The Mindset Mentor - Ep 83 - Interview w/ Billionaire Jeff Hoffman

Episode Date: February 29, 2016

Jeff Hoffman is the billionaire Co-Founder of Priceline.com. Jeff is an incredibly successful man with a wealth of knowledge that he shares in this episode. We talk about subjects like how to start your first business and what to concentrate on, how to hire your first employees and even cover what his morning routine is every day. This is an awesome episode and I think you will learn a lot from it! Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Before we dive into today's episode, if you would like a free copy of our motivational ebook called Hack Your Goals, the Step-by-Step Guide to Achieving Success, go to mwfmotivation.com and download it. It's already been downloaded over a thousand times, so go ahead and get your copy now. All right, I'll get you the podcast right now. Welcome to the MWF Motivation Podcast, which I am proud to say has been rated the number one podcast in iTunes new and noteworthy in six different categories, including self-help and business, and is a podcast designed to help you grow into the best version of yourself in 10 to 20 minutes. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we'll take a life topic, break it down, discuss it, and leave you with thoughts to impact your life and mind. My name is Rob Dial, and the podcast

starts now. Welcome to today's episode. This is an incredible episode that I am so excited to share with you guys. This is with billionaire Jeff Hoffman, who is one of the co-founders of Priceline.com. And in this episode, he shares a ton of knowledge. A few things that he shares is how he became a billionaire. He goes over his morning routine, which is something that he actually calls info sponging, which is an idea of where Priceline.com actually came about. He actually talks about how the idea for Priceline came about from reading an article about how bananas prices change as they get closer to going bad.

And the guy is a billionaire and just a wealth of knowledge and believes that entrepreneurs will change the world. And I'm so excited to bring you this episode. So without further ado, this is the interview with Jeff Hoffman. Welcome to today's episode. This is Rob Dial. And I am extremely excited today to have Jeff Hoffman, who is one of the co-founders of Priceline.com. And Jeff has an incredible story. And one of the things that I love most is that he's really into giving back to entrepreneurs, which I'm sure we will cover much more in depth. But before we do that, Jeff, I really appreciate you being on the episode. How are you today? Thanks, Rob. Thanks for having me. Good.

you probably hear it all the time whenever you're on podcasts or interview, they say, oh, this is billionaire Jeff Hoffman. And when people see that and they hear, wow, you're a billionaire, you must have worked really hard to get there. But there might have been a lot of things that went really well for you. And you're just lucky in that sense. Some people might have that mindset. But I'm just curious and for the listeners to know as well, can you take me through real quick of your journey, where you started, if you started as an entrepreneur forever, and then any hardships that you had along the way or failures that brought you to where you are today? Sure. So I'm an engineer by trade. I got a software engineering degree because software and programming, coding, was a good place to get a job.

But, you know, the real reason was that because that's what everybody said to do. My parents, other people, you know, people say, go out and get a good degree and some good skills so you can get a good job at a good company and get a good paycheck. All of which was fine. So I got an engineering degree, got an engineering job, except for the fact that I hated it. As you've said before about sort of the corporate America, you felt the same way. It wasn't, and it's not right or wrong, it's DNA. I just don't have the DNA to work in a big organization.

Thanks to my inability to control my sarcasm, I was in trouble like weekly at the company. My boss did not appreciate it. And so structurally, environmentally, I just couldn't work in that environment. And the other reason, DNA-wise, is we spend a lot of time feeding the internal animal in a big organization. Status reports and trying to make management happy all the time. And I really like spending my time on solving the actual problem. happy all the time. And I really like spending my time on solving the actual problem, doing something we can do for a customer that people actually want to get done. So when I quit corporate America, I wasn't there that many years, obviously still in my 20s. And I left to do the

startup thing. And I've been doing startups my entire career since then. I've been involved in eight of them. Some worked, some didn't. Everybody has their failures too. But the focus was not arbitrarily to, quote, be an entrepreneur. And the focus was not even, you know, let's go make money. That was never it either. The part that really attracted me was the problem-solving part, the ability to make an impact. You and I had been talking earlier about the fact that one of our first startups was solving a problem, and I remember thinking about this very distinctly, standing in a line at an airport where I was late getting to the airport,

