How To Go Beast Mode As A Founder

0:00All right, turn on the camera. Turn on the camera. I got a rant for you. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on the road. I got a call yesterday from an entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable. They were stuck. They're at a plateau. Their business is not growing as fast as they want. They were pitching me on all the new things they were going to do. New features they were going to add, a new project. And then they started telling me about the side hustle that they got going on. and I had to stop them and I had to tell them the truth.

0:32The truth is stop searching for answers. We are all guilty of this. You know, like if I'm fat, all of a sudden I'm keto, I'm paleo, I'm reading books, I'm listening to podcasts and I'm not just doing the obvious things. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a mentor has it or a book has it or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case. If I talk to nine out of 10 people, Only one might need a strategy change. For nine out of 10, the answer is up your level of intensity.

1:06The best part about intensity is that it's contagious, that you can actually create a culture of intensity. There's a wonderful story about Peter Thiel when he was running PayPal. So Peter Thiel was one of the, he was a CEO of PayPal. He's the first investor in Facebook. And I was curious because Peter Thiel is kind of like a sort of a weird dude. And I was like, he doesn't seem like a classic manager, leader, inspiring guy, super organized, button down, running, you know, daily standups. It turns out he didn't really do any of that shit. He had a very simple system. His common sense system was, well, everybody in the company should figure out one priority.

1:40Like you, you should have one priority in your brain. You're going to do one thing. What's it going to be? And forcing people to figure out one priority, not a to-do list, but a single priority was an incredible forcing function. Everybody had to say something. And if you said something stupid, it would be like, that's your priority. And so everybody picked one priority, but now that's good. But that's just like, you know, the very, very first half of the battle. What's the second half actually sticking to that? Because human nature is everything feels important. I have my one priority, but then there's the second thing that's important too.

2:09And then there's a third thing that's important too. And the problem with this that Peter said was that imagine you have three priorities. And even if you stack ranked them, you said, this is number one, number two, number three. What happens is that we often don't know the answer to number one. Number one lacks a clear solution. It's a gnarly problem. It's an important problem, but it's not an obvious problem. So what we do is we just gravitate towards the second task because it's much clearer. I know what to do there. So I gravitate towards the known, right? It's that Warren Buffett story where the guy lost his keys outside of a bar.

2:39So he's crawling around on the ground trying to find his keys. And the officer says, sir, what are you doing? He's I'm looking for my keys. Did you drop them here? No, no, I dropped them over there. Well, why are you crawling over here? Because this is where the light is. And that's how most people operate in their day-to-day priorities. We crawl around where the light is. We crawl around doing the known things, the things that feel familiar to us, rather than the important things, the things where the solution actually is over there. It's just in the dark. And so Peter Thiel, what he would do is if anybody tried to talk to him about something that was not their big thing, their one thing, he would literally just leave the room.

3:13He's like, oh, you're talking to me about that? I thought your thing is this? Okay, see ya. And he's like, I'm not going to sit here and try to convince you, but I will signal to you that this is not a priority by literally just leaving the meeting or leaving the room or just not refusing to talk to you about anything besides your one thing. To Teal, what he said was he goes, if you allow yourself to have more than one focus, you've already blinked. I love that. You've already blinked. You've flinched. And he says, you've determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome. My singular focus philosophy is that solutions may not be clear, but the path to excellence and value are.

3:46And the path to excellence and value is to have a singular focus. And I believe this to be true. I believe that the mind is a very powerful tool. I call the brain a answering machine. It's just about what question you ask it. If you ask yourself a bunch of questions like, why did this person cut me off? Your brain will tell you because they're an asshole, because you've told your brain to focus its attention on why this person cut you off in traffic, right? You focused your powerful tool on a silly thing to focus on. And the brain can really only handle one question at a time. It is not as much as we think we can multitask.

