A One Question Friday episode where caller Colin gets his NFTs stolen and asks how to handle getting gut-punched. Shaan and guest Ben Levy (CEO of Milk Road) walk through frameworks for dealing with adversity — distinguishing reaction from response, choosing your story, never playing victim, and Tony Robbins’ “90 seconds of suffering” technique.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Ben Levy (CEO of Milk Road, guest), Colin (caller)
One Question Friday Intro [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, it’s One Question Friday time. I like that name. Sam is traveling, so I got my boy Ben here — Ben Levy. Not producer Ben, not “powerful producer Ben” — this is Ben Levy, the CEO of the Milk Road and 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 Bens. This is one of the Bens. Ben, what’s up man?
Ben: 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.
Shaan: This is true. All right, let’s do this. One Question Friday. I think we have an audio clip — let’s play it. I haven’t heard this yet, so let’s see what it is.
Colin’s Question: NFTs Got Stolen [00:00:35]
Colin: Hey guys, my name is Colin. I just had all of my NFTs stolen today. My question is — and I’m sure you’ve been through something like this before — when you get gut-punched like that, has that happened to you? What happened, and how did you work through it?
Shaan: Oh man. I could feel the defeat. I could feel the pain in his voice there at the end. That was a soul-crushed “thank you.”
Okay. Colin, you got your NFTs stolen. I feel for you — that’s no fun. That’s a crime, right? Somebody came and stole your property. It’s digital property, but a crime has been committed.
You’ve got to kind of separate things out. Here’s my formula for how to handle it. Have I had somebody steal a bunch of my property before? Not really. But there are different flavors of gut punch, and I’ve had my share.
Step 1: Be Still — Reaction vs. Response [00:01:30]
Shaan: Here’s my formula for how to handle it.
The first step is just: be still. I mean this in a zen way. What’s going to happen over the next 24 to 48 hours is your mind is going to go to a bunch of different places. You’re going to get angry. You’re going to feel sad. You’re going to feel upset at yourself. You’re going to feel upset at others. You’re going to feel upset at the fact that you can’t get it back. So you’re going to hate crypto. You’re going to feel a bunch of emotions by default.
What you want to do is not just react — you want to respond. What’s the difference between a reaction and a response? A reaction is what you do right away. It’s impulsive, and typically we don’t love our reactions because they happen in a more primal way. Whereas a response is what happens when you pause for a second and choose how you’re going to react.
A reaction is typically not something you’re choosing. A response is something you’re choosing. This happens to me multiple times a day — I’ve got to check myself: am I reacting or responding here? Which one do I want to do? I can do both, but I’d rather respond.
So the first thing is: be still. Distance yourself from it emotionally first.
Step 2: Logistics, Then Choose Your Story [00:03:00]
Shaan: Then you say, all right, how am I going to respond to this? There are some logistical steps you can take — try to get it back, report it, try to figure out who did it, notify people in the community so others don’t fall for the same scam. But then let’s say you’ve done the logistics and there’s no happy ending. That’s where you have to do what I call: decide what story is true.
In any event, anything that happens, there are multiple stories. To simplify, there are two stories: the story that’ll make you feel bad and the story that’ll make you feel good. They’re both stories. They both have truth to them. It’s just a matter of which angle you’re looking from.
So you’ve got to decide: which story am I going to roll with? Am I going to roll with the version of this that makes me feel really bad, or the version that makes me feel good?
I know that probably sounds hard in the moment — you just got a bunch of your stuff stolen. Which is why we first tried to distance ourselves from it. But that’s where you’re going to have to go.
Imagine a breakup. Most people when they have a breakup feel bad and they choose a story that makes them feel worse: “All those years we spent together were wasted. I’m not good enough.” Whatever the reasons are, we come up with a story that makes us feel bad. Or we come up with a story that makes us feel good: “Now I know what I really want. Now I’m ready for the right person. I want to walk out into the street and just look left and right and say: next. I’m ready.”
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 the story — not just having the default one put on you.
Ben’s Crypto Gut Punch Story [00:05:00]
Shaan: That’s my mindset framework, Ben. What do you think? You’ve had your share of gut punches. Have you had something like this?
Ben: Yeah. In crypto, I think about a year ago I had a few ETH stolen out of my wallet and I was crushed. I actually called you and I was like, “Dude, it sucks — I just lost a few ETH 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. That’s just the name of the game.
