There are 99 days left in the year. 99 days. I almost feel like this 100 days left in the year is more important than the New Year's resolution.
I just encourage anyone, man, it's the end of the year. Use this last sprint and treat it like an athlete does the fourth quarter of a game and really ask yourself, what do I want this year to be all about? Have I kind of made my mark on the year? And 99 days might sound like a short amount of time, but that's an eternity. You can make so much happen in 99 days. And I just encourage anyone to just hear that today and just ask yourself the question, have I made my mark on this year yet? And if not, there's one sprint right here we can use.
I have two comments on that. The first is I think the idea of quarters is so stupid. Quarters should be months. Don't make it Q4. Make it like M6 and then M7. Like four weeks is significantly better. Like the time that something takes is often dictated by the increments that we measure them in.
Yeah. I can't stand that. Like in Google calendars, it defaults to 30 minute increments. I'm like, don't make it five minute increments.
The second, I joke with a bunch of my Jewish friends, one of the reasons why they're so successful is the Jewish new year is in September. So, Rosh Hashanah, I can't even say it correctly, that was in September. And so, I'm like, dude, you guys have like three months head start in terms of New Year's resolutions and reflecting on your year. And so, I was thinking about that where I've actually liked that, where you make New Year's resolutions like two months in advance. And so, you got a two-month head start on everyone.
Well, there's a, I think it's called Parkinson's law, which is like work expands to fill the time you give it. It's like modeled after physics, like a gas will expand to fill whatever container it's in. So if you shrink the container, the gas will be more compact. If you have a bigger container, it'll spread out. Your projects take the work the same way. And so if you default to, like you said, Google calendar, if the default meeting is 30 minutes or an hour, guess what? You'll find a way to talk for 30 minutes. If you had moved that same meeting to 22 minutes, you would have got it all done in 22 minutes. So yeah, I think take this 99 days and make it happen. What, where are you at with that? Do you think this way? I know you're trying not to be the kind of ADD entrepreneur or the cortisol entrepreneur anymore that's spiking in stress.
Yeah, I'm trying to fight my natural instincts.
So it's good. I think my theory is that you can't change your weaknesses, or it's really hard to make your weaknesses a strength. You can potentially neutralize it, but that's like the best case scenario. And so instead, you do something where you just create a system where your weakness can't really show itself. So like, for example, if you don't work out, you're like, "Well, I'm never going to be self-motivated, but if I prepay for this trainer to show up at my home, like I'm still going to be lazy, but like they're going to — I just have to do this. Like there's no choice." So with me, I've got a CEO, my co-founder Joe, and so we have set it up to where we only talk mostly about personal stuff throughout the day, but there's only one day of the week where I can come and complain to him or suggest improvements for the business. And that one day a week, it's only 45 minutes. And I have to write it out in advance. And so because of that, I'll like see something and get pissed off and I'll be like, 6 days later when we talk about it, I'm like, I'm not actually that angry. Right? And so like I'm a big fan of creating systems. So it's worked for me. Do you have anything major that you want to do over the next 90?
Yeah, I want — there's like one more event I want to create. I've realized that as the world is so online, so digital, I think it's just put premiums on everything that's IRL. So I want to create one more IRL event. We have Hoop Group, which is our basketball event that we do once a year. And I want to create a second. And that thing's been like such a blessing, right? It's like super fun, super fun to do. Unbelievable crew of people that come to that thing. And it's built this awesome network around something that I would just do for fun anyways. And I want to do another one of those. The problem with that one is it's so exclusive. Like not only is everybody there like kind of the top of the top, like you know, in terms of their careers, but also you have to be like really into basketball, which is fundamentally limiting for a lot of people. They're just not that into basketball. So I want to create another event that is not limited in that same way.
Yeah. It's going to happen before the end of the year.
And I don't even have the concept yet. So that's okay. But you know, how long does an idea take? Like that's how long an idea takes, right? How long does the decision take? A decision takes that long too. So you know, people would normally say, oh, that's not enough time. If you ask any professional event planner, they'd say that's not enough time. Thankfully I'm not a professional event planner and I will make it happen in that amount of time.
I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it. Whether you're going to copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it and I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful and I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through, and I put it together in a database.
HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life and they resurfaced it. They made it even better and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So, if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so, if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out.
