The 2 Things You Need for Success | Jay Samit on Impact Theory

I hope you guys enjoy the episode brought to you by our sponsor Blinkist. Go to blinkist.com/impacttheory to get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership and a 7-day free trial. All right, enjoy the episode. If you're going to do something that somebody else already does, you're going to have competition. And you got to be really, really good. And I hate competition. I guarantee you on any day, there is somebody smarter than me, better looking, better connected, wealthier. I don't care. So, if you find a void, something that no one's doing, if you're the only one doing it, by definition, you are the best in the world. And if you're the best in the world, you have no competition. So, now, hold on to that turf as long as you can. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I am here with a return guest who I think you guys are going to love, the one, the only, Jay Samit. Welcome, Jay. Good morning, Tom. So, crazy successful entrepreneur, best-selling author, and you've got a new book out called Future Proofing You. And there it is. It's blurry, you're going to want to move it right in front of your face. There it is. Um Dude, this book is amazing. Uh so much so, it is the only book that I've ever written the forward to. I've been asked a lot. Um and I want to start with the dedication, at least as it appeared in the version that I got. Hopefully, this is what you kept. Uh but here's what I saw. To the reader of Disrupt You who emailed me saying that he didn't believe anyone could become a millionaire, you're wrong. Nice and simple. So, Jay, walk us through what is What is the book? Like, what was the format? You did something pretty unique um that I happened to be fortunate enough to follow along with. So, again, a thousand thanks for writing the forward. It was a magnificent forward and I was humbled by your words. But, Disrupt You really was the most fun, greatest thing I've done in my life. And the fact that when you write a book to help people and they email you and you get what I call love letters from all over the world, hurting people in 140 countries. I don't mean that to brag, I'm just like, how is that possible? But occasionally, you get an email from someone who says, "This is all motivational, but I could never do it." And it turns out Jay has very thin skin. That would eat at me. Like, how am I not reaching this person? What what what could I do more? So, I came up with this crazy idea, if you're if you read Greek literature Pygmalion or My Fair Lady, where could I just take somebody, and I want to take somebody with least amount of advantages, so anybody reading his story would say, "Well, I'm starting off equal or better." So, could I find somebody who had grew up on welfare, a millennial, and mentor him one day a week for a year, and would it be possible to take somebody with no capital, a ground rules where I gave no money, I made no introductions, and I didn't tell him what business to do? Could I get him from basically homeless to self-made millionaire in 12 months? And I'll wreck the ending. Uh 11 months. Um and we sat down, I introduced you to Vin uh before I did the experiment and uh to document it, and you have that footage hopefully. And Vin worked hard. So, the last thing I want to do is tell anybody that it's easy. Right? Vin was willing to work harder in 1 year than most people are willing to work. So, he could live the rest of his life in a manner that most people don't. And he sacrificed and he learned, and I tried to take all that mentoring and bring it down to first of all, detailed steps to follow, and consolidate it down to what I call 12 truths. If you follow these 12 truths, you will be successful. These aren't crazy rocket science. Uh Vin's not an engineer. I'm not an engineer. Steve Jobs wasn't engineer. I mean, you don't need any college degree. You don't have to be in a first world nation. You don't have to be in a big city. You're one click away from 7 billion people. Right? So, you only have to figure out how to reach them once. And if you can figure out that process, you can do it again and again and be what I call future-proof. I used to talk about it when the last time we were on the show, I said, "Whether by choice or circumstance, everyone's job will be disrupted." And some people go, "Nah, not me." Well, I don't have to make that case anymore post-pandemic. I mean, everyone got disrupted. But, did that mean that it was a bad thing or a good thing? I mean, health-wise, it's a horrible thing. God forbid you got affected. But, every obstacle is an opportunity in disguise. You saw some people made huge fortunes during this. And so, other people wiped out. And so, all that I'm trying to do is pay it forward and teach people how they can take control of their own destiny. Yeah, that to me is such an important question right now. And one thing I think you and I have bonded over is so, something happened generationally between um you and I and then the generation that's coming up now where they feel sort of defeated before they even begin. And all the I'll even grant them, okay, cool. Maybe it's harder than it was. Um it certainly is not impossible. You've given some stats about how frequently self-made millionaires and billionaires are still coming online right now. Again, that's self-made. This is not people that have been handed something. And what I love is that you really did put your money where your mouth is to see if this stuff would work and if people get the motivation behind it, which I'll say in my language and you tell me if this is spot-on. I've dedicated the entire rest of my life to making sure that people have an empowering mindset so they'll at least try. So, I cannot guarantee their success, but I can guarantee that really going for something and believing it's possible gives you an advantage that's a thousandfold over somebody who just acquiesces and says, "Well, this is too hard so I'm not even going to try." I agree 100% and I'll even take one step further. I only believe you need two things for success. Insight and perseverance. Even in today's marketplace? In any marketplace, okay? I can teach people insight. I've taught it at the college level. I had students on first semester that made $150 million and DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL. PROBABLY A GOOD CHOICE. Um but you really help people on the persistence. Cuz motivation just like a shower doesn't last forever, okay? You need it again and again and that's what's so great about your show and what you do and why I so look up to you, the leadership you bring people. Um but for those people feeling left out and left behind and think that life's just about leftovers, I mean it's not your fault. That's the first message, okay? The bottom 1% 140 million Americans own less than 1% of this country. 