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Kind: captions Language: en H guess on what’s the Wi-Fi I can’t no I can’t get in oh it’s AR connect your teams easier than connecting your Wi-Fi HubSpot grow better all hands on deck what’s up it’s Sean and it is one question Friday so we are taking one listener question and answering it on the spot hopefully five minutes maybe 10 minutes let’s see how this goes I’m going to play this audio recording that Ben sent to me I haven’t heard it yet let’s hear it together so I was having a cola the other day and I was thinking about this question what do you do differently that allowed you to succeed that you think other people who had similar circumstances to you did not where did you succeed where they did not okay uh good question very broad question right so we could take this a bunch of different ways here’s how I want to take it what are the common answers that you think people would give to a question like this so oh what do you do differently that helps you succeed well some people will say let’s break it into groups there’s the um overly humble the overly humble will say you know I’ve just all credit to God uh I’ve been blessed I was really lucky and you know I just kind of kept putting one foot in front of the other and worked hard and and I uh you know I’m just fortunate to be born in this great place with all my my limbs and my brain and all this right okay there’s that path all true things but not that useful to somebody listening so let’s let’s kick that out also that applies to many other people who didn’t have the same result as you so that certainly couldn’t be it okay second thing hard work right hard work is the next thing that people love to say I think because hard work feels like you earned it and it feels like you’re not saying you’re better than everybody else it feels like you made better choices than others that were available to them too and um who can argue with hard work but the reality is I really don’t work very hard um or at least I don’t feel that way the thing I would say is I actually do work a lot but I only work on stuff I like and so I think hard workers you know like a janitor works hard a line cook works hard you know um a single mother works hard you know and so I I don’t really put what I do has you know pretty much no physical strain no emotional St small em strain I guess and um you know honestly it’s fun like I do it because I enjoy it I’m not doing it because I kind of feel like I have to do this in order to get what I want that is not at all how I think about things and there are many areas where I’m like oh man if I worked harder I’d get a better result and I can’t bring myself to do it I’m lazy in that way uh the reason I work a bunch is because I really uh like it feels like play to me it’s like watching somebody play a video game you you don’t have to tell them hey sit down and focus on this for 3 hours it’s like what are you talking about this Call of Duty of course I’ll play this as long as I can and so um it’s not hard work so what is it then well you said something in your question which was what’s different about you than like uh what what did you do differently than like others like you in similar situations to you okay that’s a good way of asking the question let’s take my college right here I’m wearing this shirt I went to Duke and there’s a bunch of super smart people who went to Duke in fact that Duke I was a very mediocre student um middle of the pack maybe slightly below average and um you know whatever it’s a good school a lot of smart people a lot of hard workers okay I do think that I’ve had probably more success you know by kind of a traditional definition but also just more fun than 99% of the other people who graduated in my class um I could be wrong no way to really know but uh I believe that to be true from from what I’ve seen so what is different what I would say is that most of my friends from college most of the people I went to school with played it quote unquote safe and is it really safe uh that’s the question and because to me safe is good if you can get the outcome you want with the least risk possible safe is awesome right like I don’t want to you know go to war because the outcome I want is to be alive and like I can just stay at home and that is way less risk than um going to war but I also don’t just stay at home and not drive places because I want to go see the I want to go to a movie or I want to go to the grocery store whatever I have an outcome I want but I’ll take the least risk risk possible I’m not going to you know drive a motorcycle I’ll drive a car you get the idea so to me safety is when you get the outcome you want with the least risk uh taken what I saw was most of my friends from college took what was what you would call a safe path if you wanted that outcome the reality is that I definitely did not want the outcome that those jobs led to so the jobs the most popular tracks were doctor um kind of like lawyer consultant or Banker those are like the kind of like high achiever paths that I would say most of the smart smartest people in um at my school did and I guess the other one would just be like corporate manager of some kind Okay cool so the problem with that is when I look at what success looks like for a doctor for a lawyer for a consultant for a banker or for a corporate manager none of those by default would get me the outcome I wanted right I was like dude I want to make tons of money I want to have fun every day I want to have action creativity I don’t want to just be doing the same thing over and over right like I shadowed a doctor because I was pre-med I took the mcats I was planning to go to med school until I shadowed a doctor and I went to Shadow him to figure out uh can I do this but by the end of it the answer I walked away with was I don’t want to do this because it was extreme extremely repetitive what was happening every day and um you’re helping people which is awesome but I could not stand the repetitive nature of seeing patients and having the same you know as orthopedic guy oh yep you have torn meniscus you have a torn ligament you have joint pain and there’s nothing we could do for you that that’s what it was over and over and over again and so um I didn’t want the winning path of that um so financially some some paths I was like oh man you work how hard and you make how much and like is there a path here where I could have like I don’t know $50 million like what if I want $50 million right you don’t have to want it but