no matter how good we are we can still be better you can always be better you have enough right now to change your life you have enough right now to flip this world upside down you have enough you got enough power you got enough anointing you got enough Grace you got enough patience you got enough gifting to make your money get out of debt get yourself together and change everything about your world if somebody else is working 50 hours you're working 100 you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as uh
the other company we know that a great life doesn't happen by chance it happens by Design if you outwork everybody if you try to be a little smarter than everybody if you try to be a better sales person than everybody if you try to be better prepared than everybody you've got your best chance I need you to fight I see you sitting at your desk and you doing work and you really want to go home but no you got to fight come on I see you trying to build the business and trying to get those
clients and and you're trying to promote this thing and you're trying to get it up the ground keep fighting I had the whole world telling me that I could never be an entrepreneur I had everybody telling me that I was dumb for trying to leave the comfort of trying to be a doctor I had the whole world telling me that I was throwing every sacrifice my parents made for me away so I had to work one of the hard truths about life is that success takes time and this is what the greatest entrepreneurs have done
a drive to to do more to create to bring something in to this world entrepreneurship is hard you got to work a lot and in the early days I mean I was working around the clock 7 days a week never took a vacation never spent money I mean you got to be willing to work so why don't we learn about money in school and he looked at me and says because the government doesn't let us teach that subject if you're going to win the fight for your future you're going to have to prepare your mindset
for the workload do you want to go down the entrepreneurial Journey take the risk and do that I love that risk I love the whole journey with that and I don't mind working hard and doing that if that's not for you fine this is the difference is an entrepreneur must know about money well they they're no longer entrepreneurs and it says an employee doesn't have to know anything about money there's a difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset the psychology of a champion is just different Hustlers are just wir differently the Hustler's mentality
is how can this challenge be my opportunity and what can I learn and when you find your passion it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you Direction it gives you purpose uh you can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and the best thing is to have a calling you can't skip steps you have to put one foot in front of the other things take time there are no shortcuts but you want to do those steps with you know passion and ferocity in order to do
a lot of these things you need to know how the universe works and you need to know how economy Works um and you also need to be able to bring a lot of people together to work with you to create something most people don't consider that they don't do the work they don't learn it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets now is the time to take risk I would encourage you to take risks now do something bold you won't regret it you guys will find that you have passions and having a passion
is a gift I think we all have passions and you don't get to uh choose them they pick you but you have to be alert to them you have to be looking for them and when you find your passion it's a fantastic gift for you because it gives you Direction it gives you purpose uh you can have a job or you can have a career or you can have a calling and the best thing is to have a calling and if you find your passion you'll have that and all your work won't feel like work
to you many many kids and many grownup do figure out uh over time what their passions are and sometimes we let our I don't think it's that hard I think what happens though sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions uh and so that's what needs to be guarded against my job one of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold and people love to focus on things that aren't yet working um and that's good it's human nature that kind of divine discontent can be very helpful
but uh you really you know it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets and you need to encourage that and if you're going to take bold bets they're going to be experiments and if they're experiments you don't know ahead of time whe they're going to work uh experiments are by their very nature uh prone to failure but big successes a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozen of things that didn't work so you know bold bets AWS Kindle Amazon Prime our third party seller business all of those things are examples of bul
bets that uh that that did work and they pay for a lot of experiments I've made billions of dollars of failures at amazon.com literally billions of dollars of failures and uh uh you know you might remember pets.com or Cosmo or you know give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily uh none of those things are fun but the but they also they don't matter what really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment companies that don't Embrace failure they eventually get in a desperate position where they the only thing they can do is
make a kind of Hail Mary bat at the very end of their corporate existence whereas companies that are you know uh making bets all along even you know big bets but not bet the company bets I don't I don't believe in bet the company bets that's when you're desperate that's that's the last thing you can do you need to be um if you Nimble and robust so you need to be able to take a punch uh and you also need to be quick and and and and Innovative and and doing new things at a high
