Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Jay Samit on The Art of Disruption, How Successful Entrepreneurs Find Seven-Figure Ideas | Entrepreneurship

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, young improfiters? I am super pumped for today's Yap Classic. We're pulling my first interview with Jay Sammet from the archives. Jay is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on disruption and innovation. He's raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups. He's sold companies to Fortune 500s. And he's transformed entire industries with his expertise in disruption and entrepreneurship. In this episode, Jee teaches us how to cultivate a disruptive mindset. He breaks down an exercise that you can do at home that will give you 90 new business ideas in just 30 days.

Starting point is 00:00:47 And he's going to teach us how to rewire toxic thought patterns and beliefs. And even though this interview was recorded back in 2019, it is more relevant than ever. Think about how AI is disrupting industries like copywriting and graphic design and content creation. The people who will thrive during this AI renaissance are those who have a disruptive mindset and who are able to leverage AI and think in an innovative way so they can solve as many problems as possible.

Starting point is 00:01:15 Like I said, I'm super excited to replay today's episode, so let's dive straight in and join my conversation with Jay Samet. Thanks for joining Young and Profiting Podcast. My pleasure. excited to be here. First, let's talk about your expertise on disruptions. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive innovation back in 1997. and he explained that a disruptive business is one that starts by either satisfying the less demanding customer or creating a market where none existed before. Does your definition of disruption differ from Clayton's or is it similar?

Starting point is 00:01:52 Don't like to trash people. Mine's different. One of the reasons I wrote Disrupt You is there were a lot of books written by pure academics that have never worked or done anything. The one you're mentioning actually once raised a private equity fund and they forced him to give back whatever money was remaining less than a couple years later because he had lost most of it. Here's the simple definition of disruption. Think of that scene in Indiana Jones where he's on the streets of Cairo, okay?

Starting point is 00:02:21 There's that swordsman with the giant scimitar that he pulls out. Swords had been around forever, you know, from the Bronze Age. They made little knives, bigger knives, kings were defended, Game of Thrones. Swords were great. And all of a sudden, that scene in Indiana Jones and Raiders the Lost Army, The guy comes at him with a big sword and then he pulls out of Smith and Wesson, that's disruption. Once somebody invented the gun, the sword was kind of, it doesn't matter if you make a better sword a new sword.

Starting point is 00:02:48 We now live in this era of endless innovation. And so what you have to realize is every business will be disrupted. And the only way to continue your career is to continue to disrupt yourself. So a great current example is everybody knows about autonomous vehicles. Everybody knows that they're coming fast. I have a Tesla and I'm blown away as it drives and changes lanes and does everything. So most people go, okay, so the auto industry is disrupted, but you have to look what else changes. Well, here's what else changes.

Starting point is 00:03:20 In the U.S., the automobile insurance industry is a 220 billion industry. That goes away if there's no more drivers behind the wheel. It's not your fault if it's an accident. The car that you buy, Tesla will sell insurance. And so you start noticing the ripple effect of change. So you don't have to invent something new. You just have to see how it changes the world. That's my definition.

Starting point is 00:03:47 Awesome. So essentially disruptors don't have to discover something new. They just have to discover a practical use for that discovery, correct? And that took me 20 years of my career. I'd see these amazing things invented that companies spend millions and millions of dollars for. And whatever reason, it didn't hit the market that they were. we're going for and you could say wow but if I would take that same thing to solve this other problem I don't have to invent all that you know we live a lot of time where there's so much technology

Starting point is 00:04:17 we have a supercomputer in our pocket with us 24-7 that can reach seven billion people you're one click away from being a billionaire it is that simple and all you have to do is figure out that path and the first step is to realize entrepreneurs don't sell something entrepreneurs aren't buying an apple for one dollar and selling it for two dollars an entrepreneur is solving a problem you solve a problem for a few friends you're popular solve a problem for a million people you're rich solve a problem for a billion people you change the world all of us have that ability today because we're so interconnected So you're just like one nanosecond away from changing your future in the world. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:05:04 You actually have a great story about taking technology from a failed business and then applying it in a new way to achieve massive success. You actually were the inventor of the airport kiosk. Could you just tell that story to our listeners? Because I think it really articulates how with disruption you don't have to actually be the inventor. Sure. So I was in my early 20s and one of the early people working with computers. And there was a new thing that came out called the lottery. States now had lotteries.

Starting point is 00:05:35 And to go back in 1980s, ancient history, the way that the lottery tickets were sold was a little screen, one of those, what you see in the movies, those green and white screens that just shows you the numbers. And California was the next state to get the lotteries. And they wanted somebody to make a self-working kiosk that you put your bill acceptor in and do all by yourself. And so the competition had this little green screen and you type in the numbers and that's it. And I spent every penny I had and maxed out my credit cards designing what I thought was the perfect machine.