Friday afternoon, really busy, and the line took 58 minutes. And after an hour, you get to the front of the line, and the ticket agent just asks your name, glances at your ID, and hits one button, basically, print a boarding pass. And I remember having the conversation with her because in addition to sarcasm, patience is another problem that I have. I'm very impatient. And I said, come on, you're kidding me. I said, you made me stand here for an hour so you could hit print? And this woman said, you have to print a boarding, you have to have a boarding pass to get on a plane. And I was like, I understand that, but you just hit print. That

shouldn't take an hour to use a printer. She said, you can't even get through security without a boarding pass. And I remember arguing with her even then saying, well, why can't you just put a printer out here and we can print our own? And her answer was, it doesn't work that way. So one of our early startups was designing, patenting, designing, and building ticket printers, kiosks that, you know, that's what everybody uses today now, those kiosks to go get your boarding pass. But the point is, the focus wasn't really on money or just being an entrepreneur or be an entrepreneur. The focus was on a specific problem in a marketplace that a lot of people care about that has value that you want to solve. So that was one of our early startups attacking a

real problem that was impacting a lot of people and then had a value equation. I love that story. And I remember, how long ago, let me ask you, how long ago was this when you started putting kiosks into the airport? Well, that would be, when we did the prototypes of those would be, let's see, early nineties. Okay. Cause it's, did it not take off for a few years after that when, I mean, cause they're everywhere now, every airport you go into. Products like that have a user acceptance thing. Here's what happens when you launch a product like that.

Somebody walks up. You're standing there observing this process. Somebody walks up. They see the giant line at the ticket counter. Then they see this machine that says, print your own boarding pass. They walk over and say, hmm, I could skip that hour-long line. So they go over. They engage in the kiosk.

They print a boarding pass. They take the boarding pass out. They look at it. They look at the line again. They look at the boarding pass. Then they walk over to the end of the line and say, I better make sure this boarding pass is legit. Right. So they get in the end of the line.

So adoption of anything new until people learn to trust it takes a while. Rollout is slow. Yeah. And I love what you said too, because one of the things that I pulled out, as you said, it was never about let's go make money. It was always, you're a problem solver. You found a problem. And this was something that there was a pain point for you. And you thought, man, is there some type of way that I could do it? And if you can overcome this and figure out a way to put a kiosk in there, I mean, there's an opportunity where you can make a ton of money off of that. So with other people who are out there who are thinking about being entrepreneurs and they say, well, that's a huge thing. I can't just start building kiosks. I don't have the means to do

that. I don't know the people. I can't program, do anyiosks. I don't have the means to do that. I don't know the people. I can't program, do any of those types of things. What do you say to the entrepreneurs if someone has the... They have a little bit of a burning desire in them where they're in the corporate world. And like you said, they just don't have it in their DNA. They might have a degree. They work for a company because they heard that's the route that they're supposed to go, but something inside them says, this isn't for me. What tips or steps would you say to go about if they have that desire where there's like, I think something else is for me, but I can't go on the scale that obviously that you can speak about if building kiosks or building a large corporation? Well, I mean, they can because every single one of those companies started with a really tiny effort.

Yeah. A small number of people that got around a table. You know, Priceline itself is a multi-billion dollar, $60 billion company today. But when it started, it was a small group of people with an idea. So every big company starts small that way. But probably the more important part of the answer to that question is then don't do it alone. That's where the concept of co-founders came from. People that said, this is kind of big for me. I'm not sure. I have skill sets in maybe engineering, but not finance and marketing or vice versa. I don't know how to design a machine like that or a product

like that. I think the answer then is to form a team. Find some co-founders that have the – don't find people exactly like you because then you don't get broad perspectives. And if they are an engineer and you're an engineer and no one knows marketing, you're in trouble. So find some complementary skill sets of people that have similar interests to you and form a team. That way, even if each of you – if you yourself feel like you can only do a third of a project like this, well, now you've got three people, so all of it's covered. Yeah, I love that you say that. I have another business with my best friend who were very similar, but what we like to do was very different. I think maybe I'm geared more towards the way that you are, where I like to think of problems. I like to innovate stuff. I like to think and brainstorm and do all

of those things. He's very much the type of person who likes the logistics. He likes to send the emails. He likes to do all of these things. And that makes him feel like he's working. So he brings our products, gets the shipping all together. And then I'm more of how can we continue to grow this company as much as we can. And we didn't realize this until about six months ago. And once we realized that this is what he loves, this is what I love, we're like, wow, this could actually work really well in our favor. Which is why I think that we've at least been able to see success from what we've been doing is because it's been two completely different personalities together for kind of the greater

cause. Yeah, and that's exactly right. And that's good news because that means there's a place for all of us. I frequently hear people that say, I got a product idea, but I don't write code. It's an app and I don't know how to develop an app. You don't have to know how to develop an app. Your team does. So when you're on a team with a mix of different skills, you do your part and nobody, the team as a whole, isn't going to succeed unless you have all those skills together anyway. Yeah, absolutely. I've heard you speak about, and I think that, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but kind of your mission from now on seems like that you feel that you want to empower and mentor entrepreneurs, and you feel that entrepreneurs are really the saving grace of the world, they're the ones who are really going to change the world. Why is it that you feel that entrepreneurs are the ones that are going to go ahead and do that for us?

