Digital Art Heist: My NFTs Got Stolen 😭

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en [Music] all right it’s question of the week time or one what do we call it one question friday i like that all right one question friday uh sam is traveling so i got my boy ben here ben levy not been the not producer ben not powerful producer ben this is ben levy the uh the ceo of the milk road and uh my business partner across my fund and a bunch of other things you guys hear me reference ben a lot but you never know which ben because i only deal with ben’s so uh this is one of the bends ben what’s up man what’s going on i’m riding high today chris paul and the suns won by like 25 last night so i’ve never been happier this is true um all right so let’s let’s do this one question uh i think we have an audio clip right let’s play let’s play the audio clip i haven’t heard this yet so let’s see what it is hey guys my name is colin um i just had all of my nfts stolen today so my question is and i’m sure you’ve been through something like it before um you know when you get gut punched like has that happened to you uh what happened and how did you work through it oh man i could feel the defeat i could feel the uh the pain in his voice there at the end that thank you that was a soul crushed thank you uh okay so colin you got your nft stolen i you know i feel for you that’s no fun i mean that’s a it’s a crime right somebody came and stole your property it’s digital property but uh you know a crime has been committed so you know you got to kind of separate um here’s my my kind of advice to you have i had somebody steal a bunch of my property before uh not really but you know there’s different flavors of of gut punch and i’ve had i’ve had my share here’s my kind of like formula for how to handle it the first step is just be still um and i mean this in kind of a zen way which is that look what’s going to happen you know for the next 24-48 hours for you is you’re gonna your mind is gonna go to a bunch of different places you’re gonna get angry you’re gonna feel sad you’re gonna feel upset at yourself you’re gonna feel upset at others you’re gonna feel upset at the the fact that you can’t get it back so you’re gonna hate crypto you’re gonna you’re gonna feel a bunch of emotions by default and what you wanna do is you want to not um just react you want to respond so what’s the difference between a reaction and a response a reaction is what you do uh you know sort of right away it’s an impulsive thing and typically we don’t love our reactions to things because our reactions are the things that are happening in a more primal way was that whereas our response is what happens when we pause for a second and we we choose how we’re going to respond so a reaction is typically not something you’re choosing a response is something you’re choosing and i this happens to me multiple times a day where i got to check myself all right am i reacting or responding here and which one do i want to do i know i can do both but i’d rather respond and so the first thing is you got to be still you got to distance yourself from it emotionally first then you got to say all right well how am i going to respond to this well there’s some like logistical steps you might take to try to get back report it try to figure out who did it you know notify people in the community so other people don’t fall for it whatever the scam was but then you gotta like okay let’s say you’ve done the logistics part um and maybe there is no happy ending where you didn’t just all turn out right that’s where you got it what i call you got to decide what story is true so in any event uh anything that happens there are there are multiple stories but to simplify i’ll say there’s two stories anytime something happens there’s the story that’ll make you feel bad and there’s the story that’ll make you feel good they’re both stories right uh and they both have truth to them but it’s just a matter of which which angle you’re looking at something and so you gotta decide which story am i gonna roll with am i gonna roll with the version of this that makes me feel really bad or am i going to roll with the version of this that makes me feel good and i know that probably sounds hard in the moment you just got a bunch of your [  ] stolen and uh you know which is why we first you know tried to distance ourselves from it but that’s where you’re going to have to go you’re going to have to decide the version of this story that’s going to make you feel good right imagine a breakup most people when they have a breakup in a relationship they feel bad and they choose a story that’s going to make them feel worse which is oh my god all the all those years we spent together it’s time wasted i’m not good enough or she’s not good enough or whatever the reasons are right we have we come up with a story that makes us feel bad or we come up with a story that makes us feel good which is man now i know what i really want uh now i’m ready for for the right person you know you want to walk out into the street and just look left and right and say you know next you know i’m ready and so there’s a version of the story that’ll make you feel good or bad in any given situation the power is in being able to choose what the story is and not just