Starting point is 00:06:10 It had a color screen that did video. It spoke in eight languages. It had a motion detector when you walked by it in a supermarket to go, what would you do with a million dollars or whatever he wanted to say? It was so much head and shoulders above the competition. and when you're young and starting out, you're cocky and think you know everything, that I knew I was going to win this multimillion dollar contract and life would be sweet and everything. And I go up to Sacramento.

Starting point is 00:06:38 What I didn't find out until later, because the FBI had a secret videotape, was somebody who was making a decision a state senator named Alan Robbins was taking a briefcase with $50,000 cash in it from my competition and was awarded the contract. Now, I don't know this on the day. I find this out later. He goes to prison. My competition, by the way, got to keep the contract, even though they bribed for it. But that day, I lost.

Starting point is 00:07:02 I'm not getting it. And I fly back to Los Angeles, and I am not only dejected, I don't actually have a working credit card at that point because I maxed them out. And I didn't have enough cash to take a cab. And I'm trying to figure out how to get back from the airport. And at the airport, they used to have these nice, retired people, little old men and ladies who would sit you and tell you, you different stuff. But by the time I got to the airport, those desks had been closed, the information desks. So now I have no clue. And then it dawns on me. LAX has 50 million visitors a year. Not all of them speak English. Not all of them come when the volunteers are there. How do people figure out how to get

Starting point is 00:07:43 from point A to point B, how to get a cab. This is before Uber and everything. And then I realized my kiosk would be perfect for this. So from that failure, I didn't give up. I just looked at how to solve another problem. And so so many businesses are pivots. There were three guys that had a great idea when 10 years ago, computer dating was already popular, but broadband had come out. So now you could use video and people could have video on a computer.

Starting point is 00:08:15 So they said, wait a second, let's make a dating site instead of still pictures, we'll put videos. And it was called tune in hookup. So they're going to make a fortune. They go, oh my God, now you can see persons. personality, hear their voice, so much more of chemistry is a video than a still picture. And they put this site up, they do a brilliant job, and they had one problem. They didn't realize what do you do if nothing but losers show up.

Starting point is 00:08:42 They had the worst videos. The first video on the site was a guy standing in front of the elephant cage at the zoo talking about why you should go out with them. So tune in and hookup was a dismal failure. but they looked at the data. You'll hear me say this again and again. And the data showed them something they didn't expect in their business plan. Yes, no woman wanted to date these people,

Starting point is 00:09:06 but she absolutely wanted to show every one of her friends how bad the pickings were. So she shared the videos and guys shared the videos. So about 10 months in, they changed the name of tune and hookup to YouTube. It's very rare that a person says, here's my business plan and here's, you know, the straight path to the top. It's about failing. It's about failing again and again and again until you succeed. So it's about believing in yourself. If you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. That's what Henry Ford said and it is so true. From your reading material,

Starting point is 00:09:43 I understand now that true innovation really comes from looking at problems differently. And you have an exercise that helps your students get into a disruptor's mindset where you tell them to write three problems they face each day, and it helps them look at problems differently and get ideas for innovation. I'd really like my listeners to try this at home. So could you explain how to do this exercise? Sure. So yeah, so one of the things that I've done for the past decade for fun is I teach a class at the largest engineering school in the U.S. on how to create a high-tech startup. The best student project was two students that did $150 million the first year. So this process works. And here's the process.

Starting point is 00:10:23 As you said, write down today, not tomorrow, start right now, three problems in your life and do that every day for one month. The first day, it's pretty easy. I was in traffic, you know, whatever you want to write down. But after you get one or two or three days into it, it's really hard to come up with problems because we've gotten in a mindset of this is the way it's always done. This is the way it happens. And we don't recognize problems.

Starting point is 00:10:49 So we give you two classic ones. A couple people were stuck in traffic in Tel Aviv. Now I live in Los Angeles. We have the worst traffic probably in the U.S., but every city now has traffic. And Tel Aviv isn't as bad. It's not a giant, giant city, but it dawned on them that the phone company knew where their phone was.