140 million Americans. We have 120 million Americans at or below the poverty line. Wages for workers haven't gone up since 1982. And so it is much harder. And much like when you watch sports on television, you see that best of reel, you You when they catch the ball and hit the ball and it just looks amazing. You don't see a full baseball game where nothing happens for a whole long time. Well, social media does the same thing to people. They see everybody's life in the highlights reel. Oh, it's so great. I must be doing something wrong. And it's not that. I I would have never understood what a billionaire was, okay, growing up. I didn't know what a millionaire I came from working-class family. And if you would have told me dozens of people that I know became billionaires, I'd go like, "What are you smoking? This is insane." And yet every 48 hours, as you said, there's a new billionaire created. How is that possible? And so I tried to break down in the book what we learned that was was wrong, it doesn't work. You talk a lot about having a growth mindset. Key, absolutely important. But actually our educational system stifles the mindset. And the example that I that I talked about in the book is if we go back to elementary school, right? They tell you, "If I buy an apple for $1 and I sell it to Tom for $2, I make a dollar." That's how business works. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cuz that implies what in game theory is called zero-sum game. The only way I get money is by taking your money. Well, if you have that mindset, well, either Tom has the money or I have the money. If they get a raise, I don't get it. If they get a promotion, I don't get it. Foreigners are taking my jobs. Immigrants are taking my jobs. Other countries are taking my jobs. Robots are It's It's me versus the world. It It becomes this grind of hatred. On the other hand, I go, "Tom, I'm starting this business. I'll sell you 10% for $10,000." How much am I now worth? Well, I own 90%, so I now have $90,000. It wasn't created by the Federal Reserve. It didn't come from a bank. I made it out of thin air. But I can buy things with that. I can sell things. can hire people. I can do all kinds of stuff. And that is how Jeff Bezos could lose money year after year after year for 10 years and come out the other side as the richest man in the world. He didn't take money. He created money. Elon Musk, funny from last time we sat down together, I was updating my first book. Elon Musk was worth $7 billion. Very impressive. He's an impressive guy. I love Elon. He's now worth $200 billion. What did he do in 5 years that the rest of us were asleep? And by the way, he made it all things that were public, so we all could have participated. So, you don't need capital. You don't need connections. You don't need a fancy degree. I'm not saying not to go to college. There's There's pros and cons of everything. But you can do it. And the secret is this. If you're going to do something that somebody else already does, you're going to have competition. And you got to be really, really good. And I hate competition. I guarantee you on any day there is somebody smarter than me, better looking, better connected, wealthier. I don't care. I hate that. So, if you find a void, something that no one's doing, if you're the only one doing it, by definition you are the best in the world. And if you're the best in the world, you have no competition. So, now hold on to that turf as long as you can. So, when I when I sat down with Ben, Ben came to me with an idea that probably half the people watching the show uh already have, which is I understand social media. I can help people do social media. I'm like, yes, so can 50 million other people. And his problem was saying he's probably good at it. I'm not I'm not finding finding fault with his his thoughts and skill set. is the people that he knew in his circle didn't have any money to pay him, and their Coca-Colas and and and the Sylvester Stallones of the world don't need to hire him. There's whole agencies, so he's floundering. But, what if he just focused and said, "I do social media for this." And find one thing that nobody else is is touting as their specialty, could you get clients? Well, if you pick something that really needs help, yes. And then the second you do great for that first client, you now own the world, cuz now you have this case study to say, "You're not just saying you're the best in the world, you are the best in the world." And that's all Ben had to do. No capital, nothing. So, Vin is the example of just how much of this is possible, I think is really intriguing. I think it's worth going into his story. So, when I met him, um I trusted your opinion, but didn't look at him and go, "Oh, that's the obvious choice of the person to choose." He was pretty outlandish. Um he, you know, dressed very garishly. He was like had no professionalism about him. Nice guy. I'm I am not in any way, shape, or form saying he was unpleasant. I'm just saying he was very rough, very unpolished. Um had a bit of a sort of deer in headlights effect. When I met him, he seemed unconvinced of what you guys were doing, and was hopeful to be sure, but wasn't like you were It's not like you took a kid that had just graduated with a Harvard MBA and said, "Okay, hey, I'm going to show that this works." Um in the book you reveal this, and even I didn't know this. So, in the book you pull Vin aside and you say, "Hey, Vin, look, I have done an exhaustive search for somebody that I think has the mental fortitude, the skill set, the talents to pull this off, so that I know I'm dealing with a good foundation, because I don't I have the