speed that's that's the best defense against the future and you have to always be leaning into the future if you're you're if you're leaning away from the future the future is going to win every time never ever ever lean away from the future we all have adversity in our lives you I I I would I would I doubt if you really you know if you know somebody any friend or anybody that you talk to um uh there's no lack of adversity and the uh and by the way that's good because it's what teaches us how
to get back up you fall down you get back up it always happens and you know you get certain um gifts in life and you want to take advantage of those um but you I guess my advice on adversity and uh success would be to be proud not of your gifts but of your hard work and your choices so you know you may be the kinds of gifts you get like you know you might be really good at math it might be really easy for you that's a kind of gift um but practicing that math
and taking it to the next step that could be very challenging and hard um and take a lot of sweat that's a choice you can't really be proud of your gifts because they were given to you um you can be grateful for them and thankful for them um and but your choices you choose to work hard um you choose to do hard things those are choices that you can be proud of being an inventor requires cu the world is so complicated you have to be a domain expert I mean in a way even if even
if you're not at the beginning you have to learn learn learn learn learn enough so that you become a domain expert but the danger is once you've become a domain expert you can be trapped by that knowledge and so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that you know 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind have that that look at freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that's the key um to to inventing you have to have both and I think that is intentional
I think all of us have that inside of us and we can all do it but you have to be intentional about it you have to say yeah I am going to become an expert and I'm going to keep my beginner's mind you can't skip steps you have to put one foot in front of the other things take time uh you there are no shortcuts and uh but but but you want to do those steps with you know passion and ferocity it's easy to have ideas it's very hard to turn an idea into a successful
product there are a lot of steps in between and it takes persistence relentlessness so I always tell people who are you know who think they want to be entrepreneurs it's you need a combination of stubborn relentlessness and flexibility and you have to know when to be which and basically you need to be stubborn on your vision because otherwise it'll be too easy to give up but you need to be very flexible on the details because as you go along pursuing your vision you'll find that some of your preconceptions were wrong and you're going to need
to be able to change those things so I think uh taking an idea successfully all the way to the market and turning it into a real product that people care about and that really improves people's lives is a lot of hard work don't try to chase what is kind of the hot Passion of the day I think we actually saw this I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts but I think we saw it uh in the internet World quite a bit where you know at sort of peak of the
uh sort of Internet uh you know Mania and say 1999 you found people who were uh you know very passionate something they kind of left that job and decided I'm going to you know do something in the internet because it's you know it's almost like the you know the 1849 gold rush in a way I mean you find that people uh if you go back and study the history of the 1849 Gold Rush you find that you know uh at that time everybody who was in within shouting distance of California was you know they might
have been a doctor but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold and that that almost never works um and even if it does work uh you know According to some Metric financial success or whatever it might be I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied so you really need to be very clear with yourself and I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80 looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have that
works for that works for career decisions it works for family decisions um you know do you want I I have a a 14-month-old son and it's very easy for me to if I think about myself when I'm 80 I know I want to watch that little guy grow up um and so it's I don't want to be 8 and think shoot you know I I missed that whole thing and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had and so on and so on so if you think about that
so I I guess another thing that I would recommend to people is that they always take a long-term point of view and I think this is something something about which there's a lot of controversy you know there's a there's a you know some a lot of people and I'm just not one of them believe that you should live for the now I think what you do is you think about the the the the great expanse of Time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to
leave you ultimately satisfied um so this is just my this is the way it works for me and I mean this is everybody needs to find that for themsel um so I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction and you need to find one that works works for you do the rich people cringe and say don't tell them that Robert yes yes yes don't tell people what they what you know keep them poor so my father was the head of Education PhD all that stuff I go home and ask him said why don't
