Don’t Waste This Year - 15 Principles of Success

I started out as a broke 17-year-old struggling with bad decisions addiction and ADHD but I'm going to share with you the 15 principles of success that took me from that to selling three companies writing a Wall Street Journal bestselling book and building a $100 million Empire principle number one use fear as a compass I used to think working hard meant grinding my first company I would do 100 hours a week almost burning myself out and it turns out that working hard and doing the right thing are not connected at all working hard doesn't mean hustling

working hard means doing the things that scares you I always think of this awesome quote by Joseph Campbell that says the cave that you fear to enter most holds the treasure that you seek meaning the thing that you don't want to do that conversation that decision showing up to that place that gives you anxiety that freaks you out a little bit that's actually hard work that's fear and the fear is the compass in that situation a lot of people get impostor syndrome but it just means you're stretching your identity if you're actually in a room

when you're the bottom person in the room you're in the right room you just have to rewrite the story that you're telling yourself it's crazy because fear is the path the obstacle is the way as Ryan holiday would put it fear just stands for false evidence appearing real so even though you're scared that's what courage means courage isn't taking action towards the thing you want because you're not scared courage means in the face of fear you make the right decision and fear acts as a North Start you have to take action before you convince yourself

not to do it I would argue in that moment do something quick because if you let your left brain convince you out of it you're going to wake up one day wishing you would have been made that decision regret minimization is acting in spite of fear which brings us to principle number two play to win don't play not to lose I have so many rich friends that are always focused on not paying taxes they'll go so far down that strategy as they'll go and move to another country how about go make more money how about

go try to be better the world rewards those who make courageous decisions even though you know it's going to be hard if you make a decision that is forward movement not away from pain not away from a bad decision moving towards it is going to come with so much positive energy that that momentum will actually help you get there a lot faster so stop trying to act by reducing the downside getting rid of all of it they'll always be there risk is taking decisions with imperfect data if you wait for everything to be perfect trust

me the market would have moved on you you're not going to make any money here's something to consider you will lose I believe that every time I have a business idea I'm probably wrong about some aspect of the business idea and what I do is I move really quick to figure out what aspects I'm wrong about you just have to lose in small amounts enough so that eventually you find the win which brings us to principle number three make your old high your new low a long time ago I was helping one of my buddies

with his business and in a 12-month period he followed everything I showed him and he made over 2 million in Revenue now here's the deal I told him now don't go give it back you have a belief around what you're worth and if you go above that then you start giving things away or creating situations where you lose think of it like your bank account if you're used to having $1,000 in your bank account and it goes down to 50 bucks you're probably going to make a different series of decisions today to make sure that

that balance goes up to 1,000 eventually you might get it up to ,500 and then you might decide to make some decisions to bring it down to 1,000 see how the old high has to become the new low because I need you to operate like it was 50 when it's at 1,500 so that it keeps going up and up and up see most people have these challenges around what they believe they're worth or what they believe should be there and they will make decisions to go back one of my business mentors Ed melet talks about

having a Theros stat of your life and you might believe you're an 80° type of person and if all of a sudden the room heats up to 110 because you get around a bunch of high net worth people you'll inadvertently cool the room down back down to 80 and if it drops down to like 60 or 50 you'll heat up that room to get back to 80 it's a thermostat on your life in regards to what you think you deserve from health wealth Finance your physicality your weight if you don't work on your identity what

you think you're worth you'll always be cooling yourself back down and that's why say you got to make your old high the new low so you operate as if the money's not there or the weight is more than it says so that you keep losing or gaining whatever it is you're trying to go after if you don't build that identity you won't fight for what you think you're worth it's actually being sick and tired of being sick and tired that's going to change the whole game so build your identity to change your life which brings

us to principle number four permission is taken not given I had a client the other day say to me that he wants to make it before he starts making content in many ways he's saying I need to wait to give myself permission to create content cuz I don't feel good enough yet by whose standard by whose definition of capable or successful or made it are you defining yourself and why would you not want to share what you've learned that's helped you so far with other people why wait until everything's figured out your dreams don't need