chills, cuz I know the punchline to this story. And I want to make sure that you're primed. You know, if I just picked anybody, this could be a real disaster. So, um my reputation's on the line here. I needed to make sure uh that I had the right person, and I have come to you. So, I need you to know that you've got something that other people don't have, and what we're going to do is we're going to leverage that, right? And then what's the punchline? How many people did you interview? Just Ben. So, I started off this relationship with a lie. And there's a there's a psychological tool that you can use called the Pygmalion effect. And the history of it was a professor went to an elementary school and had all the kids take a test at the beginning of the year. And he looked at the test and told the teacher, "These three students were going to be super achievers this year. They were going to grow." And at the end of the year, they measured the whole class, and what? Those three kids, super achievers. Turns out the professor lied. He never looked at the test. Picked three names at random, but knew if you treated people differently and then they thought that they were smart, they would become a smart. So, by telling Ben that he had something special that I, coming from a position of power and authority, a very successful guy, saw something in him, he had to internalize that. So, that that that gave him that push at the beginning. The funny thing that I also was a shock to me, so he didn't find out, by the way, that I lied to him until he read the book. I never told him. I never let on after the whole thing. But he When I was writing the book, he also let on to something. Six months in, he's now made, you know, $600,000. This is a kid who grew up in public housing. His parents were on welfare. I mean, he's mind-blown that this could happen. And by that point, there was a trust between the mentor and the mentee, and he handed me a piece of paper, and said, "When we first met, we know, took him out uh bought him a pizza. So, the only money I ever gave him was a board free pizzas. Uh He wrote down a note after our first meeting. And he wrote in his own words that basically he thought I was full of it. You know, that this old guy, but he has nothing else going for him. And he'll go along and he'll play along cuz he wants it so bad. I mean, it can't be real, but he'll hate anybody else if they get the opportunity. So, the seed was planted. And he gave me this because he wanted me to know that he didn't believe the advice from the beginning, but he went along with it because I said so. And uh what he would find out is and what he would say later is some of the best advice possible. And the reason is most of us don't have the experience to know many things in business. Things that might seem counterintuitive. You know, how the world works as opposed to how you were taught how it works. And that's why mentors are so important. I mean, it's one of the 12 truths that you can't do it on your own. There's this myth of the self-made man. It doesn't exist, okay? Everybody got there on the shoulders of those who came before. And I try to teach people the tools of how to find the right mentors. And it's not email somebody out of the blue like I'm sure you get every day and I get thousands of them. Will you be my mentor? The best mentors you never use the M word. You start a relationship. You I teach you how to look through their LinkedIn profile and figure out who would be right for you at that stage. You know, the richest man in the world is your mentor right now, the difference between where you are and where they are, the skills might not translate. There's people in your field that would love to help you. The world isn't out to compete. The world is really there to help. And the second you get that growth mindset and find other people with that And there's tons of organizations like SCORE in the US or EO or WPO. I mean, the help is there. There's no one standing between you and raising capital. That's has never been easier. You don't need special skills. Anything other than insight and persistence you can hire. So, then what it comes down to is what's your insight? What problem are you going to solve? And the second you go on that journey, you're accomplishing two things. One, you'll make money. But two, since you're solving a problem, you're helping people. And joy doesn't come from money. Satisfaction doesn't come from money. Purpose doesn't come from money. Purpose comes from doing something that makes the world better. So, we have a lot of problems. If you're listening to my voice and you have problems, congratulations, you're halfway there. But imagine how great it feels to solve a major issue. And I don't mean day one you have to do climate change and world hunger. A basic problem. So, I want to really nail some things home for people in terms of the um what you did with Vin. So, you said it but sort of off the cuff. You never gave him any money. You didn't even introduce him to people, which that would have been I think the one thing people would have nailed you for is yeah, sure, like he's now meeting this ultra successful guy who's incredibly connected, knows everybody, so of course this kid has been successful. But you didn't do that. Yeah, that's like No, that's like the CEO's kid who sells the most Girl Scout cookies, right? You know, 20,000 employees have to buy a box. Yeah, no. I wanted this to be completely fair, transparent other than the fact that I liked the man. And and repeatable. If it can't be repeated, what's the point? One of the things I always hate about successful biographies is if you go back in time and do what I did, well, I can't go back in time. I'm living now. So, you have to give people tools to work in the future, and that's why it's called Future Proof. Okay, so now let's start taking it step by step. So, you have the 12 truths in the book. Truth number one, where you start, which I think is incredibly important, is sort of where I spend my entire life, is you have to have a growth mindset. So, you have to believe that this is possible. Um what were some of the other key things specifically that you wanted to get Vin on in the early days, so you knew he'd be primed to achieve what he ended up