4:18We really can't. We can kind of solve one problem at a time. It's just a question of what are you going to load into your brain? And are you willing to let it sit there until it is solved? That Peter Thiel, one priority philosophy is a very powerful one. It's something that I implement on my day-to-day basis. All right. So first let me dispel some myths because I can already hear you in the comments. I can hear you type it away because what you're thinking is probably what I used to think, which is, dude, I don't want to work 24-7. That's not my goal. Well, intensity is not working 24-7. That's the first thing.

4:45Intensity is a formula, actually. It is focus times common sense times insanity. That's it. Focus times common sense times insanity. That is what I mean when I say intensity. There's a great quote, by the way. I saw Conor McGregor and Conor McGregor's story is insane. He went from a plumber on welfare to the highest paid, richest athlete in the world on the Forbes list to the first two weight world champion in the UFC. And he did this all in like five or six years. And there was a video of him after his training session. and he says the following, he goes, I've lost my mind to this game. Like Vincent Van Gogh, he dedicated his mind to his art and he lost his mind in the process.

5:24That is what's happened to me. But fuck it. When that gold belt is around my waist, when my mother has a big mansion, when my girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week, when my kids' kids can have everything they want, then it will pay off. Then I will be happy. I have lost my mind. And that is the level of intensity and insanity that you can get to if you really do this at a level 12. And not everybody's going to want to do this at level 12, but you should know what level 12 looks like. You should know what it is. And then you get to decide how you're going to dial that knob down.

5:53The problem most people have is they think they're already at a level 10. They don't even consider level 12. They think they're already at 10 when in actuality they're at six. And today I'm going to show you how you are at a six and you're not at a 10 because that is a lie. It's a dangerous lie we want to tell ourselves. The other misconception, by the way, is, oh great, I got to do more. I'm already busy. I'm already overwhelmed. Now I got to do more. No, no, no. It's actually the opposite. You are going to end up doing less. There's a great Steve Jobs quote. I'm going to butcher it. But it's basically something like focus is saying no to 100 great ideas.

6:26So you can say yes to the one exceptional one. Focus is saying no to 100 great ideas. Great ideas are ideas that you could totally make a case for that you would seem smart for you to go do. But doing 100 of them doesn't work, right? You can do anything. You just can't do everything. And so focus is saying no to the hundred great ideas. So you can do the one exception one. So if you do this right, you're not doing more. You're actually doing less. You're just doing it better. So, okay, let's jump into some examples. I'm going to start with some business examples because there's plenty of like inspirational athlete stories or just kind of like general motivation, but this is a business podcast.

7:00I am all about business. So let's do the first one. So first one is Mark Zuckerberg. So there's a great story of Zuck when he bought Instagram. And by the way, today, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead. Instagram literally ended up becoming the next social network. It was going to be its biggest competitor and Facebook bought it. Well, okay, that's cool. That's just a business decision, right? It's a strategy decision. No, no, no. It was a story of intensity. So here's how the story goes. The founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, used to work at a place called Odeo. He was actually kind of like an intern sitting at the desk next to this guy named Jack Dorsey.

7:36Odeo pivots to Twitter. That becomes Twitter. Jack Dorsey ends up being the CEO of Twitter at one point in time. And Jack Dorsey is kind of like his mentor. So Kevin creates Instagram. Twitter doesn't have photo sharing. Twitter says, we want to buy Instagram. And they offer to buy it for something like$400,$500 million. And again, this is, they have the relationship. They were first to make the offer. They offered a big sum of money. So they did what they thought was level 12 intensity. But then Zuck came and showed them what's up. So the way that the story goes down is Mark Zuckerberg starts texting Kevin Systrom.

8:09and he says, hey, I want to meet. I want to talk to you about buying the company. And Mark's intensity is almost known. It's sort of legendary in the industry. So Kevin is texting his investor and he's saying, should I meet with Zuck? I don't, I'm worried if I go there, I don't really want to sell. And I feel like if I tell him I don't want to sell, is he just going to go into like psycho mode and crush me? And the investor goes, yeah, probably. And so he's like, okay, I guess I'll take the meeting. He already has a deal on the table to sell to Twitter for$550 million. He then meets with Sequoia, the number one VC in Silicon Valley.

