#487: BEST OF - Transform Your MINDSET, Transform Your LIFE with Steven Bartlett, Krista Mashore, Amjad Masad, Dileep Thazhmon, Martin Villig, Ankush Grove, Jerrod Blandino, & Colin O’Brady

0:00We can be and become anything that we set our minds to through diligence and hard work of saying, I might not be this right now, but a fixed mindset says I might not be this right now and I will never be this ever. But being able to claim that in identity, I am this. A possible mindset says the possibilities are limitless. Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. That's a no secret. I'm ready for my close-up. Happy New Year. Have you created your resolutions yet? If you need a little help in getting you into a mindset that will challenge you to dream bigger than ever before, then this is what I have for you.

0:42Today's episode features some of my most successful guests in business who weren't afraid to dream big and then take the necessary bold action. Remember, they took the messy action. It's your turn now, my friend. If you can dream it, you can create it. I truly believe that. Don't forget, if you need a hand, you need some accountability and you want to be a part of a team that's running with you, so you don't need to go it alone, click the link in the show notes below. You're going to find the opportunity to sign up for my group coaching. Jump in now before it's too late. All right. This episode is going to walk you through how you can just go bigger.

1:192025, it's your year.

1:27How do other entrepreneurs know when is it right to just focus on one thing versus diversify? Yeah, so in our portfolio, so Flight Group is our holding company. We have 41 different companies. And I'd say we have significant operational involvement in about five of them. But there's 41 in total. Some of them are more passive investments. Some of them we might have a 20 % or 30 % stake in. And then some of them we have a majority position in. The key thing, to answer your question, is a company by definition of the word is group of people. So for me, when I got to the point in my life where I had the leverage, the resources to hire exceptional people and delegate, that's when I knew I could do more than one thing.

2:09And Richard Branson, who I met in New York and I went to an event with him and then I interviewed him for a couple of hours, is the absolute master of this. He said to me, because he's dyslexic, so he struggles with reading and he's not particularly good at maths in his own words, he said to me, I've always had to ask, Who, not how. And this is like, my girlfriend started a business. It does like breathwork and meditation. And I remember walking in the front room and watching her for seven hours try and figure out how to build a website. And that for me is almost a metaphor from what I see from entrepreneurs.

2:45They spend so much time, they waste so much time doing things that they are not good at. What Richard Branson taught me is businesses about effective delegation. Richard Branson, in his 50s, ran one of the biggest groups in Europe, right? And he told me about a meeting he had at 50 years old, runs one of the biggest groups in Europe, where he sat in the meeting, and his CFO says, Richard, do you know what's going on? He goes, he's like, no. His CFO takes him out of the room, draws a picture of an ocean, and then draws a picture of a net in the ocean, and then puts some fishies in the net and goes, Richard, this is what net profit is.

3:27Net profit is the fishies here in the net. At this point, Richard is running one of the biggest groups in Europe and he doesn't know what net profit is because he's been such a good delegator for his entire career that he doesn't really need to know a bunch of stuff. He's so good at finding people and giving them responsibility. In this season of my life, that is what I'm doing. I'm finding exceptional individuals. I'm spending about 20 hours a week of my time on recruitment and I'm empowering them to start companies. Again, I've researched this really, really deeply. I've interviewed Walter Isaacson who followed Elon Musk for two years and he followed Steve Jobs pretty much until the day he died.

4:07And I asked him, I said, what's their secret? He said, specifically in the case of Steve Jobs, he said, do you know, Steve, I was in the backyard with Steve Jobs before he died. And I asked him a question. I said, what's the best product you ever built at Apple? Steve turned to me and went, the team. He goes, that's the most important thing. He goes, the iPhone's great, the Mac is great, but the best product I ever made at Apple was the team. By definition of the word company is group of people. And if you, you know, play out this thought experiment, if any of you had managed to hire Elon Musk and get the best out of him, you would be the benefactor of trillions of dollars.

4:46So I think through that lens, My job is to find the next A player. And that's why I went from spending one hour a week of my time on hiring and recruitment. Now I spend 20 hours of my week. All of you, both personally and professionally, are in the recruitment business. It is going to be the single biggest defining factor of where you end up personally and professionally. What big regret do you have? The big professional regret I have is knowing that someone was wrong for my company or team and taking too long to make a decision about it. Because again, I wrote about some of the research in my book, but the impact that a negative member of your team has is three to four times the positive impact a good member of your team has.