So, for the listener, my last company was The Hustle, was a newsletter, but it started as an event. And it was basically one event that I would host like basically when I needed money. So, like every nine months I would do it, use the money and go hang out for like two months and then like do it again. I did that for like three events in a row and then it became a newsletter. But the first event that I hosted, I'm going to try and get the dates correctly. The event happened I think on July 1st. I started working on it on May 15th, so it was roughly six weeks and so I sort of had first mover advantage and so I could kind of be crappy and it still be kind of interesting. And I think I charged 300 dollars and I think roughly 350 people came.
I'll frame it differently. I think what you did brilliantly was the name of it was HustleCon and the vibe of it was scrappy entrepreneurs, the real deal. And the beauty of that was you didn't have to provide a polished luxurious thing because that was off-brand.
So, thank God I don't have any of that because that would be off-brand anyways.
It's like I have a friend who created Summit Series, the big event they do on the mountain. They, they ended up, the event, where they ended up buying the mountain where they...
They bought a Summit. Yeah.
Yeah. And he said the best thing Burning Man ever did was create the ethos of like, hey, like it's a piece of dirt. You create the town, you clean up the town. It's like where there's no, there's no sign. If we didn't have the right sign where the bathroom was, people would get upset.
Burning Man, they just changed the expectation where it's like, 'Of course, we're not going to baby you. You set up your own tent. You survive. You bring your own supplies. You clean up everything.' And he's like, from an event planning perspective. Brilliant.
Yeah. Um, it's great. Um, and so I'll be eager to see how you pull this off. It's definitely doable. It's just like a lot of pressure. It is a very stressful period and it's sort of like running a marathon where leading up to it you're like this is kind of cool. It gets closer and you're like I'm scared. This sucks. Never doing this again. The day happens. You don't really remember a lot of it. It was a lot of work. A week later you're like...
I can do this again and I can make it better. You know, it's like giving birth and hosting an event and running a marathon are all... hosting an all-male tech conference. Those are the two similar events.
Yeah. I also think, you know, constraints are very, very important. So time constraint is one constraint. You said money, you know, we do the events out of pocket. We don't make any money off of them intentionally. So, well, that's a little bit silly. Why, why do you do that? Well, because the constraint is what is an event that is so good, that is so, so fun, so valuable, so meaningful to us that we'd be willing to spend, you know, 150 to 250 grand to make it happen. And that literally just eliminates like 99 options of what you might do if the goal was to try to make 100 grand, or try to make 200 grand, make 300 grand, make a million dollars. Um, and so the constraint, so using the constraint of what's an event so good I would pay to host it is what's led us to creating, you know, some very unique events so far. And that's, that's kind of what I want to do again.
I want to give you a little anecdote that I thought was pretty interesting. So there's this guy Joel Greenblatt, do you know who that is? Um, he writes books on stock picking, right?
He's like one of the best investors of all time. So like Warren Buffett, he outperformed the market for decades using a strategy, but nonetheless outperformed and did really well. So, he goes to give a talk and he puts in the front of the auditorium, he's got this jar of jelly beans inside. And so, he says, "Hey, I'm going to — anybody can come on up. Come on up to the front, take a look at the jar, and I want you to write down an estimate. Don't show your friend. Don't show your neighbor. Write down an estimate for how many beans are in this jar on this piece of paper." And he's like, "You can't open it, but you can do whatever you want. Come up here and take a look." So, everyone goes, they take a look. Some people are counting the beans in the row and then the height and kind of try to estimate it. And so, um, he tallies up. He gets all the results. And, um, the guesses are 1,771 beans.
That's the average of the guesses.
That's the average of all the guesses. Now, guess what? That's only five off from the actual. There's 1,776 beans in there. The average of this group of a hundred people was incredibly close. Um, but he doesn't tell them how close they were. Then he goes around the room and he says, "Actually, you know what? Let's make this a little faster. Um, why don't you just tell me how many you think are in this thing? Say it out loud." So the first person says, "Uh, 850." And so the next person who might have been thinking 2,000 was like, "Oh, [ __ ] 2,000? Maybe that's way off. Um, 1300." And then the person who was thinking 1,700 — like 850 and 1300 — so they all say their guesses out loud. When they all said their guesses out loud, they went from being off by five to being 50% off. The average, I think, came down to like 900 or something like that. So they were off by a mile now. Same people, same jar. The only thing that changed was hearing what other people thought.
