339 - What Are You Really Afraid Of?

0:00One of the things that I see a lot in mentees is they are afraid to fail. Now, if you're a brain surgeon, I get that. You don't have many opportunities to fail being a brain surgeon. But there is nothing that we are doing in this business acquisition process that I'm aware of is going to cause life to be lost. It can put a big hurt in the financial life, but most of the time, if not always, those are recoverable, and you just have to study the history of successful people to see that while they were successful people, they were also tremendous failures along the way. I'm going to include a piece here from a podcast between Kimball Musk, who's Elon Musk's brother, and Lance Armstrong.

0:59Now, truth be told, Lance Armstrong was a fantastic athlete, Tour de France winner. I am not a fan of the fact that he cheated and, in my mind, had a massive integrity breach. But that said, primarily listen to the fact that you can either, you know, be in a situation like that and you are not the worst thing you ever have done usually and then quit and tuck yourself away like a turtle and not do anything or you can push forward and the second piece of this is kimball musk talking what he about what he learned from his brother about failure and getting used to losing look everybody knows my story and everybody knows all parts of it right they know the rise and they certainly know the fall.

1:52Anybody that falls like me really has two choices. You say, okay, I quit. The world told me that I have to quit and I'll quit. Or you say, hang on a second, you know, I'm a proud guy. More importantly, I have a family. I have five children. I have a beautiful wife. No, I'm not going to quit. And my brother's advice to me was the phrase, get used to losing. And I was like, what do you mean by that? You lose all the time. If you take get stuck in a hole and you can't move forward. But if you get used to it, then you can lose a lot of battles every day, all the way through the day. You kind of don't get lost in the hole.

2:28But you accept the loss. That's another important point. You don't try and pretend it's not a loss. And then you get used to it and you go, okay, what did I learn? What did I learn from that? Instead of being like, I'm a victim, I got lost in that. No, no, I am learning from this loss. There is a powerful lesson in what Kimball Musk just said. I don't recommend a lot of books, but there's a book, probably you can still get it, called The Max Strategy. And the author of that was a guy by the name of Dale Dutton, D-A-U-T-E-N. Very short book, quick read. But he talks about the people who had massive failures and what happened as a result of them.

3:11And if you take a read through that, he goes through a list of people who, if they didn't push forward, you never would have heard of them. He talked about how Levi Strauss tried to sell tents during the gold rush, was unsuccessful, but somebody said, can you make pants out of that? Coca-Cola, how that came about, how Velcro came about. And all of those things, some people would look at and say those were a tremendous failure. That said, they were successful. So realize you will fail your way to success. Not everything will work out. I had a mentee this past week that got a reasonably small bill from a law firm.

3:55Not small if you don't have the money to pay for it. And I explained to her that most of the time, the law firm is not going to push you on that. If you talk to them, explain that you can't pay, that you need to have a deal close, you can usually maneuver your way through that. But she was terrified of that. She also talked to her chairman and basically got the same advice. So yesterday she emails me that says, I talked to the lawyer. He said, we have to send those bills, but don't worry about it. get on with doing your first deal, essentially. I was not surprised by that response. My mentee's chairman was not surprised by that response.

4:45He also then gave her great advice, which was send him a confirming email thanking him for that, because what happens if he gets hit by a bus? And so the mentee emailed me, and she said, I'm not going to do that because we had a good discussion. And I wrote back to her and said, your chairman is both correct on both points, is that yes, didn't surprise us, and two, yes, write an email. Thank him and just say that you appreciate what he did. Why? Because as the chairman said, people get hit by a bus. People get moving on to another law firm. And unless you have confirmation of that, you don't have a like to stand on.

5:30Well, this person told me this. Well, guess what? This person's not there anymore. So you will make mistakes. She said, I'm wrong again. Yes, she was wrong again. However, she at least used her board and me to discuss the situation and have an opportunity to correct it. So don't be paranoid and fearful to the point that it freezes you. Recognize you will make mistakes, but learn from those mistakes, as this section of the podcast will, I think, drive home for you. If you are looking for help, for a few more days, the group coaching for April is going to be open. Some of you will take advantage of that.

6:18Some of you won't take advantage of it. Some of you will take advantage of saying, geez, I'd like to read that Max Strategy book by Dale Dutton, and some will not. And those that I mentor that have been successful were also people who had tremendous hardships along the way. I've tried to think if there's an easy one, and I can't think of one. My most successful mentee got 14 LOIs. All 14 LOIs disappeared in COVID. but just think about whether you would have persisted through that or whether you would have thrown in the towel. Most people would have thrown in the towel. Most people won't take advantage of group coaching.

7:01Most people won't read this book, and more is the pity. But those are all choices you, not me, have to make.