anyone's signature of approval most big businesses know less about their business than people just starting off and people starting off to look at these companies and go man they must have it all figured out no they don't they're still trying to figure it out they're still trying to figure out their next growth their next product their next opportunity just like everybody else the difference is is they're not waiting for anybody's permission to make a decision you should be looking for forgiveness not permission too often I see people going like if I can just get on

this podcast then my life will change what if they say no you don't need anybody to say yes for you to win you can decide it's like people that work on teams and they think I need a title to give myself permission to even do that what I've learned is a leader is somebody has followers a leader is not a title a leader not something that somebody blesses you with you either show up as a leader and have people that admire what you're doing and want to follow you and learn from you or you don't

and you don't need anybody else's permission to take action which brings us to principle number five measure what matters to the degree that you measure with Precision you will get a result earlier this year I had a goal it was a crazy idea to get visible ABS I know it sounds trit and egotistical but the truth was I heard somebody say in the US there's 22 million millionaires but there's only 3 million people with visible abs and I thought why not me I've been going to the gym my whole life I've been working out doing

ultas doing Iron Man's but I didn't have visible ABS the way I ended up getting there is by tracking everything I measured everything my macros my workouts my calories burned per day making sure I was in deficit my weight every morning every night in 90 days I went from 177% body fat no visible ABS to about 6% body fat absolutely shredded Peter duer is one of my favorite business minds and he has this great quote that says what gets measured gets managed here's the way I do it first thing is I need to know where

I'm going I need to have that Clear Vision of what I'm trying to build most people unfortunately don't know they just say well I want to better life more money I want to look better I want to feel better but those things aren't specific see how there's no way to measure that so if I know where I'm going what I'm trying to create then I start by writing down those goals then I review them frequently things like my bank account I look at my stripe login I get emails every day with daily cash positions I

stand on a scale to make sure my weight and my body fat percentages are in line with my goal the more I measure the daily I set up a standard that makes my goals inevitable if I follow a process and I measure these numbers and they go in the right direction the end state of where I want to end up just happens to happen it's a byproduct of making that decision which brings us to principle number six your net work is your net worth when I moved to San Francisco I didn't know a soul so

I decided to do something a little crazy and organize a Founders dinner essentially I would just invite Founders that I met to dinner and I did this every week for months eventually getting introduced to guy named Alex and introduced me to one of my First Investors in my company Clarity Mark cubin most people do networking wrong I'm going to share with you the best way to do it to connect with people that want to see you win first off the fastest way to create value for other people is to connect them with each other so

I just got off a meeting today at lunch where I brought six of my friends that don't know each other on a zoom call did some quick intros had everybody talk about their latest projects see if there's anything I could help them with and then make sure that they connected with each other in the valley the currency is introductions if you know a good person and another good person and that one person can help the other and they need the help make the intro the other point is you always want to remember people's names there's

nothing worse than seeing somebody that you know and calling them buddy trust me as a person that gets called buddy quite a bit I'm like you don't even remember my name and they're just like well you know I kind of remember meeting you at this dinner it's like it's all good but if you want to make an impression use it and remember it because it's worth everything to them the other part is you need to know what people want when you're talking to somebody your job should be asking questions to figure out where they're stuck

what they're having trouble with what are some of the big opportunities they're trying to execute on that they might need some support and then think to yourself how can you help maybe you have a skill maybe you've seen a reference maybe an article that you read recently you could share with them you being that value added person in their life is going to create the opportunity for them to think fondly of you and it's all about reach and reputation who knows you and what do they think of you but you won't really get rich unless

you learn principle number seven spend money to save time not time to save save money remember this one time I was working on a startup with my co-founder and we just got ourselves into a pickle and I call him up and I'm like hey man let's meet at the office and he says I can be there in 3 hours I just got to get some laundry done and then I'll be in and I thought to myself you make 100 Grand a year and you're going to go wash your laundry instead of just dropping it off