And he gave this example. He goes, "This is the stock market. For most of you, if you were able to independently think and analyze a business and try to come up with what you think the true value of that business is, you're smart people, you'd do pretty well. But the reason smart people don't do well in the stock market is because they're listening to the news and Jim Cramer and the analyst reports and then they look at the ticker and it's going down. I guess it's bad. And it's going up. Ah, I got to get in, so it's got to go higher, right?" And they let everybody else influence their thinking as to what the business is actually worth. And he goes, "If you remember one thing about how to be a great investor, it would be to look at the jar and write down the number on the piece of paper and know that on average you will be much closer to the true value than if you just listen to what everybody is saying." And he goes, "Now this is so difficult. There's a reason Warren Buffett says you should buy low-cost index funds even though he doesn't. And I say you should buy low-cost index funds even though I don't, because it is so hard to do what I just told you."
So we had Joe Hudson on the other day.
So I consider myself to be a fairly easily influenced person. Like I'll hear about Sam Newhouse and I'm like "that's awesome, I love that." I'm easily excitable maybe is a good word. And so he said something that was interesting where he was like — I forget exactly how he phrased it but whatever way he phrased it I went and started reading this book called The Untethered Soul, which is kind of a fine book, it's only fine, but there was like one concept that I found interesting.
So have you heard of transcendental meditation? You basically sit down and instead of being quiet with your thoughts, you're chanting, and you're chanting something, it doesn't even matter what you're saying, but it's the rhythmic auditory thing almost drowns out the thoughts in your head. I've done this before. There's a Buddhist practice that's like this that I was once taken to, I thought it was really pretty awesome. But I don't do it regularly.
Yeah. And I've done it as well and I don't do it regularly anymore. But there was one line from The Untethered Soul where he talks about the guy who created TM, transcendental meditation. His last name was Maharishi. But he tells the story where he's basically like the most important key to have a happy life is when you have these thoughts in your brain, you should treat that thing in your brain as a roommate. And so if you were to have a roommate that said, "You totally screwed that up. You suck. Like that was not good what you did. You are never going to make up for it" — like everyone has these negative thoughts — you have to be like, "Dude, you are not me. You are my roommate." And with this guy who created TM, he was like, you just have to ask yourself all the time. For every thought, you have to ask, "Why am I thinking this?" And I'll just — I'll hear it, but I'm not going to listen to it. But I have to ask myself on a consistent basis: who am I? And why am I thinking about this? And what does this mean for me? As opposed to just listening. And just the act of asking yourself that is actually really important. And that simple question oftentimes can have breakthroughs for self-enlightenment. And so because I'm a very influenced person, I have to like read something and be like, "Why does this excite me? Okay, but is this actually who I am?" And like this constant like, "Who am I? Is this who I am? It's okay to like this person's story. That doesn't mean I'm going to copy it." Like this constant inner dialogue. Because I've been asking myself, how do you become less influenced by people who aren't aligned with your life's calling or like your mission is? And so when it comes to this mimetic discussion of like how do you not let this person influence you, I'm just trying to look for exercises on how to actually combat that because it is incredibly hard.
Yeah. Although you're talking about the — and you're saying you're taking it to the extreme. You're like even the voice in my head, don't let that necessarily influence me because that thing is a monkey throwing feces all over the room. You know, it's not necessarily the most reliable, aligned source for me.
Like it is not you. It is just a roommate.
I love the roommate thing. I love the roommate thing. That's great. Have I told you about my five voices in the head theory?
No. Is one of them telling you to kill? Because we should talk about that.