achieving? So, one of the things that was key to him, I think generationally, um was he really wanted to be famous. Fame to him was was recognition, achievement, all the things that come from social media and that that that presence in in in people's lives today. And so, he wanted to name his company, you know, Vin Clancy such and such. And the very first argument that we had was that in today's world, you're not necessarily going to have a company your entire life. This isn't like Ford Motor Company, which now 100 plus years is still in the Ford family. You need a separate identity so that you can sell what you create. And wasn't getting through. So, he grew up in in London, and I I I, you know, work with Sir Richard Branson, so it suddenly dawned on me, here's the role model to bring up, okay? Richard Branson created the Virgin brand. Still in my mind the most brilliant brand in the world. And the basic reason that what is a virgin? A virgin is someone that's new and doesn't know what they're doing. So, if he starts a company like Virgin Cola and it flops because it can't compete against Pepsi and Coke, it actually makes the Virgin brand stronger. It proves that he's a virgin and he's trying new things. He's had 300 companies. He's had eight multi-billion dollar companies in eight different fields. Not a college graduate. When I did the very suspicious kid deal with him, doesn't know how to read a spreadsheet, doesn't need to. He can hire people to do that. So, the second I could separate from Vin that Richard Branson and Virgin were different identities, then Vin could create two different identities. Um, I also had to explain you have to look like your customer. You know, it's not selling out, it's saving time. That's it. If you have this really unique look, he had long hair, he had gold wings on his shoes, he had a coat made out of feathers. I mean, he was out of his mind, okay? how accurate that is. That's the kid that I met. I was like, wow. I I posted I posted a picture of uh you know, from from that before time. And and all great, but I'll I'll I'll give my own side of it, so it's not like there's the old guy picking on the new guy. I was suddenly brought in. I I was uh the digital guy from the early days on the internet at 78, you know, I was doing the first music on a computer, first video. And one day I wake up and I'm head of the world's largest music company because music world went digital. And I'm still corporate guy wearing suit and tie and nobody's relating to me. And the head of Virgin Music says to me, "Jake, you see anybody else with a tie? See anybody else with a jacket?" I'm like, "Oh, yeah. I need to relate." Went out and bought all black wardrobe and for five years I was in the music business, I only had black head to toe. But, I didn't have that barrier where people go, "Oh, this guy I can't relate and talk to." So, Vin got a haircut, okay? Vin Vin dressed Even though 90% of what he did was virtual. And that's the other big thing. Ben didn't have to rent an office. Ben didn't have to hire tons of people. Ben didn't have to buy equipment. You can create an international successful company remotely and virtually. And if you didn't believe that before the pandemic, I don't have to convince anybody now. The biggest corporations in the world realized they don't need the overhead anymore. You don't want to be owning a lot of high-rise buildings in many cities because they're going to be sitting empty. So, Ben and I clashed on a lot of stuff. But here's to Ben's credit. Ben's superpower was he knew what he didn't know. He knew that he didn't have the instinct. So, whenever he viscerally was opposed to something, he would pause and say, "Am I against this out of pride or out of fact?" And if he didn't have a fact for his argument, he would go along. And that served him unbelievably well. It's not that I'm a right and I know it all. I've just run so many companies, little companies, big companies. I've been through this that it doesn't matter what your business is, all businesses share a number of key steps and key problems. I mean, every business has to grow. Every business has to figure out how to attract employees and keep employees. Everybody has to manage cash flow. 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That's spelled b l i n k i s t, blinkist.com/impacttheory to get 25% off a Blinkist Premium membership and a 7-day free trial. All right, guys, take care and be legendary. How did you help Vin get the first customer? Because that's really, like when you're starting a business, man, that is the thing that's really daunting. So, one of the things that I told him, and he did start on this, but it it didn't happen to be where he got his customer. Um was find a a charity where you can use your skills for, okay? Cuz when you get involved with the committees and doing all that stuff, the other people volunteering aren't just volunteers and they go back in a cave. They're executives at different companies, they have different connections, and if you're showing your skills in that world, somebody will notice and say, "Ooh, I've got a project for you." So, that's a a great, you know, to do stuff at nonprofit. I had a digital ad agency that I that was acquired by uh News Corp for $200 million. How did we get client number one? We did PSAs, public service announcements, for different charities. And my first one went so viral and so insane that of course everybody in the ad world noticed and went, "Ooh, let's go there." It's It's that easy. Um Really fast, I want to push on that. So, you say a lot the phrase, "It's that easy." And what I like about that is hopefully it shakes people out cuz you'll give example after example after example after example of like, "Hey, I had an insight and I put it to use and look it built this huge thing." Or this person had an insight and you know, it ends up being a billion-dollar exit. Um so, in the context of getting your first customer that PSA, you actually had to be good. Like your PSA had to outperform. Then ended up Oh, absolutely. Then had to be good. And so, as you think about mentoring somebody or having taken one shot to find this one kid and help him become something, how much of the process is learn your craft? 