My perspective is: yeah, I’ve definitely been gut-punched a ton in crypto. And I also feel like every crypto trade I’ve ever done, I’m mad that I didn’t sell at the right time, or I held too long, or bought too late. That’s the nature of volatility. I’m going to get a huge home run because I play this game, and I learn from my mistakes.
The Wild West of Crypto [00:06:00]
Shaan: There’s also this phrase with investing: I’ve never done an investment right. On an investment that worked out, I should have always been earlier and bet more. On an investment that went wrong, I shouldn’t have bet at all, or I was too late. So you’ll never on any investment feel like you did it right — you’ll always be kicking yourself wishing you’d done it differently.
I think what you said is right: it’s the nature of the game. Crypto, NFTs — this is the wild wild west right now. There’s a reason your NFT can go up 10x in price in one month, or 100x in a year. I don’t know exactly where Board Apes were, but I think a year ago they were under one ETH each and now they’re like 140 or something. So 140x in a year.
One of the reasons you can get those types of gains is because it’s the wild wild west. But what comes with the wild wild west is: it’s not safe. There are places where you can stub your toe.
Don’t Be Surprised the Roller Coaster Goes Down [00:07:15]
Shaan: Me and Sam said this on a pod once: if you become an entrepreneur or investor, and every time things go poorly you’re emotionally a wreck, it’s like you waited in line to get on a roller coaster, strapped yourself in, and then when it went down you were like, “Oh my god, get me off this thing.” Dude, why did you get on a roller coaster?
If you choose entrepreneurship, you choose investing — you’ve got to wake up and understand what you signed up for. Like the last four months, 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. I don’t even see the color green anymore. I’m starting to text people on Android just so I can see the green speech bubble — I just want to see green.
But that’s the reality. I signed up to be an investor. What did I think — it’s always going to go up? I signed up to do this crazy crypto stuff where I’m a self-sovereign individual and I’m custodying my own assets. Well, there are going to be times where I didn’t custody them very well and they got stolen.
Same thing with being an entrepreneur: you’ve got to ask yourself, am I just complaining that the roller coaster went up and down?
Never Play Victim [00:08:45]
Shaan: That’s a way to not let yourself be a victim. One of the most positive traits somebody can have is that they never let themselves be a victim. No matter what happens, they view themselves as the person in control and the root cause of whatever occurred. In doing so, they give themselves the power to make things good and the accountability when things go bad.
That’s a decision you’ve got to make up front: am I going to let myself play victim and look for self-pity or pity from others? Or do I take that off the table? I say nope — I’m never going to play that game. That means on days where my stuff gets stolen, it’s not “somebody stole my NFTs.” It’s “I let my NFTs be stolen.” You take control over what happened. It hurts in those moments, but the decision to never play victim is one that pays off in spades for the rest of your life.
Shaan: Ben, what did I miss?
Ben: It’s also a great opportunity for a Twitter thread: “How I Got My NFT Stolen.”
Every Disaster Is a Story [00:09:45]
Shaan: Yeah! This is the beginning of every great story. I’ve had this so many times. I’ve gotten a cease and desist letter and we turned it into marketing for our company. I’ve had it where Google or Facebook launches a clone of our app, and your investors send you a link: “Did you see this?” Yeah, I saw it. I saw that Facebook cloned our app pixel by pixel, and that a 500-billion-dollar company is now competing with us. Yes, I saw the news.
But in that moment it’s like: this is our chance, this is our story. Of course they’re going to copy us — we’re onto something. Of course they’re going to copy us pixel for pixel, because we have the right solution. And you have to decide what story you’re going to tell yourself, your team, and 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’ve got to choose.
The Suns and the Price of Your Happiness [00:10:45]
Shaan: Ben, I tell you this all the time. You started this off talking about the Suns winning. Ben, how do you feel when the Suns win?
Ben: Amazing.
Shaan: Ben, how do you feel when the Suns lose?
Ben: Pretty down on myself. Pretty down on everything.
Shaan: So you ride the roller coaster and you let yourself feel bad. That’s a choice you’re making right now. At some point you might decide to play the game differently: is it possible to feel great when your team wins and not feel bad when your team loses? Yes, that is possible. It sounds like it’s breaking the rules, but that’s what you do when you’re a life hacker. You play the game on your terms.
And like when your businesses have issues — I think you don’t let it get you down at all. You’re able to take the wins in stride really well. Do you have an example of something where we had a situation where other people would have felt down but we spun it?