at the wash and fold and you walk by three of them on the way to the office he's like yeah you're kind of right and I said man I'll see you in an hour you have to go solve bigger problems right now hire to buy back your time not to add capacity most people just keep adding staff to start new projects instead of getting their time back to execute on the ones they know we going to make them money cuz they're involved to do that you need to understand your buyback rate so you just take

the amount of money you make per year divided by 2,000 that'll give you a dollar amount so if you make $40 an hour you should try to find anything you do in your life where you can pay one quarter of that to somebody else to do it for you so that you can reinvest that money and you can pay someone $10 an hour to do something do it which brings us to principle number eight default to action this one drives me crazy the amount of times I've seen 40-page business plans from people talking about strategy

this and process that and hire this and I'm just like the only thing you should be doing right now is selling something to a stranger to start the business when I started Martell media which is in multi8 fig business today I was on a hike with a buddy and I had this idea to do something completely different and instead of talking about it I pulled out my phone and I texted a friend and got the whole thing started I sold almost $100,000 of what I wanted to sell without talking to one person made the offer

figured out how to take payment right after I sold it and then moved the business forward what your first move is matters less than just making it too often people try to make the right decision in business make a decision try to make it right afterwards you know Jim Collins calls these bullets we want to fire bullets towards the target cuz we don't even know if we're close to hitting it once we nail it and we're getting towards the center that's when we load up the Cannonball and we take a big shot maybe and I

hate them business plans or hiring a bunch of people or getting an office or raising a bunch of capital but doing that before you know that you've got a there there that the dog will hunt makes no sense you want to be patient with results but impatient with action which brings us to principle number nine which is simple scales complex fails one of my favorite examples of this is Steve Jobs after he sold next to Apple and he came back he looked at all the products and decided to cut almost 95% of all products down

to a single product line they had built 15 different desktop models and he cut them all except for one if you want to grow something fast if you want to grow things with ease you have to focus on Simplicity cuz complexity is easy complexity is human complexity is the default focus is everything in business follow one course until successful if you're an entrepreneur you get to choose the rules of business instead of adding things think about how you can remove what could you take away and it wouldn't break the system that is a simple version

of what you've got which brings us to success principle number 10 make people Rich it is the first thing I think about every time I start a new business I want to figure out how do I make somebody else Rich every one of my executive leaders have a compensation strategy where they have unlimited upside I don't want to tell somebody you can only make 300 Grand a year I want you to make 3 million a year I want you to make 30 million year if you go and execute and create value that the whole team

can celebrate in I don't want them to be capped I had a friend that fired his top sales guy cuz he was making too much money do you know how silly that is cuz if you paid him 400,000 a year that means he made you 4 million and you fired him cuz he was making more than you that's not a winning strategy you receive what you desire for others if you don't want other people to be rich you won't be rich get obsessed with people's goals and problems figure out what they want to achieve in

life in regards to their personal goals and figure out what problems you have in your business that you might offer them to go help you overcome and if they do that you help them achieve their goals that way they're aligned with what you need done you have to have a big enough vision for your business so that your team's dreams and goals can fit inside of them cuz if not they'll find some other place where it will which brings us to principle number 11 change your words and you'll change your world I've coached tens of

thousands of people all over the world I can tell immediately if someone's going to succeed or not just by the words they use when you use the words like should could would you're already expecting failure by just the language you're using to describe your situation or the future you want to create language you use isn't just about communicating other people it's a signal to yourself if you don't talk with confidence about the world you want to create then your ability won't come across as confident and nobody's going to want to jump out of their seat

to help you with it the way you describe your situation will either give you hope or fear you don't think words matter trust me your language matters I remember one time listen to a guy and I really wanted to record that conversation and transcribe it and ask him to read it back to himself and say do you think that person is confident do you think that person is certain about themselves do you think that person is somebody you'd want to bet on I don't think people hear themselves enough or don't pay attention to their words

and if they did they would shape their whole reality completely different because certainty comes from language Today's Energy shapes tomorrow's reality those words will shape that energy in your reality of tomorrow which brings us to success principle number 12 actions prove your priorities there is a huge difference between what people say they want and what they actually do a lot of people might say they want to lose weight but then you watch them and they go and eat at a buffet they go to the gym maybe once a month they want to get rich but