100%. So, you don't have to know every aspect of your business. But and you you talk about this all the time. Sweat equity overcomes intellect 10 out of 10 times. Right? There's lots of smart people that aren't doing anything and aren't achieving. Like the world doesn't go, "Ooh, you're magnacumlaude. Here's a million bucks." It doesn't work that way. And yet, when you look at universities, C students donate the most money back to universities. That's interesting. They're the most successful. Okay? And it is the work that you put in and the continual work. And one of the things that I tried to also stress with people is pretty much everything we do nowadays can be measured. And if you can measure it, you can improve upon it. So, you can AB test ads very cheaply if you're doing an ad, okay? We'll run it 100 times and it costs you, you know, less than a dollar. How many people click through this one? How many click through that one? Oh, this one got more clicks. We'll go with this. Now, we'll make this bigger, make it lower. And in my ad agency example, we did this testing so much so that we got to the point where we could get the average person to interact with an ad that's interrupting you on the internet for 70 seconds. Unheard of. You're going to stop what you're doing and spend 70 seconds with your ad. That was the average. Then you start getting clients. And then it's how do I motivate? I paid my sales force more than I paid myself. I had contests where you could get a car. I had contests Um we used to put the logos up on the wall. I wanted a logo for each letter of the alphabet. If you get a client that gives you some letter that we don't have already, here's $10,000. And whatever it would take to get people to be more motivated that are in sales, that's their job. In Ben's case, he was self-motivated after the first month. And again, we're talking about, you know, one mentor session a week. This isn't I'm holding hands and secretly running an enterprise, not at all. But once he's shown what he had within him, cuz he did the work. He got the results. The results were spectacular. Now, here's the other thing about a void. If there's something new, if there's something hot, if there's something that that the world suddenly pays attention to, then any work you do in that space will be magnified. Okay? I was no computer genius. I'm not an engineer. But the mere fact I was on a computer before anybody was like "You know about computers? Tell us." You know? And so each one of the things that I did, you know, 10 years ago, I was the first app that created video chat for multiple people on a computer or on a phone. What we do with Zoom and everything else nowadays. We were too early. But you can't control timing. So then just applied the same things he would have done, you know, to help a restaurant open or to help anybody. He just happened to find with a big need and a real short window. And that's where I was focusing on. Who Who needs you today? Who Who can't survive without this today? And how do you get in front of them so that they discover you? Okay, so I want to start putting these pieces together for people. So okay, Vin needed a growth mindset. Um you planted the seed in his mind that he was special. That in the beginning probably uh took the place of a growth mindset. It was like "Okay, cool. I've got something special. This guy's going to give me the information to make me in particular blossom." He's looked at all these people, which of course was a lie, but Vin believes that. The first month we're sort of pushing pushing pushing, but what we're trying to get him to see is "Hey Vin, you're you need to find that void." So there's a lot of people that can do the social media thing, but if you pick one like hardcore niche in there and find somebody that has a very immediate need, now you can get your first customer. You can get moving. We're making sure that he understands you have to be very good at your craft, that you actually have to go out there and deliver results for people that then you can sort of snowball. Um having read the book, I know sort of where this goes. So okay, cool. He's getting the early traction. He's doing the He's living your it really is that simple line. He's just doing the things, finding the void, executing, being good at delivering results in those things. But not too long into this process, it stops being fun. And it's like this [ __ ] is hard. How I've often said boredom kills more entrepreneurs than failure. Because you just realize, "Oh my god, to get to a million dollars, like I'm really grinding here." Uh how did you help him through that process? We've got the growth mindset, we've got the skills, we've got the customers, and now we're kind of tempted to stop. So there's a number of truths. One of them is the gap to embrace failure. Everybody thinks failure is some shame. And yet if you play a video game, you don't suddenly sit down and play to the end. You die, figure out what you did wrong, do it again, you constantly course correct until you fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. Woo, I won. It's identical to business. You're going to make lots of mistakes. In Vin's case, what was, you know, anybody that thinks, you know, you're going to know what a year of mentoring somebody in putting this possibly happened to you like it was a nail-biter from where I'm sitting, okay? Plus all of the sudden, okay, he's on the right path, he's doing good, and because of algorithms and policy that had nothing to do with him or anything that he was doing, he wasn't doing anything wrong, all of sudden Google and Facebook make it impossible for him to run his business. I mean, it was a punch in the gut that would have leveled me. I would have gone like, "Oh my god, what do you do?" But one of the things that I also taught him was that you need more than one revenue stream. Cuz you never know when something some beaver blocks that river and makes a dam. I mean, you never know what's going to happen. And so coincidentally, he suddenly got I mean, just killed out of left field. But he was working on this other revenue stream and he suddenly realized, "I can take the tools that I built for here and use it for my client over here and suddenly, you know, he put it back together." So, the other thing people