having the default one put on you so that’s my like mentality mindset ben what do you think you you’ve had your fear of gut punches have you ever had something like this yeah i mean in crypto i think like a year ago i had like a few eats stolen out of my wallet and i was crushed and i think i actually called you and i was like dude it sucks i just lost a few eat because i stupidly clicked on a discord scam and i think what you said was that’s the price of admission every single person in crypto has had that happen and that’s just what that’s just the name of the game uh so i don’t know my perspective on it is like yeah definitely been got punched a ton in crypto and i also feel like every crypto i’ve ever gotten i’m mad that i didn’t sell it at the right time or i held too long or bought too late uh i think that’s the name of volatility too so i’m just like that’s the you know i’m gonna get a huge home run because i play this game and uh yeah learn from my mistakes yeah there’s also like uh this phrase with investing which is i’ve never done i’ve never done an investment right which means on an investment that worked out i should have always been earlier and bet more and on an investment that’s wrong i shouldn’t have bet or i you know i was too late or whatever and so you’ll never ever on any investment feel like you did it right you’ll always be kind of kicking yourself wishing you had done it either bet bigger or better earlier or whatever on it and so um i think the thing you said that’s right which is it’s the nature of the game and so um you know crypto nfts this is the wild wild west right now there’s a reason your nft can go up a 10x in price in one month or a hundred x in price in a year or like you know i don’t know how much board apes are were but like i think a year ago they were under one east each and now they’re like whatever 140 or something like that so you know 140x in a year so one of the reasons you can get these types of gains is because it’s the wild wild west but what comes with the wild wild west is that dude it’s it’s not safe uh there are there are places where you could stub your toe and me and sam i think said this on a pod once which was if you become an entrepreneur or an investor and then every time things go anytime disaster strikes or things go poorly or things go down you’re like emotionally a wreck because of it and i’m not saying colin is but it’s very easy to become close to an emotional wreck when things go down uh it’s like you signed up to go you waited in line to go on a roller coaster and you strapped yourself in and then the roller coaster went up and down and every time it went down you were like oh like oh my god i can’t believe this like get me off this thing it’s like dude why did you get on a roller coaster you know like uh if you choose entrepreneurship you choose investing if you choose investing you got to wake up and like the last four months dude i’ve lost millions of dollars just because i wake up and every day is red stocks are red crypto is red everything’s red i haven’t seen green in months dude i don’t even see the color green right like i’m starting to text people on android just so i can see the green speech bubble dude like i just want to see green and uh but that’s the reality it’s like i signed up to be an investor what did i think it’s always going to go up it’s like i signed up to you know do this crazy crypto stuff like yes this crazy [  ] where you know i’m playing this this this game where you’re you’re a self-sovereign individual you’re custodian your own assets well there’s gonna be times where you didn’t custody it very well and it got stolen um and so you know same thing with with being an entrepreneur is you gotta ask yourself am i just complaining that the roller coaster went up and down and uh and that’s a way to not let yourself be a victim i think one of the most positive traits somebody can have is that they never let themselves be a victim no matter what happens in their life they view themselves as the person in control and the root cause of whatever has occurred and in doing so they give themselves the power to make things good and they give themselves the accountability when things go bad and so so you know i think that’s a just a decision you got to make up front am i going to let myself ever play victim and look for kind of pity uh self-pity or pity from others or you just take that off the table you say nope i’m never going to play that game and so that means on days where my [  ] gets stolen it did somebody didn’t steal my nfts i let my nfts be stolen and right so you take control over what happened and it hurts in those moments but that decision to never play victim is like one that pays off you know in spades you know for the rest of your life ben what did i miss also it’s a great opportunity for a twitter thread right here how i got my nft stolen yeah this is the great this is the beginning of every great story right uh i’ve had this many times where i get a cease and desist letter and then we turn it into marketing for our company i’ve had it where you know google or facebook will launch a clone of our app and your investors will send you a link and be like hey did you see this like yeah [  ] i saw it like i saw that facebook has cloned our app you