Starting point is 00:11:07 So they said, wait a second. If my phone told me to go left and the other driver to go right, there wouldn't be traffic. That was Waze. And they sold it for over a billion dollars without a penny. in revenue. Second example was a reader of mine. He gets up in the morning and he grabs his medicine to take it. The phone rings. He answers the phone, has his conversation. And then he's staring there. Did he take his pill? Well, because he was doing the exercise, he's sitting there. Wait a second. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:11:39 you know, this is a problem. If I don't take it, then I won't get better. And if I do take it, I could overdose. What do you do? So he got a little plastic watch like you would. get from a happy meal. Put it on the lid of a pill bottle so when you shut the pill bottle, the clock goes to zero. So in that situation, it could look down and said, oh, I opened it three minutes ago. Yes, I took my pill or oh, it hasn't been open for eight hours. No, I didn't. Then he made a Bluetooth version so that you could check whether grandma took her medicine and remind her to take her medicine. And then he said, how do I make this really popular? And he realized it was a solution for the opioid crisis that you could make bottles that only unlock

Starting point is 00:12:19 at certain intervals. And so what from that one moment in his day, he launched a giant business that has changed society. So it's really that process. So at the end of your 30 days, you have 90 ideas. You have more deal flow than the busiest venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. And then sort them along two axes. One, what are you really passionate about? because the road to success isn't going to be easy.

Starting point is 00:12:50 So you really have to really want that business to succeed and believe in that you're making a difference. And the second is what's the size of that audience? So if the problem is something that only affects 10 people, odds are it's not going to make you wealthy. If it affects everybody, great business to go after. And there are countless examples of people solving this problem. Yeah, that is brilliant. So once we've come up with all of these ideas, you preach that we really need to, to find a way to kill them. You call this zombie ideas. And you say the faster you can kill a bad

Starting point is 00:13:23 idea, the quicker you can pivot to a successful one. So many entrepreneurs are wrecked by praise. You know, oh, that's such a good idea. Oh, that's so good. You know, one of the things that took me years, I've raised hundreds and hundreds of millions from venture capital. And when I was starting out, I would come out at every meeting and go, oh, my God, I think I closed the deal. They loved it because they tell you how great it is. And then they come back to go, well, you know, talk to the partners and the partners, you know, don't want to do it. Well, they're basically blowing smoke because your next idea might be a good one and they don't want you to be not like them.

Starting point is 00:13:55 But here's what you want to do. You want to find people that will tell you everything wrong with your idea. Because the more iterations you can do of your idea between your two ears, the less money you're burning. Because these problems are going to find themselves when you launch. and if you've spent all your money launching something that doesn't work, then you're a failed entrepreneur and you're back where you started. So when I meet with entrepreneurs, when I look at them, you know, you could call it cruel. I'm sitting there telling them every reason why I think it'll fail.

Starting point is 00:14:32 And unless you can come up with answers for each of those reasons, you're going to fail. And so once you can make that bulletproof thing that cannot be killed, that zombie idea, now go out to raise money. and you'll see how quickly that process is. Got it. And then can you give your perspective on the difference between failing and failure? Sure. Failing is trying something that doesn't work. You know, famously Thomas Edison failed a thousand times before he made a light bulb that works.

Starting point is 00:15:07 Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up. When you're failing, how do you know when to stop? okay you could be one idea one minor tweak away from you know changing your life if you throw in the towel you're guaranteeing that you won't be successful so as i said most startups pivot most businesses evolve and what causes that pivoting what causes that change is really simple you look at the data you look at the results you compare what's happening to your assumptions and you may discover something that no one else did. And here's what really happens with a startup. You start with an obvious idea, but you start spending time and resources going down a path and you go farther into

Starting point is 00:15:57 the jungle than anybody ever has. And that's where you discover something new. And that's what makes a successful business because you now have a competitive advantage that no multi-billion dollar corporation has. You have new information and new data that only you know. And the only only competitive advantage in the 21st century is being able to respond to data from your target audience faster than your competition. And big companies are not competing with you. Most aren't really trying to innovate. They're trying to fight last year's battle again and again. I was a very senior global officer at Sony. Sony thought all their competition was other Japanese electronics manufacturer. They didn't see Apple as competition until it was. It was

Starting point is 00:16:45 too late. At Yapp, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world. And when it comes to hiring, I no longer feel overwhelmed by finding that perfect candidate,

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Starting point is 00:18:04 Hello, young improfitters. Running my own business has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, but I won't lie to you. In those early days of setting it up, I feel like I was jumping on a cliff with no parachute. I'm not really good at that kind of stuff. I'm really good at marketing, sales, growing a business, offers. But I had so many questions and zero idea where to find the answers when it came to starting an official business.