So a couple of reasons. First of all, they're lean and efficient. I got a kick out of when the the lean startup movement came out. Because I was like, wait a minute, that you can't be any leaner, they're all broke. If we're all broke, then we're lean by definition, because we don't have any money to spend even if we wanted to. So I thought it was kind of funny when they said you should be a lean startup when most of us in these entrepreneurial days couldn't eat anyway. But because the truth is they are lean. They are more efficient. They move faster because they have to. So a big company whose life doesn't depend on solving a problem behaves a lot differently

than people that have to create value in order to get paid, in order to pay the rent. So you have an efficiency and cost factor in entrepreneurs and the way they get things done. But you also have a different dedication. An entrepreneur that they are, you know, the risk profile. An entrepreneur that quit their good job and is taking this huge risk to be out here trying this thing, they're approaching it with a level of passion and commitment that you just don't get out of, you know, out of a giant corporation necessarily. So for a lot of those reasons, the driving force, the passion and the efficiency, entrepreneurs are, you know, I do fundamentally believe that if you want to make the world a better place, you unleash armies of entrepreneurs and they'll

make it happen. Yeah, absolutely. And the one thing that you said is you said that they'll go out there and they'll work with a little money, they'll work off a little sleep. Do you feel, this is a question that just popped into my head, Do you feel that everybody has that capacity inside of them to really put 100% of everything into it, but they're just not optimizing their true selves, or they're afraid to take the next step, or they're too comfortable where they are? Do you feel that everyone has that, or do you just feel that some people do and some people don't? So Rob, that's a great question, because the real question you're asking is the one I always get asked, which is, are entrepreneurs born or made? And I think you just hit it. And the answer to some degree is both. The main part is mentoring and education.

An entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur mentoring a new, less experienced entrepreneur, there's a lot of things that you can learn about startups and entrepreneurship. For example, this podcast, right? You provide a service, you teach people a lot of things that they don't know. So I clearly think there is a factor of the made part of the learning. But the real bottom line is, I think that my answer, my personal editorial answer to your question is no. Everybody, it is not for everybody. There's a famous poster that says

being an entrepreneur is like jumping off a cliff and trying to build an airplane on the way down. Entrepreneurial DNA are people that are screaming woo-hoo the whole way down. They're thrilled with the unknown. They're busily trying to save their lives, scrambling to build an airplane and they never felt more alive there are a lot of people that look at that cliff and say what if the airplane doesn't work what if the wind changes what if i have the wrong tools

they never jump everybody's dna is not right for entrepreneurship to go all in and that's okay it doesn't mean you can't be part of an entrepreneurial venture you can join a startup right and you can still work there you just won't necessarily you can't be part of an entrepreneurial venture. You can join a startup, right, and you can still work there. You just won't necessarily – you might be the guy making airplane parts and preparing the people to jump off the cliff. So I do not think everybody's cut out for this, and I don't recommend it for everybody, but you can still be part of a startup,

and you don't have to be that person out in front taking risks. I just think someone does. If everyone on your team is conservative, you'll never make it as an entrepreneur. This is an interesting question that that brings up because you say some people have it, some people don't. But when you're building a company, you start getting these employees

and when you have a couple of people under you, some of them might have the drive that you do, but most of them probably are not going to want the company to succeed as much as you do. So I think the multi-billion dollar question is how do we get people, the employees that are working there to be more efficient and to be more engaged and to be more productive? So if you're running a company and you have these 3, 4, 5 employees, 10 employees under you, what do you think is the best way to make sure that that person is working their hardest in their 40 hours, but also enjoying the 40 hours that they're putting into?

So that's a great question. And that's because you have to dig. And again, I learned all these things the hard way from doing them wrong. You have to dig a level deeper than the job. What I mean by that is when you ask people about their job, that's the thing they do during the day to get money to pay the bills. Right. Right. And so a lot, not by a long shot, not all, but a large percentage of people in the world have a job because you have to.

That's how you pay the bills and take care of yourself. But underneath that is a deeper layer. An example I often tell was a guy I worked with that when I said, what is something that before you die you have to do? What do you dream about? What do you wish you could do? Because it wasn't pay my mortgage and therefore have a job that I can pay my mortgage. He said they grew up in a trailer, not even a mobile home, a trailer. And it was old and rusted out.

And they lived in an area where there was winter. And he said, before I die, I got to buy my mom a house in Florida. So she'll get a house. She's never lived in a house. And somewhere warm where she's taking care of the rest of her life. That was his thing. So when you have that discussion, and now you're the person trying to employ that person. And, and one thing is, you know, uh, dear, you know, Hey, if you come work here and you do

the following list of tasks, I will give you the following paycheck. That's our agreement. That's just not compelling, right? If you go and say, let's figure out some path by which your career at this company will help you buy your mom a house. If you make helping that guy get to the point where you can buy a mom a house, your mission too, you get people more engaged. So the long, I know that was a long answer, but the answer to your question is, is to dig a level deeper that, that, and engage people in, you know, at a level that, that involves a lot more of their life and not just their career. What are some of your goals and how can working at this company help achieve them?