we learn about money in school and he looked at me and says because the government doesn't let us teach that subject the government tells us what we can teach and what we can't teach and I thought that was strange and I said but aren't we going to school to learn about money he says no your job is to get a job I said but you get a job to earn money he goes no you're supposed to just get a job I'm going no no no no no isn't the purpose of a job to earn money
he goes you're correct I said so why don't I just learn about money I can skip the job part you know and he got flustered and he said if you want to learn about money why don't you ask your best friend's father about money I said Why That's Mike so why ask him he says because Mike's father is an entrepreneur and I said what am what are you he says I'm an employee I'm a government employee I went oh what's the difference this is the differences an entrepreneur must know about money or they they're no
longer entrepreneurs and he says an employee doesn't have to know anything about money cuz the government will take care of the company will take care of so I'm kid I'm all confused but I took my dad's advice and I TR the over to Mike's Father's office and knocked on his door and I said hey I'm here 9 years old teach me about money he says beat it kid you know but that's where the story of Rich Dad Poor Dad started and finally through persistence my rich dad started teaching me about money on one condition and
that condition was he would never pay me he says the moment I pay you you think like an employee he says that's the Trap entrepreneurs work for free and now I'm 9 years old my head's going cracking in half he says you never want a paycheck you understand that kid said okay I got it and he saids well how do I make money he says that's what entrepreneurs figure out he was like so how do I learn about money so he would just break out a Monopoly game board so I would work for free I
pick up cigarette butts and he had hotels and restaurants and I would clean and do menal tasks and as I got older I started getting into office work and marketing and accounting and I was an apprentice basically but I always work for free and he would teach me about money but the way he taught me about money was playing Monopoly and I finally one day I got upset I said well when are you going to teach me about money he says what do you think think we're doing we're playing Monopoly he goes no no no
no what do you think we're doing we're playing Monopoly says what do you think we're doing I don't know I'm teaching you about money and then that's why you know you have one greenh house you know he says there's many formulas for great success in money there's thousands of them but one of the best ones found on the game of Monopoly it still is today four green houses one red h said what he says one of the greatest ways to acquire great wealth is playing Monopoly in real life four green houses one red hotel but
is that all there is he goes that's it and he says what do you think I'm doing and I went I don't know so then he took me out he showed me his green houses and 10 years later when I was 19 I was now in school in New York and I come back to Hawaii and Rich Dad had bought the biggest piece of land smack dab in the middle of Wy ke Beach and when you go to Wy ke beach today you'll see the Hiatt Regency hotel that was his hotel just like the game
of Monopoly just like the game of Monopoly acquired assets and they became bigger assets he just kept it was called an assemblage because that property wasn't that big at the time so he had to buy out all the small guys cuz w k was a little dirt water little town so he buy out this shop owner buy that shop owner and it took him a while but he finally assembled this large piece of property and then he then he and hayatt put up this giant hotel you know I just and it just sold for $800
million so that's how I learned about money I've had Financial crashes I've had people stabb me in the back but they're all good because I grow from it that's spirituality right you know people who are afraid of making mistakes like they teach in school they don't ever grow because spirituality is there's good and there's bad there's right and there's wrong there's up and there's down most people only want to be right they only want to be positive well you can't have that that's not reality well I wasn't poor by most people's standards but I came
from a family with a poor attitude if you know what I mean because Rich poor middle class poverty starts with a fundamental attitude poverty has passed on it's taught in your families and middle class is taught in families and so the people right now who are sitting at home who are struggling financially or worried about money or unhappy they may be making a lot of money but unhappy with what they're doing it was probably taught to you you know your super ego was taught get a job work hard or you or you'll never be rich
or the rich are evil or whatever the school system will never teach you about money the school system was designed to teach you to be an employee which is important or a doctor or a lawyer a specialist but never about money and what most people lack is real business knowledge like accounting you know like debt like taxes you got to know that stuff but they don't teach it in school to anybody so and and then when people ask me how did your Rich Dad learn this when your poor dad a pH day didn't and the
answer is very simply my rich dad was my best friend's father his father died when he was 13 so his Rich Dad had this family business at 13 to run so he had to drop out of school which was this blessing you know those blessings and you know sometimes a blessing doesn't look like a blessing blessing but it turned out to be a blessing and then his teachers became his bookkeeper his accountant his attorney his Banker his real estate agents so he has what I call real teachers not these fake teachers in school you see