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Starting point is 00:18:58 and breaks it down for you. So when you want more for your business, more privacy, more guidance, more free resources, Northwest Registered Agent is where you should go. Don't wait and protect your privacy, build your brand, and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwest registered agent.com slash yapfrey and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash yapfrey. Yeah, that's so interesting. Staying on this topic of companies kind of providing value and being successful and not getting disrupted, you have a concept called value chain innovation and you talk about how businesses and products basically need to be understood as a sum of

Starting point is 00:19:43 their value-adding links. Can you tell us about value chain innovation and can you give an example of a business that optimizes it well and one that does it poorly? Sure. So when you look at where value is created, there's two things that you have to think of with starting your business or your idea. One is value creation, okay? So you've created a new product that does something. The second part of that is value capture. Napster came with the idea of people could share songs and steal songs. Change the world, but it didn't put any of that released value into their pocket, so it didn't make a successful business.

Starting point is 00:20:23 So you have to figure that out. So value creation can take place in any of the steps of business. It can take place in R&D, you can take place in marketing, in sales, in research. So really, if you look at each stage and then disrupt you, I give examples of how in each of these stages you can just focus on that one part because the part of the business that you really want to control is the part that's going to capture the value. And so in different businesses, different stuff. So conversely, you can then look at where businesses lose value. So a great example. I mean, absolutely so brilliant is the most common business that people start. Do you know

Starting point is 00:21:01 what the most common business people start is in the U.S.? No. A restaurant. Okay. And typically somebody goes, oh, I've got a barbecue recipe. I'm going to make a fortune. Well, If you really look at why restaurants succeed or fail, one of the least important things is really the secret sauce and herbs and spices. It has nothing to do with that. Number one reason restaurants fail is they have too many items on their menu, which means too many products.

Starting point is 00:21:31 And if nobody buys the fish, there goes your profits. So this guy sat down and said, OK, I'm going to solve that problem by only offering three items on my menu. That's it. Second reason restaurants fail is people all eat at the same time of day, which means if one person sits down to the table for four at lunch, you can't monetize those other three seats. So you're actually losing money. So second rule that this guy said is, okay, I'm going to only seat full tables and require people to sit with strangers. And since I'm only seating full tables, people are going to have to wait at the bar.

Starting point is 00:22:12 until a table's available and you make more money on alcohol than food. So he has these three data points that he's going to work on. It sounds absolutely like the worst idea. I'm gonna have to have a restaurant with only three types of food and you're gonna have to sit with strangers

Starting point is 00:22:27 who would do that. And for nearly 50 years now, Benny Hanas has been making a fortune. He didn't set out to say, I wanna make a Japanese tepeaki house. He set out and said, why do restaurants fail? he started by solving a problem and that's every successful business that you see today you know uber

Starting point is 00:22:51 solved an amazing problem anybody that ever visited new york city is an example cabs are great except when you need one in the rain or snow or cold you can't get one and then you get into one and odds are you don't speak the same language as the driver so you can't explain where you want to go especially i travel all over the world. And you have to carry money and you don't always have that. And on and on and on, Uber solved all that. Those are great examples. Thanks so much for sharing. You also connect business disruption to personal disruption and you talk about internal value chains. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. So that's probably what separates disrupt you from every book out there is really disruption is like plastic surgery, except you're the one holding the scalpel.

Starting point is 00:23:44 All disruption has to start internally because if you can change something that you thought was amelible about your personality, about your soul, if you can change that, you'll realize everything else to change in the world is easy. So in my personal case, I'm dyslexic. I was taught in school that that means I'm stupid. and I internalize that. And when you look today and you see that one third of all business owners are dyslexic, that Edison and Disney and Steve Jobs, et cetera, et cetera,

Starting point is 00:24:23 were all dyslexic. You realize it just means that you think different and it wasn't a negative. So if you can change that one belief, you know, many people go, well, I'm not good at math. Why do you believe that? because in third grade you failed a multiplication test that you could ace today. You know, so many of these things happened from parents and teachers that wanted to steer us down a path because they were afraid to try and they didn't like the pain of failing. So they wanted to protect you from that pain.

Starting point is 00:24:56 Well, growth comes from pain. If you constantly protect yourself and choose to live in the matrix, you achieve, nothing. And here's the secret folks that I can tell you now that I have gray hair if you're listening and you don't have any yet. Go talk to your grandparents, go visit a senior home and you will find out that the biggest regrets that old people have, the biggest regrets you'll have at the end of your life aren't the things that you tried and failed at, but the things that you failed to try. If only I had tried to be a rock and roll musician, if only I had tried to do this, oh, I had such a good idea and somebody else did it.

Starting point is 00:25:37 Those things will haunt you. You don't get to live forever, but what you create in your lifetime can and the impact you can have, especially at a time like today with so many major problems, you know, climate change and population change and all the things that go with that. Imagine the impact that you can have. That's what's exciting. That's what gets me up in the morning, you know, to get to meet entrepreneurship. that are coming up with things where you just go, oh my God, that makes so much sense.