Ben: I mean, I think we’re in one right now. We sent 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 why — we’re trying to figure it out. There’s one version where you freak out about that and let it ruin your week. There’s another version where you just take it in stride and know you’re going to figure it out.
The Highs and Lows Slack Channel [00:12:00]
Shaan: Yeah, you fast forward a year from now, this will be a forgotten footnote on the overall story. Even when something really bad happens — in my e-commerce business, our entire shipment for Christmas got seized, flagged, inspected, and we had to do a recall. All this stuff over a one-eighth-of-an-inch discrepancy on one item found during a random inspection. And people on my team were all like, “Oh my god, this is so unfair, this is so bad.”
And I created a channel in our Slack called “Highs and Lows” and I said, let’s put them here. Let’s document the highs and the lows. I think every startup should do this honestly — document the highs and lows. Because when things feel really bad and you go in there to write it down, you see the last entry from six months ago. You’re like, oh yeah, that felt pretty bad too — but I’ve totally forgotten about it. Our business has grown 2x since then. Just the way that one turned out to be nothing, this one’s going to be nothing too. I’m going to eat this and use it as an opportunity to learn. We didn’t even know about this one-eighth-of-an-inch rule — we had to go change the measurements of something. I’m glad we knew now versus when it’s bigger. I’m glad this happened because that’s going to lead to all these good things.
The Warehouse Manager Who Tried to Compete [00:13:45]
Shaan: Here’s another one from our e-commerce business. The warehouse manager we had hired wasn’t working out, and then we found out they were trying to copy our business and launch a competitor. They were in the warehouse, they saw the business going great, and they wanted a piece of it.
That was a moment where our team immediately felt betrayed and upset. “What should we do? We’re going to have to make a change. It’s going to be so hard.” And those are the moments where you need to show the most poise. That’s when strength matters — when things get hard. When things are easy, that’s not when strength matters.
So it’s like: I’ve been training for this. I’ve been training for these types of moments. Finally I’ve got a reason to use these muscles to be strong here. It was all about poise. First: be still, don’t overreact. Second: decide how we’re going to respond to this situation, not react.
And in that response, we ended up finding this amazing manager and saving all this money. We couldn’t have seen that up front — in the moment it felt bad. But two months later it’s like, we found this thing that’s saving us two dollars per order, which is going to add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars of extra profit because we found this new manager who found a new process, which we would have never done had that disaster not struck.
Once you go through life enough and have enough experience, you realize: it’s all working for me, not against me. Once you decide that, the next time disaster strikes, you think: all right, how is this working for me? You don’t panic. The people around you are like, how does this person never panic? How do they never freak out about this stuff? And then that becomes the culture of the company.
Leg Day: Where Are You Strong and Where Are You Weak? [00:15:45]
Shaan: Ironically, I’m good at that in everything except Phoenix Suns basketball.
Ben: Well, that’s because you’re mentally fit in some areas but not others. You’re fit in your upper body, you never do leg day. Everybody’s got something in the gym where they’re really strong, and then something that’s easy for others but hard for them. You could take a bodybuilder, put them in a pilates class, and they’re struggling because they don’t have the flexibility or core strength.
Shaan: Ben Levy, I’m curious — what’s your version of leg day? What’s the adversity situation where you’re pretty good, and what’s the one where you’re pretty weak?
Ben: I’m a pretty relaxed person, so I tend to do well with adversity in general. But personal attacks really get to me. Bad things happening in the world — doesn’t bother me. Bad things happening to me financially or in my business — I just kind of move on. But if someone says something bad about my character or insults me, that really gets to me.
Ben’s Barcelona Phone Theft Story [00:17:00]
Ben: The one I think of — that I actually think I dealt with pretty well — happened in Barcelona. I’m sitting at a cafe on La Rambla, which is a big walking street. I’m facing this street with tons of people, eating dinner, phone on the table, reading as I eat.
This old woman comes up and sticks a sign in my face, starts asking for money. The weird thing is I speak Spanish and she’s not speaking Spanish. She’s got a sign right in my face and she’s clearly asking for money but I can’t tell what she’s saying. I’m like, “What? I don’t understand you.” She keeps saying something, I kind of wave her off, she leaves. I’m a bit shaken up.
After a couple seconds, I go back to my dinner — and I realize: someone stuck that sign in my face, and while it was there, someone else had taken my phone from off the table. I ran off to search for her, and of course even if I’d found her she’d have handed it off to someone else. The phone was gone.