most teachers in school they're out of Ethics they teach subjects they don't they themselves don't practice I asked the teacher I said you know I'm in my third year of calculus now it was called it was called strength of material I said am I ever going to use this stuff he goes no you know said why do you teach it he says I I get paid said do you ever use it he goes no and that's why you know I you have to in life one of the things I suggest to people you got to
find a real teacher versus a fake teacher and a fake teacher is somebody doesn't do what they teach and real teacher is doing what they teach every day so my accountants my attorneys they're in it every single day that's how I learned because every day I'm solving problems in my business so I have I have accountants and attorneys and bankers and all these people on speed dial because I'm I'm solving problems with my team I see you giving this knowledge out and Yeah do the rich people cringe and say don't tell them that robt yes
yes yes don't tell people what they what you know keep them poor but you know unfortunately the poor as was in the Bible I'm not real religious the poor will always be amongst us because it starts up here right it's that fear mentality it's it's in their words you know and the words become flesh I'm not really religious I flun that a Sunday school also but when they say I can't afford it or I can't do that they go down they become what they say my PhD dad he says what do you think I am
made of money I can't afford that and my rich dad would say that's why he's poor poor people say I can't afford it I can't do that I don't have time because this an escape it's an Escape you know what I mean it's easy to say I can't afford and your Rich Dad used to say what instead of I can't afford it how can I afford it how can I do that you know what would it take or why should I do that he says a question opens a mind a statement closes the mind so
when you say I can't afford it your mind shut down and you become what you say rugby is a team sport but so is soccer the rules are different and other people are golfers they play by themselves and so everybody's different so my game financially is business number one second is real estate so what I say to young people is you you find your game out of all the reasons in the world now I've read you you have the 10 you know all these keys to success Etc what would you say is the number one
reason why people fail not necessarily why they make it the complete opposite right lack of brains lack of effort lack of brains lack of effort yeah they just they don't do the work they don't learn you know when you walk in the room when you start a business and you start to talk about somebody you're you're never in a vacuum with no competition you know unless you're just extremely lucky and if there's going to be competition that means somebody else knows your business as well as you do when you get started and if you walk
into a competitive environment and they still know more about the business than you do and more about your customers you're going to lose and but most people don't consider that they don't do the work they don't learn more about their industry they don't know even about their business I mean and so you've got to put in the effort to know more about your industry than anybody else um and that's that's the brains part and that's the effort part as well because look if you're competing with me you you better know what you're doing otherwise I'm
going to kick your ass you know and you're not going to outwork me and so you know the combination is usually what kills businesses early on more than anything [Music] you know alluding to earlier about entrepreneurs being born or built you know and I think they I knew I was wired to be excited about business how or why I don't know but you know and there's certain guys that have the genetics to jump out of the gym right there's certain guys you know that you know when they golf they have the muscle memory and and
the discipline you know Dirk um nisy may not be the most talented guy in the NBA but his discipline and his Focus to do what's necessary to be successful he willing to do and combine it with being 7 feet tall and being skilled you know makes him an amazing basketball player so it's it's understanding what your skill set is finding the right place to use those skills and then going for it you know will that make you 250 Grand it depends if you pick the right industry but whatever industry you pick if you outwork everybody
if you try to be a little smarter than everybody if you try to be a better salesperson than everybody if you try to be better prepared than everybody you've got your best chance because if you don't do it and somebody else does you know I have the saying work like someone's trying to take it all away from you you know work I actually work like someone spending 24 hours working 24 hours to take it all away from you and and that's kind of the way I look at it you know I started my first business
when I was 12 I was buying and selling um baseball cards buying and selling stamps anything I could do to make money I I was hustling and trying to do so I was into business but I not so much where it was all my friends were into it with me so they wouldn't know baseball cards yeah baseball cards you name it I mean I grew up in Pittsburgh and so I would probably even less than 12 years old I would go out buy a bunch of baseball cards that I collected and I would package I
would say okay you're guaranteed to have a Pittsburgh Pirate in this package and I would charge three times as much and I'd set up on this park bench down in the park down in Scott Township where I grew up and um I'd have these little sales and it was great I made money and I I mean it was you know and I learned as much about business when I was 9 10 and 12 as I I learned any other time let's transition to a different subject with college you went to IU y right now you