have to understand is there's going to be hardship, there's going to be obstacles. It's not going to go smoothly. Um but you either earn or you learn. So, you don't fall backwards. And he kept on learning new ways and with that growth mindset, I mean, you can't underestimate that. You don't go, "Oh my god, I failed." You go, "Okay, that didn't work. What else can I try?" You look at it as, "Okay, I learned what this doesn't work." You know, the old Thomas Edison with the thousand tries at the light bulb. And so, Ben was constantly trying new things that definitely didn't work. But you don't know unless you try it. And developing more and more revenue streams. I mean, one of the ones that he came up with on his own, which was genius, is suddenly when he suddenly had some success, a whole lot of work comes his way. Little fiddly work that doesn't have the upside and return clients of things worth his time. But rather than just say he was too busy, he would farm them out to people for a commission and then just check in to make sure they're doing it up because his his name's associated and now his referral business was minting money. So, by the end of this teach him that because one of the things that I find most um like if I could steal your brain and put it in in jar, I would. It It You have this ability to look at deal structure and and see an opportunity that other people don't see. And there were a few times in the book where I thought, "Oh man, that is like a Jay Samit classic move that he just did." And uh like cuz when you talk about an algorithm shifting, most people collapse. Like they just stop at that point. It's too daunting. Everything feels so far out of your control. It's kind of like you're you've just been the last 4 years building a house and then a tornado comes along and wipes it out and you are back to the stud not even the studs. The studs are gone. All you have is foundation. And most people then stop, whereas I've seen you in your career time and time again go, "Oh, this could actually be turned into a sculpture." And now like what was meant to be a house is a sculpture and people are paying $10 a pop and millions of people come from around the world. And I'm like, "How the [ __ ] did this become this much bigger opportunity than the thing that just got knocked down by the hurricane?" So, had you prepped Vin for that moment? Like how how did he cuz you what you give people Vin's income month by month by month. And so, did you warn him ahead of time? Like how did you shape his mind? The obstacle that that leveled him, to use your metaphor, um I didn't see that coming. I mean, no one did. That was like unheard of unprecedented in the history of of Google and Facebook. Never happened before. Hasn't happened since. It was horrible. Um but to use your metaphor, when that house gets tumbled down, you still have a good solid foundation. With a good solid foundation, you can build anything. So, deal structure is so important. And yes, you cannot stand on one foot and teach people every form of deal structure. But at least in this book, I'm trying to show them how most of the wealth that you see in the world wasn't created by hard work and saving. It was created by deal structure. Spielberg didn't become a billionaire by making movies, okay? It was the deal structure. You know, so many of these things are just me an example from Spielberg. What did he do? So, Spielberg was making good movies. Great director, making top money, living living a rich life. But his lawyer realized that Universal Studios was constantly turning his movies into rides. You got the Jaws ride, you got this ride, and the lawyer goes, "You know, Steven should get a piece of that. Or he's not going to make any movies for you again." And so his lawyer negotiated, and I'm not I'm not I'm not allowed to say what the amount is. Um but X amount of dollars per ticket for every ticket ever sold for theme park. Then Universal decides to open a second theme park. Oh my god. And then international theme park, okay? Uh George Lucas, nobody wanted to make a cowboy movie in space. It was the worst idea. This thing's not going to make anything. George Lucas's first sci-fi movie went nowhere, okay? American Graffiti hadn't come out yet. So, the most that he would give them was the standard minimum for a a writer, director, producer. And he said, "You know what? Then let me have the sequel rights." "I'm not making a sequel to this. Sure, kid. Take it for free." Turns out to be Star Wars. The studio comes back. "Oh yeah, please. We'll pay you. We want the sequel. We want the sequel." Well, and this was again his lawyer. "We'll let you have the sequel. George can have the toy rights. Free and clear. No royalty paid to Fox. No likeness rights paid to the other stars." 12 billion dollars worth of toys later, like who's laughing? And I can go on and on. McDonald's didn't make their money. Ray Kroc didn't make his money from hamburgers. Made his money from the real estate deal of every franchisee buying real estate that they made for a location. So, you can structure this So, what does this have to do me and my regular stuff? If you're going to be hired to do work for a company, if it's a small little company, and you can figure out how you can make them worth a lot, you can negotiate equity. You can negotiate a percentage of what you make for them. You can make a stretch goal on the contract that they don't believe in that if you hit the stretch goal, you get a huge pay. I was working in a company once and there were hard times, financial times. And and the CEO was like, "We have to find a way to to make the numbers." I said, "Okay. If my division does two X of what it's supposed to make, can everybody in the division get twice their salary?" He was like, "For sure." Like, never going to happen. So, I sat down everybody that worked for me, a ton of people, and I made a cut out of the CFO space and I put him on top of one of those charity thermometers, you know, that you fill in as you're raising money. And every week we started the meeting with, you know, "Where are we on this number?" And everybody got it. I had another another guy that I used to work with that if the whole division hit their numbers, you, your spouse, and your kids, everybody, the