8:42And they say, you know what? You should stay independent. Instagram can be big. We will fund you at$500 million. So same valuation, but you get to keep going. You get to keep your independence. But he goes to meet Zuck. And he goes, unlike Twitter, Zuck did not take no for an answer. So he rejects Zuck first. Zuck says, no, no, no. Just come over to my house and talk. Can you just come over today? And he says, I guess I got to go over there. I don't want to really piss this guy off. So he just says, okay, I'll just go over there. So he goes to his house. And now this is Good Friday, Easter's on Sunday.

9:10He goes to his house on Friday and he walks in and Zuck says the following. He says, I've thought about it and I want to buy your company. And Kevin's like, I know, but I already said no. He says, I will give you double whatever you're currently raising your round at. So whatever your price is, I'll give you double. And that would mean that Instagram would be worth a billion dollars. And nobody had ever paid this much for a mobile app before. This would be the first deal of its kind. Instagram had zero revenue, had like less than 20 employees. It was tiny. This seemed like an outrageously over-the-top way of going about things.

9:40And Zuck said, well, look, I can give you a billion dollars for this, but here's the deal. We got to do this deal this weekend. And he basically pushed him. And this was, again, it's Easter on Sunday. Nobody's working over the weekend. The Twitter guys think that they have a deal in the bag. The Sequoia guys think that they have the deal in the bag. And the mistake they made was they thought that work starts on Mondays. And Zuck just decided to work over the weekend. So he basically said, look, let's stay here and we'll either hash out the deal and we'll make a deal happen or we'll figure out that a deal is not going to happen.

10:06But let's just agree. We're going to stay here and we're going to figure it out. So he says, okay. So they basically stayed together for 48 hours. Zuck calls his lawyers. He calls his corp dev guys. He says, get over here. We got to figure out how we're going to close this deal now. Kevin calls his investors. He's like, Hey, I'm thinking about having this deal. And here's the quote. One of his investors says, I sat back and thought, what just happened? Like, holy shit. What just happened? How did he pull this off? And Zuck had this belief that if we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, somebody else will.

10:32The internet's not a friendly place. I have to act with a certain level of intensity when we find a deal that's like this. And so over the weekend, just to give you a perspective, to do a billion dollar deal generally takes time. Six months will go by. Nine months will go by. Zuck, his lawyers, and the founder of Instagram, they end up cutting this deal over the weekend. They do a billion dollar deal in 48 hours. And by the time the competition woke up on Monday, the deal was gone. So that's the story of how Zuck buys Instagram. And by the way, this is not the first time. He also bought WhatsApp.

11:02How he bought WhatsApp was the same way. And WhatsApp had the right culture. WhatsApp also operated with high intensity. There's a famous story that the founder of WhatsApp had the sticky note on his desk and they took a picture of it when he sold it. It said, no ads, no games, no gimmicks. That was their mindset. Every other messaging app was always adding more and more features. They would add games. They would add stickers. They would add some ads into it. They would just keep adding things. And they said, the way we're going to win is we're going to do the basic thing, messaging, and we're just going to do it better than anybody else.

11:31They were like Chick-fil-A. Have you ever been to a Chick-fil-A? You don't go to a Chick-fil-A because Chick-fil-A adds fish fillets on the menu. No, no, no. Chick-fil-A decided to have a common sense strategy. We're going to sell chicken sandwiches. And they just do it with a better level of intensity than anybody else. They sell a better chicken sandwich. In-N-Out does the same thing. In-N-Out's like, we're going to sell a burger and fries. It's not a revolutionary strategy. They did not pivot. They did not innovate in that. They just brought a higher level of intensity to it than anybody else was willing to do at the time.