got a lot of people that uh say forget about school you know drop out of school so you think they're IDI tell me why um if you're going to have him run a business if you don't understand accounting you're already behind the eightball can't you hire a guy that's that knows that but then they they still have to communicate to you your accountant might tell you you're profitable but your cash is going down you know not understanding um a breakdown and and when you don't you think you need college to learn that yeah I think
you do right because it it may not for some people look if you're so self-motivated that you can take an online course and accounting and teach yourself everything you're way ahead of the game anyways but most people aren't I don't care if you go to a community college and take accounting and and spend 99 bucks for the class just you know spending the money forces you to be more obligated to do it but accounting Finance lesser extent Marketing sales if the school offers that these are all the that's the language of business and so while
it's possible to teach yourself these things and while it's possible to hire them when you're starting your own company you don't want to have to spend money hiring an accountant well let me tell you that if you've gone through all these classes prob don't have to hire a lawyer to incorporate right you probably figure out yourself and so your cost of opening up a business drops but even more important than all that that's that's the blocking of tackling that's the language of business you know the thing I learned at Indiana that was more important than
anything else I learned how to learn and learning became far more important to me because the one certainty in business is that it's always going to be changing if you're not always learning if to this minute if if I'm not continuously learning if I'm not just absorbing as much as I can absorb someone else is going to kick my ass right so you're talking about paranoia the the greatest source of your paranoia should be knowledge if someone else knows more than you do and if you're not learning if you don't know the learn if you
don't know how to learn if you don't have a thirst for Learning and acquiring information you're you're so so so do you think like let's just say if we put 10 guys here you interview them okay you could within a 5 10 minut minute interview say this dude's not going to make it as an entrepreneur yeah I mean I can I can typically tell right I can tell um but by um their passion I can tell by their focus I can tell by their preparation you know there there's a whole realm of things than any
business here you know here's here's the business you're in and here's a thousand things that influence whether or not you're going to be successful you know through my experience in businesses I can put myself in his position and say okay here are 900 of the thousand things he has to be aware of and then go through and ask and by how many of those or her um issues they've been able to address already that kind of gives me a sense of how hard they're willing to work you know and I can tell by the questions
they ask me so all I have to do is say okay what do you want to know and you know when they start start saying what should I do they ask you yeah you know and that's fine right and I want them to ask questions but you know people like to say you know the only stupid questions are the one you don't ones you don't ask and that's not right right because the questions you ask tell me tell whoever more about you than anything else you do because in particular it tells me about your preparation
if you ask me questions about just basic things that you should have known and you should have downal to a science that's going to disqualify you almost more than anything do you think there needs to be a healthy level of paranoid absolutely there needs to be oh yeah I mean I always say you know for every one of my businesses I I say what would I do to kick my own ass you right so whatever business you have there's somebody trying to put you out of business there's somebody trying to to take a bite out
of your business and it's better for you to figure out how they're going to do it rather than they do it um and so yeah that's being paranoid and so you have to be paranoid you have to anticipate other people's next moves and you can't ever you know downplay the competition um was at a business plan competition this morning for at a college and they were kind of being dismissive of the competition and so you can't ever do that you know they're out there trying to take you down and they're not just going to sit
still and if you're good really really good you're going to inspire them to work even harder faster better and so you have to be you know very self-aware of what you're good at and what other people are good at and you know a healthy dose of paranoia makes a bit is very helpful um how does one entrepreneur increase the speed in areas that they can increase there's certain things you can't control speed of growing your business so how fast can I grow yeah I mean it just depends you've got to know your own skill set
right and you've got to know how that fits within your company's life cycle um you know some companies are slow slow grind and you just have to understand that and you've just got to buy your time and until it starts to click and then grow with it quickly you know if you're trying to release a product that needs to be ubiquitous you've got to go um as fast as you can and and then you know release a product launch yeah and and you know there there's a lot of people will say you know Perfection is
the enemy of profitability right and that doesn't mean you have to wait till it's a perfect product it really just depends on what the product is it you know a a barber shop right is it an app is it um a service is it a product but you know the the key is looking for the lwh hanging fruit what are the what are what customers are willing to write you a check or commit to it you know so that they're willing to integrate it into their daily lives or integrate it into their daily business and