5:33And a nice thought experiment for you guys to think about when you're trying to understand if an existing member of your team is good or when you're hiring someone and you're trying to figure out if they're a good team member is ask yourself this question. If everyone in the team was like them in terms of attitude, cultural values, i.e. alignment with the company culture, would the overall average be raised, maintained, or lowered? Both me and both Amazon have a policy which we call bar raises. Every single person that we hire should raise the bar. They should raise the average. Now think about one person you work with professionally and ask yourself the question, if everyone in your company was like them in terms of attitude and cultural values, I'm not saying lived experience, we need diversity, attitude and cultural values, would the average be raised, maintained or lowered?

6:26If it would be lowered considerably, you should get rid of that individual. If it would be maintained, maybe that's the case to train the individual. If it would be raised, that's the type of individual you need to promote because companies don't have one culture. They typically have as many cultures as they have managers. So in my previous business, we probably had about 30 or 40 managers and we had 30 or 40 cultures really. Because I remember one day speaking to Jason's team and they're all so happy. Best company they've ever worked for. Then I spoke to a team that sat next to Jason's team and they're all on their way out the door.

7:03They're about to quit. So you want your best people, the real sort of cultural disciples, as high as you possibly can in the organization. And that's what we call the bar razor test. I think, and I've done a lot of research on this, you can correlate someone's success in life to one metric more than others. And that metric is their personal and professional failure rates. If you want to increase your chance of success, you basically have to increase your rate of failure. And I've studied many a great entrepreneur from Jeff Bezos to Thomas Watson from IBM to entrepreneurs that I know and have interviewed like the founder of Airbnb and Daniel Ek, who's a good friend of mine, the founder of Spotify, what they all share in common is they understand that failure is feedback and feedback is knowledge and knowledge is power.

7:48So when I think about my own life and I reflect on my own failings or my own experimentation rate, leaving school at 16 years old, quitting university after one lecture, starting a company and resigning after two years, starting another business and resigning after five years, I have a very fast rate of experimentation. And that means that I think I've managed to acquire a lot of information very quickly. And that's reflected in the companies that I build. So in the companies that I build now, we have a head of failure. We have a head of experimentation. And I think there's probably some background context I need to give you here, which is the world is going to change at such a quick rate.

8:24You'll see this when you walk around here and you get to see some of the technology, that your question as an individual but also as a company should be, how am I going to acquire information quickly? And how am I going to acquire valuable information quickly? It's not going to come from books. If you listen to the futurists, they'll tell you that in the 21st century, we'll experience a rate of change that is 20 ,000 times the previous century. So the way that you acquire information, whether you're an individual or a company is you increase your rate of experimentation. You conduct more experiments.

8:56And so for something that's easy to understand, like a podcast, that means we conduct 30 or 40 experiments every week on everything, on the title, the length of the title, different colors, adding an exclamation mark, adding quotation marks, the temperature of the room, the amount of CO2 in the room when you do an interview. We take this absolute scientific approach to finding the answer, which is accelerating your rate of failure. And if you speak to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, he'll tell you the same thing. He says, Amazon has to be the best place on earth to fail. Nine of those failures will end up in the graveyard.

9:31But the one that is successful, the AWS, will pay for the entire graveyard. And the world we're moving into, it's going to be increasingly more important that your team is set up to conduct fast experiments. Meet a different guest each week. Lay it on your team. Confidence clear. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business all in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agents has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years.

10:10They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S. with over 1 ,500 corporate guides, real people who know your local laws and can help you in your business every step of the way. Build your business identity fast with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free resources, forms, and step-by-step guides without even creating an account. Sign up for a free account to begin managing your business hub with lawyer-drafted operating agreements, bylaws, resolutions, membership certificates, bills of sale, and more all at no cost. Northwest is your one-stop business resource.

10:46Learn how to build a professional website, what annual filings your business needs to stay in good standing, and simple explanations of complicated business laws. With Northwest, privacy is automatic. They never sell your data, and all services are handled in-house because privacy by default is their pledge to all customers. Don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand, and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at www.northwestregisteredagent.com slash confidence free.

11:29If your anxiety, depression, or ADHD are more than a rough patch, you don't need just another meditation app. Takayatri makes it easy to see a psychiatrist online using your insurance in days. Talkiatry is 100 % online psychiatry practice that provides comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses, and ongoing medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy-only apps, talkiatry is psychiatry. That means you're seeing a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's appropriate.

12:06All their 600 plus clinicians are in network with major insurers, so you can use your existing insurance instead of paying monthly subscriptions or out of network fees. You'll meet with an experienced licensed psychiatrist who takes the time to understand what's going on, builds a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. Your care stays consistent and evidence based. Head to talkiatry.com slash confidence and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiatry.com slash confidence to get matched in minutes.

12:52I've studied a lot of brain research and I am obsessed with the way the brain works. And so I've always I've known that it's harder for me and I have to work on it. So I'm always looking for skills, like different ways to make, be successful because people will always be like, teach me how to build a million dollar funnel. It's like, I can't teach you that until you get your mind right. So there's a strategy called stop, snap, and switch. And what it is, is we have between 30 ,000 and 70 ,000 thoughts a day that run through our mind. Research shows that about 85 % of those thoughts are negative.