11:59And so those two fast food chains make more money per location than chains that do 10 times more things that have a wider menu, that have more locations because they operate with a higher level of intensity. That's the same way that WhatsApp and Zuck approach business. The founder of WhatsApp always said, he goes, the F word around here is focus. He says, I don't think about things that I can't figure out. I don't think about the future. I don't go to conferences and give talks about where the industry is going. He goes, I focus my brain around the things that I can wrap my head around. Like, this customer's complaining about this thing.

12:32Let me go fix that bug. And he said that the reason they sold to Facebook was because Zuck chased them for two years personally. He would meet them for coffee, then hike. No deal would happen. And he would keep inviting them. Hikes, dinners, coffees. And he did that for two years until finally they relented and they ended up closing the deal. Okay, I want to talk to you about Stripe. One of the stories I love about Stripe comes from Paul Graham. Paul Graham was running YC at the time when Stripe went through it. He met the founders early on. And these were a couple of teenagers that were basically saying, we're going to change the financial system.

13:01We're going to change the payment system. We're going to go work with banks. And he's like, these two redheaded teenagers think that they could do this. All right, well, I'm curious. Let's see what happens. And he noted that Stripe was doing one thing very differently than the average company through YC. Remember, YC is the best of the best. So these guys were uncommon amongst the uncommon companies. And so he called it the Collison installation. He said, most companies, when they would talk to a potential customer, they would bump into another founder. They would say, oh, yeah, here's what we do.

13:30They would say, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. You say, oh, awesome. You're interested. Cool. I'll send you a link. I'll send you an invite to the beta when we're ready. And you could sign up. That's what most people do. He said, what the Collison's would do is very different. We started calling this the Collison installation, which would be as soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they would say, awesome. Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now. I'll do it for you. and they would literally brute force get customers on board. The person would open up their laptop and they would literally install Stripe.

13:57They would explain it to them and they would onboard them on the spot. And they did this to the first, you know, 100, 200 customers manually. And Paul Graham noted, he goes, you know, I wonder why don't more people do this? It's not like this was some outrageous strategy. It's not that it was even like that hard to do. He said, the reason people don't do this is two things, shyness or a fear of rejection. And he goes, also a misconception. He goes, they think that big things come from big things. but actually big things come from an accumulation of smaller things. I thought it was a beautiful way of putting it to understand how a big thing happens is just an accumulation of smaller things.

14:30And he said that many people believe that startups take off or they don't take off, that your business either works or it doesn't work. And he said, actually, what I've learned doing YC is that startups happen because the founder makes them happen. They take off because the founder makes them take off. And he goes, it's like an engine, right? You can't force something that's never going to work to work. What you can do is if something has the potential to work, you can crank that engine manually, hand crank it to get it going. And then it starts. And once the engine started, you know, you push the boulder enough, eventually it starts to roll.

15:02And now you're chasing the momentum of it rolling downhill. But at the beginning, it felt like pushing it to the top of the hill. And I thought that was a great analogy of how Stripe operated with a higher level of intensity. And if that's how they onboarded customers, imagine how they did the 10 other things. because how you do one thing is how you do everything. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere, that maybe a mentor has it or a book has it, or there's some knowledge that they don't have and that's what's holding them back. But that's really never the case.

15:31So rarely is that the case. Almost always the answer you seek is within. One of the great stories about this comes from Ben Horowitz. He has this phrase, he goes, lead bullets, not silver bullets. And he's talking about when he was running his company, they were at a very tough point. There was tough competition. The company was on the line. It was going to go, go bust or they were going to figure out a way to make it. He goes, my first instinct was to pivot, to try to find a magical win. It's a magical solution, a rabbit out of a hat. He's like, I so wanted to stand in front of my company and say, aha, I have the answer.

16:00I went for this walk. I met this guy and here's the answer. We just got to do this and it'll all work out. He said, but that's not really how it worked. He goes, I stood in front of the company and I told them, I said, there are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets. They didn't want to hear that, but I had to make it clear. We simply had to build a better product. There was no other way out. There's no window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door. We have to go through the front door and deal with the big ugly guy that's blocking it. We needed lead bullets. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury.