so getting a commitment either through time or revenue is typically what I look for and so if I can get a commitment then I'm I'm going to be able to learn I'm going to see how they use it do they sustain usage and then once I get the next one you know hopefully it came a little bit faster than the first then I can ask for referrals and then the next one then the next one and I just try to ramp it up you know when I bought the Mavs we we had no season ticket
holder base and so literally it was a matter of just putting a list of former season ticket holders in a white pages back then you know on my desk next to my phone and making phone calls you yeah me yeah because if I'm not going to do it how can I expect someone else to do it right so just get on the phone hey this is Mark C I'm the new owner of the Dallas Mavericks you know I'd like to invite you back it's not though this is my business you you can't get regular sales
gets or something make those calls once they get to a quarter you're a guy that's a billionaire you're making those calls well but that's all you know and that's fine and good right because everybody's got their own goals right and but still I I don't want anybody at the Mavs to be able to say well he's not willing to do the work right there's you know if I walk around I'm picking up all the papers I'm not saying go get that picked up I'm like okay that's trash I'm picking it up um so but in
terms of speed of growth it it's really you got to get that first customer first and then when you get that first what did you learn reiterate get that next customer and then hopefully as you learn more and more through the process then the next one the next one the next one becomes come by faster here's what we do know life doesn't get any easier it doesn't get more forgiving we just get stronger and we get more resilient one thing I've noticed is that enthusiasm is common but endurance is rare the race is not given
to the strong nor the Swift but it is given to he that that endureth Until the End one thing I know is that we've all been hit with a measure of adversity at some point in our life everybody listening to me has been hit with a measure of trauma everybody wants Destiny everybody wants manifestation everybody wants fulfillment everybody wants the next level in the relationship and a higher quality of living but nobody wants to eliminate distractions nobody wants to dis appear for 3 months 4 months 6 months and and and eliminate all distractions and get
it to a place where you can focus on just you what if you could just shut out every distraction what if you can just shut out the world for just a season and focus on you a man is rewarded in public for what he does in private the the reason why you don't see it the reason why it has not manifested the reason why you are so frustrated is because you have not been willing to forsake all that you've been called to forsake and to follow through behind closed doors sure you can talk about it
sure you can plan it sure you can write it down sure you can go to the conference and hear about it you can read about it but at some juncture you have to disappear and put the work in and come back and shock everybody that doubted you so some of you don't even realize you have unfinished business you need to go back where you left off with A New Perspective go back to the gym go back to the drawing board go back to the business go back to the relationship go back to the burning building
you have unfinished business all you got to do and show up with a new game plan and A New Perspective you got to finish business you have un business you got work to do what happens when your perspective your perception diametrically opposes your reality if you are going to give and grow and evolve and attain and become everything Rises and falls on your Viewpoint perspective is everything let's go I need you to hear me loud and clear how you see this thing is everything you cannot change the past but you can change your perspective about
it your Viewpoint is your advantage your Viewpoint is what changes the game everybody wants increase and and abundance and lifestyle change and new zip codes and new area codes but you only read once a week and you only work out once or twice a month and so the the reason why you don't have have what it is that you see the reason why what's in your head is not in your hands it's not your reality is because your perspective opposes your potential you don't have it because you don't see the value in it if you
believe you've been called to be the Difference Maker the game changer the disruptor the person that comes into a room and commands the atmosphere if you believe you've been called to be necessary AR and not grossly irrelevant then everything you do everything you see everything Rises and falls on your perspective your perception your Viewpoint how do you see this thing and see when we get into the prison of fear because we have fallen in an area fear has friends one of the chief friends of fear is doubt and doubt kills more dreams than failure ever
will there are people who have failed in their head before they even reach the field so I want to invite you to renounce the spirit of fear failure is the only opportunity to begin again and if I'm talking to anybody that's hungry for the future all you need is an opportunity to try again failing doesn't make you a failure it's something you did it's not who you are and so one thing we are going to have to get crystal clear about is that if I failed then I can win I'm talking to that football team
I'm talking to that baseball team that basketball team I'm talking to that fighter I'm talking to that track star I'm talking to that athlete I'm talking to that student I'm talking to the person who failed the exam over and over and over again I'm talking to that individual who feels as though all hope is lost who feels as though they gave it their all if you are still alive you've got something left Thomas Edison he was fired from his first two jobs his teachers coined him stupid that he couldn't learn anything this is the man