Starting point is 00:26:09 Because those zombie ideas, by the way, don't take a 20-page PowerPoint to explain. You can explain them in one sentence. And you go, wow, that was so obvious. And you go, well, if it's so obvious, why didn't somebody else do it? Because most people aren't trying to change the world. Most people are just accepting it the way it is. If we were told when we were growing up that, for example, we're not smart enough or we're never going to be rich or we're not fast or productive.

Starting point is 00:26:39 How do we disrupt ourselves and retrain our brains to view the world differently? Well, start doing that what you were told you can't do. One of the most common things is people are afraid of public speaking. You know, it's said that most people, given the choice of giving a eulogy at a funeral or being in the casket, would rather be in the casket. So if you're really afraid, if you say, I can't public speak, I can't do that. Well, go start doing it. You know, volunteer, get on panel.

Starting point is 00:27:04 panels at conferences, go anything. By the way, it's the best way to market yourself and create your brand. So Indiscrupt you, I walk you through the steps of breaking down that internal value chain of what is your personal R&D, what is your personal marketing, what are the tricks and steps that others have used so that you can shorten your path to success. And the second you realize that you can change, it's amazing. The other example in my life being completely transparent is my mom, she listens to this, she hates when I tell the story, my mom wanted me out of the house early. So she forged all my birth certificate, changed my age. So I went to school a year younger than everybody else, which doesn't sound like much. But when you're a little boy and all the other boys are older, that means you were the worst one at sports guaranteed from day one.

Starting point is 00:27:54 which means you hate everything having to do with sports. You have no interest in sports. You don't watch any sports. You don't play any sports. Sports were just a place for you to be humiliated and feel like a loser. Fast forward. I'm 40 years old. I'm deliberately looking at what can I disrupt in my thinking about myself.

Starting point is 00:28:15 And I realize I'm not that four-year-old kid competing against six-year-old kids on the schoolyard. I could do whatever I want. And coincidentally, I happened to have a member of the U.S. Olympic team working at my company. So I asked him, what are a bunch of exercises? Because I had no doubt a P.E. by the time I got to high school, I hated it. And I started exercising. And all of a sudden, for me, for the first time my life, you know, you can do, you know, 100 pushups. You can do pull-ups.

Starting point is 00:28:42 I had muscles. And I go, wow, you can make this. I don't have to be that scrawny little kid. And then I tried to figure out, well, what can I do with this? and being the weird person I am. I said, you know, I always wanted to be a trapeze artist, so I'm going to go and take lessons and learn how to fly through the air. That's great.

Starting point is 00:29:02 You can do anything. Another common excuse is people thinking that they don't have resources to be successful, whether that's money or context. What do you have to say about that? Bullshit. That is the entrepreneur's version of the dog ate my homework. That annoys me so much. Oh, I had such a good startup, but we ran out of money.

Starting point is 00:29:20 Really? If it was such a good startup, wouldn't have run out of money. There is no gatekeeper separating you from money. There is crowdfunding. There is private equity. There is VCs. There is initial coin offerings. There are a million ways to get funding today. Now, is there somebody standing on a street corner handing out a million dollar bills? No. Do you have to learn what is the process and where do I go and who do I have to talk to? Yes, but think of it the other way. VCs, venture capital firms, go out of business if they can't find entrepreneurs to invest in. Private equity goes out of business if it can't find businesses to

Starting point is 00:30:02 invest in. There are millions of people whose job is to give you money. On top of which I talk about in my favorite chapter in the book, OPM, other people's money, there are companies that will give you millions of dollars, and I've done this time and time again, tens of millions of dollars, that don't want any equity in your business and don't want to be paid back any of that cash. And you go, well, what do they want? Well, it turns out that your business that you're starting is gone for a specific audience. You're making a product for teens. You're making for women.

Starting point is 00:30:34 You're making for senior citizens, whatever it is. Well, it turns out there's tons of companies that are not competitive to you that also want that same audience. And what you're giving them is an idea of how to reach that audience that they didn't have. And so that's marketing spend. and they'd be happy to do it. And I'll give you a great example that'll do as quickly as possible. When I was at Sony, iTunes had just come out and the iPod was killing the Walkman,

Starting point is 00:31:01 and we had to launch a competing service. And Apple was spending $100 million a year in advertising, and I had an advertising budget of zero. So I go, well, I guess I'm doomed to failure. No. I said, okay, how do I get someone else to give me their money? to launch my competitor to iTunes, my digital download service. And so I looked at who's in trouble, what businesses were failing.