That's how you bring some of these people in and get them engaged that might not otherwise be. No, I love that. When I was first in Cutco and had to switch over to being a manager, they made me read a book called The Dream Manager, which had to deal a lot with that, which was finding the person's why, because if you find out the reason why they're there and what they really need to make the money for, you're probably going to get a lot more out of that person versus just, hey, I want to pay the bills because nobody wants to pay the bills. When the money comes in, you don't want to go, oh, well, here's my $2,000 for this week. Well, now I got to get rid of all of it. And that actually brings me back. I don't know if you're familiar with the CEO of Quest Nutrition. He actually says during his interviews, he turns the table on them.

And he says, you're going to be putting one third of your hours of living into working for me. So let me ask you, instead of me asking more questions, why don't you start asking me questions so that I can make sure that this is a good fit and that you can really put your 100% in the time that you're here? So I don't know if you know, but I did Inside Quest. Tom called me and asked me to come on Inside Quest. So I did an episode of that show. So we really did talk a lot about those philosophies. And what I was telling Tom then, what I fundamentally think to your question is that it's so sad that in America, we have the very popular saying,

thank God it's Friday. And people say, thank God it's Friday because they hate their job, which is where you spend most of your life. I was recently interviewed for a book called Can't Wait Till Monday. And the guy was saying, some people actually love their work. And the idea is, why can't you do something that you actually enjoy doing? And a lot of people can't because they don't even open that door. They've just sadly accepted that a job is a thing you have to do to pay the bills. And then your life is, you know, outside of that are things you, what we really want to do, uh, that you wish you could do. And so the whole philosophy there is, uh, is why not try to design a future for yourself that incorporates both? Can you, can you build a career around the things you actually love doing so that you become one of those can't wait till Monday people, you're going to spend so much of your life at work. Why don't you try to find something to do that actually inspires and motivates you? Yeah, absolutely. I am 100% in agreement with you because I have kind of a big Instagram, Facebook, those

followings and stuff. And so I'll post stuff randomly throughout the time. And instead of TGIF, I always post the TGIF is The Grind Includes Friday. Because I think that most people are like, it's Friday. I'll check out because I'm going to get a happy hour in three hours. But no, I love that because then Sunday comes around and they're like, oh, crap, I got to go to work. And that's the one.

That's why they can't wait till Monday because people are depressed on Sunday nights. And some people, you know, my first startup was this company called CTI, Competitive Technologies. I Sunday nights, I was like antsy because I loved work. I loved going there, actually. Working with great people, working on great projects. We were doing well. So, you know, the feeling of being excited on Sunday night instead of dreading the start of another week, Monday being this bad, negative, dragging day.

Our Mondays were good because we liked being there. Yeah. So how long ago was your first startup then? That was also early 90s. Okay. So let me ask you this then. With millennials coming in... Actually, no, no, no. That started late 80s. Late 80s. So then you've seen from, I guess, the mindset shift between millennials coming in. And I'm curious with you seeing a startup before startups are cool, before being an entrepreneur was cool. Now, millennials come in, people talk

about how they're grinding, they're working so hard. What are the biggest differences you've seen between the millennials now, but also the generations before that used to work for you? And do you personally feel like I've seen in articles that millennials are getting softer, that they feel more entitled compared to the generations before? So here's the thing. I do see you do have some percentage. Let me say this. This will be kind of a mathematical answer.

You might have a higher percentage. And by the way, I spend a lot of time with millennials. I speak at colleges and universities all the time. I'm on the board of Semester at Sea and have been on the ship with hundreds of college kids where we had days and nights to talk about life, et cetera. So it's a space that I spend a lot of time in. Excuse me. say i spent a lot of time in um excuse me um the uh so i would say that you have a higher percentage than previous generations of entitlement of uh of of young people who do feel entitled and they feel entitled because they feel like you know the previous generation whether it's you know everything from occupy wall street to auto industry, bailout, already made up, they feel like, hey, you guys screwed me, you owe me something.

There are a higher percentage of those. That's the bad news. But here's the good news. The good news is, there's also a way higher percentage of young people who literally want to change the world. They don't just want a job. They want a legacy. And I think that might be a higher percentage than there's ever been in the population. So I meet so many young people that do they need a paycheck and pay the bills, of course, but that's way down the list of their top 10. What they really want is to be involved. They want to make a difference. They want to make change. They want to have an impact and a legacy. So I think that's really exciting that this generation has a way higher percentage of people who actually care and don't just want to