let’s say I do want it because I do right and I’m not afraid to say it I’m not ashamed of the things I wanted I was like that sounds awesome if I could choose between less money and more money I’m choosing more money right that was very obvious to me at the time and when I looked at how much you could make in a certain amount of time the first let’s say 10 years of your career I was like Wow uh okay Finance I might be able to get there but not really these other paths okay maybe I can do it in finance or Consulting but what do I have to do to get there oh man I got to grind 80 90 hours a week kind of as the low man on the totem pole and I’m just like an Excel monkey and I’m like you know I’m not building I’m not creating anything new and I’m not building my own business I’m like just this kind of like middleman uh that’s what it felt like or corporate management that’s cool but like I got to go to an office every day 9 to5 wear a certain thing and talk a certain way and spend a bunch of my days doing um you know like you know certain meetings that I didn’t want to do like you know Talent calibration and like you know employee onboarding and all this right so I didn’t find that fun and I even saw people that who are playing that game at a high level so for example when we got acquired by twitch I saw well what is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company do every day and what does you know the VP product do and what does the CTO do what what do these people do every day if I look at their day and I don’t want it then why am I in this track so I would say the fir the most important thing I did differently was get clear on what I actually wanted how I wanted my life to go and then I looked at the quote unquote safe tracks and I realized pretty quickly that those don’t get me to that thing I want so in that sense they’re not safe at all they’re extremely dangerous to my goals right are you following that like if you if you look at what you want if you have a clear picture of what you want and then you look at the safe path and you say does the safe path get me to what I want and the answer is no then it is not safe it is extremely risky because it’s putting my dream at risk and knowing what you want also takes a little bit of work so take some time take some imagining take some sampling I would go and meet a bunch of people and be like so what’s your life like you know uh okay you have this much money what how does that work you have this uh work schedule how does that work oh you never see your kids okay that that doesn’t sound like a win right like uh my buddy dated a girl in college my roommate was dating a girl in college and her dad was a high you know whatever partner at whatever deoe Boston Consulting whatever whatever it was and and you know she was just like yeah growing up like he was home Thursday through Sunday and then he would fly out Thursday through Saturday he’d fly out Sunday and he’d be at a client site from you know Sunday through Thursday every week and then he fly back and he was super tired and that was the first 18 years of my life so I I immediately could cross that safe path of Consulting off because if that’s how the the top of the top do it in that field then I don’t want to do it and of course there are outliers in every in every industry every track there are some outliers but then have to be really clear that hey am I betting on being an outlier in that path if so then I got to be willing to make that choice so for example I chose entrepreneurship what I knew was that the day-to-day of an entrepreneur sounded really fun I get to build a a product a create a product from scratch maybe invent a new product um I get to sell it that sounds interesting marketing as I always found fun and um you know I get to go on this ride where I’m sometimes I’m pitching to investors sometimes customers sometimes I’m putting out a fire over here that sounded really fun to me and I tried it out and I actually really enjoyed it and I knew that okay most entrepreneurs don’t make it but I thought well if I really enjoy this then I’m I’m probably going to be willing to do it for 10 15 years and what I saw was that most people would quote these statistics that 90% of businesses fail or that this individual idea has a very low chance of have very low chance of success and that is true most individual ideas and businesses do fail and the way uh the quote I heard was that yeah startups fail but entrepreneurs don’t what that means is that if you look at any great entrepreneur any entrepreneur who sticks with it who’s really tries hard and actually has some skill over a 10 to 15 year period they all win right they tend to they tend to win the odds are in their favor that in a 10 to 15E period they do have a win and when they win they win in an order of magnitude of millions and millions of dollars okay great so even the one idea that I’m doing this year might not have the highest odds of success if I just keep keep at this for 10 15 years my odds of success go from individually very low to collectively over 10 15 years very high so I loved that I loved the size of the prize I loved the likelihood of success and I loved the data day to get there which told me I’ll probably stick with it long enough to hit a win and so that’s how I chose what I wanted to do so in summary what I think I did differently was get clear on what I wanted and then I what I recognized was that the quote unquote safe paths weren’t really so safe after all because they had a very low chance of getting me to that outcome that I wanted and so in that sense they were the riskiest Paths of all whereas most people I think gravitated towards something that sounded good in theory or sounded good to their parents or sounded good to their aunts and uncles and their peers and their teachers and whoever and they said Yep this this sounds good and they got onto a track that actually won’t lead them to a lifestyle that they want whereas I figured out the lifestyle I wanted first and then I figured out and then I looked at what tracks can get me there and I chose the safest amongst those all right that’s all hope that was helpful come on I know that was helpful it had to be helpful right I put my I put my heart into that one so I hope that it was helpful I hope I might have took an idea that you already had and maybe put it a little differently or brought it to the front of your mind and maybe it was buried in the back of your mind that’s that’s a win for me out of these so one question Friday in the books [Music]