Why Didn't You? | The Importance of Living Without Regret

0:00Unbelievable to me how many people are willing to live unhappy for 25 more years because they've created a jail for themselves on the amount of money they make with no savings and then they're stuck. Look, everything you fear with the financial step back will seem like a pimple on the ass to the regret you live with your whole life by not jumping. If you feel it in your belly, you are dramatically better off to jump, fail, and then go back and get a job than to be 67 and be like, why didn't I? Why didn't I is the great poison of the back half of all of our lives. I think if you die, you're out of business.

0:38So I'm first curious about the inspiration behind it. Why exactly start this four-month accelerator? I think, from my perspective, I think it's always the same thing for me inside of VaynerX. It's the combination of demand from the outside and journeys from the inside. So this beautiful young lady to the left of me as our CMO, as our chief marketing officer, really started to build very deep relationships with a lot of our clients. And in general, as I watched a lot of our activities with our business development and our friendship and our karma, so much of it was beyond the black and white and tactical marketing needs.

1:25It had a lot more empathy, a lot more emotional intelligence, a lot more what modern people would call spirituality to it. And so it just had more heart to it, which was wonderful. And I saw an opportunity based on people that were reaching out to James, Andrea's partner in this, who was running this program over at the Sasha Group, one of our companies, where it was like mentorship, very heavy-handed consulting. And I saw a combo, both for a lot of the entrepreneurs that were gravitating to our universe and to the C-suite of the Fortune 5000, private equity-backed businesses or Fortune 500 companies.

2:12And so we thought there was an opportunity to level up people's games, both emotionally and tactically. We felt like there was a moment in time and there continues to be a moment in time in the business world where people need a substantial leveling up, both in their spirit, which leads to off-sites and meditation and working out and just like true like 360 leveling up as a human and then leveling up as a marketer. You know, I think that is a very big deal for us. We think we are a substantially big lead on what is happening in modern marketing and we thought there was a affordable pricing structure that would bring value and I think our first class proved that to us.

2:56Yeah, I just, one other thing to add is I just think we were also hearing quite a bit that people were low in the tank and they were feeling like they needed something to reboot, not only professionally, but also personally. And I think we're very fortunate here with all of the people that Gary collects. They're all super curious. They're super generous. They're smart at what they do. And so we wanted to open that up. It's more of a legacy play than it is, it's not going to be the biggest blockbuster business necessarily in VaynerX, right out of the gate. This is we're building it because we really care about these people and we want to make a difference in their lives.

3:36That's great. So how would you describe the relationship between wellness and business success? Well, I think if you die, you're out of business. So, you know, I think the relationship is that if you do not have your physical and emotional framework stable, it's hard to put in the effort that is required to reach the top of anything and and so you know so much it's incredibly obvious to the world that if god forbid you become ill it's hard to prioritize your job what i think is far more hidden and luckily thank god more of the 95 percent of the time is that people don't feel happy enough don't feel fulfilled enough just don't have the spark it's hard like I you know I got very fortunate I've always had a spark professionally because I'm an entrepreneur and I've always built my own stuff but I felt my entire childhood disliking school and I remember what it felt like every Monday morning it's actually a very weird time for me me and my mom literally talked about this yesterday this usually was the time of year where I'd get really depressed for a week because I knew I was going back to school like 11 year old me, 16 year old me on this exact date was devastated because the summer was now over and like I'm looking, thank God the New York Jets would keep me happy but other than that and like to think that 70, 80 percent of human beings live their day to day life dreading Monday morning and living for Friday afternoon sucks.

5:20And so for us you know wellness is very 360 obviously you have to be physically healthy you know in the scheme of things to a certain degree to function we think there's a mental and emotional one that's incredibly hidden and we tap into that quite a bit in this program that allows you to actually go all in on being tactically successful at tiktok marketing you're not going to get going about doing tiktoks for your business if you hate it i think there's also there's a lot of research out there that shows that you know for those that are truly high performing leaders and that's who we're talking to here and who are a part of the program that health and well-being is really a part of getting to that next level and leveling people up these leaders are also responsible for teams and employees who a lot of them are suffering from a great deal of anxiety and all the changes that's going on in the out in the world isn't making it any easier so there are a lot of responsibilities on these leaders, and some of them are ill-equipped to be able to help in nurturing their employees.

6:25And so we're trying to give them, you know, we're trying to make, create a place where it's a playground to really learn things that haven't been taught before, and to give them the ideas, but also the playbooks, and to actually do the work alongside them, which is, you know, it's not just the inspiration, right? I think that's an incredibly important point, Shereen. I think if I'm reading this or I'm watching this, let it be very clear, like, this is not like foofy, foofy entitlement camp. Right? Like, I think actually one of the things for sure that I love contributing to the program is like, okay, I had a one-on-one with somebody that's in the program right now.