slug it out at work every day. Yeah, I think it's interesting because I think more than anything else, the internet connects us so much where you can see people. Now I can go online and I can have people that contact me on my Facebook or whatever it is, and they might be in Iraq or Afghanistan and all of these different countries. And my generation, whatever it is, and they might be in Iraq or Afghanistan and all of these different countries. And my generation of millennials is going, well, I'm friends with this person on Facebook. I could see what they do. I don't want to bomb them anymore. I want to see if we can all just kind of work together and co-create. Exactly. You're dead on. The birth of the first ever globally socially connected generation has changed everything. Yeah,

absolutely. And I think that I had this conversation last week where I think that also with the internet, obviously all of the good that comes from it, but some of the bad comes from it where maybe the fact that we see that there's so many different things that we could do. There's so many avenues that we could invest our time and our money and friendships and everything. And I think that there's a lot of the silver, shiny objects, especially with entrepreneurs where we feel like we can fix this or we could do this, we could make money doing this because this person has. But I've heard you speak about when you go into something and you go into a specific venture, you speak about getting a gold medal in one thing

and one thing only at that point in time. So what do you mean by getting a gold medal in just one thing? Sure. So, so many entrepreneurs come up and they say, or just energetic people, and they come up and they tell me how they have five ideas. And I'm working on these five ideas and I always tell them the same thing, get rid of four and just pick one. Excuse me. And here's the reason why. The good news and the bad news is it's never been easier to start a business right we're in a time period in in you know in history where creating startups has never been easier so that's good news because it's easier but it's bad news because everyone else is doing it too therefore you got to find a way to break through the noise and the only way to break through the noise is to achieve excellence.

You can't be just an also-ran. You have to do something in a specific market space that you're doing better than anybody else does it. That's how you rise above the noise is by being the gold medal winner. You have to be the best at something. So since being the best, think about it, winning a gold medal, anything is hard. You don't see a woman's gymnast that was a gold medal gymnast shooting hoop, playing volleyball, hitting the softball, and doing a few minutes of gymnastics. You become a gold medalist, she does gymnastics every day since she's a kid. So the model's the same. In order for you to get noticed, you have to achieve excellence and be a leader, and in order to do that, it's really hard. You've got to be really, really focused on that thing. So I always tell people, pick something, win a gold medal at it, and then advance from there. Amazon's an example. Bezos' initial approach was, let's be the best

damn bookseller on the planet. They stayed disciplined and only sold books. Once they did that and were an amazing e-commerce experience, people started asking. Zappos only sold books. Once they did that and were an amazing e-commerce experience, people started asking. Zappos only sold shoes at the beginning. Price line really never changed. Almost 90% of the business is hotels. It's a gold medal hotel company. And so it focuses its business on the thing that it does well, which is getting you discount hotels. So companies become successful by rising above the noise, by achieving excellence in something that they can really claim their own. I love that. And the reason why I love it the most is because my favorite book,

I read 40 books last year, but my one that really stood out was The One Thing by Jay Papasan and Gary Keller, because it just talks about figuring out what your one thing is and putting all of your effort into that one thing and eventually good can come from it. Yep. Completely agree. And I had Jay on my podcast and it was an incredible episode because I was able to ask all of the questions that I felt were not answered. Pretty much all of them were answered in the book, but there was a few where I wanted to dive a little bit more in depth.

But with someone who's going to be an entrepreneur, I've heard that you say instead of, you know, you might go out and you might take over and be the next Amazon, like you said, but I've heard you say that you find the problem and to start small and to make locally, find some type of problem that's local to you, try to solve that problem, and then eventually grow from there. Is that still what you would recommend is the best step? It really is. And the reason why, again, you're trying to achieve excellence, but early on you need success.

Your solution needs to work. And your goal is to have everybody that uses your product or service to say, wow, this is great. So when you try to open across a broad range of markets, either market segments in terms of customers or market geography, broad range of markets, either market segments in terms of customers or market geographic geography. Each segment has different problems and, and, you know, likes and dislikes just as each, each geography does. So trying to service all of them at once just dilutes your ability to get it right. So when, when people, when we say pick a problem, you actually know,

so that you can dig deep into it and do it on a smaller scale to prove that you're right. And everybody looks and says, wow, they really did. I'll make this up. They really did solve the traffic problem in Tulsa. Say, I wonder if that would work in Dallas now. And you can expand out from there, but it's hard to start something that you say, this is going to work in New York, Dallas, LA, and Chicago on day one because markets are different. So I always tell people to pick a smaller focused market, achieve success, show everybody that it works, and then roll out from there. Yeah.

And I think that that makes it a little bit more comfortable for people because it's not as daunting of own life to go out and change the world. And it might be something where somebody who is stuck in a day job, like we said, maybe they are 30, 35 years old, and they thought this was the route they're supposed to go because that's what the world and society told them. But now they think, well, I kind of want to make some changes. If you start small and think locally about changes you can make, you could do stuff at night when you get home from work so you don't have to quit your job. Or you could do something on the weekend and make the right connections. Would you say that's probably the next step for that type of person?