who invented the light bulb the first thousand times he faed failed but he was never a failure he just found a thousand ways that don't work you're know thas Edis you didn't try a thousand times try a thousand times and then come talk to me and tell me you're not enough tell me you don't have what it takes tell me you're stupid tell me you're dumb tell me you're slow tell me you don't have enough whatever pushed you to the ground whatever knocked you to the floor from that place I want you to look it
in the eye and tell it tell that person tell that circumstance tell that place tell whatever it is that knocked you to the floor you can't keep me here if you're going to understand the program of resiliency we are going to have to stop running from difficult times stop praying that the storm will pass over you and pray to grow through the storm stop going around it go through it what you go through you will grow through some fights are not one in the first round flat out and the moment that you get that and
you get crystal clear and you accept the fact that there are some Giants that you will not defeat in the first round you need endurance you need stamina to reach some goals you're not going to hit the million with the first investment you're not going to hit the Home Run always at first swing but resiliency says I belong here and I deserve another shot I want my opportunity give me my opportunity spacex's lack of experience $1.6 billion could compromise sa testified against commercial space flight no I I I wish they would come and visit and
and see the hardware that would do in Camp and and I think that would change their mind you know those guys are heroes of M there are many more ways to fail than to succeed for a rocket there's like a thousand ways that thing can fail and like one way it can work you can have a lot of Rocket failures the first stage lift off of the Falcon KN rocket 3 2 1 what I'm trying to do is is to make a significant difference in space flight and help make space flight accessible to to almost
anyone there need to be reasons to get up in the morning you know life can't just be about solving problems otherwise what's the point there's got to be things that people find inspiring um and make life worth living if somebody is doing something that is useful to the rest of society I think that's good thing like it doesn't have to change the world like if you're doing something that has high value to to people um that's I mean I think that's that's fine like stuff doesn't need to be change the world just to be good
depending upon how well you want to do particularly if you're starting a company you need to work super hard and I mean if you do the simple math say like okay if somebody else is working 50 hours and you're working 100 you'll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the as uh the other company I am somewhat impulsive and uh I don't really want to try to adhere to to some CEO template a natural human tendency is wishful thinking a challenge for entrepreneurs is to say well what's the difference between
really believing in your ideals and sticking to them versus pursuing some unrealistic dream that is a really difficult thing to to tell can you tell the difference between those two things I think certainly uh being focused on something that you're confident will have high value to someone else um and just being really rigorous in making that assessment I think so certainly extremely tenacious and then just work like hell I mean you just have to put in you know 80 hour 80 to 100 hour weeks every week I mean I think it's it's like quite quite
painful and difficult all those things improve the odds of success I came to the conclusion that if if we can advance the knowledge of the world if we can do things that expand the scope and and and scale of Consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened and and that's really the only way forward it's unreal space was hard and Rockets tend to fail unfortunately um and even when you've got like a lot of really smart people working super hard to minimize the probability of failure it's still still there
and it's um and it's you know it's it's quite significant you know people have ask me like well why why Rockets you know especially hard um and and you know part of it is like everything has to work the the first time like there's there's no you can't do a recall you can't patch it it's got It's like 9 minutes to orbit or it's over you can never test the rocket completely in the environment that it's actually going to experience you you can't fully recreate something that's moving super fast in a vacuum on the surface
of Earth like you can only really recreate that on in space I mean it's I think it's it's like quite quite painful and difficult honestly um and it's it feels terrible um uh but uh yeah I mean the the company is sort of like to you know me to you know rally them and so I do um but I honestly feel super bad so what what does Super heart mean um well when my brother and I were starting Outpost company uh in instead of getting an apartment we just rented a a small office and we
slept on the couch and we we showered at the the YMCA and uh we're we're so hot up we had just one computer so the the the the website was up during the day uh and I was coding at night 7 days a week all the time if other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks and you're putting in 100h hour work weeks then even if uh you're doing the same thing you know that you you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve when I was young I I uh
I didn't really know what I was going to do uh when when I got older um people kept asking me and and um but but then eventually I thought that the idea of inventing things would be would be really cool and the reason I thought that was because um I I I read a quote from arth C Clark which said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic and and that's really true um if you think if you go back say 300 years the things that we take for granted today uh would be you you'd
