing, so you can fill in the blanks for me, but like, what were some of the smaller things that you needed to

learn how to do as a thing to be able to like mix one song into another? Well, you need to know music because music has different, I'm really going to butcher it. So DJs are literally going to laugh at me in their WhatsApp groups, but, um, different beats per minute. So every song has a different beat per minute. So you need to learn about the different beats per minute so you can merge them. Um, every a different key i think that's kind of what they call it a key so you have like an a a b a c and you need to know that because before you even get to mixing them in that's quite important um so that's the like the music side of thing then there's the like the hardware

itself which is knowing how you see two songs coming at the same time so you need to learn about the hardware before you can mix two songs together and then um yeah actually interestingly in the first hour of lessons i was expecting to jump on the decks but the first hour of lessons that i had was all about what is music totally it was like and how does music sound good in this kind of like eight bar thing uh-huh music goes in so it was all about music itself i had to start over, whereas I was expecting to jump on the decks. Yes. That is a brilliant example of deconstruction. It's exactly what we're talking about. So the skill is not DJing itself. It's learning about keys, learning about tempo, learning about transitions, learning about all of these smaller things that you need to use in concert in order to use them together to do this more complex thing

that you want to do. So a good teacher, like the value of a good teacher is they can help you with that deconstruction. Like what are all the little sub components that I need? And then the next layer down from that is once you've deconstructed into the smaller parts, that's when you start to do some research of which of these parts are more important or less important. What should I focus on first? What can wait until later? And so like tempo and musical keys might be really important. And so it might make sense to start the process there. Let's get that really solid. We can wait for the hardware. We can wait for the plugins. We can wait for all of these things that comes later. Get this stuff down solid first.

Nobody wants to wait. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's the thing. I think there's an element to which that's true. There's also an element to waiting here, going about it in a little bit more of a deliberate fashion is what gives us an advantage as adult learners. Like we can approach what we're doing in a strategic way. We can focus our time and attention on the things that are going to have the highest rewards first. And so just a little bit of impulse control of like, I'm going to hold off on the buttons for a couple hours to learn a little bit of this first. Like that's where you start figuring out the inflection points in the skill.

Like the things that if you can just wrap your head around this, you can get a huge improvement in a very short period of time. And then the trick on the research phase, and this is the one that I struggle with a lot because I like research. It's fun for me. I can get stuck here. And so the trick is to do just enough research

to give yourself context, understanding what you're looking for, an idea of what it looks like to do well or to not do well. And from there, you do just enough to know a little bit of what you're doing, and then you actually start the focused deliberate practice component because that's where the skill is actually built the skill is not built in research a lot of people seem to get stuck on that research part because they are you know that people call them in culture procrastinators but i had a conversation with nirayal and he said we're discomfort avoiding creatures and he said whenever you find yourself procrastinating

um it's basically because there's discomfort associated with the task at hand yeah so i had a conversation with someone very close to me recently actually yesterday and um in our conversation they've been meaning to do this online project for a long long time for two years now and they've just done everything but this online project and when we kind of deconstructed it as you said it was really because they don't feel competent in several of the individual pieces so they're just like researching themselves to death and taking no action absolutely this is one of the biggest the biggest barriers to learning as an adult adult learners hate to feel stupid we hate to to feel over our head that we don't know what we're

doing, that we're going to look bad in front of others, that there's some idealized skill level that would represent success and your early attempts look nothing like that. There was an study that was done about changes in artistic ability and inclination over the human lifespan. And so when you ask a bunch of young children, are you an artist? Every one of them answers yes. Yeah, I create art. That's what I do. And there's a certain threshold, and it usually happens around the middle grades, junior high-ish, where people will start to say,

like, no, it's not something that I do. And there's a certain amount of self-consciousness that develops in the process of becoming an adult where you can start to recognize that the difference between what you can do and what you want to do can be somewhat extreme. And that self-consciousness can be an active barrier to getting started in the first place.