they never look at their bank account I don't care what you say you want I care what you do if you tell me something's important to you show me your calendar and your bank account and I'll show you your priorities what you invest your time and money on is your priority people say oh my family's important well show me where date night is well I'm busy with my business okay what's important in your business well I need more customers show me how much time you're spending on marketing how much money are you spending on marketing

how much time you spending on sales calls all your time spent Building Product or doing the service it's like yeah well I have to build the thing so I can sell it no you don't most people lie to themselves about what's important to them your priorities is all about saying no to something so you can say yes to something else which brings us to principle number 13 ask better questions anytime I coach a CEO or founder I always ask them a simple question if somebody bought your business tomorrow what's the first thing they would change

then it's a followup of why haven't you made that decision yet that simple question will program their mind because an uncreative mind can spot the wrong answer but it takes a very creative mind to spot the wrong question and the wrong question will drive you down a path that you can't come back from here's one of my favorite questions ask somebody what are you pretending not to know how to do why are you pretending who would you be without that story a properly placed question can just shift your whole point of view and get you

crystal clear on the next steps to move your dreams forward the coolest part is the best leaders in the world they don't give feedback they ask questions they coach through their questions they help people realize what they should see but they can't see cuz it's right in front of their face there's a question I ask myself every day as an example to get me on on track to keep me focused to bring the right energy and it's how can I appreciate even more God's grace and guidance in this moment and I can ask myself that

3 four five six seven times a day and it just gets me back on track so what's your question how do you get back on track after having a hard time Tony Robbins has this great quote and he says the quality of your questions will dictate the quality of your life ask better questions live a better life which brings us to principle number 14 learn do teach 8 years ago I was speaking at an event in a prison and I met a guy that absolutely blew me away two months ago I get off stage who

do I find there this gentleman he wanted to say hi he'd been out for a couple years and he's now the executive director of a nonprofit helping people transform their lives who are recently incarcerated just like him I came from that environment as a teenager see you'll never know the impact you can make if you just follow this simple rule work harder on yourself than you do on your job become more so you have more to give other people have more to serve with other people if you get out of your situation it's your responsibility

to send the elevator back down and help people come out of that hole the philosophy of integrating your learning comes from nursing school when they talk about it they say you got to learn it you got to do it and you got to teach it if you learn do and teach you integrate that knowledge into your life it becomes who you are not just information that you can memorize and recite to somebody else it impacts your life and if you become the example then other people will feel that energy and be inspired by you and

that's why having that gentleman come up to me after I got off stage to tell me that I inspired and now he's inspiring thousands of people just like we were that's crazy you can do the same thing which brings us to the last success principle number 15 Define your why 2024 was a crazy year new businesses big opportunities stages books just everything was bananas and I was already maxed out but I had something on my heart I needed to do and it drove me my whole life it's been a big part of my life working

with Ru but I started a new program called Kings Club it's a free youth program that I Mentor 100 kids every couple weeks personally in this building and it's a passion project that's kind of become a movement in our local community it's bananas I get to sit down and have a personal connection with these kids I get to Mentor them I get to show them my Supercar collection we get to talk about real life challenges that are facing them now and my favorite part is I give every one of them a book thinking Grow Rich

my why has been clear from the day I got sober out of rehab I believe that your purpose sits right next to sometimes the worst thing that's ever happened to you and for me clearly being incarcerated as a teenager really affected my soul and if I can do that for other people that is my everything if you have a why that's bigger than your fear then you'll do it you won't second guess yourself you won't put it off your why has to be so powerful that it makes the how seem small it doesn't have to

change the world it just has to change your world start with your community start with your backyard so many people want to get up and like I want to change the whole world how about you just start with your world how about you start with your community you have people that are in need all around you you don't have to make it this big you just have to start if you have a y attached to your do it'll Propel you forward with more energy and faster than you could ever imagine if you want to learn

the 40 brutal truths I wish I knew in my 20s click the video and I'll see you on the other side