And that’s the kind of thing I actually deal with okay. Obviously I freaked out for a couple minutes, was really mad and stewing. But eventually I was just like — I’m okay. I was freaking out because I didn’t have a phone in a foreign country and it felt scary. But I’m okay. I’ve got all my fingers and toes. It was actually a good opportunity to reevaluate: all the things that actually matter in my life are not affected by this thing being gone.
Tony Robbins’ 90 Seconds of Suffering [00:19:00]
Shaan: I’m also going to give a technique, because one part is the philosophy and another is an actual thing you can do. It’s really annoying when bad things happen and the advice you’re getting is, “It’s okay, don’t worry about it, shake it off” — because in the moment you feel bad. You feel a sense of loss. So the actual technique here is a Tony Robbins technique he calls the 90 Seconds of Suffering.
The story is: Tony goes to India with his Platinum Partners — these are the people who’ve been to the beginner Tony Robbins event, thought he was the messiah, paid 25K or 100K or whatever to go on a trip with him. He takes them to some ashram in the mountains.
They meet this guru guy, and the guru says, “Mr. Tony Robbins, how are you?” And Tony is like, “Oh, fantastic! Life is amazing, I feel so grateful” — all the Tony Robbins things in his monster voice. And then the guru says, “But how are you dealing with your suffering?”
Tony’s like, “Suffering? What are you talking about? I’m Tony Robbins. I’m not suffering. I’m Mr. Positivity. I’ve got my Platinum Partners, we’re in India, I’m teaching — I’m not suffering. They might be suffering, I’m not.”
And the guru says, “But I just saw you a moment ago. Your employee said something about what they forgot, and you got so upset, you were telling them how they should do it differently. Your face completely changed.”
Tony’s like, “Well, we have this trip to make great for our partners and this person dropped the ball — I really care about — ” and he caught himself. He’s like, okay, I’m just justifying.
And the guru said, “That’s suffering. It has a different cause than what you see on the streets of India, but they feel the same thing — suffering in a moment.”
Then the guru said, “You are Tony Robbins. I see you now — you’re bright, you’re happy, you’re lit up, you’re energetic, you have your charisma. Don’t make your happiness so cheap, Tony Robbins.” And Tony was like, “Happiness cheap? What do you mean?”
He goes, “That guy did this small thing and took your happiness. Your happiness had a very low price. It only took a very small event to take it away. You want to be the Louis Vuitton of happiness — you want your happiness to be very expensive, so it takes a very very big event to take it away.”
How to Apply the 90-Second Technique [00:22:00]
Shaan: So you have to decide: what’s the price of your happiness? Is your happiness going to go away if someone gives you a wrong look, cuts you off in traffic, your pizza delivery gets delayed? You lose that joyful state of mind you could otherwise be in.
So Tony came up with this technique: the 90 Seconds of Suffering. He started noticing these little moments where he’d lose his state — he was no longer in that happy, grateful, optimistic, enthusiastic state of mind. And he decided: I can’t prevent feeling that feeling. It’s very hard to just prevent it. But I can contain it. I’m going to give myself 90 seconds to suffer. After the 90 seconds, I’ve got to let it go — but I get those 90 seconds.
What happens if you don’t time-box it? It’s very easy to have something ruin your day, or get you down for a week or a month, and suddenly you’re depressed. Time-boxing is valuable.
But the funny thing is, if you do the 90 seconds of suffering — like, all right, this happened, I’m going to give myself 90 seconds — within about 24 seconds you’re like, all right, whatever. I don’t even need the whole 90. If it’s going to end in 90 seconds anyway, do I really need to sit here and wait it out? You end up not even doing 30.
So the technique of giving yourself 90 seconds of suffering whenever something happens has been pretty game-changing for me.
Wrapping Up: The Story You Tell Yourself [00:23:30]
Shaan: So, Colin — your NFTs got stolen. Have at it. 90 seconds to suffer, suffer as fully as you want. But the agreement is: at the end of those 90 seconds, you no longer get to suffer about this. You’re going to take a deep breath and change the story in your head.
Because it’s not that your NFTs got stolen that’s making you feel bad — it’s the story about it. How much money you’ve lost. How you’re not going to get them back. How long you spent collecting them. How that was your favorite one. That story is what’s making you feel bad.
After 90 seconds, you’ve got to change that story.
That’s my advice for One Question Friday. That’s it. Peace out.