13:20And so when you can identify the negative thoughts, because energy goes where focus flows, what you think about actually happens. The neurotransmitters in your brain does not know the difference between what you think and reality. So if you're constantly thinking, I'm tired, I'm too old, I don't have any energy, I'm not good with technology, I can't do this, right? The brain goes, okay, you're right. And it doesn't look for ways to help you overcome that. So if you can recognize what you're saying and train your brain to start thinking about good things, recognizing good things, seeing your successes, and I call it stop.

13:50Like when you have a negative thought, like, oh my gosh, I am, who in the heck would ever leave their career, their career 47 to change careers, right? That's a negative thought. That happened to me when I was 47. I decided I wanted to become a coach. I was making about$1 million a year as a real estate agent. And I was told that I was crazy to do that because no one's going to listen to you at 47. And normal people at 47 don't leave their successful career to do something different. Not a good idea. And so what I said was, I thought, okay, I've been doing this for 17 years. I'm very good at it.

14:21I was successful at that. If I was successful at that, I could be successful at this. So you have to stop and recognize the negative thought. The negative thought was, who the heck is going to listen to you, Krista? You don't have a list. You're just the girl who wet the bed until she was 10 and couldn't read until fifth grade because of the abuse. Like, you don't have enough knowledge. What are you going to say? You don't have a following. I had to change those thoughts into stop and stop, recognize it and go, no, because of your success, right? You stop and you snap, stop the, you recognize the thought, you stop it, you snap the bracelet and you switch it over the other hand.

14:53You say the opposite of the negative thought. It's called stop, snap and switch. If you do that, anybody, I guarantee you, do it. Have your kids do it. Have your spouse do it. Have your friends do it. Like stop, snap, and switch. You will be amazed at how you can train your brain to start working for you. And so now when things happen or the fear comes up or the negative thoughts, it's more like moments or minutes, sometimes a little longer depending on how bad it is, right? Instead of days, hours, weeks, months, years kind of a thing. So do you get nervous or are there like tips that you can give everyone listening?

15:27How, when you're doing something for the first time, how do you ensure that you have success? Here's how you assure you have success is that you just don't stop. I think I would have been more fearful if I didn't start this. I feel like the universe has my back so much because the real estate market right now with the recession, like we were on track last February, like a year, like a year and a half ago, we did$4 million in one month. So we were on track to start doing like two,$3 million a month. Well, then the market crashed and interest rates went to 7%. There's no inventory. There's a recession.

16:00So I am so glad that I took the risk and took the leap of faith because I think I'd be more nervous now if I didn't have this. This is going to end up being bigger than my other coaching business. I know it is, right? Because we've helped hypnotists. We've helped people that are teaching investings, people teaching leadership, public speaking. We've taught all these different businesses, tapping, like, you know, how to do really, really well. And so, yes, I was scared to death, but I have learned to stop, snap, and switch. I've learned like, Krista, keep going. Like, stop saying that to yourself.

16:31That's not serving you right. It's you're not, those thoughts are not training your brain to help you. I stopped, snap, and switched my way right out of it. Because trust me, there's been plenty of times like every day where I'm like, you know, I have to just turn that little, you know, negative voice. I call it the bad wolf, the amygdala. I got to shut it off. Tell us a little bit about getting into the coaching, starting that business, the digital marketing, and how you've scaled it massively in the past couple of years. I became a good realtor by utilizing digital marketing, social media, and video to dominate my market, right?

17:02I became a marketer instead of just an agent. And it worked like crazy good for me. So I thought to myself, that's what I have to do in coaching. So, and mind you, when I did this, Literally, my family said, Krista, you're crazy. You shouldn't do this. It's not a good idea. Like, are you sure? I'm so glad I didn't listen to them because it took me 14 years as a real estate agent to break the million dollar mark. And I did it in 11 months in the coaching spirit, utilizing. And now we're doing million dollars a month. We've had we've done over a million dollars a month the past 31 months in a row right now during a recession, during the economy, during it all by taking the risk, taking the leap of faith.

17:39but it's because I come from an educational-based marketing standpoint. I'm a marketer first. I love digital marketing. I love funnels. And if you're somebody right now, you are trying to break out there. You have to get comfortable being uncomfortable, number one, but you've got to get comfortable being in front of people and being yourself and letting people see the real you and exposing yourself to people. I pay for attention. And that's how I've gone about the whole digital marketing aspect of it is I'll put money behind running ads just to get my face in front of people without any call to action.