7:09And this person got done speaking and she talked all the good stuff. She's like, I just want to do right by my team for something she's struggling with above, right? And I'm like, got done talking to her. I said, your team is not six-year-olds at kindergarten. You're talking about people that make over a half a million dollars a year in salary and are in their 40s and 50s. They're grownups. They can deal with what you're talking about and if they don't like it, they can go get another job. And it was an interesting moment for her. I think she got too caught up on the, See, what's happening is that everyone's going too left or too right, too blue or too red.

7:46To me, this is a program that focuses on purple. You know, like, we're gonna want to talk about, like, being healthy and all this stuff. I don't view that as, like, modern, foofy, hippiness. I view that as very tactical function truth. But what we're not gonna do is create entitlement and sit around and dream about, like, ideological, like, the secret was misinterpreted, I think, as a book. Like you're not gonna sit on your couch and be like, I hope that I win the lottery and then you win the lottery. It's not how it works. It's like I have a goal and once you understand your goal, you'll be able to do it and so I think one of the things I'm most excited about this program is that for some people, it is self-esteem is their issue even though they've gotten to the highest levels and we need to talk about that.

8:35You know, insecurity and fear is driving their management style. For other people, when we audit them, they're emotionally super strong, but they stink at marketing. And like, if you're bad at marketing, you will go out of business. And so I think it's kind of like a CAT scan and an MRI on an individual basis. And then just like the real world, some people need modern Eastern medicine and some people need modern Western medicine. We're agnostic. We're not ideological about what these individuals need. We're obsessed with reverse engineering what they need and delivering on what we think we can contribute.

9:10for them to be successful, I think that is gonna be an understood conversation in the business world for the decades to come. That makes sense. I wanted to backtrack a little bit to what you were talking about, getting that spark, not feeling like you wanted to go to school and for a lot of employees, not feeling like they wanna go to work on Monday morning. How do you get that spark? By challenging yourself on tough questions. And honestly, I got even a deeper one for fighting for the spark. If you actually say that happiness is what you're trying to achieve, do you have the humility and the strategy to take a financial step backwards to achieve it?

9:52It is unbelievable to me how many people are willing to live unhappy for 25 more years because they've created a jail for themselves on the amount of money they make currently and live within that with no savings and then they are stuck. You get your spark by putting pressure on yourself to answer yourself true questions. And I think that's been the biggest aha. As you know, we've been incredibly on stealth mode in the sort of beta launch, if you will, with the 10 vivers, as we call them. And, you know, a lot of them, they're all came into the program because they felt stuck in some area of their life or another.

10:39And they've come out on the other side, sometimes even finding, thinking it was one thing and discovering it was another. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, we're fortunate. And then we've got a lot of experts that come in and a lot of people from our Vaynerverse that are friends and family that help them along this journey, along this path so that they can do the deep work and so that they have a community that's safe. It's a place where they can be vulnerable, but also that they can confess that they don't know this about marketing or they don't, you know, they're holding on to something that's from their past that gives them imposter syndrome.

11:12We work through all of those kinds of things because it's a highly, highly personalized program. We don't think there's anything out there that's quite like it. It's very Vayner in the sense that, you know, we're out there, we're doing the work. But, you know, we're trying to do something that folks haven't done before. For lack of a better analogy, I really do think it's the purple analogy is the best one. We believe that most organizations don't have enough of a soul or a heartbeat or actually care about their people or on the complete other side of the pillow, it's just a bunch of hippie ideologies and like it's all great, but then you went out of business.

11:52So I mean like the hippies became the yuppies. And I think about that all the time. I think about all those kids in the 60s that talked all that shit and then were money, money, money crazy in the 80s. I think that there's a middle ground and I think this program captures that and I think that that could be transformational in the business world because I think that is what was required to having sustained success. On that point for your audience which I know very well because I've been in it for a long time I actually think that last point is the biggest issue for entrepreneurs. Can I squeeze in one question for you before you leave?

12:30Our audience really cares about starting businesses so what advice would you give somebody who's ready to start a business but afraid of the financial risk or feeling like an imposter? Imposter is a fancy new word we came up with. I think the first thing that people need to understand is that imposter syndrome means you're insecure. That's what it means. I know we've repackaged it. We've repackaged a lot of things in society lately. Imposter syndrome is just a fancy new word for you're insecure and that's allowed. You're allowed to be insecure. are. The reason I jump on that in your question is my advice to someone who wants to start a business is the following.

13:07The longer you wait to not do it when you actually are ready to do it, the more it becomes a thing. The more you stand at the edge of a pool as a six-year-old and fear swimming, the more you wake up like I did and you're nine and you're still not swimming. that happened to me because it started to become a thing within itself. So my recommendation is don't be delusional, have a plan, but here is by far the biggest thing I can say on this issue. Everything you fear with the financial step back will seem like a pimple on the ass to the regret you live with your whole life by not jumping. You are dramatically better off jumping if you feel it in your belly.

13:56to jump, fail, and then go back and get a job than to be 67 and be like, why didn't I? Why didn't I is the great poison of the back half of all of our lives. That's amazing. Thank you.