know pixel by pixel and that you know this you know 500 billion dollar company is now competing with us yes i saw the news but you know you got to sort of like in that moment it’s like this is our chance this is our story of course they’re going to copy us we’re on to something right of course they’re going to copy us pixel 4 pixel because we have the right solution right and you have to decide what story you’re going to tell yourself and your team and your the people around you so that again you’re going to feel some kind of way would you rather feel bad or feel good that’s all you got to choose i tell ben this all the time what ben started this off talking about the suns winning and ben how do you feel when the suns win amazing ben how do you feel when the suns lose pretty pretty down on myself pretty down on everything so you ride the roller coaster and you let yourself feel bad and so you know that’s a choice you’re making right now at some point you might decide to play the game differently which is i’m gonna is it possible to feel great when your team wins and not feel shitty when your team loses yes that is possible it sounds like it sounds like it’s breaking the rules but like that’s what you do when you’re like a life hacker he’s like yeah you break the rules like i’m gonna play the game i’m gonna play the game on my terms and uh and so there is a version of that yeah and like when your businesses have issues i think when the business have issues like you don’t let it get you down at all uh and you’re you’re able to take the wins and stride really well do you have an example of that like something where we’ve we’ve taken we we’ve had a situation where other people would have felt down but we we spun it do you has anything come to mind uh i mean i think we’re in one right now right like we send the milk road and we’ve had some deliverability issues recently where the open rates have dropped a little bit and we can’t really tell you know we’re trying to figure out why and i think there’s one version where you freak out about that and you make it ruin your week or ruin your day and there’s another version where you just take it in stride and know you’re gonna figure it out this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients whole history calls support tickets emails and here’s a task from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better yeah like you know you fast forward a year from now this will be a forgotten footnote on the overall story and even when things are really crazy and you know something really bad happens like you know in my e-commerce business our entire shipment for christmas got seized and flagged and then inspected and then we had to do a recall and like all this stuff and the people you know people on my team were all like oh my god like just for this you know 1 8 of an inch you know this random random seizure for no reason just because of random inspection then on one item they found a one-eighth of an inch discrepancy oh my god this is so unfair this is so bad blah blah and it’s like all right like dude look like you know we and i created a channel in our slack called highs and lows and i said let’s put them here let’s let’s document the highs and lows and i think every startup should do this honestly is document the highs and lows because it’ll just get you used to being like when you go in there when things feel really bad and you want to go in there and write it down and you’ve it’s like you see the last one six months ago and you’re like oh yeah that felt pretty bad too but i’ve like i’ve totally forgotten that our business has grown 2x since then and like oh you know just the way that that one turned out to be nothing this one’s gonna be nothing too i’m gonna eat this and i’m gonna like use this as an opportunity to learn like oh [  ] we didn’t even know these this one-eighth of an inch rule we had to go like you know change the measurements of something like i’m glad we knew now versus when it’s bigger right i’m glad this happened because that’s gonna lead to all these good things um and so you know there’s uh we had an example like this where like i’ll give you another one with our e-commerce business uh the warehouse manager that we had hired uh turned it wasn’t working out then we found out they were trying to like you know sort of like copy our business in a way and like launch a competitor or something like that because you know they’re in the warehouse they see businesses going great so they wanted a piece of the action and this was a moment where our team was sort of like you know immediately felt betrayed and then upset and was like well you know um what should we do should we change you know should we we’re gonna have to make a change it’s gonna be so hard and that those are the moments where you need to show the most poise right that’s when that’s when strength matters is when things get hard when things are easy is not with strength matters so it’s like oh dude i’ve been training for this i’ve been training for these types of moments finally i got a reason to use these muscles and that are that are in my body to be able to be strong here and so it was all about poise it was all about basically coming up with all right let’s first be still let’s not overreact second