whole company, goes to Hawaii each year for vacation. Um so, think of how you structure things. At the minimum, say, "If I hit my target for this contract, I get renewed." Cuz if you build a company and you do all this great stuff, they can later hire somebody to go to work for less than you once you've already made them. So, deal structure is so important. And and so, in Future Proofing You, I really try to go through a bunch of deal structure examples and why you may need to bring in and spend the money to have it an expert help you structure certain types of deals at certain times in your life. Okay, so here's my takeaway from you as a human, certainly the thing that I take away from your books, which are so important. I cannot stress how much I consider your books important for anybody who's trying to accomplish something in their lives. But the um punchline is you can learn this. But the way you think about deal structure, all the stuff you walk people through in Disrupt You, all the stuff you watch walk people through in Futureproof You, is you can learn it. Maybe it's even um it it's not like physics hard, but sure, it doesn't come naturally to people. I don't care. It's like if you want to own your life, if you want to take your time, turn it into usable skill set, and have the kind of extraordinary outcome that you had with Vin, who again, you picked a random ass kid who grew up on welfare. You didn't give him any connections, no money, nothing. You taught him a certain way to think. You taught him how to think about deal structure, how to be impervious to changes, and it's like it [ __ ] worked. The kid hit a million dollars in revenue in 11 months. It's so crazy. And when you're reading the book, you're like, "Oh my god, is this going to work?" It it it there anything I'm going to put you on the spot. Was there anything in either of these two books that you go "Wow, that's rocket science. That's that's complicated. That's, you know, I have to learn, you know, Pythagoras's theorem." Or was it all common sense where you kind of go, "Huh." And it's just common sense that you didn't think of before. We need to give you a new word because it isn't common sense. But it is once you have been introduced to it, it suddenly seems self-evident. Okay. is not the thing that I would ever expect people to have sort of on average across the board. It's one of those things where there are certain types of minds that see that just like it it becomes apparent to them. They're they're the people that can pull themselves out of the matrix, okay? I'm fascinated by people that can do that. I'm not a person that can pull myself out of the matrix. But once somebody presents to me the path out, I'm willing to do the [ __ ] work to get out, right? So, we all have our thing. You're able to pull yourself out of the matrix. Now, you've actually packaged, "Hey, everybody. Here's how you do it. It This is something It is a process. And here is the process. And now it's up to you to go learn." What I am so desperate for people to understand is what you teach is a process. It is not rocket science. It is not Pythagorean theorem. But it does require the cultivation of your will, your purpose, your ability to um fall and get back up. You even one of the sub uh headings of one of the chapters or one of the sections of one of the chapters is cultivating purpose. And I thought, "I want it lit- If I could put my finger on one thing in the table of contents that proves you know what the [ __ ] you're talking about." It doesn't say, "Find your purpose." It says, "Cultivate your purpose." So, talk to me about cultivation. Like hey, people aren't going to be born with this. They don't need to be born with this. How do they cultivate something like purpose? So, we all have our unique life's journey. And life is hard. I mean for everybody. There's different levels of hard. I'm not third world country, where do I get clean water hard, but everybody has their own their own pains and stuff. And when you see and experience pain or see injustice or things that get to you, each one of us would like to fix something, to make the world better. And as you can start aligning what you do to helping others, the greatest joy you'll ever get is when you help someone else. And the more you're helping others, the more you end up helping yourself. I mean, I got very little joy, zero joy out of running big ones. I mean Out of running what? That's big companies, you know. I've run companies with 200, 300, 400,000 employees. There is a reason why they pay you a ton of money to do that. Your inbox is filled with hate every morning. Hate your company, suing your company, hate you, why's this, you know, everything sucks, shareholders, every I mean, the whole world just it's miserable. Then I dedicated my life to teaching people how to achieve their dreams. And my inbox is filled with on my lowest day a random note that comes in from somebody. Uh I shared one in this book that I asked her permission cuz I was so moved by it. But uh a woman about 50 years old uh decided she was going to take all her money and and go into the Airbnb, you know, rent some places and and be in the property business. And she lost everything. Oof. And she was planning to kill herself. And she called her daughter to say goodbye before she killed herself. And I thought to myself, you're killing yourself because she lost money? That's the stupidest thing in the world. And her daughter gave this woman my book. And this woman wrote me to thank me that it got her out of that darkness, and now she has a successful business, and she's moved on. So, I found my purpose. Um we all have it. When I was young, my purpose wasn't I want to be rich, and I want I want a yacht. It was I had two small children. And how can I give them a better life? And for so many people, they think a better life means buying your kids the things that you didn't have. A better life is teaching them the things you didn't know. So that they don't have to make your same mistakes. But that's been my life's work. And now that they have their own lives, I had a void to fill. I was you know, lost. I was offered tons more jobs and you know, been there, done that, don't need the money. There's no motivation to put up with the aggravation. But, I