Absolutely. Okay. That's a way they can dig in and get started in bite-sized chunks. Absolutely. Good. And with getting mentors, because I know that you're big on getting mentors, what is the... I love that you're, you're big on getting mentors. What is the, I love that you, there was something that I had to pull from one of the podcasts I listened to, because the way you explained it was so good. Cause I think that most people there, it's so

scary to go up to a mentor or to reach out to somebody and they say, what value do I have to offer this person? Why would I ever reach out to this person? You know, they're, I'm just, you know, 22 years old or whatever they might be. And this person's a multimillionaire in their 40s or 50s. With getting high-level mentors, and they're questioning what value can I add? I've heard you talk about the analogy of the prettiest girl at the dance. And could you speak a little bit about that? And if I'm somebody who's trying to go out and find a mentor, what's the easiest way to go about doing so? And then what value can I add to this person that I'm reaching out to?

Yeah, so I gave that example because I was thinking a high school football game is what made me think of that. There are 70, I was thinking about false negatives and false positives. Who advises you? Who tells you if your idea is good or not? So I started thinking about it because one time I was at a high school football game and I did the research after that. There's 17,000 high school football games, right? So Friday, on a Friday night. So all across the country in every little town on a Friday night in that little stadium, in that little game, some player is the best player on that field and some girl

cheerleader is the prettiest girl on that field so here's what's happening in that little stadium the guys are all saying man jimmy's going to play in the nfl and the girls are all saying you know sarah is so beautiful she's going to be uh you know the next jennifer lawrence she's going to be the next Jennifer Lawrence. She's going to be a movie star. But if you back up, everybody is saying that in every little stadium. Someone's always the prettiest girl. And in that town, everyone always says she's going to make it and be the big movie star or whatever. And statistically, she's not. So I started thinking that a lot of times we get, you know, who's saying that? The people in that town. If a casting agent from Hollywood shows up and says it, then you should listen. If an NFL scout says, Jimmy's got an arm, we want to talk to that kid, then you should listen. So I started thinking

about mentoring because I'd have an idea and the people around me would say that's stupid or they'd say that's great. And I started thinking, wait, you get, and here's the conclusion, by the way, the tweet version of what I learned is we get our advice from proximity, not from relevance. You know, the people around you are always telling you how you're doing. But I started thinking, I really need an NFL scout to tell me if I can play football and how to play it. And that girl needs a Hollywood talent agent, not her mother saying, you're going to be a big star because they don't know what it takes. So I started realizing that I needed to find a mentor

outside of my physical circle. I needed to find somebody that is an NFL scout. So my recommendation to everybody is whatever domain, whatever industry, whatever area you are really focused on, go find a mentor who actually has had success in that area. So I had to do a lot of just cold calling, emailing people and say, I'd love to talk to you. I know that you know this stuff. I get them now. People will say, I know you know the online travel industry. Anyway, I could get some of your time. Pick a mentor that is somehow relevant in the area that you're trying

to be in so that, again, their tips on how to throw the football are coming from someone who actually used to play in the NFL. Yeah. And I think that you had said you had, you might've been when you were in high school, you said that you had a friend and she was the prettiest girl out of everybody. And she wasn't asked to the dance because of the fact that everyone was afraid to go up and ask her. And you say it's kind of the same thing with mentors. There's some people that are out there that are very successful and they've reached this success so much that all they want to give back, but they're just kind of sitting there because nobody's reaching out to them because they're afraid to do so. You got it exactly right, Rob. And the reason I use that example is because that was my best friend in high school and she was the prettiest

girl in school. She always won best looking. And one time she said, anyway, you could take me to Friday's dance. I said, are you kidding? You probably have 50 dates. And she said, Jeff, everybody assumes that everyone else has already asked me. So actually nobody ever asked me to the dance. So I started thinking when I wanted to contact that first mentor, that first NFL scout, I said, well, geez, he's a big shot in town. I'm sure he gets 50 requests a day, so I shouldn't call him. And then I thought when I finally did contact him, I said, I'm sorry to be one of your million requests. And he said, because everybody assumes I already get 50 requests, nobody actually requests anything. So our advice to all of our

listeners is exactly what you said, that if you assume that person is unreachable and don't try and everyone else assumes that that person might well have been totally reachable, give it a shot. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy to think about because there's so many people that are just afraid to do it because they don't think they have anything to add. But in reality, they might be the only person reaching out to this person who already wants to give back, but it's just their fear holding them back. Yeah, absolutely. Fear always does that. Of course.

So I have a question for you. If you were to... You have all of this experience, everything you've done, you've been in the business for a while, you've gone through different startups that you've been through. If you lost everything today and went back to square one, what do you think would be your first move tomorrow? My first move would be team. This is what I got wrong. This is what I know now. Before I started, you know, really focusing, I started building businesses and getting into areas I didn't know and then scrambling wildly to find somebody that knows this stuff to help me out. Now what I know is that you should every minute of every day, everywhere you are and everyone you're talking to, you should be talent scouting.