let’s decide how we’re going to approach this and respond to this situation not react and then in that response it turned out where actually we ended up finding this amazing manager and we ended up saving all this money now we couldn’t have seen that up front in the moment it felt bad now three months later or two months later whatever it’s like oh dude we found this thing that’s saving us you know two dollars per order which is going to add up to be hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra profit saved because we found this new manager who found this new process who found this new thing and we would have never done that had that disaster not struck and so once you go through life enough you have enough experience you realize oh it’s all working for me not against me and once you decide it’s all working for me not against me then the next time the disaster strikes like all right cool what’s this how is this working for me and you don’t panic you know the people around you are like man how’s this person never panic they never freak out about this stuff um that and then that becomes the culture of the company that’s where you want to be ironically i’m good at that and everything except when it comes to phoenix suns basketball yeah well that’s because you’re fit you’re mentally fit it’s like you know you’re mentally fit with your upper body you never do leg day right so it’s like everybody’s got something in the gym where they’re really strong at it it’s easy for them it’s hard for others and then they have something that’s easy for others hard for them and that might be calf raises that might be whatever and so like you know you could take a bodybuilder but you go put them in a pilates class and they’re struggling because they don’t have the flexibility or the maybe the core strength of coordination to be able to do some some movements and so everybody’s got these moments that are these situations that are harder for them like ben wilson i’m curious for you uh what’s the thing give me yours what’s the adversity’s disaster strike situation where you’re pretty good and then what’s the adversity or disaster strike situation where you’re pretty weak what’s your version of leg day i’m actually like um because i’m a pretty relaxed person i tend to do pretty well with adversity but like personal attacks really get to me like like bad things happening in the world don’t don’t bother me bad things for other people don’t care things for me really care no but it can have like if it hurts my bank account even or like whatever like i just kind of i move on with life but if someone says something bad about my character um or yeah insults me or something like that the the one i think of that i think i dealt with pretty well was i was in barcelona and as it relates to what this guy was talking about and uh i’m sitting there at like a like a cafe so imagine a cafe i’m on la rambla which is like a walking street and so i’m facing this this big street with a lot of people and i’m eating dinner and i’ve got my phone on the table and i’m reading my phone as i eat dinner and this old woman comes up to me and sticks a sign in my face and starts asking for money but the weird thing is i speak spanish and she’s not speaking spanish and i i don’t know what she’s saying she’s got a sign right in my face and she’s she’s speaking clearly asking for money but i can’t tell what she’s saying and i was like what i i don’t understand you and she keeps saying something like go go away i try and kind of show her off she leaves i’m kind of shaken up and after like a couple seconds reorienting myself i go back to my dinner realization there’s someone that stuck the sign in my face and underneath it had taken my phone from off the table and i run off and go search for her and of course even if i’d found her she’d probably handed it off to someone else and the phone was gone and um and that is the kind of thing that i actually like deal with okay like obviously i freaked out for a couple minutes i was was really mad and was stewing but uh eventually i was i just kind of like was like okay i’m okay it was hard to explain like i was freaking out because i didn’t have a phone in a foreign country and it was like scary but i was like i’m okay i’ve got all my fingers and toes and it was like actually a good opportunity to kind of like reevaluate of like all right this is going to mess with a lot of stuff but all the things that actually matter in my life are not affected by this dog being gone right i’m gonna also give a technique uh because one one part’s the philosophy another is a simple technique you can do so how do you actually be still how do you actually get to the response not the thing and it’s really annoying when bad things happen and then the advice you’re getting is like it’s okay don’t worry about it shake it off you know because it’s like no in the moment i feel i feel bad i feel some sense of loss uh you know and so you know it’s very hard and so the actual technique here is a tony robbins technique that he calls the 90 seconds of suffering and the story is tony goes to india and he’s like he’s taking he’s taking his platinum partners and these are the dudes who’s like you go to the beginner tony robbins event you’re like oh my god this guy’s the