did have an engineer who worked for me decades ago who reached out to me and he had a solution for climate change, poisons in our foods, um and he needed to get his company off the ground. So, I said, I have a moral obligation to go on as chairman. And so, I'm chairman of Greenfield Robotics, which instead of putting poison on our food to grow food, let's just think that for a second. How's that rational? All of our crops are grown with tons of herbicides and pesticides. We put enough stuff to kill them, but uh it's not going to hurt us, but now we find out this is cancer. So, we have little robots that go up and down the fields, take care of the weeds. For 300 million acres of corn and cotton, I can't you know, you don't need to camp anymore. But, that also means you don't have to kill the soil. And the number one source of greenhouse gases is not cars and factories, it's farming. So, if we don't kill the soil, we sequester carbon. We take poisons out of our soil, so it doesn't go down the Mississippi to kill all all the fish, and we take poisons out of our diet, so we don't die. How can I not join on to that purpose if I have the skill set to help? It'd be morally wrong not to. So, you can find purpose in any job and the proof of it is let's look at immigrants. I don't care from what country to what country. An immigrant made a choice to go from point A to point B. Point B may have been really horrible, but they're now on a on a mission and they have a purpose to their life. So, you may see them sweeping up or you may see them at an entry-level job, but that's not their destination and that propels them and that's why 1/3 of Fortune 500 companies were founded by an immigrant or the first generation child of an immigrant. They're on a mission to do something. And so How can people make that more robust in themselves? So, you get a spark of something. Nobody's born with a purpose. Um how do you fan those flames and turn it into something that will sustain you when the job is getting hard, when you're bored out of your mind, when you want to give up? How How can you make that a strong enough thing to carry you through? So, to to find a purpose and all that, I I put in a bunch of questions to ask yourself. And as you answer these questions, it will become obvious what that is. Uh You set goals along your purpose. You know, if it can be measured, then it can be improved. How can you What can you What impact can you have, to use your language, this year? How do you do it? Fear is a tool. Fear is good. You're not going to overcome your fear. That's another one of the truths in this book that most people don't talk about. You It's good to be fearful. That's why we're here. Your Your great great great great great-grandfather wasn't afraid of that saber-toothed tiger, you wouldn't be here. And you're not going to change that. But maybe you're afraid of the wrong things. You're afraid of losing money. You're afraid of of being embarrassed. You're afraid of what your friends or parents will say if you have started a company and it fails. Shouldn't you be more fearful that you're trading away years of your life, 10 years of your entire life, for a job that's unfulfilling? For a job that will never give you the lifestyle that you want? I'd be afraid of wasting the one life I get, the one time I'm on this planet. That's the big driving fear. How do I make today count? How can I start my dream today? And a lot of what I write about isn't about, you know, here's your five-year plan. What are your five goals for tomorrow? And you and I share that approach. Every study shows if you write down your goals, you have a much better chance of making them happen. Cuz you're focusing. And if you do it the night before, you no longer have worries keeping you up all night because you got the ideas down. And when you're sleeping, those solutions will come. You're freeing your subconscious. You're freeing everything that blocks you. And so, a lot of the things that may sound to people that haven't read my books like tree-hugging hippie, you know, sit under the pyramid stuff. That's not me. It's actual biological science on how we work. How our fear response works, how all these things work. So, if you can leverage the science of what makes your body function to help empower you, athletes do it. Athletes have to get in that mode so that they get adrenaline to run. Yes, they work out hard at exercising to make their their their meat muscle, you know, their their what they are as as good as biologically possible, but that won't get them those reflexes. That won't get them across the finish line. And it's the same thing. And by the way, these same techniques will work in finding a partner in life, you know, finding uh you know, dating. I mean, it's all straightforward and doable. And that that's my message to the future people. But, when I realized I'd left some people behind that didn't believe they could do it, I was willing to bet my entire reputation that they can. I was worried. I was fearful. But, it worked. Yeah. Jay, thank you so much, man. Where can people find you? Um obviously go to Amazon, wherever books are sold kind of thing, but how can people connect? So, as I did with the first book, I made a workbook so there's more exercises that's all free. Um, it's 32 pages and you can get that at my website jaysammit.com j a y s a m m i t dot com. Uh, you can follow me on social media LinkedIn anywhere. Love to hear from you. Love to hear the the uh, how you feel about the book and uh, hope that uh, everybody uh, you know, gets gets their journey made a little bit easier. Thank you so much again. Thank you for for writing the forward. For the tumble loot. Truly truly my pleasure. Guys, I I will just say this, read it. It It is a game changer. Walks you step by step exactly what you need to do. There are no gatekeepers and speaking of things that will move you forward. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care. The world changed. Well, the world's continuing to change. We have self-made billionaires in their 20s happening almost monthly. They have the same 24 hours a day that you and I do. What are they doing differently? What are they doing that can be learned from and copied and emulated to solve a different problem?