16:34They're the fintech of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is because it does everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it's super important for us to be able to easily wire transfer, pay all our different vendors and suppliers all around the world. And the old way with our more traditional bank that shall now be named, I try it online. It would say no, it would freeze my account. Then I'd have to go in, book an appointment, speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn't need.

17:02And then finally, after 30 minutes there, then they charge me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible interaction. And now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons, and I'm done. It's such a seamless experience. It's very intuitive. Everything's under one place. They basically took all the things any company would need for their financial tech, and they made it super easy to use and put it into one platform. So highly, highly recommend it. If you're not using Mercury, I question your judgment. So that's it. You've heard it on My First Million. For more information, check out Mercury.com.

17:29Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. In my experience, the thing that's actually come out of this philosophy of there are no silver bullets is that actually there are silver bullets. But the only way you discover them is by just firing a shit ton of bullets that you think are lead. And then you sort of pleasantly surprise yourself when you find one idea, one experiment, one tactic that totally works in an outsized way. You find your silver bullet. But the only way to do that is by being the guy who believes there are only lead bullets. So I'm willing to fire all the lead bullets in order to make this work versus the guy who's going to run around trying to just find the one magical silver bullet and really take no action, right?

18:08If you wanted to look at your pie chart, you should be spending maybe 10 % of your time on the idea or the strategy side of things. And it is important to get a good strategy, but it's usually a very common sense strategy. If your strategy is convoluted, if your strategy requires multiple new innovations and leaps of faith, you are likely going to fail. You are likely diluting yourself into thinking that the pie chart is 80 % ideas and 20 % execution. It's much more like 10 % or 20 % ideas and strategy and 80 % blood, sweat, and tears. and that blood, sweat, and tears should come from a certain level of intensity, right?

18:41It's not simply about working more hours. It's not simply about just burying yourself in the office. There are times where you'll do that. And that's the other kind of philosophy that you should internalize, which is there is a time to sprint, okay? You cannot sprint the whole time. You cannot always be running your max speed. It doesn't work that way. But you should be able to recognize when you need to change gears and you need to sprint. One of the stories I love, I've talked about this in the podcast before, is the story of Sylvester Stallone. Sylvester Stallone wants to be an actor. And so he goes and he auditions everywhere and he can't get a role.

19:12Nobody wants to cast him as an actor. He doesn't look the part. His mouth moves a little funny because he had a problem at birth. And he just wasn't the guy. He wasn't the classic Hollywood face. He doesn't give up. He decides to take matters into his own hands. He says, if I can't get cast in a movie, I will make a movie and I will give myself the role. And the problem is he hates writing. So he decides, well, I'm going to, for this, I got a sprint. I'm going to do this thing the best I can but I will plow through. I will brute force my way to this. So he goes to his house and decides to write a movie.

19:41He writes the first script of Rocky, the rough draft of Rocky in three days. Three days. Most people don't believe that's possible he did in three days. He talks about how he did it. I want to read you this quote. This is Sylvester Sloan talking about focus. His daughter asked him, she goes, did you really paint your windows black to focus? He goes, yeah, I did paint them black because I didn't want to know what time it was. It didn't matter what time it was. It was time to write. Otherwise, I would tell myself, oh, it's time for breakfast. And I would immediately derail myself. I would say, well, I'm just going to have breakfast and I'm hungry.

20:13I don't need to know what time it is. And that was the kind of thing, you know, I wanted to eliminate all my possible excuses, all my possible distractions, because I knew how hard it was for me to write. I was begging when I was writing, please, someone just call the phone. Just please get me to do anything else besides this. But instead, I unplugged the phone so that nobody could call. I painted the windows black. He says, 100%, black windows, no phone. And that approach of painting the windows black is a certain level of intensity. He doesn't do it all the time, but he knew there was a time to sprint.