messiah and so you’re like oh if i pay 25k a year i get to go on a trip with tony and like i get to be a platinum partner and so you pay maybe it’s even more than it’s 100k or something like that you pay some crazy amount of money and you become a platinum partner so he took his platinum partners to india to some like ashram in the mountains and he’s like you know just giving them a unique experience and he goes and this like kind of guru guy in the mountains is like oh mr tony robbins you know blah blah and he’s like he’s like how are you he’s like oh fantastic you know life is amazing i feel so grateful saying all the tony robbins things in his like monster voice and then they’re like the guy was like uh you know i said something like you know but how uh you know uh he said so how are you dealing with your suffering and he’s like he’s like uh suffering like the hell you talking about bro like i’m tony robbins uh i’m not suffering i’m mr positivity i got my platinum partners here we’re in india i’m i’m teaching i’m not suffering they might be suffering i’m not suffering and he’s like but i just saw you a moment ago um you know you’re whatever your employee was saying about the thing they forgot and you got so upset you were telling them how they should do it differently you you totally changed your face oh well you know that was just we have this i want this trip to be great for our partners and you know this person dropped the ball and uh yeah i guess i kind of lost my cool but you know i i really care about bubba and he’s like he caught himself he’s like okay i’m just justifying um he’s like he’s like that’s not suffering though suffering is like look around in india you see people suffering on the streets and he’s like he’s like it’s the same thing they have a deep different cause but they feel the same thing they feel suffering in a moment right and so he goes he goes um you know you he’s like you are tony robbins i see you now and you’re you’re you’re you’re bright and you’re happy you’re lit up you’re you’re energetic you’ve got the you have your charisma all the stuff and he’s like don’t make your happiness so cheap tony robbins and he told him and he was like um happiness cheap what do you mean he goes that amy’s like that guy just did this small thing and your happiness he took your happiness so your happiness had a very low price it only took a very small thing to acquire your happiness he took it away from you and so what you want to do and so my takeaway from this was like you want to have this like you want to be the louis vuitton of happiness you want your happiness to be very expensive that it takes a very very big event even bigger than all your nfts get stolen for for somebody something to take it away so you have to decide the price of your happiness is your happiness going to go away if someone gives you a wrong look or cuts you off in traffic or you know your delivery gets your pizza delivery doordash gets delayed are you gonna get upset and it not upset in a big way but like you lose that joyful state of mind you could otherwise be in and so he gave himself this thing tony came up with this technique called 90 seconds of suffering he goes okay so i started to notice these little moments where i would lose my state i would lose my state of mind where i wasn’t i was no longer in that kind of happy grateful optimistic enthusiastic state of mind he’s like and i would just decide all right i can’t prevent feeling that feeling like it’s very hard to just prevent it but i can contain it and so he’s like i’m going to give myself 90 seconds to suffer and after the 90 seconds i got to let it go but i get 90 seconds to do it and of course what happens is like you know if you don’t give if you don’t time box it it’s very easy to like have something ruin your day or even kind of get you down for a week or a month or a year and you’re depressed all of a sudden so time boxing is valuable but but the funny thing is if you do the 90 seconds of suffering we’re like all right this [  ] happened i’m gonna give myself 90 seconds within like 24 seconds you’ll be like all right whatever i don’t even need to do the whole 90 like oh it’s done like i know it’s gonna end anyways in 90 seconds do i really need to sit here and wait the 90 to feel bad like if it’s going to end in 90 seconds anyway so you don’t even you end up not even doing 30. and so that technique of like giving yourself 90 seconds of suffering whenever whatever happens has been like pretty game-changing for me and so you know i’d encourage you to do that all right and if he’s got stolen all right have at it 90 seconds to suffer suffer fully and as much as you want for 90 seconds but the agreement is at the end of that 90 you you no longer get to get to suffer about this at the end of the 90 you’re going to take a deep breath and you’re going to change the story in your head about what’s making you feel bad because it’s not that your nfts got stolen it’s some story about that it’s how much money you’ve lost how you’re not going to get them back how you spent so long collecting them how that was your favorite one that story is what’s making you feel bad and that after 90 seconds you got to change that story so that’s my advice for one question friday that’s it peace out you