Starting point is 00:31:28 There were two right then. Spurlock had had the movie supersized me where he ate McDonald's for 30 days and nearly died. So McDonald's sales went down for their first time in their 40-year history. I said, okay, McDonald's has problems. And the biggest airline in the U.S. United Airlines was in bankruptcy. They have problems. So now all that I have to do is figure out. how do I solve McDonald's and United's problems with my music download service and they'll give me money.

Starting point is 00:31:57 And you go, well, how do you connect those dots and make a long story short with McDonald's? Pitched them. Buy Big Mac, get a free track. So you got a free song. You got a free code song with every burger that you bought. And McDonald's spent tens of millions of dollars of TV advertising where every customer was driven to my store to get their free song and then they'd signed up and they could buy other stuff and United Airlines had tons of people that weren't flying anymore because they're worried about the bankruptcy but they had enough frequent

Starting point is 00:32:28 flyer miles to make like nine round trips to Pluto so I said okay you can now spend your frequent flyer miles at my store and now United let us throw a concert at 35,000 feet in a plane they played that video on every flight and millions and millions of their customers suddenly became my customers I spent $0.0.0 to launch that business. I've done that with crowdfunding for commercial real estate. I said, okay, no one cares. That's a complicated concept. How do you get anybody care about?

Starting point is 00:33:01 And I said, okay, where can I find hundreds of journals that have nothing to write about? And it turns out that was the first year that Coachella went from one weekend to two weekends. So I go, okay, so there's 600 journals that had a bunch of stuff to do one weekend, sit in Palm's with nothing to do for five days and another weekend. So I went to Hard Rock Hotel and I said, we're going to crowd fund your remodel. And they go, we don't need a remodel. I go, you need a remodel. It's a free million dollars. What would you do with it? And suddenly, everybody writes about it, launches the business and the business gets millions and millions of customers. Hey, young improfitors. As an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that getting a huge expense off your books

Starting point is 00:33:47 is the best possible feeling. It gives you peace of mind and it lets you focus on the big picture and invest in other things that move your business forward. Now imagine if you got free business internet for life. You never had to pay for business internet again. How good would that feel? Well, now you don't even have to imagine because spectrum business is doing exactly that. They get it that if you aren't connected, you can't make transactions, you can't move your business forward. They support all types of businesses, from restaurants to dry cleaners to content creators like me and everybody in between. They offer things like internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, and mobile services. Now, for my business-owning friends out there, I want you to listen up. If you want

Starting point is 00:34:25 reliable internet connection with no contracts and no added fees, Spectrum is now offering free business internet advantage forever when you simply add four or more mobile lines. This isn't just a deal. It's a smart way to cut your monthly overhead and stay connected. Yeah, BAM, you should definitely take advantage of this offer. It's free business internet forever. Visit spectrum.com slash free for life to learn how you can get business internet free forever. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've

Starting point is 00:35:07 been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. can be the year that you build something that is truly yours, the year where you take control over your career, and it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my mastermind subscription is also on Shopify. I built my site quickly in just a couple of days, payments for setup super easily. And none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does, because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my masterclass

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Starting point is 00:36:33 This new year with Shopify by your side. What's up, Yap, gang? If you're a serious entrepreneur like me, you know your website is one of the first touchpoints every single cold customer has with your brand. Think about that for a second. When people are searching on Google, everybody who interacts with your brand first is seeing your dot com initially. But here's a problem.

Starting point is 00:36:56 Too many companies treat their website like a formality instead of the gross tool that it should be. At YAPMedia, we are guilty of this. I am really due for an upgrade from my website and I'm planning on doing that with framework this year because small changes can take days with my other platform and simple updates require tickets. And suddenly we're just leaving so much opportunity on the table. And that's why so many teams, including mine, are turning to framework. It's built for teams who refuse to let their website slow them down. Your designers and marketers get full ownership with real-time collaboration, everything you need for SEO and analytics,

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Starting point is 00:38:05 Rules and restrictions apply. Such good examples there. Just switching gears a bit, something else that you talk about is visioning. Why do you think visioning is so crucial when we have our next business idea? And what are your tips to do it effectively? It turns out that that expression, the power of positive thinking is absolutely true. When you are in a positive mind frame, when you, you know, I start each day with two affirmations. Today can be better than yesterday and I have the power to make it so.

Starting point is 00:38:38 And just by looking in the mirror and saying that, as silly as that sounds, here's what happens physiologically. It lights up the synaptic nerves in your brain and you release dopamine. So you actually are doing the same thing as if you were using drugs. And it puts you in a positive state of mind. Well, when you're in a positive state of mind, you're more likable. You'll have a better love life. You'll close more sales. You're seen as more intelligent.