So I believe that people — it's not one roommate. I think there are these five voices in the head. And once you know that these parts of you exist, you'll start to recognize them because they'll pop up. It's kind of like the movie Inside Out, if you've ever seen it. Inside the girl's head, they do it with emotions. There's like the red angry guy, there's the blue sad girl, there's the fearful one, and then there's the grossed out one. So Inside Out showed this in a movie with emotions, but I think there's a similar thing going on with voices in your head. Who are the five? The first one is the critic. And the critic is like David Goggins in your head. You're never enough for him. You did 100 push-ups, you should have done 200. You could have done more, you [ __ ]. And he's there for a reason. He serves you, keeps you honest, prevents you from getting high on your own supply. There's a reason that he gets to have a room. But god darn it, if you listen to that guy too often, life doesn't end up very well for you. Then you have another voice, and I call this the voice of the mother. And the voice of the mother is a more caring voice, but it's also the one that's protective. It's slicing your grapes for you even when you're 19 years old. It doesn't want you to get hurt, and wants you to live a nice safe life and be protected, and wants everything to go well for you. And that's great too, because it's nice to be protected. It's nice to play it safe and you don't want to take too much risk. But at the same time, the dose makes the poison. Too much of that can also ruin your life because you'll play it too safe. And you go on and you go forth. And so there's these different voices. I could go through all of them, but that's the idea, that there are these five different voices. And then at the end of it, if you're able to hush up all these voices and get them to go back to their room for a little bit, the thing that's left, that's you. The last voice is you. That's the self. And the problem is it's so noisy in there because these other voices are constantly chirping that it's hard to hear what you truly think, what you truly want, because it sounds so easy. "Well, you should just do what you want." Most people don't even know. So why do we do things like meditation? Why does sleep help? Why do we do therapy? Because you're trying to get these other voices to just shut the [ __ ] up for a minute. So you can actually just figure out what you want and then go do that. It's pretty easy once you get there.
Have you ever described anything to AI and you describe this really interesting thought? You're like, "I think I just came up with this cool idea." And they're like, "Yeah, dude, that's called the theory of relativity." And you're like, "So I'm as smart as Albert. We invented this concurrently."
Well, is this a thing? Is this a thing that exists?
Yeah. Well, there's this great book called The Six Thinking Hats. I found this to be a very productive book.
Uh I believe — is that — I'm looking it up. Who? I think that might be him. Yeah, you're right.
The lateral thinking guy. Yeah. And it's basically like oftentimes at work or when you're working on a project, typically there's always the guy who defaults to "that can't work because..." And I remember reading that and I'm like, how — or thinking about that, I'm like, how do I change this guy or change myself?
And so there's the six hats of thinking and one of them's like the guy — the white hat is focus on facts, the yellow hat is be optimistic, the black hat be devil's advocate, whatever, and there's like six hats. And like when you're having a discussion you're like, okay, I hear what you're saying, can you go ahead and tell me — if you were an optimist what would you say about this idea? And it just creates a significantly better conversation where you're like, okay, listen to this voice, I hear you — you're being this person that might be who you are — I need you to pretend that you're an optimist person and tell me...
Or like, okay, you're this creative — like we used to have creative people at The Hustle — and it's like, okay, you're saying this crazy idea, I need you to be a manager right now, think through a manager's perspective and tell me how this makes profit so I can continue paying everyone's salary. And it's like, okay, let's think through that lens. And it starts actually changing the conversation meaningfully.
So what you've described is a little bit similar to what one of my favorite business authors of all time has described. So congratulations, you are now my favorite business author.
Yeah. All right, sweet. That's a win for me.
By the way, I like doing this — the physical version of this. So I actually have like two hats that I use. So when I was — I told you I was studying the creative...
Did you literally put your hat on?
Yeah. So I was studying the creative process and one of the biggest things in the creative process is that you need what Jerry Seinfeld calls two minds. The two minds of a creator. And the first mind is this childlike mind. So you know when you want to sit down and create, you're sitting in front of a blank page. The reason people have writer's block, the reason people struggle to create daily, is because you're afraid. You're afraid of failure. You're afraid of looking bad. You want so badly to be great that you're not willing to do something bad, to not put something bad down on the page. So you put nothing down at all as a self-protective mechanism.
So he talks about how you need the childlike mind at the beginning who's just going to grab a crayon and just scribble. And you almost want to have this attitude towards that version of you that's like, "Oh my god, sweetie, that's amazing. Can I hang that up on the fridge?" And you need to nurture that energy because it's what's going to get you going, right? It's going to get you to put things on the page and then you'll eventually figure out how to make it good. Good comes later. Don't worry about that. So you need this childlike mind.
He's like, and then what happens is about four hours later when you come back and you now have a bunch of scribble on the page, you have to completely change into a ruthless [ __ ]. And you now — this is the editor. And the editor is basically saying, "No, no, no, less of this. Trim the fat. Too many words. Too many syllables. Cut down. Rearrange this." And you got to be able to do both. You know, somebody who can only do the free play and never edits, never has any kind of discernment or taste or judgment, doesn't work. But if you bring the judgment into the room early on in the brainstorm, you're not going to have a very good brainstorm.