It's all by comparison as well, isn't it? Really, because- Yeah, like comparison with other people and then also comparison with ourselves. Um, so with other people, like early stages of skill acquisition, if you're comparing yourself to the masters in hours one, two, and three, you are not doing yourself any favors at all. Um, and then even like, I think that's a little bit easier to avoid because I have only golfed a couple times in my life. Comparing myself to Tiger Woods doesn't feel like an even like conceptually appropriate thing for me to do. That's not difficult. The harder thing is comparing yourself

to the other person who has not golfed very much, but somehow hit a shot straight or whatever. Or like, it feels like this shouldn't be so hard for me. Why is this so hard for me? And then like the self recrimination feedback loop starts. And so I talk about in the first 20 hours, I call this the frustration barrier. And so generally speaking, rough rule of thumb, hours one to 10 are brutal, emotionally speaking. And so that's the period of time where you're really frustrated. Things make very little sense. You're like, I don't know what a key is, let alone a key change. What's a beat per minute? And like, all of those self-consciousness circuits are fully online, fully firing. And, um, no matter how much you want something, those, those first few hours can be pretty brutal.

It's where most people quit as well, I guess. And that's why. It's an emotional management problem. And so the way to get around that, also the way to get out of research mode and into doing mode, and this is where the title, The First 20 Hours, comes from. The First 20 Hours refers to a pre-commitment, which is a very useful piece of behavioral psychology that says that if you pre-commit to taking a certain action, either a certain amount of times or within a certain period of time, either to yourselves or ideally to other people, you're far more likely to actually follow through on the doing of the thing. And so what I found is that in learning a new skill,

making a pre-commitment that no matter what, I'm going to spend 20 hours doing this thing. I might be terrible. This might be really uncomfortable. I might hate it. I might never do this again. But no matter what, I care about this thing that I want to learn enough that I'm going to invest at least 20 hours of my life figuring out if this is good, if this works for me, if this is beneficial. You said something there, which I think is key, which is you said, this matters to me enough. Yes. And that feels like it's a prerequisite, something that we really need to be clear on before we even start. You know, because without that part, you refer to it in your

10 major principles of rapid skill acquisition as choosing a lovable project. Exactly. Yeah. Why does that matter? Well, it's because we're busy. It's because we don't have infinite time, energy, and attention to do all the things that might look, feel, sound fun or interesting to us. And so there needs to be at least some minimum threshold of, yeah, this is important to me to make some trade-offs in other areas of my life, or to not watch that movie, or not relax on social media this night. I'm going to carve out some time in my day and actually make this a priority to sit down and do the work.

And generally speaking, I found that for myself, if I'm not willing to make the pre-commitment to put at least 20 hours into it, that's a pretty good indication that it is not important enough for me to invest time and energy in in the first place. We've been through most of them there. So number one is choose a lovable project. Number two is focus your energy on one skill at a time. We said that one. Number three is define your target performance level. We talked about that as well. Number four is deconstruct the skill and sub skills. Number five is obtain critical tools, which I guess is the tools you need to do the practice, right? Yeah. That's kind of a subset of removing barriers to practice. And so the classic example here is

so many people in the world want to learn how to play the guitar. And so the thing to not do is buy a guitar and leave it in the case and put it in a closet upstairs far away. Because that just requires too much time, energy, thought, attention of like remembering where it is, going upstairs, grabbing the guitar, getting it out of the case, getting all ready. The best thing that you can do is just make it really, really easy. Remove all the friction from it. Get a little stand, put it right next to, you know, your living room chair or couch where it's a visible insight. All you need to do is reach over, grab it and start. It just makes it more likely you're actually going to sit down and do the work. I think we've covered all 10 there. The last one is emphasize quantity and speed. Yes. Yes.

What does that mean? So early on in the process, there's a tendency to like want to do it perfectly sooner versus doing it imperfectly more is actually more beneficial. And so in this case, for your DJing, mixing a lot of songs one to the other is going to teach you a lot more than just hyper-focusing on song A into song B

and I'm going to work until this is perfect. You're just not going to learn as much. It's the variety, the exploration and the variety of circumstances will teach you more about what it looks and feels and sounds like than trying to get too perfect on one specific thing too quickly. So like going back to the playing guitar thing,

get a bunch of tabs and learn how to play a whole bunch of different songs, not super well, because it's the commonalities that you learn between the different experiences. Those are the things that really tune you into what's really important. The foundations of the art. Exactly. Like what's a chord? So for guitar, what's a chord? How do you change from one chord to another? Tracking beats, tempo, things like that. Like those are the foundational skills that apply across pieces of music. And so if you practice those first across a wide variety of things, that's just optimizing that early practice around things that will stick, that you'll use a lot.