Starting point is 00:39:08 it goes on and on. Conversely, when you're in that negative funk, you can't see opportunity. We all work with that person that comes in every day with the cloud over them. You know, oh, this is wrong, this is wrong. They're never going to get out of their own way. So you have to start with picturing that end state, picture that goal. Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, before it became Mr. Universe, he pictured himself up on that stage. Most, Olympiads picture themselves on the platform with that metal going around their neck. They see it. They visualize it.

Starting point is 00:39:45 It sets in their mind. And then you can take that vision, whatever that is, and work backwards from that. I want to be a doctor. Okay. Well, that pretty much means, I guess I have to get to med school. And how do I get to med school? And you work backwards those steps. You don't have to know every step in the journey to start the journey.

Starting point is 00:40:04 You just have to know where you're heading. And guess what? If you don't have a goal of where you want to be in five years, you're not going to get anywhere. You'll be exactly where you are right now. And what could be sadder than that? Totally. Let's move on to how the world is changing in terms of the way we work. People are calling AI, robotics, and automation, the fourth industrial revolution. How do you envision these technologies changing the way that we work? half of all jobs are going to disappear over the next decade. And for anybody that thinks that's hyperbole, let's take an instant journey back 100 years ago. 100 years ago, half of all people in the U.S. lived on farms, and they made food for the other half that lived in cities. Two inventions, irrigation in the tractor, and today less than 2% of people in the United States are on farms. And not only do they feed 300 million people, but they feed the rest of the world. world by exporting. So if you think about it, if half the people used to be and only 2% are doing it,

Starting point is 00:41:10 half the people in the U.S. lost their jobs. Happens that we had the industrial revolution, so they all went and worked at factories, et cetera. We know that story. Today, anything that can be automated will be automated. The number one job in the U.S. is a truck driver. There won't be truck drivers. Amazon's now taken it where they have a robot that can load and unload trucks. Amazon has robots that move stuff around the parking. We have drones that will. deliver self-driving cars. We have self-driving freighters that take stuff across the oceans that are unloaded by robotic cranes that go and load into self-driving trucks that take it to stores and distribution centers. So those jobs are going. AI, on the other hand, is taking anything

Starting point is 00:41:53 that's basically knowledge-based and can do it better. God forbid you have cancer and you go to radiologist, maybe in his life he's seen 2,000 patients and he's seen 2,000 scans. Well, IBM Watson has seen every scan of, you know, tens of millions of people and can 99.999 accuracy instantly know what they're seeing. And the same thing can be said. Law firms no longer need tons of lawyers. AI can write most contracts. You don't longer lead comptrollers and lots of accountants, the large accounting firms and all that will be downsized. So you're going to have tons of people losing their jobs. And so one of the reasons why I'm spending whatever time I have left on this planet teaching people how to be successful is all of this means we're eroding the middle class

Starting point is 00:42:45 and you can't have a democracy without a strong middle class. So if you like living in a world filled with democracies and stabilities, you better thank the entrepreneur because they're the only ones creating jobs. So at the same time the many jobs are disappearing, many new ones can be created. You know, no one really should spend their entire time on this planet doing a mundane task over and over again that could be automated. Nobody was born to flip burgers for 50 years. I'm not putting that job down. It's not beneath somebody.

Starting point is 00:43:20 But how great would it be if we could free people from the mundane and let them do something more inspiring, more challenging, more human and humane? Yeah. So we're going to see with climate change, more refugees moving and populations moving as different countries are affected differently. Many countries will no longer be able to grow the food to feed their own populations. So we're going to have huge existential problems that need to be solved. And yet the heavy lifting of what those tools are of the AI systems, the neural networks, the robotics and everything, those have been designed already. You don't have to invent, you don't have to be some, you know, Einstein to do it. And I'll give you, again, one of my favorite examples.

Starting point is 00:44:03 God forbid your child's born missing a limb or a hand. Think of what their life is like. Think of when they go to school of how they're different and kids pick on them and they withdraw and their personality. And their whole path is changed because of a minor disability. Well, people that I know looked at that and they looked at 3D printers that were so cheap. So most kids don't get a prosthetic because they grow so fast and prosthetics are very, very expensive that they don't get them until their teenagers or adults when their personality has now been formed and altered. So they 3D print for about $15, amazing prosthetics that work.