So this is what happens to me now. So this is what happens to me now. Like I said, now when I'm out and about in the world, I spend a lot of time talking to everybody that I can talk to everywhere and networking and constantly building my network. So that's what I would, if I was starting all over, I would immediately start building that network. I would start meeting people everywhere I can, understanding what their strengths and weaknesses and talents and dreams

and desires are, and start loosely assembling a network that as soon as I had a business I wanted to launch, I could immediately pull really talented people from all over the place. Because since I didn't do that, I was so inwardly focused, it was really hard for me to find people when I needed their help. And I was already drowning by the time I reached for a paddle. Yeah, that's really good. I talk about building a network more than anything else because I think that people's top five is usually not the top five that they want it to be. And it only takes a couple months maybe of just networking before you can completely surround yourself with people who are top level where you want to be and really

push you to where you want to be as well. You got it. Let me ask you this. This is, I opened it up. I sent an email out to my entire list. So a few thousand people. And I said, I'm going to interview today. What would you, what questions would you ask? And I had an overwhelming, and I mean like 90% of them wanted to know this question.

And the question was, do you have a morning ritual? And what other daily habits do you keep yourself to and usually do almost every single day? Sure. I totally have a morning ritual and what other daily habits do you keep yourself to and usually do almost every single day? Sure. I totally have a morning ritual. Okay. I made up a word for it. I call it info sponging. Okay. And it's this. I started to notice as I was blessed enough as my career went along to get to spend time around really successful people. And I started to wonder this, what are the common elements of successful people? What are the things that successful people do that everybody else isn't because there must be something they're doing? Here's one of the ones I noticed that I adopted and it's my morning ritual. They process a much broader swat of the cut of the world than

everybody else does. If I'm in the healthcare business, I spend all my time in healthcare. I don't really care what's going on in banking or retail malls or whatever. I'm a healthcare guy. But I notice that these successful people do care. So here's what info-sponging is. This is my morning ritual. During this time, every morning when I get up, I take the first few minutes of the day to do something

called info sponging. The idea is that you are going to challenge yourself to learn one new thing every day. If you can't do it once a day, do it once a week. I do it every morning though. You're going to learn one new thing every day, but you're going to learn one new thing that you have no idea why you're learning and no reason to. If you're in health care for this info-sponging 10 minutes or whatever it is, you're not in health care. You can't think about health care and you can't click on it. You are going to go follow your curiosity. Click on a new technology in the banking industry. Click on a new regulation in Europe.

Click on a story about consumer trends in the fashion industry. It doesn't matter what it is. Learn one new thing each day outside of your bubble. Click on a story about consumer trends in the fashion industry. It doesn't matter what it is. Learn one new thing each day outside of your bubble. Then what you do is, what I do at the end of when I'm a new thing is I write down one sentence. A one-sentence summary of what I learned. One day I read a story about perishable commodities. And it talked about the fact that the entire marketing and pricing mechanism for a perishable commodity,

it was talking about selling bananas in a grocery store, is completely different than a can of soup that can sit there for two years. So I wrote down, that was my info sponge for that day, was that perishable commodities require a completely different promotional and pricing scheme because it's very time sensitive and diminishes as the banana starts to turn brown. What does that mean? I have no idea. But what you do with each of those things you learn is a puzzle piece. And then I periodically look at all those puzzle pieces, move them around the table and say, can I make something out of this? So you can already see where this is headed. I remember one day I saw that, what I told you about perishable commodities and selling fruit. But I remember

hearing a story about the number of airline seats that fly around the country empty every day. So I connected those two puzzle pieces. Perishable commodities have to be sold differently. And I was like, wait, what's more perishable than a banana? A banana, at least you got the week to sell it. An airplane seat, all the goods are spoiled as soon as you close the door. So you assemble these puzzle pieces, you info-spun, you see what the rest of the world is doing, and you try to find out how you can use other ideas to create new things in your industry. So the very first time, Jay Walker, he's the guy that,

Jay's the creator of the Priceline Intellectual Property. He's the one that came up with the name your own price, Harvesting Consumer Demand. But the first time Jay called me and said, I got an idea to launch, let's launch a company. And he started talking about it. Immediately my mind said, hey, wait a minute. We can build a perishable commodity distribution system for things, for really perishable goods like airplane seats and hotel rooms.

So, again, that's my morning ritual is info sponging. Spend a couple minutes to learn one new quick thing every single day. That's interesting. So what it all boils down to is that Priceline.com boiled out of an idea of reading about bananas. Is that kind of what I'm getting? Among other things. No, that's awesome. And I think I've heard you speak about that before where you talk about the guy who originally started in fast food joints.