And so we created these two hats literally, like Diego got them made for us, which was like — it says Rick mode, which is like Rick Rubin. So it's like Rick mode when it's like, dude, we're just messing around. We're playing, we just trust ourselves. And you're Rick mode. And then we have Prick mode. And you put on the Prick mode hat, it goes the other way. It's a different color. And if we were in Prick mode, then it's like, well, that's who I'm supposed to be right now, so let me go ahead and do that.
And at first I felt kind of silly. And then I started noticing there's a lot of examples of great people who do this. So Warren Buffett has an actual thing on his desk called the too hard pile, because his investing philosophy is that look, you can't have a great opinion on a hundred straight stocks or investment opportunities. Like you should be able to pretty quickly figure out the five that are very interesting, probably good no-brainer things to do, the five that are absolutely terrible duds — stay away, red flags everywhere — but then 90% it's too hard to judge, it's too close to call, can't tell. And so he literally creates the too hard pile on his desk so that he can put things in there, just mentally say, look, I don't have to come to an answer. It's just in the too hard pile. I don't need to worry about it.
There was a guy, Zach Dell, so the son of Michael Dell from Dell Computers, and Zach Dell's got this really interesting company called Base Power now. And he was on a podcast and he was saying — he's like, "I have two notebooks." So he's like — I forgot what it was — like the red notebook and the blue notebook. And I think you will like this because this is every business like CEO business owner has this. He goes, the red notebook is working in the business. So if I have an idea of what we should do, what we should change, this customer thing, and then the blue is working on the business, which is, oh, this person's not in the right role, or we need to hire somebody for this, or we need to get an office, we need to rearrange our office space so these two groups are sitting closer to each other so that they're going to have better chemistry. And so, in the business and on the business. And he's like, I have two separate notebooks so I know which one I'm doing when and I know if I'm spending too much time in the business, it's like I'm all over the red notebook. Is that it? Do you have the same thing?
Can we just admire the showmanship? Can I just do that again? Instant replay. Sam picks up the notebook, shows it like that where it looks like one thick notebook, turns, fans it out. Two notebooks.
Yeah, I have got two notebooks. Um, I actually have a third. Hang on.
But wait, there's more. The ultimate showman. Hey, Zach. Suck on this.
In the business, on the business, and out of business.
It's like the five-year journal that I write, where it's like, here's how I feel today, like right now. The next one is like content ideas, like just random ideas. And then the next one is like, here's what I actually have to do, and I need to work through the actual problem.
What's your system for this?
So this one I do almost religiously every day. So this is the five-year journal. So every day I write like, here's what I did today. Here's something to be grateful for.
So this is like five, ten minutes in the morning. What do you do?
No, three minutes. So it could be like, today I read about Aristotle and I loved it for these reasons and I need to be reminded to do X — like Aristotle. Or it could be like, today I went to San Francisco. It was amazing. Um, we brought help with us and it made the trip so much easier. So it could be just like — I'll look back at a year like, ah, that's a good reminder. The next one, this one will be more like — let's say I'm reading a book and I'll have an interesting idea related to that book. So I just need to get on paper. And then the next one is like, here's what I have to do today. And it's mostly checklists, but I'll kind of brainstorm solutions to the problem.
So, your boy's got books. And by the way, that's like a consistent thing I've noticed amongst creators that I like, is that they — I think the easiest way to say it is they write drunk, edit sober.
Um, so I've noticed that consistently. But then you have stories like Eminem, the famous story where he walked in with Dr. Dre and Dre plays the first beat and then within five seconds he goes, "Hi, my name is." Like you're like, okay, so it definitely could just happen. But typically the people who are systematically great, including Eminem — like I think Anderson Cooper did a story on Eminem where they're like, dude, he writes like crazy, like I've never seen someone write down so much stuff. And another thing that they would say about him — and Eminem when he was younger came off as this party guy, maybe he was — but they're like he's at the studio at 9:00 a.m. and he goes home at four. Like it's a work day. And I notice that there's way more systematic ways to being creative than there is examples of epiphanies, right?
Well, the analogy I would use — because I think it's, yeah, both. Like, yeah, you have those moments where the song comes on, the beat comes on and he starts doing "Hi, My Name Is," or you hear this a lot where somebody — it's like in 24 hours they wrote both of the hit songs that define their careers in one day. All it took was one day. And
It's like, no, all it took was every day for their whole life, and then they had that day. And the analogy I use is, you know, you have a 2% conversion rate and the conversions just came like in number 98 and 99.