be burned at the stake for um you know being able to fly um that's great crazy uh being able to see over long distances being able to communicate having um effectively with the internet a a a group mind of sorts um and having access to all the world's information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth um this is this is stuff that that really would be magic or would be considered magic um in in times past in fact I think it actually goes beyond that because there are many things that we take for granted today
that w't even imagined in in times past they weren't even in the realm of magic so it actually goes goes beyond that so I thought well you know if if I can do some of those things basically if I can advance technology then that that's like magic and that would be really cool um and the the I was at sort of a slight existential crisis cuz I was trying to figure out what does it all mean like what's the purpose of things and um I came to the conclusion that if if we can advance the
this this the knowledge of the world if we can do things that expand the scope and and and scale of Consciousness then we're better able to ask the right questions and become more enlightened and and that's really the only way forward for any given company just keep thinking about are these efforts that people are are expanding are they resulting in a better product or service and if they're not stop those efforts um and then the final thing is is is don't don't just follow the trend you may have heard me say that it's good to
think in terms of the physics approach of first principles uh which is rather than reasoning by analogy you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there and this is a good way to figure out if if if something really makes sense or if it's just what everybody else is doing it it's it's hard to think that way you can't think think that way about everything takes a lot of effort uh but if you're trying to do something new it's the best way to think um and that
framework was developed by by physicists to figure out counterintuitive things um like quantum mechanics so it's really a powerful powerful method I think the final thing I would encourage you to do is now is the time to take risk uh you don't have yeah you don't you don't have you don't have kids uh you your obligation oh s probably don't have kids um the the the the uh but but as you as you get older your obligations increase so you the and once you have a family you start taking risk not just for yourself but
for your family as well it gets much harder to uh do things that might not work out um so now is the time to do that uh before you before you have those obligations so I would I would encourage you to take risks now do something bold um you w to regret it thank you not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter need be portrayed as home runs or strikeouts success or failure it's so ridiculous that it's portrayed that way but it's what sells newspapers so it's what you read about
you can have an idea that doesn't yield a better way to do your job or your career but it changes your life and what's that worth marry the right person the most successful people I know are divorced and they tell me it wasn't worth it don't do it don't sacrifice your families hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are I invented something that many of you use every day you don't know it it's buried in the Enterprise but I know it and I know how it feels and I'll tell you it
doesn't compare to every day holding that one's happy and healthy little hand and by the way don't step on anyone's neck to advance your cause don't Sue anyone and try not to get sued you'll sleep better at night I've never been a party to a lawsuit in my technology career and amen to that my wife and I don't put work before our daughter or each other engineers in my company with similar families and I have been together most of our careers we don't waste time commuting to offices we don't have each other over for dinner
we don't have holiday parties we get it done and then we see our families I believe you can hear the siren Call in your lives without it leading to you crashing against the rocks and I think that's worth sharing I agreed to join a nonprofit board my primary school board and it changed my life I learned about parenting and education and philanthropy and what motivates people the union of concerns scientist just forecasted that nearly 4,400 homes in Marin County alone are going to be completely underwater in less than 30 years due to sea level rise
so my generation your generation we're going to have to do something we're going to have to do something for now I keep searching for ideas like taking our daughter to school on an electric tandem bicycle we count the idling cars as we pass in traffic we wave to them they used to wave to us but we're getting a little Annoying now so they kind of just but it's something it's something that we can do maybe you'll have an idea about attacking global warming or maybe you'll have an idea about attacking poverty or maybe you'll have
an idea about attacking truth and news reporting and maybe you'll do none of those things but maybe you'll speak from your heart authentically in front of the person that you're going to Mar marry and maybe will be inspiring in an increasingly unrecognizable world my career trajectory should be recognizable to you this means you can do what I've done you can have this life you can be happy in your career and your family and if you want the world to know your name well then I applaud you I really do the world needs you and I'll
wish you every success if you're willing to sacrifice it all bet it all blow out the curve just remember my name as your backup plan do not go where the path may lead go instead where there is no path and leave a trail [Music]