He started putting drive-thrus in, correct? That's kind of what he was doing? Yeah, exactly. That was one of my most influential stories, which was a true story I was reading about that they were a fast food business and they weren't really innovating and they were trying to think of something

to distinguish themselves and be unique and innovative in the market. And the guy is like, when you just stare inwardly, they're fast food. So the natural thing to do is stare at fast food. So he looked at the French fry thing. He said, I can't make fries any faster because you can't heat oil any hotter.

Then he looked at the drink machine. Well, I can't make filled Diet Cokes faster because they splatter. So that's the wrong place to look. Always keep looking at your industry for ideas as a bad idea. So what he said was, I just got to free my mind. So he got in his car and he said, I'm going to go look at banks today. And his colleague said, what are you talking about? Banks don't make french fries or cheeseburgers. They know nothing about food service. You're wasting your time. So he started visiting banks.

And in truth, the first few banks didn't help him. But I think it was the fourth one when he got there, he couldn't park because there were pickup trucks and wood and hammer and nails and carpenters in the parking lot. And he said, what are you guys doing? And they said, again, true story, Rob, they said, we got this really cool brand new idea that we're going to be the first one in industry to build. And he said, what are you building? And they said, ah, it's this new thing. We're going to call it the drive-through window. So he got in his car, zoomed back to the hamburger joint and the first fast food excuse me the first drive-through window in the fast food history did not come from any of the fast food companies it came from a bank and it was only because this guy was out looking to see if banks or other

industries he was info sponging he was looking to see if anyone else in the world around him had a good idea that he could apply to his industry. And it was a good success story because their chain was wound up being acquired by McDonald's, I think, because they were the inventors of the drive through window. Wow, that's such a great story. Because it's completely a story of you always hear it, spend less time in your business and more time on your business. And by going out of info sponging and trying to look at other ideas, you can try to figure out ways to connect the dots to put them in your own business as well. That is exactly right. I love that. Well, let me ask you this. Now that we're getting towards the end,

and I had a lot of people that ask questions like, how did you get to where you are? There's a lot of questions, but I think that one of the things people really wanted to know is when you're learning and you're going through books that you read, what would you say are a few of the books where if you're brand new at this personal development or reading or getting into entrepreneurship, what are the one to three books that you would say, these are the ones that I think are the best that I think stand the test of time? Well, here's the thing. I'm probably the wrong person to ask that because since I spend so much time on the business and in the business, all of the above, I intentionally like to reboot and refresh my mind. And in software terms, I like to flush out

all the registers and get everything out of there. So I tend to read fiction so that the mental escape, stepping away from the business, taking my mind off it for a while, gives me a fresh perspective each time. So I focus on stories that open my mind, but they're not business books. So that's just a personal decision. For example, The Alchemist, a famous older book. But reading that book, I read Kite Runner recently. And while it's a tight book, when I read it, it made me think about all these, deeply think about all these life-level questions about what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What are the people around me doing?

And why do they do what they do? why do they do what they do? When I came back to work after finishing that book, I had a different vigor for attacking things at a higher level than just the day-to-day details. So I think you read with purpose. And my purpose is that I tend to read fiction that will open my mind to the general way I'm thinking about problems, not the specific problems. I love that. I love the book, The Alchemist, too. It's one of my favorites. When I quit my job and went to Europe for three months, I took it with me because I heard it was Will Smith's favorite book.

And it quickly became one of mine because I think it completely changed the life path I was on. Well, I do appreciate you being on the podcast so much. And I think it was very eye-opening to see that someone who is very successful still goes through all of the exact same things that everyone else does. And that there's a lot of mindset shifts that you've had over the years. And I think it's great to listen from someone who's been through all of this as a mentor to other people. So people can listen to it and go, okay, well, he did this. He made these mistakes. What can I pull? And I guess info sponge from all of the things that he said. So I really appreciate

you being on the episode and I hope that you have a great day. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. And I look forward to you and I's next conversation. Let me ask you this, Jeff, how can people get ahold of you? Or is there any way that they can, should they follow you on Twitter? What's the easiest way to get a hold of you? Twitter, my Twitter handle is Speaker Jeff. LinkedIn is probably my most active social media though. Okay. Because obviously we can immediately learn about each other. Yeah.

LinkedIn and Twitter are probably the two best. But, you know, I'm actually certainly not opposed to giving out my email address, which is just Jeff at Colorjar.com. Just how it sounds. C-O-L-O-R-J-A-R. Colorjar is our design company. But Jeff at Colorjar.com or find me on LinkedIn. And you can tweet me at Speaker Jeff. Great. Thank you so much, Jeff.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Rob. Well, that's it for today's podcast. If you want the show notes for this episode, they can be found at mwfmotivation.com. Also, if you liked this episode, please spread the love and share it with a friend because it's our mission to help as many people as we can.

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