18:15Because research shows it takes about 47 times for someone to see you before they actually click. And the more value that you add, the more you speak directly to someone, the more that they will click. So instead of asking somebody to download my book in the beginning or to give me their contact information in exchange for a lead magnet, what I do is I just give value, value, value. And then I'll ask them to click, right? So that has been my strategy and it's worked really, really well for me. Russell Brunson, in fact, he's the CEO of ClickFunnels. He actually had me talk about that on stage two years ago, the pre-funnel.

18:46Like what is your marketing strategy before you drive traffic to your funnel? And that's been the way I did it in real estate and the way that I did it in coaching. Meet a different guest each week.

18:59Kush, you talk about being a different kind of unicorn. I know many people, like myself, you want to believe you can drive your business to success overnight, but that hasn't really been the way it's happened for you. You call yourself, what kind of a unicorn? We call ourselves a slow unicorn. So it took us around 10 years to become a unicorn because we picked up an industry which was not revolutionized by the internet. so the restaurant industry started 500 years ago so Amazon came revelized something, Uber revelized something but no one did anything in terms of food so that's where we picked our battle there was no playbook to play on so we were not any XYZ of India so we built our own our own learnings did a lot of mistakes so we started with one brand on the high street then we went to dark kitchens with one brand.

19:55Then we realized people order McDonald's never a salad from McDonald's. So each cuisine need to have one brand. So we started building multi-brand. And one core value of ours is to challenge the status quo. So we keep challenging the way food business is being run. So today we operate 400 kitchens from four countries, 20 brands, and we serve 10 million meals a month. That's been our journey. And recently, we got Wendy's to India. So Wendy's, a 100 years old company, the first time in the history they could open 150 locations in the span of 18 months. So that's the kind of scale to bring on. But it took a lot of time for us to understand mistakes, go back, redraw, and a lot of backers and our investors.

20:46So none of our investors ever exited so far. So we have like SofSecure on board, Goldman Sachs, I go to QIA. So it's a long journey, and that's why we call ourselves a slow unicorn. What keeps you going through a long journey? So one very obvious is love for food. So I love food. And then the other thing is, I think the overall mission is, still McDonald's is the world's most valuable food company at$130 billion. We are just a billion dollar. So we have a lot of canvas to be covered, a lot of things to be done. We recently entered Saudi, and we know how big Saudi is a market. So we just entered and have three kitchens here.

21:27So ambition is to be the largest in the world. We are already largest, but keep growing and have like 50 ,000 internet restaurants, around 2 ,000 locations, and have all the cuisines on board, which we make and serve to our customers. I love it. Follow your passions and set massive goals. we keep hearing be courageous embrace failures over and over again thank you so much starting the year with a wardrobe refresh quince has you covered with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished they're perfect for layering mixing and building a wardrobe that lasts their versatile styles make it easy to reach for them day after day quince has all the staples covered from soft mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100 % silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear.

22:19Their wardrobe essentials are crafted to last season after season. Their Italian wool coats are real standouts. They're beautifully tailored, soft to the touch, and built to carry you through years of wear, not just one season. The quality shows in every detail, the stitching, the fit, the fabrics. Every piece is thoughtfully designed to be your new wardrobe essential. And like everything from quince. Each piece is made from premium materials and ethical trusted factories that are priced far below what other luxury brands charge. I can't tell you how much I am loving my new cashmere sweater. It's a staple for sure, and I can't wait to give one to my best friend for her birthday this year.

22:57It is timeless, gorgeous, and the softest thing I've ever touched. Which quince pieces are you interested in? I mean, from the bags, to the denim, to the sweaters to the jackets. They're all incredible luxury high-end products without the high-end price. Refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Don't wait. Go to Quince.com slash confidence for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash confidence to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash confidence. Dilip, to you, what are the most important skills or qualities an entrepreneur needs to have in this day and age?

23:44I can talk about myself. So I think the first thing is you can't almost overthink it. And the number one thing I've seen with founders that don't make it is they kind of analyze it to death. And the reality is you're going to have 50 % information if you're lucky. If you're waiting for 80 % and 90 % information, someone's already done it. And so you have to move pretty quickly. And that window that you're building for also moves. And the biggest thing I've seen is people think it's always there. And they're like, now I'm ready. But that window's already gone. And someone else has already done that.

24:15And when we launched, we started in multiple countries. And we were shipping U.S. cards to multiple countries. Now we have licenses in 22 countries. But if I was waiting for the license to start, we just would never start. And so it's a balance. You have to be comfortable with that level of risk. And then the second thing is, I think someone mentioned this here. but you have to enjoy the process. Like, build something you want to build. Because at the end of the day, you know, the funding, your unicorn, like, none of that's going to get you through when it's hard. And you have to, like, be like, why are you actually doing this?