Is there anything about the subject of learning and the first 20 hours that we've not discussed that you think is especially important to close off on? If someone is really that they want to learn a new skill and we're thinking about where they are and where they want to get to, Is there anything else that you think they need to know that we haven't covered? I think that this dovetails a little bit with our conversation around personal MBA. Spend more of your time doing weird, cool things.

Like, having that exploration budget of really just, like, the further afield you go, the more things you discover, you'll find some surprising commonalities that can be very interesting and very cool. We were talking about Apple earlier. One of the primary design inspirations for the Apple computing system

was Steve Jobs taking a random calligraphy class in college. And it's not something that you would put together in some sort of obvious way, but it was an important enough influence of being able to take some part of life and like apply it in a different way in a different context to another thing that unlocked a lot of value for a lot of people. And so for me, like in the larger sense, I think it's just really valuable to take a step back and think about like, what might I want to experience

or what might I want to learn how to do at some point in my life? Just make a list. And it can be, I think self-editing here is not the way to go. Just like make a list of all the things that appeal to you for whatever reason. And then the benefit of an approach like the first 20 hours is it gives you

a way to make actually going about doing that thing look and feel far more approachable than it otherwise might be. When you said the thing about Apple there and Steve Jobs going to that typography, calligraphy class, it made me realize that in life, there really is no such thing as a waste of time. No, there's really not. Because we think of chilling on Netflix as a waste of time, but you can uncover something about story arc from watching a movie

that makes you bring that into your creative work or into an advertising campaign. And I think some, actually, it's interesting because if you think about that example you gave of Steve Jobs in that typography class, had he just gone to computer programming lessons about how to make software or hardware, he wouldn't have stumbled across

the brilliant sort of insight that design and typography and calligraphy really, really matters. So these devices wouldn't be so amazing. So sometimes the most valuable skills or inspiration we can acquire exists clearly outside of the bubble that we work in. Totally. Josh, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Oh, excellent. That's fun. And the last question that was left for you is,

oh, they finally got some, finally someone with good handwriting. I can read this one without stuttering. When you look back on your life, are there more things you regret doing or regret not doing? Please give some examples. Wow. They went heavy hitting on this one.

It's a stitch up. I love this. Yeah. It stitches up the next guest. No, it's good. Um, I think I have more mistakes of commission, things I've done, than mistakes of omission or regrets. So generally speaking, like if I can anticipate that I'm going to regret something,

I just try not to do that thing in the first place. And I think some of those things can fall into daydreamy sorts of, oh, what would have happened if I... Oh, yeah, like hindsight. Yeah, I mean, almost pure hindsight bias, which is also one of the things I talk about in Personal MBA. It's a thing.

So for me, it is like a lot of those regrets revolve around decisions that I made that didn't work out, relationships. I have two kids and the process of raising kids is hopefully informed trial and error, but like fundamentally trial and error. And yeah, that's part of the learning and the experimentation too, of just like, sometimes you have to make the call on the fly and sometimes you don't know whether the call you made is, is the right one, the best one. Do you have a mental model or framework for decisions generally?

I really, like my fundamental way of approaching decisions is scenario planning. Like I really try to think through, all right, what are my options here? How much detail can I create around each of these potential options? What are the trade-offs? Are there any really like hard trade-offs, things that must be accounted for? And then just really like in my current understanding, try to play out what's likely to happen down each of those paths and then pick the one that seems the best or the most appropriate given the circumstances. Josh, thank you. Thank you for writing two exceptionally important books. And really,

you know, I'm a real big advocate and believer that we need more entrepreneurs in the world, but more people just generally that understand business, even if they're going to continue to work in corporate environments, because I think that's net benefit. I think that's net beneficial to society at large, our society, but also to individuals, because it empowers them to have more optionality in their lives, to be able to make more choices about what they want to do, where they want to spend their time. And societies run on businesses. You know, what we're doing now is a business. The way that I'll get home tonight is a business. So understanding the fundamentals, the levers that are running society, I think is only net

positive for everybody. And that's exactly what the personal MBA does. It deconstructs what businesses are and it helps us understand the world around us and the incentive structures of the world around us in a really, really empowering way. So thank you for writing a book that really speaks to those people

that maybe can't afford to go and get a very expensive MBA at one of those top schools, but gives them an equally, if not more important understanding of business than anything ever could. It's an exceptional book and I applaud you for writing it. So thank you. Thank you very much. That was very kind to say, and I appreciate it. Thank you.