Starting point is 00:44:44 But they were entrepreneurs that took it one step further. They said, how can we take this disability and turn it into something special? And so they went to Disney and they licensed Iron Man and froze. and Star Wars and made the coolest prosthetics for young people. And so now, instead of being the kid that nobody wants to play with, they go, oh, I want Iron Man on our team, right? And when I give my talks at universities, I show a video of this beautiful young woman who had no forearms that is two of these prosthetic hands,

Starting point is 00:45:19 these low-cost prosthetic hands that are beautiful, and she plays classical piano concerto, and she plays classical piano concerto, and she's a little bit of her. and there's not a dry eye in the room. Wow. That was an entrepreneur. They didn't invent the 3D printer. They saw a problem and they applied it to that problem. That's so inspiring.

Starting point is 00:45:37 Let's go back to the fact that you said that the middle class is inevitably going to shrink as these technologies come on board and jobs are going to stop being available for people. And essentially, people are going to need to be reskilled, right? So what are the types of skills that you think that people are going to have to take on in order to have job security in the future? So I think we can all agree whether you like it or not, your career will be disrupted. And it doesn't matter what stage you are. There's tons of people that were like, oh, I work for this big company. I work for Kodak.

Starting point is 00:46:12 I want to work there forever and it disappears. Or I work with this retail chain. You know, it's been the retail tsunami as tens of thousands of chains just closed. So how do you protect yourself? So disruption isn't about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you. Number one, going to college for four years, which I think is important. It's not for everybody.

Starting point is 00:46:35 But that's not going to arm you for the rest of your life with knowledge. Nothing makes me matter than the following statistic. The majority of college graduates in the United States never read another book. Let that sink in for a second. You spend more on a mocha, hot, latte, whatever than you do on books each week. You have to commit to lifelong learning. The world is changing. No one's going to employ you, work with you, unless your skills are the best that they can find.

Starting point is 00:47:05 And your knowledge is current. I'm in my 50s. If you came to me and I was a doctor and I told you, I haven't learned anything since medical school 30 years ago, you'd run out of the office, even if you were sick and dying. Okay, that's what you have to look at with your career. You are going to be constantly involving. You're not going to have one job, one career. You're going to do many things and you're going to have to constantly learn. Number two, if you're not going to be at one job for 40 years and getting that gold watch,

Starting point is 00:47:35 that means you're going to always be in the market to a new job and a new skill in a changing world, which means you have to learn how to market yourself. You have to become the brand of one. personal branding through social media, through LinkedIn, through Instagram, through so many tools, we see all these people that became influencers and then actually became businesses. Kylie Jenner is the youngest self-made billionaire. And it's not because she was a Kardashian. It's not because she's beautiful.

Starting point is 00:48:08 There's other people that are beautiful. There's other people that are famous. She took that and turned it into a business. So how do you become a brand of one? How do you find and build your tribe, whether it's locally or internationally? It is so easy to find that. And so if you start looking at your life as being in permanent beta, then it's a fun challenge and a fun game. And it also means you never have to get bored.

Starting point is 00:48:37 So I'll pre-guess a question, which is how do you know when to leave your job? If you're at a job where you're learning, where you're growing, where there is more skills that you can pick up, stay there and absorb it. Think of it that you're going to grad school, but somebody's paying you to attend it, okay? If on the other hand, you're at a job where you are at a Tomneton, where you're just doing the same rote mundane thing over and over again, and there's no chance for you to change that, it's time for you to move on. So plan your exit, plan what you want to do next, figure out what those skills are and what's driving you. Where is that goal? Where do you want to be five years from now?

Starting point is 00:49:20 Where do you want to be 10 years from now? How do you get there? And now life becomes an adventure and it's fun. Awesome. Well, this was incredible. Honestly, you went through so many gems for our listeners. I'm sure everyone's going to have to listen to this two or three times to get everything out of it.

Starting point is 00:49:38 Before we go, where can our listeners learn more about you? and maybe you could just talk about your workbook that you have that I think would be a great asset for everyone to get their hands on. Sure. So it's easy to find J-S-Samett. You can follow me anywhere on social media and Google all that. But J-S-M-A-M-I-T is my website. I post articles, daily motivation, all that. But I also have on there a companion workbook to disrupt you that's free. It's a 40-page workbook to ask you questions to push you along in your, self-disruption so you can get the most out of the book and really focus. And again, my goal in doing this wasn't to help me. It's to pay it forward. So if I can help ease you in that

Starting point is 00:50:25 journey to success, then, you know, that's that's why I'm doing this. Thanks so much, Jay. It was a pleasure having you on. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Jay Samit on The Art of Disruption, How Successful Entrepreneurs Find Seven-Figure Ideas | Entrepreneurship

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